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Comment by ZhuanXia | Hacker News Reader

China has half the world’s manufacturing ability, a civil service selected strongly for cognitive ability, a much more diligent and capable people, and a large population. Not to mention experience in pandemics of this type. China will become zeroth world shortly. We will have to get used to them surpassing us.

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Please let's not go into nationalistic flamewar.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646393.

How can China become zeroth world shortly when half of the country is still living in third world conditions? I suppose if you only consider how the wealthiest in Shanghai and other Tier 1 cities live their lives then yes China is approaching parity with the West but that ignores that America's per capita income is almost 5 times higher than China's.

China also has the nasty problem of many of its best and brightest wanting to come to America and the West where they will have political freedom and more broadly freedom of expression, something that cannot be bought in China no matter how wealthy one becomes.

I have seen the progress in China since the late 1990s. A rate of change impossible for a modern westerner to believe. China is not a photograph but a video on fast-forward.

people were saying this about the USSR in the 1930s (see beyond the urals by john scott). it's always faster to catch up than to break new ground. their rate of progress will slow dramatically as they approach the state of the art.

Not with over 1 billion people and the western world on its knees. If anything, their going to progress far faster than anyone else once this is over.

maybe, maybe not. it's impossible to say. developing new stuff is a very different game from catching up, especially when you get to manufacture mid-tech stuff for the west and take a loose interpretation of intellectual property. as a state, china currently seems much more able to direct its resources towards worthwhile endeavors than the US, but afaik they are still pretty far behind when it comes to cutting-edge stuff. the new j-20 fighter isn't a match for the f-22, let alone the f-35. they can't touch the level of US silicon fabs without annexing taiwan. I've read some convincing arguments that it may have an edge in cyberespionage/warfare, but it's always hard to judge those capabilities.

The same way the US is considered first world with half of its population living in poverty, a third or more without proper healthcare, almost one percent in prison, etc.

There is no evidence the average Chinese person is "much more capable" than the average American. And the Chinese were evidently not "diligent" enough to shut down wet markets despite years of repeated warnings from epidemiologists, nor were these civil servants forthright enough about what was happening fast enough to prevent spreading this illness to other countries.

Stereotypes in either direction are dangerous, unfounded, and unproductive.

Chinese Americans objectively have better SAT and ACT scores (so much so that they get screwed by affirmative action policies)

Maybe Chinese themselves aren't "more capable" but the Chinese elite who can get to America and likely the Chinese elite who stay in China are certainly "more capable"

They have a collectivist culture with "tiger parents" who force kids to study far harder than the average throughout the non Asian world. Sometimes, stereotypes are simply true.

The only reason the civil servants do dumb stuff like you describe is the CCP. If you removed literal communism and the orwellian society, they will beat us long term. Imagine that the government of Taiwan ran modern China. It would be unstoppable...

I expect you'll be hard-pressed to convince people that SAT and ACT scores are predictive at anything other than taking SAT or ACT tests unless you're controlling for an equal amount of study effort.

Basically Goodhart's law.

As long as they’re operating concentration camps, it’s the duty of the rest of the free world to oppose them.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-concentrationca...

This mindset and the ideological blinders it introduces is a huge problem.

When china went aggressive on the virus people looked at it as draconian measures because of the ideological lens, not looking further to see the measures were absolutely necessary by scientific fact.

When Singapore started to spring into action, the western press was musing about election posturing all the while nobody prepared.

Ideology kills. We need science. And maybe then we can feel morally superior again

Small city-states (Singapore, Hong Kong) with dense urban populations were always more cautious about epidemics.

And it's not like no one was speaking about how unprepared the 'West' has been for years. (Bill Gates' TED talk is making the rounds now that talks exactly about this.)

It's not ideology. Not morality. It's simply a matter of cost-benefit analysis. Public health has been put on the backburner for decades, life expectancy was slowly creeping up, people were getting lazy, and the biggest problem was obesity.

And even though experts were constantly recommending more spending, more stockpiles, etc. it found no traction in politics. And here we are.

Well that calculation is about to backfire dramatically.

Cost - benefit for reelection is a key failure point in our system

> When china went aggressive on the virus people looked at it as draconian measures because of the ideological lens, not looking further to see the measures were absolutely necessary by scientific fact.

None of this would have been necessary if the doctors reporting the Wuhan virus weren’t killed for presenting bad news. There’s clear evidence that the Chinese waited far too long to start acting and alerting others. Also there’s absolutely no reason to believe the Chinese are reporting accurate numbers.

The ideology that’s dangerous is authoritarian government. It happened in Chernobyl and it’s been repeated time and again with China and their respiratory illnesses from easily preventable sources.

Who killed what doctors in Wuhan

I misspoke, there’s no evidence I’m aware of that they were killed. But given China’s history of abusing critical citizens, it wouldn’t be surprising. What’s more accurate is that doctors who spoke up about the impending disaster died of the disease (perhaps unnecessarily) after being censured for their free speech.

Yes China is too slow. First case in December and few dozen cases in January then lockdown. If China had a great president from the free world like mr Donald Trump, then they could act much more quickly and shutdown the whole country since day one. I remember Mr. Trump has an uncle who was a professor at MIT, so that he could understand the seriousness of COVID19. Make China Great Again!

and the u.s. is not intentionally misleading the people right now when it's clearly in front of us? the u.s. government is blatantly lying and even profiting off of the virus.

and your comment about china continuing to manipulate numbers is poor speculation on your part. i am unable to find the article at the moment, but the WHO representative who was there was asked that question, and he stated that there was no reason he saw that numbers were being manipulated. he stated that once the response ramped up, that they were taking it very seriously and were quite methodical.

that's a poor argument. for one, the u.s. has concentration camps as well, just not to that scale. secondly, if one just focuses on these types of arguments, then you ignore all the ways that china is positively surpassing the u.s. their ability to handle infrastructure and crisis like this greatly surpasses the u.s. and other countries. they are logistics and operations experts. the u.s. is flailing about without any shared direction whatsoever.

You talking about the Chinese, or the US with for profit prisons and slavery enshrined in the US constitution (slavery allowed in punishment of a crime deemed guilty by 12 white men).

Do you have numbers on the composition of juries nowadays? How representative the are of their communities?

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