20 years ago China had a single high speed rail link in Shanghai going to the airport. Now they have more than 30,000 miles of high speed rail where they've bootstrapped all the civil engineering, they make their own trains, etc. The system handles over 4 billion trips annually and they built the entire thing for an estimated $900 billion [3], which is now less than the US spends on the military in a single year.
Every $1 you spend on the military is $1 you don't spend on housing, healthcare, education, roads, trains and other infrastructure. Eisenhower warned about this 60+ years ago [4].
[1]: https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/All-of-China%27s-preside...
[2]: https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/09/many-of-chinas-to...
[3]: https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2152581/huge-668bn-high...
[4]: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...
Despite all that, Xi has done really well for China. I was totally predicting the opposite given that Xi was clearly a departure from the technocratic leaders that previously ran China (I thought Xi was a Mao throwback).
First, he's had a real anti-corruption push that seems to be meaningful and seems to apply to senior government officials and the wealthy (eg Jack Ma).
Second, real estate speculation was rampant in China for years but Xi quietly popped the bubble more than a decade agao. The property market is still in a dire state but he took the long-term view that housing should be for, well, housing, not investment. He did this by basically increasing the margin requirements that ultimately caused the Evergrade default. I think history will show this was the correct decision.
Third, Xi grew up as "Mao royalty". His father was one of Mao's lieutennants and he was a privileged child of that circle. But when he was a teenager, his father was purged in the Cultural Revolution and was ultimately expelled from the CCP. Xi repeatedly tried to join the party and ultimately succeeded then spending years quietly working in backwaters.
Lastly, Xi has quietly purused a policy of not relying on the West. Investments in renewable energy has been truly massive. Watch in the coming years as China catches up to ASML and TSMC with EUV, a technology that US has embargoed from export to China.
He did suffer from the cultural revolution but afterward he was elevated with strong preference. He even lost one of those Chinese “elections” where they take the top 20 out of 21 candidates, and they still let him through.
Anti-corruption pushes in the government are 100% purges, just under a different name. As for Jack Ma, wasn't he targeted because he said something that the censors really didn't like all while pushing some finance app? My memory is hazy as to why it happened, but it certainly wasn't because he was wealthy.
Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.
The country is doing the same thing on multiple fronts as fast as possible
This vision holds because it presupposes that the only thing people care about is political freedom, when in reality there can only ever be one political class and political freedom is largely about some other political class trying to take control because the current system doesn't favour them in some way.
Western democracies, at their worst, have a largely permanent political class who is elected every year under the pretext of democratic legitimacy. Eastern dictatorshpis, at their best, have a government that is continuously rotated to ensure competent implementation gaining legitimacy from delivery.
Both are contextual and the position along the autocracy axis largely depends on implementation. Whether people can actually vote is irrelevant (Europe is generally one of the worst examples of this, elections constantly, most election produce governments that polls under 20% within months...it is very strange that people call this democracy).
- energy independence
- ASML level microchip production
- the SOTA of AI
- citizens that accept surveilence and lack of privacy
- strong local manufacturing
- eastern world support
- yuan recognized as a stable world currency
But they do suffer from issues as well:
- Aging population
- Autocracy (or well, one party system)
- Brain drain (better funding and security in the US and Europe, US has managed to alienate a lot of very promising figures so it's closer to just Europe, but capital markets in Europe are still hit and miss)
It's completely understandable why US is freaking out, china's future still looks a lot more promising than the one US find themselves in.
citizens had no choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
How much good did either do?
The reality is that chinese goverment is - overall - delivering results. People will accept things that bring good outcomes.
There's also upsides from the surveilence and the way things are done in China which makes it way more resilient from outside influence and disruptive bad actors.
Now I don't want the same things in my country, but it suits China to some extent.
It's certainly not to China's extent, but is America really that opposed to surveillance and lack of privacy?
Yes, we tend to raise a huge stink when evidence of such comes to the surface.
But actions speak louder than words, and through our actions we already largely accept surveillance and a lack of privacy.
Everyday consumer apps are some of the worst offenders. Our social media apps listen to us, Amazon Ring doorbells are allegedly accessed by ICE (though Amazon denies it), Flock cameras abound (not to mention the fact they're poorly secured so who knows who else is watching other than the municipalities Flock contracts with), companies own much of our data and sell them to myriad unknown sources on a whim. There are too many examples to list.
No, it's not as severe as China. But we're certainly not trending in the right direction.
And unfortunately it's pretty clear the current administration is working hard to enact a similar chilling effect on free speech. It's hard to see how we avoid becoming a similarly surveilled and repressed state if there were a third term.
Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.
Perhaps my comment should have been more specific about the fact I was referring to not having any freedom of speech when it comes to criticizing the government.
But as a thought experiment, what happens once the government does something unpopular? Or once the economy is no longer thriving?
The masses tend to be pacified when their basic needs are met and the unspoken social contract is upheld. But I'd be curious to see how the people react if the fallout from the ongoing real estate crisis in China continues to persist and affect middle-class people as just one example.
China certainly has a long history of centralized bureaucratic governance. It also has a long history of silencing its critics. They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai). It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
So sure, quality of life has generally gotten better for many people living in China. I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
The real question is whether your picture of ordinary Chinese life is accurate. And IMO it mostly isn't. This is not North Korea. Mainland residents made 291 million exit/entry trips in 2024 alone. There was a survey that found many respondents were willing to complain to the government or even protest over concrete issues like pollution, which is not how people behave if society is defined mainly by universal terror. So the better description is that China has hard political red lines, but normal daily life for most people is not "stay silent or vanish".
> They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai).
The Peng Shuai case became a major Western media story, yet the controversy lasted only a few weeks before the international attention faded. Meanwhile, the WTA eventually backed down from its boycott threats. This illustrates how these incidents are often weaponized for geopolitical narratives rather than representing systematic policy.
More broadly, every country has mechanisms to deal with corruption, fraud, and abuse. China's anti corruption campaign has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of officials. The difference is that in China, accountability flows through Party mechanisms rather than Western style independent judiciaries.
> It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).
That was over 35 years ago in 1989, so longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You're basicallt judging present day Germany by conditions in 1945. China's government, economy, and society have transformed fundamentally since then.
> I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.
The assumption that 1.4 billion people live in constant terror is simply not consistent with what we observe. If the level of fear you describe were accurate, would we not expect to see mass emigration rather than the world's largest annual outbound tourism? Would we not see economic collapse? The voluntary return of over 100 million Chinese travelers annually many of whom have the means to stay abroad tells you something significant about where people actually want to live.
Predictions that Chinese society is one downturn away from revolt have been made for decades, and they have repeatedly been wrong.
An authoritarian system can be repressive and still enjoy genuine mass support. In China's case, the evidence strongly suggests that both things are true at once.
The CCP's legitimacy rests not merely on performance but on a coherent worldview that China's developmental challenges require a unified national direction rather than gridlocked partisan competition. For a country that experienced a century of humiliation, civil war, and famine, stability is existential.
You wrote that quality of life improvements "don't really negate" your fear based argument. But I'd ask: at what point does aggregate human welfare matter more than ideological purity? If a governance system has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while maintaining social order and national dignity, on what grounds do outsiders declare it illegitimate?
The Chinese people are not waiting for Western validation. They're building a civilization according to their own traditions and values.
- surveilled cities and less dense places through doorbell cams - surveilled digital communications - social credit scores (try getting a bank account if you've opted out of things like lexisnexis etc)
And they're running into the public issues already, such as lack of large power transformer availability and noise complaints from trying to generate their own power.
Plenty of gas pumps to go around, more of them aren't going to provide anybody private with more of what they crave the most which data centers do provide. That's the reason for the push to abandon EVs and reduce their competing demand for scarce electricity.
New electric capacity, paid for by the ratepayers, would benefit those same ratepayers if used for EV charging but big biz isn't in the game for them.
Why do they always get left out of the comparisons? Because they're so far behind anything it would be an insult to include them?
though in 3.5 months they are gonna ban EU consumers from buying cheap things directly from AliExpress and groom July 1st you will have to pay 3EUR for each ordered item, including that 1EUR screen protector, because it's much better when you can feed some useless middleman than saving money, thanks EU!
With that logic, every programmer on this site should spend as much time as possible on Facebook. This will make their salary equal to that of a Meta employee!
Consuming something is not the same as being able to produce it.
And yes, basically, no one should include europe in the comparison until US oil fields are depleted, and even then at best it would be a race for the second place. You can't compete without gas and oil or a huge manufacturing lead, and europe don't have any, and only have specific subset of manufacturing (basically sensors, electronics, avionics, optics, and handmade clothing) that isn't workforce-intensive, nor resource-intensive.
At least the Chinese tech will be available to European consumers, nothing says insecure like pretending a competitor doesn't exist.
An American would prefer that a field make 1 unit of rice if everyone got 1/n units. This is different from cultures where the preference is that you maximize your wellbeing (older America) so that if someone could figure out how to make the field make 10 units of rice, it’s okay if he makes 8 units and everyone else gets 2/n units.
The modern American cultural optimum aims to minimize |x_i - x_j| while growth cultures attempt to maximize x_i. An ironic reversal of roles.
On almost every topic, the discussion will turn to what that other evil part of society is doing to disrupt the good guys. If people are arguing about how to house people or stop crime (both basic issues), you will never move from these topics.
Most visible example is public infrastructure, middle-income countries in SE Asia have better infrastructure than the US (and most of Europe)...this makes no sense within the prevailing political/economic/social context in the West, it should just be totally impossible.
In your example, the current crisis can be represented as:
A field exists and produces 1 unit.
A financial entity buys the field and applies unsustainable methods to increase production 100 units, keep 99.5 of them, distributes 0.5/n. People are pissed that they’re getting half of what they used to despite incredible productivity. The people elect a leader to fix the situation. The leader confronts the financial entity, and returns to the people with 4 units in their pocket and excuses.
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/exploding-wealth-inequality-u...
No other country in the world has anything like the Republicans in the US, who are the only major political party in the world to oppose the existence of man made climate change.
There may be political parties in the rest of the world that say that the cost of tackling climate change is too high, but they don’t dispute the factual reality of it.
The Republicans were in this position between about 2008 and 2014 when their leaders were McCain and Romney, but Romney’s lack of insanity inspired a massive backlash within the crazy part of American society that then made Donald Trump their primary winner in 2016 as a repudiation to the not completely insane Republican leadership.
I know HN loves to pretend that the Republicans and the Democrats are just two sides of the same coin, but this can be shown to be objectively false by comparing to political parties abroad. Democrats are a normal European center left to center right party with all the flaws that brings with them.
The Republicans are now a party of insanity.