Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NickC25 | Hacker News Reader

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>For US to be on the brink of any real crisis there would need to be a super power alternative. There is none and it does not look like any is going to be in the next 30 years.

China would like a word. A developing country with a highly educated population with a military that has achieved nuclear capacity....that also has developed trade relations with practically every other major economy on the planet. While their style of governance might be somewhat blunt and brutalist, it's also lifted a billion people out of destitute poverty. That builds tremendous trust internally.

The USA, on the other hand is trying to recover from having a perpetually bankrupt illiterate spray-tanned wannabe mafia Don pedophile fraudster as their previous president, who very well could get another chance at the Presidency. That president lost the popular vote by several million votes yet still got power. He's been elevated to the status of God by his followers and political party, and is untouchable to the point where he admits serious crimes and walks away a free man to this very day. Oh yeah, 70+ million people want him back in power.

We're not in crisis? Yeah, no. This is real.

China has collapsing demographics. Hated by every one of its neighbors. An economy completely dependent on exports. No food security. No energy security. A dictatorship.

China's demographics are a problem, yeah. I'll give you that all day. Yes, they have a dependent economy, sure, but if you think about it, so does the US - nobody builds physical goods in the US, and American corporations are just as import-needy as China is export-needy. Food security is just a famine away, and The Party wouldn't lose any support even if a few million people died.

The Chinese people have ZERO problems overall with a dictatorship. You can't manage to take a billion people out of poverty without one, sadly. The Chinese that I've worked with not only like what the Party has done to their families and communities, but also their local economies.

Your view is that it's a brutal dictatorship. Their view is that The Party has put a roof over their heads, put food in their stomachs, developed an economy, modernized their country, educated them (and paid for them to study overseas), and has given them a good life - a much better one than their grandparents ever got a chance at.

"You can't manage to take a billion people out of poverty without one, sadly."

Please elaborate and defend.

How about you show a country where a billion people were taken out of poverty while not governed by something westerners call a dictatorship?

Given that we have exactly two instances of countries that had a billion people, you're cherry-picking (whether or not deliberately).

You could argue that more countries have rapidly emerged from poverty while controlled by a dictatorship than controlled by a democracy. (Even South Korea would qualify for that.) But your "a billion people" threshold makes it look like you want to shut down debate, rather than actually look at data.

> you "a billion people" threshold makes it look like you want to shut down debate, rather than actually look at data.

Not so - the threshold is there for a reason. It's inherently harder to corral more people than fewer people. At the time that South Korea became a fully fledged democracy, their population was between 37 and 45 million people. That's roughly the size of the urban area of China's 3rd largest city.

You cannot control a country of 1.3 billion people (with a landmass larger than the continental USA) that has regional cultural differences such as diet and language as easily as you can a homogeneous population of ~40 million in an area the size of Indiana.

If I wanted to increase the GDP of the city block I live on, it's a lot easier than if I wanted to increase the GDP of my entire city, let alone the county, state, or country. Things are harder at scale. That's where the efficiency of a dictatorship shines. Not that I'm a fan of The Party, or of dictatorships. Fuck them both. I've done business with The Party, and 10/10 would not recommend. But credit is due where credit is due, and The Party has managed to do some things that have been incredibly beneficial to China at large, on multiple fronts - economics, infrastructure, education, etc... Part of their ability to do so comes from having a centralized dictatorship.

Please elaborate? 1 billion people+ being taken from poverty into an infinitely better standard of living within 1 generation.

Care to name me a massive country of 1 billion+ under democratic rule that manged that sort of economic growth in that same frame of time?

> The Party wouldn't lose any support even if a few million people died.

Historically, famine has been a very common precursor of dynastic change in China. Famines are often interpreted as the current regime having lost what Mencius (孟子) called the "Mandate of Heaven" (天命).

> The Party wouldn't lose any support even if a few million people died.

I really doubt that you're right on this point. It plays badly with "put food in their stomachs".

Did the billion people get out of poverty because of the party or despite it?

The great leap forward killed up to 55 million people.

China demographics are plainly bad. Also, they managed to degrade their topsoil faster than the US. Agriculturally, the huge contributor is their fishing fleet, but relying on that means they have to keep the US happy to guarantee a relative stability accross the oceans.

Maybe India could be a relative threat, but I don't think so. They're at the end of their demographic transition and they wasted a big part of it (from 2010 until covid) (basically, a country is most productive during a demographic transition, for multiple reasons). The issue is that they didn't build enough infrastructure. It's okay in immigration-positive country like the US (immigration is basically a demographic cheat code that bail you out of your mistakes). In India, where there is a lot of skilled emigration, it's a big disadvantage.

I don't disagree that China's got some serious issues - food security, skewed demographics, insane cost-of-living issues (that blow the USA's out of the water), a ticking time bomb of a real estate bubble, etc. I have studied this for a long time, and worked with Chinese nationals for several years.

However, their government has the absolute trust of the populace at large, and the one benefit of a dictatorship is that things get done in government, rather than endless partisan bickering where the only real beneficiary is the stock market which relies on government's inability to do anything besides say words.

Trust and fear aren't remotely the same.

That's right. And in China's case, it really is mostly trust, not fear.

Compared to the US, where the US government is not at all trusted, and feared by many. Minority groups fear it as a tool of oppression; one of the two major political parties regularly claims that the government steals elections from it.

There is good reason to fear the Chinese government, and some Chinese do. It is not a democracy and does not pretend to be. But it's not the "Big Brother" situation it's often portrayed as. Most Chinese genuinely believe that the government is a benevolent dictatorship that is working well for them.

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