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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

I have a fairly dim view of China's ethics and respect for human rights, and so tend to suspect the worst; however, the hyper-competition in China's production industries has led to product ecosystems rife with unsafe materials (e.g. lead), and other cut corners. Now that many Chinese are able to purchase the things they produce, I can imagine that safety regulations are starting to be demanded by the public, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, I am sure this push will also be used to further crackdown on political dissent and to consolidate power, I can well imagine.

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> I can imagine that safety regulations are starting to be demanded by the public, and that is a good thing

I remember seeing a sign at the Hong Kong border when going to the mainland warning that there was a maximum amount of infant formula that could be taken across. Hopefully this is that crackdown.

This thing can be good for the Chinese people, but it's CCP, so yeah, it must be evil intentioned.

I don't know if you really mean it or you are forced to well imagine it so your comment won't be downvoted.

USSR followed the same path when their citizens grumbled about liberalization. State owned enterprises are now seizing power from private companies and foreign entities. Pretty soon you are going to see replays of USSR SoE dominance such as lack of innovation, bread lines, inefficient operation, and corruption. It seems xi jing ping did not fully study the downfall of USSR after all.

I've been hearing from pundits that the collapse of China is around the corner for the past 25 years, and I have yet to see why I won't be hearing about it for the next 25.

They've been saying it since 1949. Now China is the world's second (first on some measures) largest economy, and they sent a rover to Mars and are building a space station.

I had occasion to read some New York Times newspapers from 1917 and 1918, and they were filled with stories about how Mr. Lenine's (sic) government was about to fall if not already in flight. Off the mark by 70 years or so, and Russia is still run by former CP nomenklatura.

This analogy works on a few levels, but not in others. One key differences between the USSR and China is that the USSR did not have a close economic relationship with the U.S., nor an economy near parity to the U.S.'s. There might be a decline of Chinese power, but it will not take a similar path, imo.

Agreed that it’s not exactly the same scenarios. However US is actively disengaging from China. And as far as economy parity I think that may never be as China is on a downward trajectory while US is going up. And lots of china’s numbers are fabricated.

The causes of the downfall of the USSR seems to always line up with whatever political angle the writer has. Leftwing can point to a lack of (political) liberalization or poor planning, rightwing can point to not going further on (economic) liberalization. It's a topic that is really valuable to think tanks based on their politics and their donor's politics.

Most people in the West (both left and right-wing) thought the USSR was much more economically productive than it actually was, and that the populace was more supportive of the regime than was the case. The Chinese learned very valuable lessons from the USSR, namely that liberalization is very dangerous for a regime; North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.

I am not sure how earlier political liberalization could have saved the USSR, which was essentially a (communist) imperialist dictatorship.

> North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.

NK doesn't go to wars outside it. And they have support of China. This surely supports a long term stability... but how much of a long term, remains to be seen.

The USSR economy did pretty well under Stalin, especially during the Depression that affected the west. Khrushchev deprioritized capital expenditures and that was the beginning of the end. Similar story in the DDR around the time of Stalin's death.

No, that is completely wrong that the USSR economy did well during the depression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

There are many other sources / economists who will support that, wikipedia is just the fastest.

Stalin's government did do a great job of ramping up industrial production before and during WW2.

Both Victor's, and your point is completely incorrect.

The point is, whatever survivor's of thirties tell, thirties were a terrible time, even if they were living in a relatively well off Moscow.

That's the only truth, not that of lunatical historians which have nothing, but digits to look on, and imagining things well knowing that pretty much nothing in official economics documents from USSR' reflected reality.

Stalin, and his industrial proves is another busted for 100th time trope, straight out of original propaganda. A thing glaringly obvious to any Russian citizen who had at some time a surviving relative who went through that time, but not to people who purposefully keep returning to it for search of their worldview validation "alternative facts"

Well if the USSR economy was in shambles in 1941, that makes the Red Army's pushback of Barbarossa, and the reversal of initiative at Stalingrad all the more impressive.

The same weather problems that hit the Ukraine in the early 1930s hit the US too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl .

The economic landscape of the US at the time was the Depression, whereas the USSR economy was chugging along, other than the poor harvest in the Ukraine that year. Walter Duranty of the New York Times visited Ukraine at the time, and said the harvest was not a good one but a lot of reports coming out of the Ukraine were overblown.

And very few people look at what topped it off: the cold war. The insane pressure from the US caused USSR to overspend on military when then barely fed their population. I think people should say "US won the cold war" rather than "the cold war ended" or "the USSR collapsed". It didn't collapse on it's own...as bad as communism was for the population, they could have potentially carry it on forever, like North Korea, if it wasn't for the US pressure.

It's not like the US kept it a secret that they wanted to either gain enough of a military advantage over the USSR to remove them as a viable threat or force them to keep spending ever more amounts of resources on military boondoggles.

It's interesting that likely the biggest beneficiaries of Cold War ending were Russians, not Americans. So maybe US won the cold war - even though they were really worried about collapse of USSR and creation of multiple states instead the former one - but Russians certainly got something out of that collapse.

EDIT: and by "Russians" here I rather mean "former Soviet citizens".

Do you really think that the Chinese government have not studied the causes and effects of the ussr collapse enough? The other large communist nation who was also their neighbour? Or is this just some weird rhetoric you're using

USSR didn’t have private enterprises and thus no markets. There was no competition.

Actually, it did: it was called "NEP"[1] and was used to reboot the economics after the revolution and civil war. Afterwards the control of all economic matters was ceased again by the goverment.

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

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