Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kirse | Hacker News Reader

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China's rise to dominance is unquestionable now. The current US administration has failed miserably.

Breathe into a bag, dude. You and everyone else fear-mongering in here. China has a lot of talent, but they also consist of a government that controls its people and stifles their freedoms on every possible level. And because of that their innovation will always be constrained. An un-free people is an un-innovative people.

The US has one great thing that no other country has, and it's why we're still the only country to put a man on the moon, to land rockets backwards onto a floating platform, to continue to shift the landscape in transportation, and why Google and Facebook and Microsoft still dominate the net landscape, while the best China can do is make their garbage rip-offs and steal the hard-won intellectual property that we continue to churn out. It's also why Beijing often has a thick fog of pollution, and why you can protest, speak, and worship in this country without being thrown into a re-education camp.

Any guesses on what that thing is? That thing that keeps people in the US innovating and churning out fresh material that China can only steal? It's because the US is a country unified by a set of ideas, not borders drawn around a people group. The key governing concept that man is free to pursue their own happiness and shape their destiny.

Man irresistibly is drawn to freedom, and until the CCP releases its grasp on its citizens' freedom, their dominance is only an illusion. Stop pushing a narrative based on fear.

> Breathe into a bag, dude.

That's not ok in HN comments, so please don't post like that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, please don't take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar and please omit generic ideological rhetoric. It leads to repetitive, tedious discussion on the internet because forum comments are much too shallow a medium to get anywhere new with it.

Its funny to see all the subtle racism come pouring back as soon as the west feels threatened. "the best China can do is make their garbage rip-offs and steal the hard-won intellectual property" - typical western superiority bullshit. Why don't you go to a country and live there for a year before regurgitating uninformed cliches like this? I doubt you have any real understanding at all about what daily life is like in China.

Somehow its inconceivable that any other country besides the mighty and noble 'Murca can innovate lol. Believe me, there are plenty of countries with far far more innovative public infrastructure like transport. Many countries with more "innovative" health systems in that you don't die or go bankrupt without insurance.

When all the xenophobia and fear stops the trickle of immigrants into the US, they will understand what drove innovation was not some magical freedom that 90% of democracies have, it was talented people from all over the globe.

> When all the xenophobia and fear stops the trickle of immigrants into the US, they will understand what drove innovation was not some magical freedom that 90% of democracies have, it was talented people from all over the globe.

How is China going to attract talented people from all over the globe?

Even with 1.5B people, they'll be competing with 6B who can't (and don't want to) join them and would prefer to join a Western country that will eventually give them naturalized citizenship and treat them somewhat as equals.

Outrageous compensation packages. Last figure I read, they've already poached 20% of Taiwan's semi engineers over the years. That's before recent initiatives to compensate foreign workers 3x-5x salary. They're flying in Korean specialists on daytrips to accommodate their desires to still live in Korea, building churches on campuses etc. Basically what western companies did in the 90s to entice foreign specialists to work in China, a lot of cash and allure of royal treatment i.e. specifically because they won't be equals. Work in a nice tier1 city for 5-10 years and retire or naturalize / work in the west. Semi engineers are project paperclip tier assets in the coming years, they're get work and fast-track citizenship considerations regardless of their past affiliations and most likely, because of it.

If the US didn't pay 3-4x the salary for software engineers compared to Canada, I wouldn't be here either. If China paid me more, I'd move in a heartbeat.

This comment encapsulates in a very crisp way why people are skeptical of immigration free-for-alls. Many feel the same way you do, that it's just a method of economic extraction and they don't have any skin in the game for the long term health and viability of the host Country.

Why should global citizens be tied to an outdated Westphalian concept of a nation state?

Note that during the time they're in a certain country, these experts are most likely paying taxes at the top tax bracket.

Because there is no such thing as a "global citizen", first of all. And just taking a look around, the death of the nation state must've been greatly exaggerated in some circles.

>these experts are most likely paying taxes at the top tax bracket.

Who cares. This is a thinly veiled attempt to say that any person's worth in a given society is approximately equal to how much they pay in taxes - which is insane, for a great many reasons.

I'm not saying they will. I'm only saying the US has become far less attractive to immigrants over recent years. It might not even have any impact on the US, who knows.

If anything is racist, it's the assumption that the only relevant difference between China and the US is racial.

Asia has more successful and less successful countries. Europe has more successful and less successful countries. Africa has more successful and less successful countries. The Americas have more successful and less successful countries. Countries with markets and liberal democracies consistently outperform countries without them. Totalitarian states can, in the short run, appear very successful--Germany and Russia both had stretches of this during their totalitarian eras--but it never lasts. Maybe I'm wrong and China is the first country to successfully perfect totalitarian single-party rule, but odds are that their growth and success will, in the end, be just as illusory as that of their forebears.

Your perception of China is 10-20 years out of date.

> controls its people and stifles their freedoms on every possible level

This is not at all the reality in China today. China is free enough: don’t talk too much about politics on social media, and don’t protest, and you’ll (probably) be just fine.

The biggest lesson I’ve taken from my years living in China is that you don’t need Freedom for people to prosper collectively (though I’m still convinced you need a free press as a check against power). Not everyone here is happy with single party government, but the vast majority are ok with it. There’s no revolt coming.

The bottom 50% of China are having their best string of decades in two thousand years. Freedom is great, but so is eating, and so is the promise of a much better life for your kids.

China’s getting its innovation game together too, they just need some time. I don’t see soft power happening any time soon though.

Freedom is great, but so is eating, and so is the promise of a much better life for your kids.

Thanks for the reasonable insight, you make some good points, especially that one which touches on the importance of hope. My question then is "how much leash is enough" if the dog is still under control of its authority? Even if the leash is 100ft. long, does the dog really experience freedom to explore the outer limits with the collar still tugging around its neck?

The greater the freedom (or maybe the perception of freedom ala Viktor Frankl), the greater the depths of hope and willingness to persevere through suffering, which is often a necessity at the blistering edges of innovation.

Then again, many of the world's early "innovations" were completed on the backs of controlled slave labor. Ignoring any jokes about "wage slavery", maybe you are right that a loosely-enslaved China is enough to achieve the controlling party's objectives, but I would still view that as a Pyrrhic victory.

Thanks for being open-minded and having a dialog.

I wouldn't call China loosely-enslaved; Chinese certainly don't see themselves as working for the Party, but for themselves, or for a prosperous China as a whole. Even though the information environment here is completely controlled, life really does feel free for the most part.

Is it really a Pyrrhic victory when a Chinese middle class family can have a comfortable, genuinely happy life? How is that family's happiness different from that of a family of westerners that comes here and lives happily for many years, as many of my friends have done?

But more to your point, it's true that America has some special sauce that 1) drives innovation faster than anywhere else in the world, and 2) attracts people to settle there from all over the world. But we see that Freedom is neither sufficient to become an innovation powerhouse (look at much of Europe) nor is it necessary (see Korea and Taiwan in the 70s and early 80s, which back then were very much not Free).

If you want to point to something as the reason why China is less innovative than the US on the whole, I'd point to the emphasis of rote memorization in the school system, and to the fact that college is kind of a joke, at least for the techies I've talked to. But that will slowly change, and even now China has a vibrant startup ecosystem.

The Party knows that for its long-term survival it must align its own interests with those of the people. And right now, to quote Singaporean academic Kishore Mahbubani in a recent Sinica podcast, "the primary goal of the Chinese Communist Party is to revive Chinese civilization." Of course, the party will insist that this be done on its own terms.

Human rights issues need not be addressed here because in practice they do not factor in. The US especially emphasizes these things because it loves to have the moral high ground (and I believe it does), but that unfortunately does very little to slow the rate at which the US, with its ineffective strategy over the last two decades, is ceding the geopolitical high ground.

>Man irresistibly is drawn to freedom

The success of China and people in the West increasingly saying things like "But do we really need freedom of speech that some people don't like?" makes me question this claim. Countries go through cycles of freedom and intense restriction. People are willing to fight and die for both sides. It's just a matter of who's more persuasive at the moment, and in the case of China, young people know their grandparents and even parents were laboring away on farms with holes for toilets while they're driving BMWs and buying new iPhones every year. Play a couple videos of chaotic protests in other countries on the news and they've made up their mind as to what they prefer.

It's easy for China to sweep away their problems. Other countries have also been nervously saying "China will collapse any day now! They're building empty cities!" It's not happening, but people think it is.

Treating Chinese failure as an inevitability is only making one's own country weak. They need to be seen as equal to the US and just as ready to economically hammer countries in the same way the US likes to. America's biggest advantage right now is cultural. People like American media and it helps give people a decent impression of the US. Nobody knows about China. Now that China is buying up Western media companies, that'll change in the coming decades.

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