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Comment by wtodr | Hacker News Reader

This is the same trite bullshit we’ve been hearing for decades. Look at where China is today.

Keep in mind that China is not where it is today because of Xi. He could take it further for sure but so can he press the wrong buttons. It remains to be seen how China fares in the next few decades.

Yep, China was on a massive and insane growth trajectory prior to Xi. Xi's policies and constant banging of war drums at Taiwan's door has cost China massively in terms of foreign investment and even knowledge transfer opportunities (by the ever-gullible West).

Western powers were never going to let China rise peacefully. As soon as China started designing phones instead of just manufacturing them, the west become much more "China bad". Had nothing to do with Xi.

He's doing a better job than Zhao Ziyang, that's for sure.

I'm not convinced that it could be attributable to Xi. China has been on this trajectory before he became the leader.

> It remains to be seen how China fares in the next few decades.

it is easy to continue on momentum alone.

They have the numbers on their side - IIRC they have more STEM grads than the US has workforce, and they graduate a lot more every year. Apple alone spends about a Marshal Plan per year in high-tech manufacturing, for what the know-how remains in China to manufacture other high-tech products. I think Tim Cook mentioned that no company outside China could make their MacBook shells up to the specs they need. The product is "designed in Cupertino", but the machine that builds it is designed, made, and operated in China.

Multiply that by the number of companies who spend heavily in China for manufacturing, indirectly causing their advanced manufacturing industry to grow beyond anyone else's and it seems inevitable.

> the same trite bullshit we’ve been hearing for decades

Nope. It isn’t. Xi has ruled China like a dictator that breaks the tradition of intraparty competition the CCP has had since Mao.

When Xi ended his Wolf Warrior nonsense it seemed to signal a reset. Now we have this nonsense.

> Look at where China is today

Look at where America is today. Both are richer than they’ve ever been. More militarily potent than ever. Both are growing their economies, militaries and territorial ambitions. Both have serious issues, including the gerontocratic oligarchic consolidation of power at the expense of national interests.

Not that I disagree, but I’m curious how you define national interests.

> curious how you define national interests

My metric would be what the country’s population today and weighted populations of the future, if they could weigh in, would choose.

It’s possible to frame ex post facto and impossible to pin down in the present. And it’s inherently subjective and culturally relative. But it’s useful to reason with, including for finding patterns in history.

One pattern is the cost of corruption. If a leader is making billions off their power, they’re putting person about polity. That’s currently true in America [1] and China [2][3]. The difference is America has a chance to fix that in ‘28. China used to rotate leaders. But Xi fucked that up. (Note the language similarity between the above comment and how MAGA defends itself. “Trite bullshit.” Beijing has a hidden MACA problem, it’s just had a tougher time dealing with it because Xi reveres Mao.)

[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/asia/chinas-preside...

[3] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/20/us-intel-sa...

Can’t weighted population of the future change based on what is chosen? For example by immigration and deportations?

Also is MACA actually MCGA? Or something else? Aren’t there similar trends also in Europe and India?

> Look at where America is today. Both are richer than they’ve ever been. More militarily potent than ever.

just don't look at the first derivative vs china

The argument is the reflexive defensiveness works-and is raised—in both cases. Premature declarations of victory have never been a historic sign of strength.

The question is rather: Where could China have been today if it started opening up decades earlier?

> Where could China have been today if it started opening up decades earlier?

Or without Mao being a trash fire of a leader. (Flip side: where would they be without Deng or Zemin, or others in the CCP who put nation above personal interest? The folks Xi is killing because they threaten his personal interests.)

Maybe the combination of capitalism + democracy is so successful because it aligns the incentives of leaders and the masses best (to the extent possible).

My takeaway from China is democracy is less important than political competition. Between Mao and Xi, the CCP had the latter without the former. Today, America has the former and is struggling to keep the latter.

Yes agreed. But competition for what?

I'd say for the good of the majority of the people.

In other systems only those on top profit (maybe 10-20% max) even if they claim otherwise.

Thus democracy, through competition, aligns the leader's incentive with their people best.

> In other systems only those on top profit

Are you saying the US isn't doing that presently?

Yes. Mind you that like most things in life, it's a spectrum.

I think not. European colonialism was hardly a democratic project, and the extreme success of the US is attributable less to ideology and more to being an entire continent with a relatively tiny indigenous population that had not exploited any of its natural resources. Ideological/paradigmatic competition is not some neat controlled experiment where you can normalize existing conditions to unity and then draw conclusions from measuring subsequent growth; initial resource distributions make a massive difference and geography, while not the only factor, is highly determinative.

So you’re saying having a head start due to geography is all that matters?

If power differences can be explained by better access to resource and it’s only about head starts, China should have stayed the leading power.

China had fallen behind long before Mao, after being among the most powerful and advanced nations for most of recorded history. It appears to now be stepping back into that familiar role.

Neither China or the West handled the transition to industrial civilization well. A key difference is that most Chinese died due to incompetence on the part of their leaders, but in the west they mostly murdered one another on purpose.

Once again a Nazi is in charge of the western world's most advanced rocket program.

doesn't "murdered one another on purpose" equals to "incompetence on the part of their leaders"?

Then US continues to be a hegemony

It's amazing. The American president is quite literally creating a parallel military force to jail and kill people on the streets, they're arresting opposing journalists, politicians, pressuring tv channels and news organizations to fire people, invading countries without congressional approval, threatening allies with annexation for no fucking reason, dismantling any social programs left, and all of that led by a proven pedophile billionaire that was the customer and friend of a huge human trafficker, as were most of his billionaire friends who he favors with absolutely no shame.

And this is just the latest news coming from over there. I won't mention the fact that there are people alive today who couldn't drink from the same fountain as other people because their skin is dark. It was never fucking great.

So if you are American and still talk all this shit about China being a dictatorship and authoritarian this and “purge” that, I wish you would honestly shut the fuck up. Really. You are in no position to have an informed opinion on this because all of your information is force fed down your throat by half a dozen mega companies that are in bed with your regime.

So yeah, I'm sure China has a lot of issues, but if you didn't live there for some time or even speak the language for that matter, just shut the fuck the up.

> if you are American and still talk all this shit about China being a dictatorship and authoritarian this and “purge” that, I wish you would honestly shut the fuck up. Really. You are in no position to have an informed opinion on this because all of your information is force fed

Bit defensive there, eh?

China is an autocracy and Xi is acting in the predictably self-destructive ways a dictator does. The U.S. is heading down that same path, with Trump practically mimicking Xi. N = 2 doesn’t weaken an argument. And folks who lived through the Nazis saying they see similar veins today doesn’t undermine their credibility.

(The hilarity of it is if you take your comment and replace China and America with partisan or pro-American coding, you could pop it out of Hegseth’s office and it would be right at home. Your comment almost seals the point that Xi is all the problems of MAGA, except polling China instead.)

Yes, I'm aware how ignorant I may sound, but it's so goddamn frustrating to read this kind of bullshit everytime I come to an American platform.

Ok, China is an autocracy, right? Could you explain to me how China conduct elections? Can you explain to me how they approve laws? Do they have a constitution? A justice system? Try answering these questions without much looking up and even if you do, please note the sources. No need to answer me really. Just ask yourself whether you know this or not and how qualified are you to actually label a HUGE state like China with one single heavily charged word.

The US is not an autocracy, is a mix between a plutocracy and a gerontocracy.

I wanted to argue China is gerontocracy as well, but it seems I remember wrong

Jiang Zemin in office in office 1993-2003 - 67-77yo

Hu Jintao 2003-2013 - 61-71yo

Xi Jinping 2013-2026 - 60-72yo

about time to replace XJP

US really went downhill into gerontocracy after Obama

if it would be up to me I'd set limits to terms of candidacy to somewhere between 35-65 at the day of elections

No. I didn’t vote for that, and I’m not going to meekly give up on talking shit about the US and other countries. This idea that you have to be perfect to comment on anything imperfect needs to die.

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