I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
Yes. Who said they hadn't?
For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world.
E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough".
1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1).
Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period")
"China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""
https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order.
That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture).
Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing.
Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!)
Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup.
Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years.
Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.
[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA
> check and balance in China
Do tell.
Last I checked, China was a one-party state and doesn't have the same judiciary-executive freedom that typically defines 'checks and balances'
Check and balanced exit, as one example, in the ways of how policies are executed between different branches and sectors.
Like if Xi wants to do some thing, the functioning branch has a great deal of influence, as the government officials are not refreshed between different government terms. Like many of Xi's policy can be effectively nullified, if the policy really were not effectively mobilizing the functioning units.
One might fancy that Xi can install his own men that is so effective that the above check is rendered ineffective. That's possible, but it seems even in the imperial era, a sane emperor was not able to do that [1]. Nor I see any evidence that Xi had acquired any such superhuman power.
These are unfortunately not as visible as western systems.
But again, I can only state qualitatively, in the sense that the check and balance is so much more effective than what a lot of people imagine. I am not an expert that can give you a systematic description of the details. I once again lament the missing of a modern day Tocqueville...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1587,_a_Year_of_No_Significa...
Well, he does need to be voted Secretary by the Central Committee. The change that was made recently was to remove term limits - but in theory he can still be voted out. Weak sauce I know compared to judicial oversight but hey, you asked.
I agree with the GP that labeling Xi a "dictator" is hyperbole. I wouldn't even say he's as entrenched as Putin.
So anyone who claims Xi is a dictator has evil motives? No room for honest disagreement? The facts are not only clear and unambiguous, but also so widely spread that everyone knows? Nonsense. "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil" is a very cheap rhetorical trick. You sound like...
Well, you sound like the American left. And the American right. And the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party. What you don't sound like, though, is a reasonable person having a reasonable discussion, who has evidence on his side.
Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels). Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road).
So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..).