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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

China is what happens when you put scientists and engineers in charge [1][2].

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...

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On a semi related note, military leaders in the US have been warning about the dangers of the American deficit and have a long history of trying to cut waste by getting rid of weapons programs and military bases they don’t need but are constantly blocked by the civilian leadership in Congress because of the job loss.

Xi is the first President/leader China has had who literally never worked another job outside of politics and doesn’t speak a foreign language. They gave him a degree in chemical engineering when the universities re-opened after the cultural revolution but he never even had to pretend to use it. Hu, Jiang, and Deng actually worked as engineers and spoke languages besides Chinese (Russian and/or English).

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).

Xi is a fascinating figure. I had real concerns when he pushed through repealing term limits. I thought this could be another Putin but that hasn't been the case.

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.

Entire subthread is excellent, great comments and observations by all.

There were lots of red flags with Xi, and I’m afraid the world will learn the wrong lessons from his success. Maybe Democracy really is overrated, after all it gave us Trump…twice. The world looks at the USA and China as role models, and only the latter don’t look like a complete clown.

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.

>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).

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.

Yeah he was encouraging young people to go into debt and then was publicly critical of the pushback against him, two big no nos

Jack Ma’s situation wasn’t corruption though. He simply made the mistake of publicly criticizing the government’s economic policy. He was disappeared shortly after. Then he reappeared a few months later and he has been on his best behavior since.

> 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).

Uh, interesting take… I think many would say he was silenced/disappeared by the CCP for daring to openly speak against it.

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