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Comment by Nux | Hacker News Reader

"China knows everything we know, and many things we do not"

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/hurricane-china-how-to-prepar...

Man this article is interesting and I agree with a lot of what he is saying, especially about people being totally ignorant of how deeply compromised our corporations and intellectual property is.

But wow this guy is on somw type of high horse. Talking about how a third of americans believe conspiracy theories and want college to be more expensive cause they dont want their kids to be "libtards"

And the part where talks about a kid in the US having a bake sale to pay for his brain surgery being some sort of embarrassment compared to China. Pardon me while I roll my eyes back into my skull. You think 90% of the population of china has access to brain surgery? Give me a fucking break. This is the country that not a generation ago were killing children en masse and forcing abortions to stop their population growth. Its not some utopia where all the sick are healed. The CCP couldn't give a fuck about some poor kid in the country side with a brain tumor. Gimme a fucking break. And to say they've eliminated poverty to a greater degree than the US is absolutely laughable. The fringes of Chinese society are dyed in the wool 3rd world levels of living. Even the living standards in the biggest cities are arguably shittier than poverty in the US. I'd rather be impoverished living on an acre of land in boondock Missouri than living in a 200 sqft apartment in Shanghai.

But yeah, we can't ignore the rise of China. We do so at our peril.

I’m not sure who’s engaging more in hyperbole - you or Yegge. China eliminating poverty to a greater degree than the US isn’t a controversial statement - China accounts for 75% of global poverty reduction from the 70s to now. Regardless if they were struggling to eat a generation ago, the Chinese have made a complete turn around in the past 40 years. Finally even if Chinese health care today isn’t exceptional (I can’t say for sure as I haven’t looked into it), the Chinese are at least currently transitioning to a national healthcare system. I can understand Yegge’s frustration - in the long run worse system that is improving will eventually beat out a better system that is stagnating.

All in all, China has already “risen”. To pretend that China is still 3rd world ghetto of the 90s is to ignore that fact at our own peril

OP said the fringes of China are basically third world ghettos, and having seen it first hand, he/she is not far off.

International/military supremacy is a completely different story though.

There's not much of value in that screed. He's right that we shouldn't ignore China, but for a number of wrong reasons, and he's terribly wrong about how powerful and wealthy China is.

the current China is like the late Ming dynasty

Yegge has spend years working in the Asia region, in a business capacity. What makes you so sure that he's so wrong?

(I mean, maybe you're right - but that makes me curious as to who you are that you're more knowledgeable than him about this particular topic)

It baffles me that people skip over their ongoing demographic crisis/population pyramid inversion which will have been the largest and most rapid in human history. Only 900 million people and 1/3 of them are over 65 in 2050? We're rapidly approaching the closing stage of the second consecutive Century of Humiliation, and the CCP will not exist at the end of it.

The US and western liberal democracies just need to keep their shit together for another 29 years. (which, I admit, is easier said than done)

> Only 900 million people

So the USA can dominate the entire planet and most of space with 330 million, but China is dead in the water if they drop to a mere 900 million?

If you look at China's problem from a third world perspective like mine, ALL of their issues get easier with less people.

1 US citizen is worth about 5 PRC citizens in terms of economic activity. The PRC's GDP per capita is roughly the same as Brazil's (this situation is unlikely to improve either [1]). Imagine Brazil scaled up to 900 million people and 1/3 of them are over 65. Social welfare systems start to buckly/collapse, and retirement benefits must be cut or the retirement age raised.

The only thing the PRC could do right now is force people to reproduce at gunpoint, and they even shot themselves in the foot there with the One Child Policy and now having 30 million more young men than women.

It's going to be scary to see Japan, the PRC, the ROC (Taiwan), etc. lose 1/4 of their populations in the next 30 years. The US is the only developed country with okay demographic projections through 2050, and that's only because of immigration. Not sure where you're from, but if you're in a developing country you'll probably be doing okay in 2050.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_income_trap

Excellent post. Thank you for sharing.

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