China is eating the world

The fast pace of economic growth didn't necessarily come from authoritarianism (though I'll accept it helped in some ways) but from the fast catch-up. That isn't going to last forever. Growth will slow - it's slowing already. And when it does, a generation of people (who grew up wealthy) will start to think about corruption, human rights, and having a say in what goes on.

My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.

> The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures.

This one hits close to home. I saw an improvement in quality of life between the 90s and maybe 2005, but not so much since then. Not to say that there hasn't been progress, I mean tablets and pervasive internet & smartphone usage was unthinkable back then. But my life isn't any better for them. Cities feel worse, more congested, less money for public transport, more littering. Nature is disappearing all around me. Energy is WAY more expensive. Food quality is worse. Pollution seems worse. Hell, people seem worse, somehow?

Maybe this is all the disenchantment of middle age (or slumbering depression). But I haven't seen any political projects that fill me with joy in a very long time. Only dread. From shitty "free" trade agreements to Chat Control. Pouring more concrete and reducing train services. Endless austerity because we can no longer afford healthcare and/or pensions.

Yet at the same time, economic growth has mostly kept going, but it isn't translating to improved quality of life for Average Joe.

* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.

* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.

* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.

* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.

Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.

There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.

Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.

My hopes for China fall into 2 main camps: - Measured increases in personal freedom. Restricting information serves to slow the viral spread of minority/non-mainstream opinions (i.e. limiting the reach of a vocal minority), but keeping the population from being exposed to "bad" information is only beneficial as long as the government is "good".

- Acknowledge/continue working on current issues (demographic issues, housing market, domestic consumption). The worst that can happen to a country is that they trick themselves with their own lies (a common trope in many films featuring non-Western countries).

Interested in hearing thoughts/rebuttals/additions on this.

Disclaimer: I am ethnically Chinese but grew up outside the country.

Not sure how the title matches with this line at all.

In any case, these kinds of analyses always seem really shallow and historically ignorant to me. I can totally buy the idea that China will become a dominant economic player in the world, if it isn't already. This seems like an obvious, borderline mundane observation to make.

What would be more insightful is an analysis of China and the West that factors in three big things:

1. How the unique aspects of America basically make it impossible for the the country to be in the position China was in during the 19th and early 20th centuries, which is to say, a total disaster, beset by civil wars, colonial acquisitions, invasions, on and on. No matter how much China outcompetes America, I don't think it will ever be in that sort of situation. The military and national security state, plus the sheer amount of personal firearms, pretty much guarantees IMO that the US is basically impregnable from outside military interventions. 19th century China had neither of these things. And so I think you're inevitably going to have, at worst, a multipolar world, if not a directly bipolar one.

2. More broadly, how the cultural dynamics of the West led to the Reformation, Wars of Religion, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution and to the West being the dominant power in the first place. And more importantly, if those cultural trends are still active, even if they are somehow dormant. If you don't factor these in, your picture of history is extremely short-term and basically dependent on contemporary predictions of the future. (See: predictions of Japan in the 1980s.)

3. And more recently, how the "enemy" of the Soviet Union prompted the US to behave more competitively and feel pressured to perform. See, for example, the Space Race. I don't really get the sense that China is anywhere near occupying the same place in the American imagination right now, and so there isn't much of a competitive spirit. There seem to be rumblings of one developing in the last decade, but it's still not quite there. If it ever develops, certainly it's going to be a factor.

Also: >prosperity without freedom, development without democracy, safety without expansive civil liberties.

So did the USSR in many places.

This one hits close to home. Case in point, many people on HN argue that having fewer goods and higher prices is part of being an developed country. I think it's deadly wrong. A hallmark of a modern industrialized society is to make once-expensive products accessible to the majority of the people, if not everyone. That's how we got electricity, got clean water, got food like butter (which only wealthy families could afford), got cars, got iphone, got all kinds of appliances, and got amazing infrastructure. And somehow now it's okay to accept that China can manufacture and build faster, and cheaper, and better?

Only two parties (of practical importance), each with its power highly centralized (one perhaps more than the other), isn't actually very democratically friendly in terms of choice. Or policy idea evolution/recombination. And from a "democracy" PR perspective, it's not going so well either.

A healthy democracy, where ideas and candidates have more sources and competition, would be much more likely to be development friendly/capable/consistent.

The downsides of Chinese authoritarianism are very real. I wouldn't want to live there. But the west is increasingly unable to deliver on things that are lower down on the hierarchy of needs. Crime and personal safety, infrastructure maintenance, homes within commuting distance of jobs. It's not so much that we need to dream bigger as that we need to stop sawing off our own legs with the basics.

Plus when decades of "democracy" can't deliver things the majority wants - like reduced immigration - people will rightly ask what good it is to anyone.

I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.

China is great but it is still a middle income country like Thailand or Malaysia. It's sheer size means that there will be pockets of innovation in a sea of what is overall suboar by western standards. There is definitely things that the west can learn from china (like the value of hard work and getting things done) and some of their tech (like batteries ) is leading edge but we have to put things in perspective. Every civilization will have it's advantages and disadvantages. There is no superior system. For the west (especially Europe) we need to embrace change. That is something that the Chinese truly lead the world.

Hmm I don't know about those so called "western values" - seems to me there's a lot of hypocrisy in western nations, where we look down on so called authoritarian societies as wrong or even evil. As TFA says, it looks like the Chinese government is delivering for its people, while it's clear that western democracies are not.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68844731

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/02/the-relationship...

https://www.hudson.org/technology/china-ignores-rule-of-law-...

Every time an article like this hits, the Western brain spasms.

But…but they don’t innovate, they just copy!

But…but ghost cities, Evergrande, debt spiral. Any day now it all collapses!

But…but how do they even freedom?

We can't believe China is eating the world because it would mean Western Civilization is contingent - that everything leading up to this point wasn't an inevitability. That we actually had a choice and got tricked into strip malls, failed governance, and life long debt. That wealth inequality wasn't actually our destiny and the people who got rich off what we built didn't actually deserve it.

So we have to believe that people may ride those trains and pay with those QR codes, but deep down, their souls are yearning for suburban strip malls, CNN panel discussions, and 30-year mortgages.

China has to be perpetually both failing and knocking at our doorstep because the idea that then we’re left with the intolerable truth: they actually built things that work, and we chose not to.

The author got one city in this list backward. China copied Singapore, through and through. Deng Xiaoping's state visit to Singapore was the catalyst and model for China's subsequent opening up and 'state capitalism'[1][2][3], where the party in power would have leverage and possibly ownership over both state- and privately-owned enterprises.

Singapore calls them 'GLCs', or government-linked companies, and they form the overwhelming majority of its GDP.

[1]: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=6c7cb559-... [2]: https://eresources.nlb.gov.sg/newspapers/digitised/article/s... [3]: https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/looking-back-on-deng-xiaopin...

Brown University's Costs of War project estimated that by 2021, all post-9/11 wars had cost $8T. When you factor in inflation since then, it easily exceeds $10T spent murdering farmers making $2/day in the Middle East. With nothing to show for it.

That's roughly a third of America's GDP/current debt wasted on making the world a measurably worse place.

What? New Orlean's French Quarter doesn't have McDonalds or Starbucks, either. And how is it shocking that a historical district in a province not internationally well known would have mostly domestic tourists?

> China has built its own enormous internal market—its own tourism, its own brands, its own everything. They've turned inward not from isolation but from self-sufficiency.

Is this person completely ignorant about Chinese history? Precisely nothing has changed about China, the culture has always been like this, if only because they've always been so large. There's a reason they've always called themselves the Middle Kingdom (i.e. the center of the universe). Large countries are like this, generally. The USA is like this. Perhaps the author is American and that's why they're so shocked when they begin to see the world through others' eyes.

I'd be interested to see something with more detail and citations. Or maybe even a rebuttal piece.

It seems like politicians in liberal democracies are giving up on democracy and turning to authoritarianism instead.

But since 2008 it’s become clear to many people that these liberal democracies are actually governments owned by the upper class.

It’s not that politicians are turning away from democracy. They are throwing the mask off. What they envy is the ability to exercise power without disguising it.

That’s not going to cure our problems. It’s actually the narrow self-interested decisions of the upper class that have landed us in this state of decline.

I know this is a tangent but I really think it's completely asinine that we hold passenger rail and particularly high-speed rail to the same standards (environmental, eminent domain, etc) as other projects — public and private — in light of the fundamental differences:

- RoW for trains is highly constrained. Turns and hills are both very bad. A factory can be moved. A road can turn. A train is SOL.

- Passenger rail displaces transport modes that have far worse externalities for the environment, human safety and land use. Other infrastructure generally does not do this. There are a few exceptions like powerlines.

- Failing transport networks are a national embarrassment. If we have to do this — if we're committed to Cold War Two — then can't we at least win?

It's not just China that built more miles of passenger rail than the United States in the past two decades. It's also Mexico. Something is wrong.

This is such an America centric point of view. Plenty of central Europe is delivering longer life expectancy and better public infrastructure, without the authoritarian state (at least if you ask anybody but an American).

The war on corruption in China[0] is noteworthy where by 2023 “2.3 million government officials have been prosecuted”.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corruption_campaign_und...

Barrington Moore Jr.: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966)

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

The Communist Party of China obtains and centralizes authority from the lower layers to the upper layers, but the Chinese leaves the implementation details of its five-year plans at the local level. The political incentive is to make your bosses and subordinates look good, so they don't lose the mandate to reign to another clique in the party. Of course there was the example of the USSR failing to succeed in the global stage, but the Chinese variant is working in interpreting Marxism and Leninism to the Chinese 21st century.

Meanwhile, the Western model was based on prior enlightenment and humanist ideals before Marxist critique of 19th century capitalism. The idea was that an enlightened populace would be able to democratically elect representatives to best represent themselves and their interests as opposed to a king, but the West after capitalism is largely setup to reward international capitalist incentives over other national interests.

However, the two worlds are interdependent on each other. It was the first world outsourcing its manufacturing to this second world that led to its current prosperity. The first world instead pursued services and financialization.

because, Some people in China they don't care what "THE WORLD" care, So, "THEY ARE ALIENS", that’s what this is all about.

I don’t know much about China, but I’m not sure the Chinese model of economic modernization today is much different than post-war US model that worked of defense-led capitalism, strategic resource stockpiles to maintain price stability, and strong antitrust. I think the Chinese economy is probably more free-market (in the sense that it is easier to start a business, and the Econ 101 model of pure competition that drives down prices applies to more markets) than the US is today.

People and development go together. The more people you have, the more development you can have. India is experiencing a similar early growth trajectory (from a GDP and energy use perspective), because like China, they have over a billion people. Comparatively, the US for example, has a few hundred million people.

Historically, this has always been the case. China and India were the most populated places and biggest economies for much of the past several millennia

What held China and India back the past few centuries? The west, through its Opium wars and colonialism. Globalization accelerated a reversion to the mean

The takeaway here shouldn't be to end democracy and turn to state capitalism or mercantilism. For the US to keep up, it will need more people. Or AGI I guess

So they can give back to the world. They've destroyed countless Chinese in the process, but that's not our problem. Complaining about trains when cheap air travel is available to even the poor is peak academia. Complaining about semiconductors to several generations who grew up on the Internet and iPhone doubly so.

Anyone who has China lust should move there, the same for anyone with a burning lust for communism, give up their Western citizenship, and put their ignorance—oops I mean foresightedness—to the test. In fact, it's too bad we can't deport people there (eg wannabe communists). For the rest of us, Google Street View (of China versus, say, anywhere else), Walmart, and a healthy understanding of the difference between real life and Substack should suffice.

Author sounds like someone on their way from a week-end in the Huxleyan London of Brave New World. Everything was so beautiful. Freedom? Fuck that.

Success is attributed to repressive and uninclusive government sytems rather than to the far more decisive factors: market reforms, foreign capital, and global trade integration. By collapsing this complexity into a single flattering story about centralized control, the piece functions more as an ideology and propaganda piece than a real good faith analysis of China's root causes of success.

The narrative also erases China’s structural advantages: the world’s largest labor force and vast natural resources that made global dominance in manufacturing and supply chains possible. These advantages would likely have delivered major growth under democracy, and possibly with less fragility, failure, and human rights abuse. By crediting authoritarianism instead, the article smuggles in a propagandistic message: authoritarian control isn’t incidental but necessary for technological and societal success. Bullshit!

Recently, I was watching a documentary about World War II (made by Americans) and was shocked by how severe the casualties were in the war between Germany and the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, in contrast to the Western Front. Ideology seems to be a primary culprit in that tragedy.

I also watched a documentary about the Vietnam War (also made by Americans) and couldn't understand why the U.S. engaged in that war, sacrificing so many lives simply out of fear of the vague notion of communism. Decades later, we can see that not much happened as a result of that fear.

Most of the time, I feel that people are not so different from one another. There may be slight variations in thought, but those differences are minuscule.

I completely don’t understand why U.S.-China relations have worsened in recent years; it seems very absurd to me. All the mutual hatred stemming from ideological differences is just nonsense, similar to the animosity that exists between different religions—it's all nonsense.

You'd be surprised by how much the rest of the world does not care about these things at all or even finds their presence degrading

yunnan is rural historic farm area, next to tibet, it's not supposed to have mcdo. did author cry he couldn't get shake shack in tibet?

Are they leading in solar panels? wow ... almost like cheap labor and non-existent pollution control makes manufacturing real cheap. Did you hear they're also mining and burning more coal than ever, despite the west's alleged 150 year advantage. But let's forget that. we can totally trust china to remove coal by 2030 like promised.

we call china "emerging" because most (numbers, not the average) of its people make less than 10k per year. most of its rich people aren't investing in stocks or bonds. the government still needs to direct investment in large swaths of society, that is why china earns its "developing" label.

do you think china's courts are developed? we call them emerging or developing, because they haven't shown to be independent yet and they issue political rulings like in some ... developing ... banana republic. that's why it's called developing. their institutions aren't particularly ... instituted.

misleading calling china leader in heat pumps ... yes cheap heat pumps. good for them. but volume doesn't mean good, everyone likes cheap stuff.

china makes 5 year government plans public, what is this 20 year plan he talks about? what is the success rate of these public plans? remember, they promised to control coal and reduce usage by 2030.

small countries like singapore becoming more authoritarian by copying chinese politics isn't the bragging win you think it is.

If we're going to compete with a free market against China's hybrid-communism, then we should do things that enable the strengths of a free market to be realized.

If our free market is a Magic The Gathering deck, it's like we're a blue deck that refuses to put any blue mana into the deck. Our deck isn't losing because it has bad ideas, it's because we weren't willing to put any of the supporting cards into play.

Patents are mostly used by large companies to protect themselves against smaller companies that could be more efficient. We choose to use patents in a way that stifles new competition. We refuse to put the "efficient new competitor" card in our deck.

Intellectual property lasts for--what?--150 years these days. Ridiculous.

What about labor vs capital? Income is taxed more than capital gains. This is not based on economic theory or anything, this is just a decision we've made. We have chosen to value moving money and capital around more than working and building things.

What about the "free" in free market?

Do we make it easy for laborers to move around freely? Nope.

We have weak social safety nets. Healthcare is tied to employment as though those who are not working a traditional job deserve to die.

We allow Jimmy John's to include non-complete clauses to prevent their workers from making sandwiches for a company that pays more.

We also allow a form of indentured servitude via "TRAPs"[0] which prevent workers from moving freely in the market.

We're trying to compete as a free market without allowing most of the things that make free markets effective because they would be inconvenient for those who already have wealth and power.

When the private data of millions of people is leaked twice a month, nobody cares--or rather, nobody with power to do something about it cares.

When giant companies fail because they made bad decisions, we bail them out, thus eliminating the opportunity for new and smarter companies to grow.

Our law making system seems completely unable to change any of these things and has devolved into one man making unpredictable threats and orders that are probably illegal and unenforceable, but most just follow them anyways.

What does it mean when the things that happen in a healthy free market aren't happening?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32905728

What ideologues often forget is that their beliefs don’t pay rent. They don’t feed the hungry, they don’t create economic growth, they don’t solve problems. Yes, democracy is phenomenal and I think that direct democracy is the current peak governance model out there, but look at how easily Western Democracies have been captured by capital, how western economies lost the plot of the long game and failed to solve problems because they’re so myopically focused on next quarter growth at all costs and shareholder returns. We point our fingers at the abuse of the Uyghurs by China and prison labor, but conveniently ignore the migrants crossing the Mediterranean that our countries let drown, or the immigrants being kidnapped by governments, or the American prison industrial complex’s outsized impact on non-white communities, or NATO’s abuse of and complicity in the genocide of Muslims and Arabs. We crow about Chinese mass surveillance while feeding Meta, Google, Palantir, and the NSA with all our data.

Which is to say, we actually aren’t that different.

And when you begrudgingly swallow that uncomfortable truth, you begin to see how we’re objectively worse off now and in the near future than our Chinese peers. Our infrastructure crumbles because we allowed Capital to neglect it, while China’s whisks its citizenry around quickly and efficiently using EVs and HSR. Our employment markets are similar in struggles for the youth and the cost of living crisis, yet China at least acknowledges the issue and attempts to support its people while Western governments embrace austerity and blame labor for being robbed by Capital. Whilst Capital decries over-regulation as hindering its prosperity here, Chinese firms flourish under a far more strict regime because they understand politics is a fool’s errand for entities designed to make goods or provide services.

I love what China has done, even if I’m disgusted with the horrors it has wrought on others to achieve it. Where I differ from others is that I’m not naive enough to believe we’re assured victory simply based on ideology, morals, or ethics alone, nor do I engage in the denialism so many worship when cheerleading anti-DEI, anti-science, and anti-labor talking points in a vain attempt to boost personal worth at the expense of others.

This is the last real chance for Western governments to establish, at the very least, a balance with China in the century ahead. China still needs western R&D, western technologies, western patents, and western money, at least for the time being.

Once they have a competitive navy? Once they’ve transitioned to renewables? Once they’ve closed their supply chains and can recycle their waste into new products? Once they’ve solved the hard problems Capital never can, because they’re not immediately profitable to do so?

Then we’re cooked.

Mobile payments vs credit card payments aren't a revolution. America has Google and Apple Pay but most Americans still swipe. It's just not that different and it's easier to compartmentalize your spending that way.

The idea of an "everything app" like WeChat actually turns me completely off. I don't want everything in one app. I want compartmentalization. I value it, in fact.

> The West spent 150 years building coal plants, then natural gas, then slowly adding renewables. China went from burning coal directly to becoming the world's solar panel factory. They make 80% of all solar panels globally.

China is also, incidentally the coal king of the world, and has rapidly expanded coal production over the last few decades. Their coal consumption has tripled since 2000. For all the breathless commentary on solar the author spares no ink on China's appetite for coal.

The reason people still claim China is a developing country is so that they get a pass on arbitrary restrictions imposed on "developed" Western nations who like to pay lip service to climate change concerns and don't mind the gradual decline that comes along with this antigrowth mindset. Meanwhile the world has outsourced production to China, where coal makes up a majority of the electricity generated. Your country is getting leapfrogged by a competitor who doesn't play by your rules, but at least you can virtue signal to your elite friends while it happens.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China

While California can't build anything these days, I would not hold their dysfunction to the rest of the Union. Florida built high speed rail between West Palm Beach and Orlando in just 4 years, and the route extends to Miami. Tesla built Giga Texas, the second largest building in the world by volume, in 14 months. American tech is also in the lead in self driving navigation.

> China skipped the strip mall phase entirely. They went straight from street markets to super-apps that livestream shopping, where one influencer can sell $15 million worth of lipstick in five minutes

China was never going to have strip malls. Strip malls are a feature of suburban life. China does not have the same geography nor the same decentralized population distribution as the U.S. has.

As for livestream shopping, spare me. Americans don't shop via livestream because we're not entertained by the idea of being pitched crap we don't need. It's not novel to us either, we had the QVC network going back to the 80s. When I buy something, I search, click add to cart, and then checkout.

> We’re going to solve climate change with a lot of Chinese technology—or we’re not going to solve it at all.

If you buy the idea that we're going to solve for climate change with Chinese tech while China continues to pollute more than ever, I don't know what to tell you.

China's "tech" in this case isn't their tech. Japan has produced more of the IP surrounding solar panels than anyone else, followed by the U.S.

Numerous people were at pains to point out how these assumptions were overbroad or outright wrong, but could not get a hearing. In the US, people are heavily propagandized from childhood to believe that the United States is the greatest country in the world. Most other countries don't do this. They have national pride, people will casually say their country is the best, but they mean it in the sense of it being their favorite, not as some objective fact. They don't do daily pledges of allegiance at schools or sing the national anthem at every single sports fixture. This is a recipe for cognitive dissonance.

Now of course people debate things online, in the media, and in academia, but often ideas that go against the grain are just entertained as polite abstractions compared to the greatest-country-in-the-world 'reality'. You can see this very clearly in politics, where a lot of people in Congress just don't really understand of believe perspectives that don't align with this default, and that goes a long way toward explaining how we have so many political actors that are increasingly and often aggressively detached from reality.

The United States would have become a superpower regardless of what political system it adopted. If you give a bunch of settlers with relatively advanced technology access to an entire continent that's geographically isolated and only thinly populated by indigenous people with simpler technology, and that continent is rich in natural resources, the settlers and their descendants are going to prosper. The US constituted itself as a republic out of pragmatism; even if the founders had wanted to establish an American monarchy, they couldn't very well have instituted one based on the divine right of kings while repudiating their existing remote monarch. The British empire, constituted on a very different basis, continued to prosper for another 150 years after the US detached itself.

In both cases, the countries had overwhelming strategic advantages; isolation and unspoiled resources in the American case, technological and naval superiority in the British. The foundational ethos on which the polity is run and which holds the population together is important, of course, but any ethos will do as long as the population is willing to go along with it.

I don't think China's current conditions are the product of communism especially - as many have pointed out, they have something more akin to state capitalism now. The authoritarian structures in Chinese society have roots going back ~2200 years, to when the state of Qin managed to establish imperial authority and a centralized state with a bureaucracy and national political infrastructure instead of a feudal system. That centralized state has mutated or broken down numerous times over the centuries but has always been re-established in some form or other because it provided more general advantage to the polity as well as its rulers. About 1500 years they instituted imperial examination systems, which recruited state officials through merit rather than ancestry or wealth.

Modern China adopted communism partly to throw off the shackles of colonial powers; my shallow take is that coming under the partial control of western nations like Britain and Germany induced a sort of culture-shock paralysis, but being further subjugated by their upstart neighbors from Japan (which country's name is synonymous with shortness/weakness in the Chinese language) shook them out of it. Communists were able to combine nationalist sentiment with the long-standing disaffections of the peasantry and a solid grasp of insurgent military tactics, during a period when other great powers were distracted by warring with each other. Following WW2 they speedran the industrial revolution: while the human costs were atrocious, I'm not sure that they were actually worse than those in the west, just more concentrated in time. Now they've speedrun consumer and technological economic development and exploring their imperial/hegemonic opportunities, a process which will play out for another 1-2 centuries, if history is any guide: https://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf

said guide is a heuristic rather than a rule, of course; ancient Egyptian civilization is thought to have persisted for about 3000 years. You live in closer historical proximity to Cleopatra than she did to the first builders of pyramids.

To wrap up, my basic point is that Chinese authoritarianism isn't a product of communism so much as a reconstruction of a centralized state that has served the country for millenia, about 8 times longer than American society has existed. Nor do I think it's 'eating the world'; rather, China is resuming its historical place as a hegemonic power and is merely eating America's lunch. This is understandably unsettling to American strategic thinkers, some of whom had fallen into the trap of believing their own hype about a unipolar world in recent decades, and others of whom viewed China's ascendancy in manichean terms due to communism rather than looking at it in systematic terms and considering as simply a continuation of long-running historical patterns accelerated by technological change.

China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.

You're phrasing make it sound like they aren't the largest coal consumer in the world. If they managed to genuinely leapfrog the west their manufacturing industry would be mostly electric. They are using the same unsustainable tech as the rest of us.

The same global pressures that affect every country will hollow out their supply and talent pyramids and there is no way around that short of just saying NO to slave labor

Did anyone else see the picture and immediately think that this design wouldn't be possible in the west because it didn't have any anti-homeless barriers on it?

Also, it's logically impossible for China to be good. I have found a mathematical proof:

1: Democracy is good

2: China is not a democracy

Therefore, obviously China is not good.

I don't think of China as producing cheap crap, I think of it as producing everything. A lot of that stuff is cheap crap, I know because I bought it. But clearly they also produce high tech and high value goods.

I also don't think it's surprising or new that an authoritarian country can deliver material progress for its people. I think the same was true for the early Soviet Union and the fascist countries of 20th century Europe. Democracy's main selling point was never that it made us rich.