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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.

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I don't think the other governments that collapsed in 1989 in the face of public protest could be honestly described as "relatively liberal".

Fair. I think a better way of putting it is that they lacked the unity to agree to just keep firing on people until they won. A relatively liberal culture is one reason government forces won't do that; in the case of someone like Ceausescu it was more that the generals tended to think his last few years had been a disaster and the rebels had a point.

Every communist regime that collapsed was in the process of liberalizing, except Romania, which wasn’t overthrown peacefully.

China didn’t collapse in 1989 because they were the only communist regime able and willing to massacre protestors.

"relatively" can cover a lot of ground :-)

From my naive observation, the regimes of Eastern Europe had lost their will to perpetuate. (Everybody saw, including party apparatchiks, that the people in the west have better lives. Or at least better goods. :-) )

The cynical take would be that the (smarter) communists in power prepared themselves for the transition, positioning themselves to benefit after the change.

I’m glad it didn’t work in 1989 because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded. At the same time I don’t want China to succeed and export its brand of capitofascism purely because I don’t think most other countries can find their benevolent dictator. The cognitive dissonance is wild right now.

> because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded

Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology.

Counterfactuals are always hard in history. But we literally have the nationalist government's democratic, capitalist successor kicking in way above its weight class economically and technologically. It's fair to say that if the '89 protest hadn't been massacred, the 21st century would currently be undoubtedly China's to rule. (I'd also put even odds on Taiwan having peacefully reunified by now.)

[1] https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/taiwan/china?sc...

It’s much easier to increase the GDP per capita for 20 million people compared to 1.4 billion especially when Taiwan started with a 10x higher GDP per capita. If anything they have lost a significant percentage of their lead. I don’t think what worked in Taiwan would work in China because the scale is astounding.

Is that true? The whole point of per capita is to cancel out the linear benefit of 100 million workers being able to outproduce 10 million workers. There are ways for small countries to have a per capita GDP higher than would be feasible for a larger country, but Taiwan doesn’t really do any of those. They don’t have oil or any other particularly valuable natural resources, and they aren’t a tax shelter like Ireland or a microstate with workers commuting across the border like Luxembourg. They have to create wealth the hard way, through labor productivity, just like the mainland. And between the two, the mainland has the potential to realize greater economies of scale.

> Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology.

Also worth mentioning, all the while being under a military dictatorship (see White Terror) until the late 80's.

First, note that Taiwan was initially not democracy, the liberalization started by lifting of martial law in 1987, first parliamentary elections in 1992, first presidential elections in 1996 (this is widely considered the point at which Taiwan became a consolidated democracy)

From your link: 1987: Taiwan 5325, China 300 1996: Taiwan 13588, China 710 --- 2024 Taiwan 34060, China 13314

Whatever starting point you choose, China has risen faster than Taiwan.

In fact, there is non-zero chance that if China had a regime change and heeded west's economic 'advice', it would have gone through equivalent of what Russia went in the 90's.

They are doing fine, thank you, doing it their commie way, despite Zeihan and others preaching China's immminent collapse for decades.

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