The question for a real investor in a stock market is, is it going up or down over a 10 year period or if it's a company the same thing applies in a period of 10 years is it going up or down. Outside of that in any stock market you are gambling.
Who knows though, maybe the Chinese government will manage to make a smooth transition towards a more democratic system without the violent revolutions that previous incarnations have had to deal with respectively.
Now is probably a critical moment in determining whether such a future scenario is realistic, considering the slowing economic growth of China and the need to transition towards a service oriented rather than manufacturing based economy. Economic recession is usually one of the first steps towards civilian revolt in authoritarian regimes.
There are currently two state level organisations over 1,000 years old, Japan’s Chrysanthemum Throne, aka the Imperial Household and the Holy See or Papacy. The only other state to break 1,000 years I’m aware of was the Most Serene Republic of Venice. State continuity is an extremely hard problem, and I don’t see much evidence that monarchies were stable. Succession disputes and civil wars are really common in republics, monarchies, empires, everything. Democracy’s virtue is in simulating a civil war by counting heads and facilitating an orderly and peaceful transfer of power between groups that detest each other. When the hate gets too much then you get a civil war.
Authoritarian governments have the problem that the Western bloc is implacably opposed to their existence and will take any opportunity to extinguish them. Look at what happened to Libya after Qaddafi cooperated and dismantled the chemical weapons programme and did that help him? Hell no. Hilary Clinton gloated over his death after she persuaded Obama to destroy the only Libya.
This is not the only time the US has opted to spread its values at the expense of countries that had no quarrel with it. The US sent the Flying Tigers to Burma well before Pearl Harbor, and knew perfectly well that the oil blockade of Japan was an existential threat to the Empire of Japan. Likewise the US got into WWI and WWII because it wanted to. The US was shipping aid and supplies to the U.K. The sibling of the Lusitania was hardly an unforeseen consequence of supporting one side in a war.
China is well aware of this, or at least the Politburo and the rest of the top level cadres in Zhongnanhai are. The West is inimical to their existence. Ditto the North Korean leadership. The US is totally untrustworthy as far as they’re concerned.
More broadly apart from the Holy See and Chrysanthemum Throne the countries that have gone the longest with continuity of government and sovereignty are the USA and U.K. The US is due for another civil war, people certainly hate each other enough and the UK’s claims to governmental continuity have a huge asterisk called the Glorious Revolution or Dutch invasion.
The Holy See hasn't actually been either stable or a state level organization continuously for the last thousand years.
Well, it didn't even become a “state level organization” until the temporal dominions of the papacy became separate from the Holy Roman Empire in 1177, so even if you ignore both times the papal states were disestablished, it doesn't reach 1000 years.
> The Holy See has had rival claimants since 1,000 but the current pontiff derives in a direct line from that of 1,000 AD
Only in the sense that a convention later grew of describing a particular line through the period of two and then three competing lines of popes that were ended with a common replacement as “the” line of popes, but that's an after-the-fact rationalization, not actual continuity.
Being authoritarian from the beginning just makes you start that much closer to edge.
The bugs with authoritarianism reveal themselves at this point, as the wide powers given to the aforementioned incompetent people in power results in extremely bad decisions being made, ultimately leading to a degradation in society and either collapse or a coup. Such a cycle is extremely unstable, and it only takes a brief glance at history to see the results for yourself.
There’s a reason why in today’s world, empires and monarchies have been replaced by republics with systems of checks and balances that are put in place specifically to avoid these effects.
- Am I just being prospective and intentionally introducing some contained risk to my financial plan (fine)
- Am I doing this for entertainment (fine)
- Is this for learning purposes (fine)
- Did I just get a tip which is near-insider or insider-quality (well...party politics can lead to this)
So, some gambling can be bad in some sense sure, but not necessarily if informed by various conditions or analyses. A big part of HN psychology skews toward low financial risk + low tolerance for nuanced financial thinking so I thought I'd mention that.