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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers, and a gigantic, rich, soil. And it's easier if you not care about destroying everything in your way.

Still.

It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people.

Beside, we did the same: polluting, forcing population to work, etc, only 100 years before, but we attacked other countries while doing so. Which China haven't. And about this pollution thing, they seem to correct trajectory faster than we did, given their timeframe and inertia.

It's amazing to watch.

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>It's impressive for exactly the same reasons. It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship, to maintain motivation and cooperation across a gigantic country and 1.7B of people.

On the contrary you could argue that the brutal competition in the country encourages people to be razor sharp in some fields.

A more controversial and touchy point is that they have a strong sense of national and ethnic unity, which many democracies lack. This has many disadvantages of course,[0] but can be extremely helpful for maintaining cooperation and motivation at a large scale whereas the West arguably has trouble dealing with ennui and lack of purpose. To some extent the form of functional ethno-nationalism China has is hard to reproduce elsewhere, and is the result of very specific historical and geographical factors. Japan and Turkey for instance have similar traits but nowhere near the same results. So China is tautologically highly suited to doing what it is currently doing.

[0] https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/11/19/the-upper-han

In one sense, China is only ~70 years old, and it was born in a horrific era that lead to yet more horrors. When a few generations live and die without hunger or war, it will be interesting to see if they are so willing to believe whatever the Chinese government wants them to believe.

I wonder what built this, becauqe clearly it's not new. China use to do it 2000 years ago too.

You could spend your entire career on this topic and still never find the answer, but this article gives a nice summary of some of the factors.

https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/evolution-chinese-nat...

I'm not convinced you have to be a brutal dictatorship in order to support significant government investment in key industries. You just need a lot of money and a political willingness to spend it.

Not even a lot, just a big enough percentage to sway things.

>It's hard to foster an intellectual elite in a dictatorship

Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program?

It’s easy to pour money into STEM fields. If you only crack down on ethnic minorities and outspoken dissenters, and if you censor uncomfortable news about these crackdowns, the majority of your engineers and scientists won’t care enough to DO anything. This approach worked for the Nazis and, to a lesser degree, the Soviets. It is working very well in China.

> Have we forgotten about Nazi technical excellence, Werner von Braun, and the Soviet space program?

One could argue that both the Nazi and the Soviet programs had roots in pre-existing system setup up before the totally authoritarian ones took over. For Germany, Imperial Germany + the Weimar Republic (both flawed democracies, but still, democracies) and for the USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense, but was pretty liberal from a scientific and artistic point of view. Way more so than the USSR.

If anything, both the Nazis and Soviets drained their scientific communities so much that by the end of the regimes they almost destroyed them.

I don't see the drainage; 70 years after the October revolution, the USSR was still being first on important space exploration milestones, including the first permanently manned space station, in 1986.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_space_program#Notable_f...

It's only a tiny, tiny part of science in a country. Ussr had nowhere close to the growth china as, even when recalibrating to the population size. The ussr economy was dying, with no innovation and no production outside of the war effort.

Economy was dying but not for lack of innovation.

Mostly because certain very poor agricultural decisions caused repeated famines and further social unrest. Other than that it is telling that USSR was essentially a close second to USA for most of its existence, sometimes even at the forefront.

The problem was management in the lower base levels like building industry, especially agriculture and some low level factory work, like parts or pieces. R&D and military industry was excellent.

Not a field expert, but I'm fairly sure that China's vast economic growth is due largely to trade normalization with democratic countries in the last 20 years or so that happened after the fall of the USSR.

Both were subject to the 'dont trade with communists' policy during the time they both existed..

China actually turned the ship around thanks to Deng Xiaoping. It wasn't just trade normalization, it was also their adoption of many free market practices that allowed them to be competitive. Compare and contrast with Russia.

Funny enough Russia is even more capitalist than China. However, its capitalism is focused on resources and agriculture (esp. fishing) sector and not manufacturing (except weapons where they excel) - and keeps quite a bit of EU in stranglehold.

Hmm. interesting.

But wasn't this the same time as glasnost/perestroika?

And again, this doesn't happen in a vacuum..

Was non-communist policy (e.g the west) more favorable to china than russia?

That came later.

The USSR drained everything else to keep the space program and the military at a high level until it fell.

Once it fell, I'm pretty sure most of those researchers ran wherever they could, as fast as they could.

Not really. They got priority but not exactly at the expense of other fields. There was a lot of agricultural and biological sciences done, even electronics and civilian computer science too. And obviously mathematics. You probably haven't heard enough of it because Russian science was not named after Russian scientists too often in English. Heck, even some cars were quite cutting edge for the day until the catastrophes hit real hard. Though the infrastructure was really bad.

Nothing really was drained for advanced projects, not even coffers. What happened was tragic mismanagement of agriculture, part manufacturing and building industry. This resulted in serious shortages all around and many deaths to famine.

Only at the end did innovation slow down, due to above factors and social unrest.

Yes, but that’s entirely my point. So long as they and their families were taken care of, most stuck around (though certainly some of that was due to fear).

Try any scientific field other than aerospace, physics, or mathematics.

Soviet biology was utterly destroyed by an ideological commitment to Lysenkoism.

I think the drainage was a lot worse on the Nazi side. The Nazis took their country's resources and started a big war, invading Poland and much of Europe, and then (what ultimately destroyed them) Russia.

The USSR never committed so many resources to war; they engaged in the "cold war", but that was really about it. Germany was fighting an active war on two fronts and got crushed in the middle. The Soviets just built a bunch of bombs and walls (after the action in WWII).

> USSR, Imperial Russia, which ok, might have not have been democratic in any modern sense

That's a massive understatement. The Russian Empire abolished serfdom in 1861[0]. There's no way that the Soviet space program was an extension of institutions from a society that was literally feudal a generation before the revolution.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861

While i agree that much of the technological progress happened under soviet times, USA also abolished slavery in the 1860s, so this is not a very good data point for comparison.. one could make the argument that most 'western' (in a loose sense) technological progress beyond initial industrialization happened from WW1+ ... which would imply different things for different places

Russia was abolishing serfdom and discovering the periodic table at about the same time. History isn't fully linear.

And yet einstein went to the US and give them the bomb.

During the cold war, little progress has been made engeenering that were not benefiting the wzr effort. Source: my last gf was born on the other side of the wall.

> It helps to be a dictatorship that can force anybody to do what they want, and send to camp people that don't. It also helps to have millions of cheap workers, and a gigantic, rich, soil. And it's easier if you not care about destroying everything in your way.

Is this about China or the US? I mean it's got prison / slave labor, cheap workers (minimum wage, what's that?), huge lands, etc. Don't think the US moved away from those practices a hundred years ago, they're still doing it, they're just calling it differently and it's coming from financial interests now instead of political ones (e.g. private prisons that make sure to keep their cells (over) full and their cheap labor supply up)

Please don't take HN threads even further into ideological and nationalistic flamewar. These discussions are all the same, which makes them predictable, which makes them boring apart from the intense indignation they provoke. That is not what HN is for.

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