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Comment by cabalamat | Hacker News Reader

> the results so far haven't been uplifting

10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

> I don't think that a comparison of the US system vs. China is going to produce a clear "winner"

It's likely that one of these two countries is going to end up dominating the world. Of course, it's not so much about countries as social systems: both have their strengths and weaknesses.

> And I betcha if you analyzed a Chinese and American bureaucrat, you would find that they look, act and think alike.

I'm sure you're right.

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> 10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

They are catching up to status quo. Mostly because they squandered the previous decades scientifically hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state.

Which is so different from the War on Terror and the Patriot Act.

The War on Terror, foolish and wrong-headed though it has been, can't be placed on the same footing of destructiveness as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Not by several orders of magnitude. And you have to come through Stalinism and the Holocaust en route to making that comparison, so let's keep things in perspective here.

I guess I was responding to "hunting down sparrows and enemies of the state" rather than the revolution specifically, so I will accept they are in a different league.

Still, I'm not sure killing around 3% of Iraqis is something that can be dismissed as "foolish and wrong-headed" either.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,863327,00.h...

As misguided as the Patriot Act is, it pales in comparison to the Great Cultural Revolution and other acts of horror insanity that devastated China after World War II.

> They are catching up to status quo

Yes they are catching up. Three quarters of the countries in the world are catching up -- or trying to -- the most advanced countries, and that's been roughly the situation since the industrial revolution. The difference is that China has been more successful than anyone else at catching up; to the best of my knowledge no other country has ever managed as good a performance (except for poor countries that discover oil, which doesn't really count).

10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

China had the prior example of Taiwan to imitate. And Taiwan had China scared witless by the end of the Cultural Revolution, when it looked like the total size of Taiwan's economy, with only about one-SIXTIETH the population, might exceed the size of China's economy soon.

Global domination is a funny thing. Did Britain impose its ways on the world and change it forever, or did the world change it?

The answer is "all of the above". Of course many Brits got rich at the expense of the others.

> 10% growth every year for a quarter of a century? I regard that as very impressive.

It's not that impressive when you're chasing tail-lights and the folks ahead are (mostly) helping.

Come on... Simply holding together such a big country is really a daily miracle. I live there and I can tell you Chinese people are not what you think, they are VERY HARD to govern. They never stop inventing ways to break the rules, they have a tendency to suddenly and unexpectedly jump all together on the same side of the boat. A daily miracle, I tell you, and most of this miracle is based on the rock-solid traditional education given in the country-side.

I'll tell you, the Chinese hard even harder to govern than the French. (I'm French, I know both.)

> Come on... Simply holding together such a big country is really a daily miracle. I live there and I can tell you Chinese people are not what you think, they are VERY HARD to govern.

You've identified the problem, but it's not the problem that you think that it is.

Why do you assume that "holding together" and "govern" is a good idea? More to the point, what would happen if the Chinese govt stopped trying to do so?

It's not like China is going to be invaded.

I was going to write something about keeping the gangsters in check, but then I remembered that official corruption is a huge problem in China, and most of that stems from this "govern" thing that you value so highly.

> They never stop inventing ways to break the rules,

Which is another reason why 10% is no big deal.

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