The American Dream Is Alive in China
palladiummag.com
palladiummag.com
> China’s success scares me. There is something deeply disconcerting about watching China surpass America in the ways it is. China is transforming fishing villages into major industrial cities, while we fail to build high-speed rail or new housing. How are we going to catch up?
Right now China is still high off a period of heavy growth and industrialization. How China can handle easing out of heavy growth in the next 2-6 decades will show how real the Chinese dream is, but my personal fear (as a person who believes strongly in western liberalism) is that a rich authoritarian country can unlock a world of efficiency that the western world can only dream of, leaving our standard of living in the dust by comparison
I fear that this will lead to an era of global authoritarianism as countries around the world seek to emulate the success.
As a rail enthusiast, watching China build huge subway networks and a massive web of HSR almost overnight while my very rich western city struggles to extend a century old trolley by a few miles in the same timeframe, it really feels bad.
At the bottom end, manufacturing is moving out of China to countries like Vietnam. While high tech manufacturing is still China's forte, this is largely confined to special economic zones like Shenzien, and reliant on lack of enforcement of patent and copyright, as well as government subsidies for import and exports of components and manufactured goods. We're all familiar with the impossibly cheap components and electronic devices available through services like Ali.
I'm not sure any of this is sustainable - whether in an environmental sense, or economically. There is much that is illusory about the Chinese economy, and the recent clamp down of state control may well be an effort for the CCP to maintain control during the inevitable economic collapse they see coming.
Well, I'm not convinced that this effect is necessarily widespread. Certainly more common than in the west where we have strict building regulations and such, but this is the flip side of getting a lot of housing built cheaply, which is necessary for China. An analogue might be construction in the states during our industrial revolution - we had all sorts of horrid issues, from barely-livable tenements with no ventilation to massive fires that killed tons of poor workers. Most of the stuff we built back then doesn't come close to conforming with modern building code.
In any case, it's not a big problem I saw personally in China, but I'm n=1 here. I stayed in a relatives' apartment building from the 90s that was holding up fine, as well as perfectly nice newer apartments that relatives enjoyed in tier3 cities and older houses and townhouses that aged well.
I imagine this is the kind of thing that western media likes to play up, but isn't as visible for people on the ground (another example is the social credit system - I couldn't find any evidence the social credit system even exists yet during my time in China, much less the horrifying things we see reported regularly.)
> But to what extent it is merely attempting to outrun a construction bubble, and ensnare developing world countries in debt; versus building a sustainable economic model, is questionable.
Strongly agreed, hence my comments that the next 2-6 decades of slowing growth will be very telling on the "Chinese dream".
I don't think Chinese success is guaranteed - I think the CCP has made a lot of frightful financial gambles. My big fear is that it does, somehow, pay off, and the world turns to China as a model of how to run a country as a result.
They get away with all kinds of abnormal activity because most of their citizens are still poor. Once people have resources they won't bend over as they once did. I doubt their rate of progress will continue as it did over the last 2 decades. Things are going to get more complex for them not less.
It’s called “nail resident” in China. Such story is quite common and unless you are alone force removal isn’t implemented that often. Honestly just call grandpa and let him rest in bed, nobody dares move him
The major difference, however, is that the US was still a democracy that had mechanisms to allow for things to be changed for the better. It’s hard to see what mechanisms for improvements exist in China.
Not on home soil perhaps. But from the 50s to at least the 80s, that was the general policy in Latin Amercia. Then for more recent you can look to the middle east for the mass round up of civilians, torture and decades long imprisonment without charge.
Not exactly the same, but correlations exist, as they do for the parent comment you are replying to
white middle class America maybe, but certainly not "America"
What the hell is this guy saying? "Oh sure, China has literal concentration camps, but as long as you're not there then it's just great!"
>In many ways, China in the 2010s reminds me of what I’ve read of America in the 1950s: the country is powerful, economic development is booming, and people are optimistic about the future.
"People" meaning "the ruling class". It was great living in America in the fifties, as long as you were a white dude with a job.
As an American, though I think my country might be even more shameful, We have Gitmo. We have a country that lied into a war that killed at least 100.000s of people.
Our treatment of asylum seekers now is certainly worth a dystopian movie or two.
As far as the 1950s you are defining the ruling class as the ruling class and the middle class? I dont disagree with you about diversity but the middle class was much better off than it is today.
Our ever-shrinking middle class and our ever getting richer oligarchs and the political class is contrasted to China's increasing middle class.
But you go from zero it is easy to improve, and in the US we used to have a large middle class so it is easier to lose.
For example the frequent adulteration of food (including baby food) with poisons. The panopticon surveillance and control of movement which prevents the poor and those living in rural areas from travelling within their own country. Restrictions on free speech, not only political in nature but critical of any aspects of civil society - and the inevitable lack of reforms to public health and safety.
Increasing nationalism, police observation and 'patriotic' violent attacks on foreigners. Violence against medical professionals when patients feel (rightly or wrongly) that they haven't received the treatment they should have.
The rise of an unelected dictator forming a cult of personality and the subsequent reinvigoration of anti-foreign, nativist han Chinese sentiment, and the increased suppression of minorities and dissent that has resulted.
The thousands of 'incidents' of protests (attempted rebellions) that are ruthlessly crushed each year, while being actively hidden by Chinese media and social media.
The incredibly successful censorship of both China's own history and any discourse about political reform.
On and on.
China is a spectacular case of all the ills that can befall a centralised authoritarian regime when people cannot directly criticise their government. This article seems to advocate 'learning from China' in a way that implies replicating their authoritarian control. It reminds me of a bizarre TED talk a few years ago that celebrated the supposedly effective meritocracy of the CCP - just before it became one man dictatorship - while ignoring the fact that the CCP leadership is almost exclusively composed of the children and grandchildren of the communist party leaders that supported Mao. It is in short, thinly veiled propaganda.
https://www.amazon.com/have-been-harmonised-Kai-Strittmatter...
It made me read it and even though I try to be up to date with world news - it's a true eye opener.
They're able to get big things done. Elon Musk recently commented that he was amazed how fast they're able to build things and said he's never seen anything like it. We are regressing in this aspect. We can't even get decent public transit built in the Bay Area or improve the homeless situation despite being one of the richest places in the world.
India too has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, while remaining federated and to some extent democratic. The elevation of China's billions out of poverty has come through it's involvement with the marketplace of global capitalist democracies - not the other way around.
No offense to the Indian people, but I always find it amusing when people use India as the counterexample to China to show "you don't need Socialism to achieve the same results." When it almost tells the exact opposite story.
There's also this.[3]
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/country/india
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/country/china
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20160921084037/http://www.spectr...
The Chinese economy is overvalued, and economic growth is grinding to a halt despite massive government spending. https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3033564/c...
Every western country is a counter example.
Also, I'll probably take World Bank's data more seriously than an unsubstantiated claim by some random guy on the Internet.
Oh, and it wasn't me who brought up India as the counterexample.
> Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.
Using a word exactly correctly is not "random".
but the US statistics on imprisonment of minorities is no better.
> For example the frequent adulteration of food (including baby food) with poisons
all major countries have scares and recalls due to contamination
> The panopticon surveillance
really? After all the details come out in the last 5 years, surveillance cannot be thrown at the Chinese alone. UK leads CCTV per population (or some metric). NSA data slurping revelations...
> and the inevitable lack of reforms to public health and safety.
why do you think the Chinese do not make improvements to public health and safety? Of course they do.
> Increasing nationalism, police observation and 'patriotic' violent attacks on foreigners
errr are you blind to the rise of this in the US since Trump and UK since brexit?
> Violence against medical professionals when patients feel
Bombing abortion clinics comes to mind
> The rise of an unelected dictator forming a cult of personality and the subsequent reinvigoration of anti-foreign, nativist han Chinese sentiment, and the increased suppression of minorities and dissent that has resulted.
Change unelected to "unelected by the majority" in higly disputed elections countrywide with many cases of fraud and vote tampering and I can think of another country this applies to
Anyway, why does the above mean there is no "American Dream" in China, when most the accusations you make can be levelled (in some form) to the US as well
Sure there may be an American Dream in China, if you line up with the acceptable profile of citizen. But the Dream is supposed to be for everybody; that's foundational to the idea.
this seems fallacious. it's not clear how the various whataboutisms you're engaging in establishes or relates to "the american dream in china" actually existing or not.
Any US or European citizen can travel freely throughout their country or to most countries in the world.
While the US carceral state is indeed abominable and a continuation of the suppression of African Americans, America does not have prison camps holding a million members of an ethnic minority.
The NSA surveillance programme revealed by Snowdon and Manning is awful, as are the continuing attempts to prosecute and silence whistle blowers. Fortunately the US does not regularly send police officers to harass citizens based on their expressed political beliefs. Nor does it scrub political communication and expression from the internet or censor it from public media.
Electoral fraud and gerrymandering are awful. They are in no sense comparable to actual dictatorship however.
Critiques of murderous dictatorships like those in Russia, China and North Korea are always side tracked like this. No one is disputing the many and varied faults of liberal democracies. But to hold them up as equivalent to the imprisonment of Uyghurs, the harvesting of prisoner organs and so on is disingenuous to say the least. Not least because we in the west have the privilege of making these critiques, which Chinese do not.
The more modern, post-WWII imago of the American Dream of a booming economy and cute little suburbs was overlaid over antiquated Jim Crow laws and early Cold War saber-rattling that would accelerate into the greater turmoil of the '60s, which would turn out a tragedy more than anything. Many of the criticisms you put on China now have mirrors in a historical America.
China and America are really both flip sides of the same coin. It is true that looking at China as a safe haven when America's economy and culture has become so anxiety-riden is silly and ignorant. China is able to rationalize itself with a liquefied idea "socialism" it never truly was able to understand in the first place, and has grown to content to treat the task of governing its people in similar kind to herding animals.
I would not pin China's blame singularly on the CCP or Xi for that matter, but I would rather describe the CCP a symptom of modern capitalism. If one were to hypothetically "clean the CCP's house" with a new stock of younger legislators that weren't "beneficiaries of the Mao era" as you claim, than you would likely find them repeating the same regressions as their predecessors; never mind that Xi himself was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, considering that his sister was killed by student protesters and his father was jailed for 10 years. China's problems (more problems of contemporary society in general) extend beyond the Mao legacy, similar to how Leon Trotsky did not regard Stalinism in the Soviet Union as purely beginning and ending with the one man.
Sure, everything is nice for many people if you don't dare speak against the authority. Tomorrow you're on the wrong side of the fence. Good luck coming back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/chinese-ap...
https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/09/chinas-new-cybersecurit...
On the topic of the 'American Dream': the more successful you are, the more likely it is in such a system that you don't pay off the right guy in time, or don't surrender enough of your wealth to a well-connected guy who wants a piece of it. And off to the Gulags you go, sharing a cell with the 'political prisoner' who pointed to as a cautionary tale of why you must not speak out and criticize the government. Wait, does that mean you're also a 'political prisoner' now too?
The list can be made much larger, but then it needs to explain each case, whereas the ones above most people know about.
You can say this is not speaking truth to power, it was leaks that are different but not really.
Concentration camps in China, might be a secret. I dont think they are but what goes on in side of them is meant to be, breaking the government's repression of information is a good thing.
Just like telling the world what the US really does is good for our country.
Perfect? By no means. Far better than China? Absolutely.
The larger point I was trying to make is that having the rule of law usually moderates the severity of repression, sure, but it's not just a difference in degree. It's a difference in kind - it prevents arbitrary oppression. You can fault the US for suppressing whistle-blowers/leakers, but you cannot tell me those whistle-blowers/leakers simply stumbled into their actions without knowing they'll get in trouble. They knew the game, and knowingly broke its rules. Are there rules in China? Maybe, until there aren't. Ask the two Canadians being held in isolation without even the right to a book, just because their files turned up at the wrong bureaucrats desk and became needed to send a message to the Canadian government.
This is also why I won't set foot in the PRC if I can help it. I don't want to be used as a message to my government, no matter how unlikely it is for an insignificant pawn like me to get caught up in something like that. I'll limit my travel to places where I can read up on rules beforehand, and those rules are actually followed.