why is there always pro-China messaging here and on Reddit? Every day there's another story about how China is eclipsing the West, but wake me up when the CCP changes.
China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
China might be eating the world but the most obvious thing is the astroturfing.
And when I glance at pictures of cities in the US I see fascist armed goons terrorizing people and crumbling infrastructure
So why this particular comparison with a single country to you? Tokyo, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore exceeded Western cities decades ago. Even today, Shanghai or Shezhen only is developed in certain areas, it does not reach the high level of urban development on ALL areas like in Hong Kong or Tokyo. And the mopeds or metro bomb checks aren't endearing either. It feels some people were either living under a rock for the last two decades, or they do have an agenda to push.
If one is debating in to inform, should you not point out that greater perspective here?
Even more, like OP said, why now specifically with all these articles salivating China. What were you doing back in 2007 or 2012, that you were not making the same comparisons could be made to Tokyo or Hong Kong, that you would well understand years ago. But there clearly isn't such a barrage from back then, either fron Americabs or Japanese or Hong Kongers themselves.
And that's not a false dichotomy? If I say which sport is more exhilarating to watch football or basketball? It's not a false dichotomy and it's weird if someone were to butt in with "What about baseball? Why didn't you mention baseball? What about soccer, what about tennis, this isn't a fair discussion!" I wasn't saying and didn't even imply those are the only options they just happen to be the ones we're talking about and it would be absurd to bring in the thousands of other sports to figure out which of the two is more exhilarating to spectate.
Tokyo has been considered a high tech utopia for a long time no one is surprised by its modernity (similar with Hong Kong) whereas China over the last decades has been portrayed as being little more than poor starving farmers and slave labor in worn out factories, and that juxtaposition is what makes it an interesting point of contrast.
Also I did see a barrage of articles praising Japan in the last few decades. There's literally multiple terms for westerners who are obsessed with Japan.
Also if it hasn't been unique to China at all (although I never said it was) why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?
Except the Chinese model is literally based on the Four Asian Tigers' models. Making this analogous to different sports isn't really a correct analogy, because it's more like if a sports team that was previously doing terribly decided to change and copy what other, more well known and succesful teams were doing and predictably started finding more success.
So okay, you praise the success of this specific team, but if this has already happened 5 times (if not 8 times if you count Germany or Spain or Vietnam) with the same strategy that is well documented and understood, then it's quite iffy that you don't mention that prior context or successes at all. Is it really that country or is it just the strategy, then why not mention the strategy if you are using as basis of comparison to improvement back home. It's a highly naive and misleading way of portraying things, unless if you are just focused on nationalist triumphalism or mypoics.
>why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?
India is a highly diverse and multicultural state with dozens of different languages. Their political system is a compromise between those varying interests, not a single party that conquered everyone else. They pursued ISI, not Export-Driven Policies. South Asia is isolated from East Asia via mountain ranges, and does not have rich neighbours nor is a nexus of trade. India itself is largely the invention of the British Empire as recent unification. India is obviously not similar to China at all. The fact that you mention them as a basis for comparison is already quite strange.
When we talk about East Asian Tigers, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and then also Japan, these are all largely homogenous (if not fierecely integrationist as in Singapore) societies, they are literally the same region, one of them is literally an off-shoot of China, are the closest comparisons. And so if you have closest similarities become successful in the 70s following similar strategies, and you decide to copy such policies in the 90s, then it's utterly banal that you would follow a similar path as your most similar societies. So it's not unique at all, it's just the general trend, so why all the triumphalism now..
The early 80s were similar, when Japanese economy was in every single headline and being compared to the USA’s. The difference is, this time China has already surpassed the states in most of meaningful statistics.
Who is "everyone" here? MSM and Economists has been largely singing praise to China's model for the last 2 decades, unless if you count the occasional critique or caveats which they do equally for everyone including America.
Frankly speaking, I see far more complaining about the aformentioned "China will collapse" in every China thread than I see people actually saying "China will collapse", and pointing to some fringe youtube channels or individuals like Gordon Chang isn't really indicative of anything beyond strawmanning.
1. It's a massive PR campaigns. Things are actually _not_ that great in China, their numbers are completely fake, and it might collapse any time now.
But China manages to make people write the contrary.
Maybe they _are_ paying for all the Youtubers [1] [2] and journalists [3] who explain that US decisions in trade, science, energy, etc... are a huge gift to China.
This is not so impossible: that's basically what the Soviet Union tried to do until the 70s. Lots of people in the 60s were rooting for the USSR, hoping the West would copy them... Maybe the moon landing help deflate that bubble. And somehow, the shit hit the fan early enough, and demonstrably enough, that it all collapsed.
It does not have to be a conspiracy - maybe if you manage to publish cute numbers that tell a great story, people will repeat the story for you.
And we're so unfamiliar with China in the West, that we would not see through the BS.
2. You see it repeated a lot, because it's real. China is once again the dominant superpower in the world, they're ahead of us in every department and we will soon look like archaic peasants compared to them : basically the rest of the world history. It's just that we witness one of the small bumps where they were not at their best, and we assume it was "normal".
The problem is that China is building so much of the world that we rely on, I honestly can't think of good reasons to think 1 is true, and not 2.
Maybe Taiwan will be their Afghanistan ? (Sadly, it will only take us a couple years to know...)
That being said, I really wonder what's the way "out", if there is any, of dependency on China:
* just chill, accept that we'll never build anything ever, and buy chinese stuff ? * wait for demography [4] to become a real problem ? * rebuild a supply chain from the ground-up - curious where you start from. What's the first factory you rebuild ? * assume that it, too, shall pass, and that at some point China will make one of the blunders that authoritarianism allow ?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU8zYS43TRg&pp=0gcJCbIJAYcqI...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tNp2vsxEzk
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/asia/trump-science-...
[4] https://www.newsweek.com/china-faces-economic-blow-populatio...
So, "we'll see", I guess ?
But if we look at MSM CNBC, NYT, CNN, etc, none of them are saying "China is going to collapse", and if anything I'd probably vouch there are more articles praising China than there are ones critiquing it.