Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dluan | Hacker News Reader

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I was just in Hangzhou two days ago, and went through the Hangzhouxi train station. Needless to say it's utterly massive, straight out of a Star Trek scene, extremely efficient and clean. Construction was started in 2019, and finished in 2022. It cost $2.25bn. Hangzhou has 5 of these train stations, let alone one.

I'm convinced that every SV founder or neolib politician who writes these hit/think-pieces is getting their enemy entirely mixed up. China is massively bureaucratic and regulation heavy, and just by the scale of these projects, it's simply impossible to think that if you just loosen some rules and fly by your seat pants, you can build a 11 platform train station in 3 years. Again, this station is mind bogglingly massive.

The real answer is that China's regulatory loop is extremely short and small, where the government works very closely and reacts very quickly. You can talk to your regulator, even if you're a small startup working on a small hardware problem. Because every single community district has a CPC office, with representatives that can escalate things all the way up to the top. There's a clear chain of command, and throw in some guanxi to keep the gears greased up, things (problems, questions, hurdles) get to where they need to go. In the US, politicians don't work for their constituents, and even in the rare cases where they do (or have good intentions), they are up against other politicians who have ulterior agendas and their own goals. The machine thrashes against itself, not in a single direction. This is exactly the image of "democracy" in the the minds of the Chinese general public.

The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.

> The problems described in OPs post are exactly the kind of thing China is good at tackling because their democratic system is actually built for this.

China does a lot of stuff right, and your points may be entirely valid, but calling that system “democratic” nullifies everything else said. It’s a one party state.

> It’s a one party state.

By this logic US is two-halves-party state. You are no less dictatorial than China, just better at hiding it at the cost of how performant it is. Democracy is an European thing that rarely ever got successfully exported.

The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.

The interests of the mainstream political parties in the US are disconnected from the material conditions of the people. And what passes for debate is the narcissism of small differences that leaves the super-structure untouched.

China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.

> The US is a one-party state because of elite capture.

This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.

> China found a system that works for them after a century of trying every system.

Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.

> This is demonstrably false given the election result in 2016. Donald Trump was absolutely the anti-elite candidate with all of the establishment politicians on both sides of the aisle denouncing him as a candidate and calling his supporters fascists. His election was a national shock.

And then he governed in a reactionary way that favored the elites with whom he transacted. One man cannot change the superstructure through electoral means, as Lenin pointed out. All the undemocratic, unilateral powers that Trump has taken advantage of didn't start with him; they began with his predecessors and the larger national security state, who expanded executive power without oversight.

>Fine, and we'll see how that system works over the next century. This thread isn't about the efficacy of the Chinese system. It's about protecting the concept of democracy from propaganda.

Propaganda is how you control public opinion and sentiment in a democracy. See the work of Edward Bernays and Chomsky. Propaganda is an integral part of modern liberal democracies to arrive at a consensus that is largely disconnected from the needs or will of the electorate.

China doesn't need us to tell them how to run their country or their provinces.

This is incorrect. There are 9 parties. You are likely saying "well it's functionally a singe party system" yet you can't even read Chinese to understand what the policy positions of the different factions within the committees are.

Here's a good primer if you're interested in learning more: https://progressive.international/blueprint/cb7dbaf4-b106-41...

I'm not sure why you think I can't read Chinese, but Xi has been in power for 12 years and as far as I am aware cannot be removed by anyone other than the CCP. Please correct me if I'm wrong. If the people whom he governs can remove him by some kind of democratic process, then perhaps your points are valid. My understanding is that they cannot.

> Socialist democracy must, therefore, be seen as a historic, multi-generational and dialectical process by which conditions that enable increasing parts of society to play an active role in governance are created, nurtured, and defended. China has advanced on this path further than most societies in modern history. From early experiments in village-level organization to building a nationwide process for 1.4 billion people from 56 ethnic groups across a country spanning over nine million square kilometers, this process has come to be contained in a concept called “whole-process people’s democracy” — a practice of democratic governance built on over a century of organizational experience.

This (and the rest of this article) is nonsense propaganda if the above is correct.

There are 100 million members of the party, and these people vote directly for their local representatives, who then go onto vote for the village, town, city, province, etc representatives, all the way up to the Standing Committee which includes Xi. There are 3000 members of the National People's Congress that directly selects the Standing Committee. In rural areas or special administrative provinces, often anyone can vote, including union members who aren't officially party members. Comparatively, in the 2024 US election, 150 million people voted. So there's roughly the same amount of votes happening.

Maybe you don't agree that not being able to pick the head of state is not a valid definition of democracy. In that case I'd argue that having a twice-indicted convicted felon is not valid democracy either. In any case, feel free to keep your version.

Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. Soviet Union had elections as well.

Existence of elections does not mean a democratic process. United States of America has elections as well.

I.e. existence of elections is necessary, but not sufficient.

Not bring up the US when someone is criticizing China, challenge level: impossible

This is the main issue with tankies, not that they go bizarrely out of their way to defend the PRC (and weirdly sometimes the Soviet Union or even North Korea), but, as Westerners, every geopolitical analysis they have is Americentric. Every news article for them is framed as, "How does this affect, or, is influenced by, American hegemony?"

It often results in them completely disregarding the opinions, motivations, and agency of anyone that isn't American or a citizen of the PRC.

The article is about the US.

The OP made a false claim about China.

The argument you will hear from Americans and Europeans is that in order for it to be a "democracy" that anybody has to be able to vote. This is, of course, hypocritical because not a single one of those countries allows everyone to vote. And, just like China, every one of those countries has powerful government officials that are appointed by other government officials rather than elected by the public. And in many of them there is a parliamentary system where the public does not get to vote on the head of state, but rather the head of state is elected by the parliament.

In fact, the US republic at its beginning was more similar to China. The president and Senate were elected by the state legislatures, not the public.

There are other things that are critical to democracy to actually function in the spirit of democracy - universal suffrage obviously, and the USA fails in this insomuch as it removed the right to vote from felons and engages in gerrymandering and disenchantment.

However other countries don't suffer the issue to quite the same degree, and the PRC is happy to restrict the right of some people to representation such as the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang. You might say they don't deserve it, I say that's just a justification for disenfranchisement, and a bad one.

You also need to let citizens have the ability to converse and discuss and try to influence each other and who they vote for, and to learn facts about politicians outside of channels that are supportive of the politician. By that I of course mean that mostly free speech and free press are a requirement for a functional democracy, else you could call North Korea a democracy which is of course absurd.

The PRC may get many things right, and hell maybe we are entering The Chinese Century, but regardless it's not immune to criticism, and pretending otherwise just to oppose American hegemony simply hurts one's ability to do so as everyone will just accuse you of being a Little Pink.

Yes, democracy includes the right for the people to elect a convicted felon. We do not agree on a definition of the democracy. Your usage continues to undermine your original valid point.

These statements about numbers are meaningless to make the case that democracy exists in the PRC. There's 1 billion people there, comparison of vote counts to smaller countries doesn't make sense.

Party membership comes with 關係. It's not really about having the right to vote. Some people just join during school.

The PRC gets many things right but we should be honest about its flaws. The truth is the CPC, and especially now Xi (you HAVE seen the updated textbooks about father/brother xi, right?), are single points of failure and unchallengeable authority. What happened to the left communists in the PRC? What happened to the smaller unions that didn't toe the party line, and not in the direction of capitalism but deeper into leftism? Where are the Chinese anarchists? Hell, where are the Chinese communists?

The only path forward to a communist PRC is a split into province level states or better yet smaller entities. It's only a matter of time before Xi goes senile or has a big birthday he wants to celebrate by escalating imperialism into military intervention and tanks the entire PRC economy in doing so, or simply dies and kicks off a shitstorm power struggle that cripples the CPC and the country along with it.

Given all the videos I've seen on YouTube of bridge and building collapses in China, I think you're glossing over all their shortcomings. Maybe they do have a tight regulatory loop - I don't know - but their aggressive timelines and poor materials seem to have bitten them in the butt a number of times.

But by what definition do you say that is bureaucratic and regulation heavy? It sounds like the opposite to me. The decision to build was made by a single authority and then executed. In the US there would have been at least 3 different levels of government involved, and possibly multiple agencies at each level. And then after they have made their decision, which would take years, they would be sued by many different private organizations that are against the project. All those lawsuits would have to be resolved before work could start, which would take even more years and require modifications to be made to the plan to appease these organizations. To me it sounds like your system is very light on bureaucracy and regulation compared to ours.

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