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Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the liberal west mentality is the only way to make technological progress. I dont think in an autocratic society people can really thrive. Maybe a bit. But i dont think China would ever be able to pass the US and Europe with high tech. Everything is copied and stolen. They cant even implement or come up with decent safety standards in electronic devices. Their factories are dangerous places where curruption is daily practice. The individual doesn't count. Its all about output. How can that ever lead to creativity and happy researchers. Or maybe this all is changing in China?

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>I wonder if the liberal west mentality is the only way to make technological progress.

Germany made significant technological progress from 1933 to 1945. They threw away their early lead in computing after the war, maybe not too unsurprising given the circumstances.

But I also think China deserves some credit for mastering the 95% approach to product development, which is now even infecting western companies.

The Chinese strategy is clearly a race to the bottom and they seem to be winning. Things like safety standards and reliability are mostly a burden if you are shoveling out to a market of consumers willing to buy anything if the price is low enough. Stealing is obviously far cheaper then R&D, which means just another market advantage.

> I wonder if the liberal west mentality is the only way to make technological progress. I dont think in an autocratic society people can really thrive. Maybe a bit. But i dont think China would ever be able to pass the US and Europe with high tech. Everything is copied and stolen.

Nah, this is exactly what Japan did post-WWII until they didn't anymore. You copy until you catch up. Once you've caught up, you innovate. There's nothing fundamental that will hold China back.

There are even benefits to authoritarianism - for instance Chinese infrastructure is in many cases far better than US infrastructure and built far more efficiently. The US has about 49.9 miles of high-speed rail while China built 25,000 miles in the last few years. They've even got maglev trains. We've got the diesel Caltrain (for now! electrification is finally happening). [edit] (And soon the Bakersfield-Merced Express - stopping at every cow paddock along the way). The PRC built a bridge from Hong Kong to Macau, 34mi long, and built islands along the way to support it.

Never underestimate your opponent!

Japan arguably resembles a liberal western country though.

japan and korea use a proxy like a feudal-era lord systems. Hence, the chaebols and keiretsu controlling the bulk of the economy

> There are even benefits to authoritarianism - for instance Chinese infrastructure is in many cases far better than US infrastructure and built far more efficiently. The US has about 49.9 miles of high-speed rail while China built 25,000 miles in the last few years. They've even got maglev trains. We've got the diesel Caltrain (for now! electrification is finally happening). [edit] (And soon the Bakersfield-Merced Express - stopping at every cow paddock along the way). The PRC built a bridge from Hong Kong to Macau, 34mi long, and built islands along the way to support it.

I don't see how that can be explained by authoritarianism. All you've arguably shown is that today China is more efficient at building out infrastructure than the US.

The US built infrastructure efficiently too back when it was a developing country. From 1940-1980 the US built an incredible amount of infrastructure.

It’s must more efficient to build where there was nothing before than build where there is already something. Even China faced this issue with Three Gorges which took then decades just to get started.

I can accept that one point doesn't make a line.

However, I think it's also worth mentioning since you call out the 1940-1980 period, that a lot of that infrastructure was built thanks to, to my knowledge, the federal Declaration of Taking Act, 1931.

It was put on the books to enable faster confiscation of land for public use by the government. Unlike state eminent domain laws, the federal law gives the government the right to take the land first, tell you to vacate immediately, and have the courts set a price later. The government acquired land area under the declaration of taking act roughly the size of South Carolina (20 million acres). [1]

Meaningful infrastructure projects require setting aside individual rights for the collective good, and in the last few decades the US lost its taste for doing so. Now even building a basic over-land high-speed train is a morass of litigation and whining which balloons costs, reduces state capacity and leads to ridiculous compromises.

In my opinion it's not a question of whether theres "something there" or not - there's nothing in the Central Valley or along either the I-5 or the CA-99 corridor of any particular note. Building along it efficiently requires some authoritarian land-taking that the US has long since lost its taste for, despite having the capacity to carry out.

Many today would consider collecting 20M acres of land, telling people to get off, and eventually paying them out some amount set by the courts to be an act of authoritarian government imposition on private land incompatible with a western liberal democracy. In my opinion it's silly that one dude's cow paddock and one dude's fear it might make some toads sad can hold up high-speed rail between the two of the biggest economic powerhouses in the world.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/enrd/history-federal-use-eminent-dom...

Funny that you use the high speed rail network as an example. While China built an impressive amount of it in a short time, they also built way too much of it. The routes between smaller cities and some of the routes between larger ones lose ridiculous amounts of money and most of the network is just getting to the age where the first major maintenance is becoming necessary.

The network as a whole is deep in the red and it accumulated $ 1T of debt, alot of which was underwritten by the local governments. Because the fares are so high, most chinese cannot afford the high speed trains and they instead use the slower service. In essence local taxpayers are subsidizing the high speed journeys of the rich.

Contrast this with Germany, where sure buildout is slow and >250km/h sections are rare, but all train operators combined only have something like 5B € in debt and the high speed sections are about break-even.

>built too much ... debt

Infra net benefit goes beyond basic balance sheet math, no serious analysis suggest US high way system or 1T infrastructure bill to get US infra unfucked a massive waste. The purpose of infra is to generate more economic activity than it consumes. Analysis of net benefit of PRC HSR a few years ago was ~400B, or ROI of ~7%. It's a solid investment. The other context is PRC pop concentration of 1.3B east of Heihe–Tengchong Line, denser the closer to coast, where military aviation gets priority due to proximity of neighbours makes mass civilian air travel not feasible - HSR is replacing capacity for air travel not slow rail. Imagine if all US aviation, military and commercial are biased towards one coast to the point where capacity to move bodies becomes functionally saturated. Hence the joke that once PRC reunites with TW, they can afford to push military aviation further out from coast and then civilian aviation (notorious for delays in mainland) wouldn't be such a shitshow. Also why it's not useful to contrast to Germany since connecting requirements for a long trip (i.e. 600km Berlin-Munich) in a small country is different from long trip (i.e. 1500km Beijing-Shanghai) in a large country. Ultimately, PRC HSR is impressive reflection of CCP state capacity because it's not just about laying down fuckload of tracks, but being able to politically realize enormous projects for the right reasons.

Also for reference this entire idiotic PRC HSR boondoggle narrative was popularized by Indian nationalists after PRC nationalists made fun of them for not being able to build HSR, then amplified by customary western PRC bad bubbles.

A colleague of mine came back from a trip to China —decades ago, IIRC— and was asked by a somewhat insular neighbour "are the ChiComs still Communists?"

His reply: "yes, but they're the sort of communists who all dream of becoming millionaires."

All economies are different. But some are more different than others.

Communism after WW2 was not an ideological monolith and had two main, competing types: Soviet and Chinese.

Apparently the latter proved to be more flexible in the long run.

My father happened to attend a meeting once that turned out to be a propaganda event for Chinese communism - they gave him Mao's red book, which was promptly confiscated by security services who were standing in the exit.

No other consequences, just an unsaid, stern warning that the only accepted form of communism in this soviet satellite state is the one from Moscow.

Yes. The leader of an autocratic regimes have to reward the key holders to keep their support. Those key holders might have a layer beneath them where you also have loyalty as the prime driver.

Democracy and the rule of law looks like chaos in the eyes of strongman. " Let some strong iron man rule us, screw human rights". You get: Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Putin, Xi, you name it.

Make no mistake, the tendency to have yearn for someone to fix the country is very human. We can talk about Trump for days, but he was chosen because he appeals to exactly that idea. To be honest, I had misjudged Trump myselves early on too.

We have to be honest with each other: in American politics there have always been a current that strives in the direction of an autocracy. It is backed by some of the most wealthy conservatives, they seem to look at the Russian oligarchic model as an inspiration, it seems. Not illogical, as for those select few people, the law, the trias polica, human rights and those things we collectively obtained after centuries of struggle are just brakes on their quest for more power.

That political gremium is successful in diverting attention from what they are aiming at. People are now convinced they should be afraid of transgenders and Mexicans it seems. Why? Because the support of conservatism is crucial for implementing the overthrow of democracy.

Meanwhile the self-coup on the Witehouse was almost successful. The Republican Party has been taken over by people that don't believe in democracy. If you know you have lost the elections, but instead you declare the democracy dead by telling the people they shouldn't trust it, you have given a very clear signal about where things are heading.

I fear many Americans live in denial, because it sounds too extreme. We should remember that Hitler did not win the elections in the Weimar Republic. We are getting used to more and more extremism and corporatism, which paves the way to anacracy -> autocracy+oligarchy. But apparently we have to learn that lesson every century. Getting rid of non-democratic elements usually takes lots of blood. The Ukranians can tell you something about that. As do the Iranians.

Keep dictatorship away with a large middle class, education, decouple journalism from corporate interests [1], trias politica (esp seperation of law making and jurisdiction!) [2], consequence culture, keeping wealth concentration in check, making any political donations punishable by life sentence and hefty trade barriers for autocratic regimes.

You see, those are good things for society and horrible things for the few.

________

1) In a case Fox News defended themselves (case of Tuckerson) in court that they could not be convicted as it should be blatantly obvious that they were not telling the truth all the time.

2) See the supreme court of the train wrecks you get when you don't have this in place.

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