Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

I'd honestly turn the argument on its head. It's China that is being democratic, in the most literal sense. Giving the people what they want, clean energy, cheap stuff, infrastructure simply by satisfying market demand.

It's the largest western, ostensibly democratic nation that is run by some combination of occult neoreactionaries, techno-elites and pseudo-royalty all of which seem to have lost connection to immediate reality in pursuit of annexing territories, bringing about the singularity or what have you. It is ironically China who is more short termist and notably better off for it

I would actually much prefer if the US was run by people who fix potholes in the streets than something that resembles Dune's House Harkonnen

View on HN

Neither is democratic. Democratic is direct rule of citizens, or at least some significant fraction of citizens. Only Switzerland is partially a democracy nowadays. Western countries are oligarchies, where elected elites are ruling however they deem necessary, but possibly with some caution because of elections. China is not even an oligarchy, it's a despotic regime, completely severed from the citizens.

It's not market demand. The government is ordering the construction of solar and wind farms without regard to the market demand or to the citizens residing in the locations where the solar farms and wind farms are to be built.

That's the exact opposite of democracy and capitalism.

It's a rational way to deal with their energy needs, reduce pollution and their impact on the climate.

They have small gas and oil reserves if I remember. Unfortunately, if they were sitting on Venezuela or Russian style reserves or oil/gas the story might be different. But unlike Europe, the Chinese can see that being beholden to foreign states to keep the lights on is asking for trouble.

They seem to have avoided the ideology the big fossil fuel companies push in the west to make fossil vs green a political/class discussion, not a rational one. Rationally it makes most sense for a nation to generate their energy needs in a way they control with wind/solar/nuclear.

It's not small -- China is the world's 4th largest oil producer. They domestically produce about 75% of their demand.

This number is wrong. Instead, ~70-75%[0] of China's oil demand is met by importing.

[0]: "2024年，中国...石油对外依存度71.9%，同比下降0.5个百分点。" (In 2024, China's ... dependence on foreign oil was 71.9%, a year-on-year decrease of 0.5 percentage points.)(https://finance.sina.cn/2025-01-24/detail-inefzsek2941040.d....)

you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean. You can say "China meets the wants of most of its citizens" (in which case, citation needed...) but that is definitionally not democratic. Democracy is a system, and a process can or cannot be democratic (within or outside a democratic system).

>you can't just go redefining terms until they mean what you want them to mean

Sure I can. There's obviously no one meaning of the term. The Democracy of the Greeks has very little to do with the Democracy of Rousseau, or the 21st century. The Chinese themselves consider their system democratic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism).

And you can make the case that a system that delivers the will of the people has a stronger claim to the term than a system that merely exhausts itself in staging democratic processes with no regards to outcomes.

This is funnily enough even happening within Western societies where people are branded pro or anti-democratic usually based on their affiliation. Laying exclusive ownership to the term is simply a rhetorical tool.

Well, you CAN, yes, but then nobody knows what the hell you're talking about and at that point why should we even care

Reply on news.ycombinator.com