I've been surprised by how many powerful and influential people still insist that we don't really need to worry about China because their authoritarian system is incapable of innovating and they can only copy the work of others. It strikes me as an example of rejecting new evidence in favor of more comforting prior assumptions. I fear that we won't wake up to reality until we have experienced our own Suez Crisis.
We already have examples of chinas cieling. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all have per capita gdps that are significantly lower than the west as well, and they have stopped growing. The East Asian model seems to cap out at 60% or so of what America is capable of.
Some of these “strengths” listed are actually bad things. Long hours studying and working aren’t translating to higher productivity. In fact productivity per hour worked is abysmal in east Asia. It’s a lot of zero sum red queen race bullshit.
People working 996 are unsurprisingly not having any children. What’s the point if building apartments in ghost cities for children that don’t exist?
China has scale. 1.4 billion x 50% of our gdp per capita would be a terrifying opponent if nukes hadn’t made major power war obsolete.
Luckily it’s also the case that the Chinese have started like zero wars since deng.
I’m more worried about America adopting Chinese “strengths”.
Yascha, my son’s father in law is from Taiwan with business in China. He tells a different story than what you describe. He thinks there is a lot of smoke and mirrors to the look given to tourists. Real estate is overbuilt and unaffordable for most people. People are not happy with Xi Jinping. Many of the rich people are moving their money out, expecting that when Xi Jinping is replaced, there will be chaos because of the power vacuum it will create. He also talks that in his most recent visit, he could not use his phone to summon a taxi because phones have to be registered with the government. He had to arrange with his office to be picked up and taken everywhere.
So how do people who are working 72 hours a week, 12 hours a day and 6 days a week, have time or energy to attend concerts, dress up for cosplay, etc.? If days off are so rare, when can they go to the doctor, or the grocer, or the mall? Is all shopping and leisure conducted only one day a week? Who's eating in all these restaurants or buying all the fancy good if the entire adult population is at work all day every day?
That still leaves the question, those who do 996, whom I assume are very numerous, even granting that they have no time nor money for recreation, when are they able to buy even their necessities? There was a time when the American workingmen also worked 12-hour-days, six days a week, but that was when women were "keeping the home fires burning" and this article is not talking about laborers but people who work in offices.
It's hard to imagine that all the glitz of stores and restaurants are only for, say, the top 5% of Chinese society. But then, there are more people in the top 5% of Chinese society than there are people in France or the UK!
It maybe doesn’t cover all of the cases but delivery is far more advanced in China. Office workers can get stuff delivered at home or at the office. Many buildings have lockers outside where delivery guys drop stuff off.
Thank you for your look at China without the reflexive “evil empire” lens, — offering a rare, objective view of a society whose governance, while undeniably authoritarian, has delivered stability and prosperity for the most of the population. One can almost call it a "perfect dictatorship": efficient, long-term in vision, and rooted in centuries-old tradition of respect for elders and authority.
The achievements of this model is a stark contrast to the Soviet experiment, and they deserve to be acknowledged without reverting to Cold War caricatures. Before 1949, it’s worth remembering, China had never initiated a war of aggression.
I hope you will address the "New Chinese" phenomena - wealthy elites tied to the Communist Party but driven more by personal enrichment than patriotism — mirrors the “New Russians” of the post-Soviet era.
And to those who argue China’s economic rise rests on “stealing” American technology — the hard truth is that much of it was handed over by U.S. companies chasing cheap labor, higher profits, and weakening labor movement at home in the process.
China’s strengths and flaws both deserve to be clearly understood and condemning its authoritarianism should not blind us to what it has achieved.
Are you unaware of China's demographic decline? Do you not know that it imports about 75% of its energy and about 75% of the agricultural chemicals needed to produce what food it does? Are you unaware that it does not have a blue water navy. Its ships can sail no more than 1000 miles, if unimpeded. The US, through Breton Woods, made globalization possible. Post USSR, the US has no interest in globalization. North America is the only region on the planet that exports both food and energy. If the US considered China to be a threat, all it had to do is wait. Xi Jinping has reduced the CCP to a cult of personality. He has eliminated anyone who might challenge his judgement or authority. So, he no longer has valid data upon which to make enlightened decisions. Do you really believe China to be a world power in a decade?
Thanks for this. You've articulated a sense that I haven't put my finger on.
For a while now I've had this feeling that the dissatisfaction in the U.S. , particularly from MAGA folks, is somehow mirroring the rise of China, not just in timing (they're winning, we're losing) but in form.
It feels similar to me to the way that the New Deal reflected the rising strength of the Soviet model in the 30s. Like people in the US were saying "I wonder if maybe _that_ is the solution" and so took working class poverty more seriously than before.
Now we see not just anger at and distrust of institutions in the US, but in a new "centralitarian" style, rather than the libertarian style I've known my whole life. It feels like Trump's appeal is partly, or maybe even primarily, his desire to centralize power. And not only (though obviously significantly) for personal aggrandizement. For the sake of being decisive, taking action. He boasted of taking action very extensively in his address to Congress.
And of course the abundance movement is now pushing similar values with a left leaning tilt.
So this feels like this fits. But if it does, my question is, how does this happen?? That is, through what mechanism might voters, most of whom don't analyze comparative politics, get such a sense? What clues lead them to think not only that China is strong, but to get a sense of why and how.
I'm grateful for the window and looking forward to your second installment. It's short-sighted, and probably idiotic, to ignore this former Sleeping Giant, which is now very much awake and competing all over the world in all economic sectors. PS Chinese food, even the American version, really is something else. Yum yum.
This framing of China as a highly centralized technocracy fundamentally misunderstands the governance structure that has actually been in place during China’s rise. What China has had since the late 1970s, at least until very recently, Xi et al have been working overtime to centralize things there in recent years but it seems that string pushback to that has developed as there centralization and technocracy drive have produces poor results, is not a monolithic top-down apparatus, but a fragmented, locally and regionally competitive, and de facto pluralistic system of economic and scientific with governance highly diversified participation in important decision making that in some of the most important respects has more in common with the pre Neoliberal Era American political economy than with either Soviet command planning or the post1970s American technocratic-managerial model he is implicitly defending. In fact, it hasnt resembled that model at all
Under this system, provinces and municipalities controlled their own fiscal bases, operated their own lending vehicles, pushed their own industrial strategies, and competed directly with one another for investment, technology, and talent. Local party branches, as in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and countless interior regions, functioned not as passive relays for Beijing, but as semi-sovereign civic-economic hubs, deeply embedded in local institutions. And possibly singularly most importantly, the CPC has has at the local level robust actual lower case "d" democratic analytical, deliberative, and decision making structures internally while having a socially and professorially highly diversified membership pool. When they use the term that is translated into English as "technocrat" they just mean at various stages of analysis, actual practitioners of whatever narrow task who are party members are heavily engaged. This system is in ways strikingly reminiscent of how Jacksonian Democratic Party organs and their successors once formed the backbone of America’s locally and regionally-embedded, development-driving economic system.
The People’s Bank of China and the large state owned corporations was effectively federated with branches responding to regional interests; state-owned enterprises were not unified monoliths but locally-embedded political-economic blocs; even regulatory enforcement varied substantially across localities. This was a system of regional discretion, embedded local knowledge, and governance pluralism, messy, competitive, and bottom-heavy, that looked much more like the Old Republic United States than anything in the modern, radically-centralized American technocracy, where control over capital flows, industrial siting, education, and even municipal governance has been subsumed upwards into a centralized financial-bureaucratic elite.
Mounk’s repeated use of “authoritarian” as a stand-in for centralization is a category mistake. Political authoritarianism is not what drove China’s economic success, it was things like institutional plurality and local autonomy, held together by a loose constitutional-party umbrella, that allowed for rapid policy experimentation, parallel industrial development, local-level learning curves, and a powerful diversification of economic bases. Beijing, for most of this period, acted as a strategic coordinator, not a detailed planner, much the way Jackson-era Washington oversaw but did not micromanage industrial and financial development across the American states.
The irony is that as China has begun shifting toward actual centralization under Xi, its growth performance, dynamism, and resiliency have declined, this is because in line with what we would predict given our understanding of the American historical pattern, once autonomy, fragmentation, and true local discretion retreat, innovation, pluralism, and economic independence degrade very quickly.
In truth, Mounk has China and America reversed, it is the United States , via its technocratic consolidation of banking, corporate governance, education, capital allocation, fiscal policy, etc under a narrow managerial elite, that now displays the hallmarks of an over-centralized, quasi-bureaucratic planning order, while China was, for most of its rise, much closer to a lower-case “d” democratic, experimental, federated political-economy. That is exactly why its cities and provinces became as competitive as American states used to be, and why the American system, once the world’s most decentralized and democratic engine of economic growth, is now stagnating under the weight of its own centralized planners.
I'm far from an expert on China, but your post aligns with what little I've heard about China's internal governance. You can see it in the way they pursue dominance in strategic industries. Rather than a Soviet-style top-down approach, they create a favorable playing field for business with an all-of-the-above approach of subsidies, cheap land, free electricity, increased focus within universities, protection from or co-opting of foreign players, etc. An enormous field of players sprouts and compete. Eventually, Beijing turns off the spigot, forcing the companies into brutal hyper-capitalist competition until a smaller pool of globally competitive exemplars are left. It's enormously expensive and likely inefficient, but it works and it works relatively quickly. In addition, many or most of these conditions are created at the local and provincial levels as cities and provinces seek to outdo each other economically and in the eyes of party grandees, leading to a highly dynamic and varied approach. Party leaders determine the targets, but leave it to local leadership to determine how these targets will be achieved. Does all of that sound right to you?
Yes, from my pov that’s broadly correct, and it’s even more structurally decentralized than most people realize; Chinese cities and provinces don’t just compete on subsidies and industrial planning, they often engage in whats effectively moderate local trade protectionism even against the rest of China, they maintain their own slightly-fragmented capital markets, the big state owned companies are in many important senses ranging from ops decisions to investment decisions to R&D decisions are effectively several companies as they are geographically diffused with redundancy and local party branches have a lot of control over them, and very importantly control the bulk of both revenue-raising and spending, which is important because it means real fiscal and strategic decision-making remains lodged at the local level rather than at the center, and theres even more than all that.
What’s even more striking is that the Party's local branches decision making structures rely far more on lower case "d" democratic type structures than they do on modern Western-style lower case "t" technocratic type structures. They have highly diversified membership with robust internal democracy structures and they are embedded in communities of various types, and their lower local party branches are directly tied into civic-economic life that make them function in some ways almost like Jacksonian era to 1960s old American political machines, enabling very wide and very diversified participation and knowledge processing intense bottom-up information flow and policy feedback, instead of modern Western intellectually narrow and homogenous rigid top-down managerialism
Do you know of any good books on the topic? Given how China has consistently surpassed Western expectations, not to mention their increasing global importance, having a good understanding of how their system works (or has worked pre-Xi) would surely be beneficial.
Germany is a part of the EU just as Ohio is part of the USA. Germany is not equivalent to the USA. The states of the USA were always intended to be quite independent of each other. That constitutional dictate has been stomped, nearly to death, by two political parties that have no governmental authority whatsoever.
My wife and I were in China for two weeks with a group of American couples adopting Chinese children. Our group visited Tiananmen Square. We were warned ahead of time, do NOT mention the massacre to anyone. Americans know more about the massacre than the Chinese do.
Still, it's a very open, friendly society. People were glad to intermingle with us, and us with them. Except for church. We had a Sunday service in an auditorium. No Chinese were allowed. Armed guards checked everyone's ID, the ONLY time or place where that happened.
I know that this article is just part 1. But I still warn everyone that China is a totalitarian state, no matter how you spin it. And the individual states in the USA are autonomous states, not unlike Germany is in the EU. Two parties in this country seek to erase anyone's knowledge of this essential fact.
Yes they are. You've just come to believe that what the two parties do is constitutional. The constitution specifies that the federal government's purpose is to see to things that the individual states can't reasonably see to. The federal government declares and prosecutes wars. It makes treaties and sets tariffs. It settles disputes between states.
The federal government has no authority to regulate education within a state, or healthcare, or retirement.
It is the states that created the federal government, not the other way around. Their intent was to NOT have an autocratic Big Brother government controlling everything.
If we eliminated the two parties, and followed the constitution, we would be very much like the EU.
Most of this was true in 2015 and all of it was true in 2023. The real story here is the Western commentariat waking up (finally) to the biggest story of the 21st century. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The recent conversation Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze here is probably the best example of this. Tooze made the point that all of industrial progress (from ~1800 to today) is basically an introductory chapter to the book China is writing today. You can’t understand “modernity” without understanding China. The West is no longer driving history.
Excellent and fair essay. I visited Beijing and Shanghai many times pre-covid, and recently spent 10 delightful days touring Yunnan. All of your observations align with what I've personally seen.
Yascha, your insights are precious gems. China obviously gets a lot of things right, consequently challenging Western assumptions on democratic liberalism as the preconditioning for high living standards, innovation, decency, and what not. Thus transpires the double squeeze from the allurement of the Chinese model and the nihilism of the right.
I've been surprised by how many powerful and influential people still insist that we don't really need to worry about China because their authoritarian system is incapable of innovating and they can only copy the work of others. It strikes me as an example of rejecting new evidence in favor of more comforting prior assumptions. I fear that we won't wake up to reality until we have experienced our own Suez Crisis.
We already have examples of chinas cieling. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan all have per capita gdps that are significantly lower than the west as well, and they have stopped growing. The East Asian model seems to cap out at 60% or so of what America is capable of.
Some of these “strengths” listed are actually bad things. Long hours studying and working aren’t translating to higher productivity. In fact productivity per hour worked is abysmal in east Asia. It’s a lot of zero sum red queen race bullshit.
People working 996 are unsurprisingly not having any children. What’s the point if building apartments in ghost cities for children that don’t exist?
China has scale. 1.4 billion x 50% of our gdp per capita would be a terrifying opponent if nukes hadn’t made major power war obsolete.
Luckily it’s also the case that the Chinese have started like zero wars since deng.
I’m more worried about America adopting Chinese “strengths”.
Yascha, my son’s father in law is from Taiwan with business in China. He tells a different story than what you describe. He thinks there is a lot of smoke and mirrors to the look given to tourists. Real estate is overbuilt and unaffordable for most people. People are not happy with Xi Jinping. Many of the rich people are moving their money out, expecting that when Xi Jinping is replaced, there will be chaos because of the power vacuum it will create. He also talks that in his most recent visit, he could not use his phone to summon a taxi because phones have to be registered with the government. He had to arrange with his office to be picked up and taken everywhere.
Did you experience any of these things?
This is a terrific primer on the "current" China. Looking forward to the next installment.
So how do people who are working 72 hours a week, 12 hours a day and 6 days a week, have time or energy to attend concerts, dress up for cosplay, etc.? If days off are so rare, when can they go to the doctor, or the grocer, or the mall? Is all shopping and leisure conducted only one day a week? Who's eating in all these restaurants or buying all the fancy good if the entire adult population is at work all day every day?
There’s a massive wealth gap and the wealthy do NOT do 996.
That still leaves the question, those who do 996, whom I assume are very numerous, even granting that they have no time nor money for recreation, when are they able to buy even their necessities? There was a time when the American workingmen also worked 12-hour-days, six days a week, but that was when women were "keeping the home fires burning" and this article is not talking about laborers but people who work in offices.
It's hard to imagine that all the glitz of stores and restaurants are only for, say, the top 5% of Chinese society. But then, there are more people in the top 5% of Chinese society than there are people in France or the UK!
It maybe doesn’t cover all of the cases but delivery is far more advanced in China. Office workers can get stuff delivered at home or at the office. Many buildings have lockers outside where delivery guys drop stuff off.
Excellent article!
We should rejoice in China’s strength especially as it has been gained at no great cost to the rest of the world.
I look forward to reading Part 2
Thank you for your look at China without the reflexive “evil empire” lens, — offering a rare, objective view of a society whose governance, while undeniably authoritarian, has delivered stability and prosperity for the most of the population. One can almost call it a "perfect dictatorship": efficient, long-term in vision, and rooted in centuries-old tradition of respect for elders and authority.
The achievements of this model is a stark contrast to the Soviet experiment, and they deserve to be acknowledged without reverting to Cold War caricatures. Before 1949, it’s worth remembering, China had never initiated a war of aggression.
I hope you will address the "New Chinese" phenomena - wealthy elites tied to the Communist Party but driven more by personal enrichment than patriotism — mirrors the “New Russians” of the post-Soviet era.
And to those who argue China’s economic rise rests on “stealing” American technology — the hard truth is that much of it was handed over by U.S. companies chasing cheap labor, higher profits, and weakening labor movement at home in the process.
China’s strengths and flaws both deserve to be clearly understood and condemning its authoritarianism should not blind us to what it has achieved.
Are you unaware of China's demographic decline? Do you not know that it imports about 75% of its energy and about 75% of the agricultural chemicals needed to produce what food it does? Are you unaware that it does not have a blue water navy. Its ships can sail no more than 1000 miles, if unimpeded. The US, through Breton Woods, made globalization possible. Post USSR, the US has no interest in globalization. North America is the only region on the planet that exports both food and energy. If the US considered China to be a threat, all it had to do is wait. Xi Jinping has reduced the CCP to a cult of personality. He has eliminated anyone who might challenge his judgement or authority. So, he no longer has valid data upon which to make enlightened decisions. Do you really believe China to be a world power in a decade?
Thanks for this. You've articulated a sense that I haven't put my finger on.
For a while now I've had this feeling that the dissatisfaction in the U.S. , particularly from MAGA folks, is somehow mirroring the rise of China, not just in timing (they're winning, we're losing) but in form.
It feels similar to me to the way that the New Deal reflected the rising strength of the Soviet model in the 30s. Like people in the US were saying "I wonder if maybe _that_ is the solution" and so took working class poverty more seriously than before.
Now we see not just anger at and distrust of institutions in the US, but in a new "centralitarian" style, rather than the libertarian style I've known my whole life. It feels like Trump's appeal is partly, or maybe even primarily, his desire to centralize power. And not only (though obviously significantly) for personal aggrandizement. For the sake of being decisive, taking action. He boasted of taking action very extensively in his address to Congress.
And of course the abundance movement is now pushing similar values with a left leaning tilt.
So this feels like this fits. But if it does, my question is, how does this happen?? That is, through what mechanism might voters, most of whom don't analyze comparative politics, get such a sense? What clues lead them to think not only that China is strong, but to get a sense of why and how.
I'm grateful for the window and looking forward to your second installment. It's short-sighted, and probably idiotic, to ignore this former Sleeping Giant, which is now very much awake and competing all over the world in all economic sectors. PS Chinese food, even the American version, really is something else. Yum yum.
This framing of China as a highly centralized technocracy fundamentally misunderstands the governance structure that has actually been in place during China’s rise. What China has had since the late 1970s, at least until very recently, Xi et al have been working overtime to centralize things there in recent years but it seems that string pushback to that has developed as there centralization and technocracy drive have produces poor results, is not a monolithic top-down apparatus, but a fragmented, locally and regionally competitive, and de facto pluralistic system of economic and scientific with governance highly diversified participation in important decision making that in some of the most important respects has more in common with the pre Neoliberal Era American political economy than with either Soviet command planning or the post1970s American technocratic-managerial model he is implicitly defending. In fact, it hasnt resembled that model at all
Under this system, provinces and municipalities controlled their own fiscal bases, operated their own lending vehicles, pushed their own industrial strategies, and competed directly with one another for investment, technology, and talent. Local party branches, as in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and countless interior regions, functioned not as passive relays for Beijing, but as semi-sovereign civic-economic hubs, deeply embedded in local institutions. And possibly singularly most importantly, the CPC has has at the local level robust actual lower case "d" democratic analytical, deliberative, and decision making structures internally while having a socially and professorially highly diversified membership pool. When they use the term that is translated into English as "technocrat" they just mean at various stages of analysis, actual practitioners of whatever narrow task who are party members are heavily engaged. This system is in ways strikingly reminiscent of how Jacksonian Democratic Party organs and their successors once formed the backbone of America’s locally and regionally-embedded, development-driving economic system.
The People’s Bank of China and the large state owned corporations was effectively federated with branches responding to regional interests; state-owned enterprises were not unified monoliths but locally-embedded political-economic blocs; even regulatory enforcement varied substantially across localities. This was a system of regional discretion, embedded local knowledge, and governance pluralism, messy, competitive, and bottom-heavy, that looked much more like the Old Republic United States than anything in the modern, radically-centralized American technocracy, where control over capital flows, industrial siting, education, and even municipal governance has been subsumed upwards into a centralized financial-bureaucratic elite.
Mounk’s repeated use of “authoritarian” as a stand-in for centralization is a category mistake. Political authoritarianism is not what drove China’s economic success, it was things like institutional plurality and local autonomy, held together by a loose constitutional-party umbrella, that allowed for rapid policy experimentation, parallel industrial development, local-level learning curves, and a powerful diversification of economic bases. Beijing, for most of this period, acted as a strategic coordinator, not a detailed planner, much the way Jackson-era Washington oversaw but did not micromanage industrial and financial development across the American states.
The irony is that as China has begun shifting toward actual centralization under Xi, its growth performance, dynamism, and resiliency have declined, this is because in line with what we would predict given our understanding of the American historical pattern, once autonomy, fragmentation, and true local discretion retreat, innovation, pluralism, and economic independence degrade very quickly.
In truth, Mounk has China and America reversed, it is the United States , via its technocratic consolidation of banking, corporate governance, education, capital allocation, fiscal policy, etc under a narrow managerial elite, that now displays the hallmarks of an over-centralized, quasi-bureaucratic planning order, while China was, for most of its rise, much closer to a lower-case “d” democratic, experimental, federated political-economy. That is exactly why its cities and provinces became as competitive as American states used to be, and why the American system, once the world’s most decentralized and democratic engine of economic growth, is now stagnating under the weight of its own centralized planners.
I'm far from an expert on China, but your post aligns with what little I've heard about China's internal governance. You can see it in the way they pursue dominance in strategic industries. Rather than a Soviet-style top-down approach, they create a favorable playing field for business with an all-of-the-above approach of subsidies, cheap land, free electricity, increased focus within universities, protection from or co-opting of foreign players, etc. An enormous field of players sprouts and compete. Eventually, Beijing turns off the spigot, forcing the companies into brutal hyper-capitalist competition until a smaller pool of globally competitive exemplars are left. It's enormously expensive and likely inefficient, but it works and it works relatively quickly. In addition, many or most of these conditions are created at the local and provincial levels as cities and provinces seek to outdo each other economically and in the eyes of party grandees, leading to a highly dynamic and varied approach. Party leaders determine the targets, but leave it to local leadership to determine how these targets will be achieved. Does all of that sound right to you?
Yes, from my pov that’s broadly correct, and it’s even more structurally decentralized than most people realize; Chinese cities and provinces don’t just compete on subsidies and industrial planning, they often engage in whats effectively moderate local trade protectionism even against the rest of China, they maintain their own slightly-fragmented capital markets, the big state owned companies are in many important senses ranging from ops decisions to investment decisions to R&D decisions are effectively several companies as they are geographically diffused with redundancy and local party branches have a lot of control over them, and very importantly control the bulk of both revenue-raising and spending, which is important because it means real fiscal and strategic decision-making remains lodged at the local level rather than at the center, and theres even more than all that.
What’s even more striking is that the Party's local branches decision making structures rely far more on lower case "d" democratic type structures than they do on modern Western-style lower case "t" technocratic type structures. They have highly diversified membership with robust internal democracy structures and they are embedded in communities of various types, and their lower local party branches are directly tied into civic-economic life that make them function in some ways almost like Jacksonian era to 1960s old American political machines, enabling very wide and very diversified participation and knowledge processing intense bottom-up information flow and policy feedback, instead of modern Western intellectually narrow and homogenous rigid top-down managerialism
Do you know of any good books on the topic? Given how China has consistently surpassed Western expectations, not to mention their increasing global importance, having a good understanding of how their system works (or has worked pre-Xi) would surely be beneficial.
Just a few observations:
Germany is a part of the EU just as Ohio is part of the USA. Germany is not equivalent to the USA. The states of the USA were always intended to be quite independent of each other. That constitutional dictate has been stomped, nearly to death, by two political parties that have no governmental authority whatsoever.
My wife and I were in China for two weeks with a group of American couples adopting Chinese children. Our group visited Tiananmen Square. We were warned ahead of time, do NOT mention the massacre to anyone. Americans know more about the massacre than the Chinese do.
Still, it's a very open, friendly society. People were glad to intermingle with us, and us with them. Except for church. We had a Sunday service in an auditorium. No Chinese were allowed. Armed guards checked everyone's ID, the ONLY time or place where that happened.
I know that this article is just part 1. But I still warn everyone that China is a totalitarian state, no matter how you spin it. And the individual states in the USA are autonomous states, not unlike Germany is in the EU. Two parties in this country seek to erase anyone's knowledge of this essential fact.
Yes they are. You've just come to believe that what the two parties do is constitutional. The constitution specifies that the federal government's purpose is to see to things that the individual states can't reasonably see to. The federal government declares and prosecutes wars. It makes treaties and sets tariffs. It settles disputes between states.
The federal government has no authority to regulate education within a state, or healthcare, or retirement.
It is the states that created the federal government, not the other way around. Their intent was to NOT have an autocratic Big Brother government controlling everything.
If we eliminated the two parties, and followed the constitution, we would be very much like the EU.
Most of this was true in 2015 and all of it was true in 2023. The real story here is the Western commentariat waking up (finally) to the biggest story of the 21st century. It’s been very interesting to watch.
The recent conversation Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze here is probably the best example of this. Tooze made the point that all of industrial progress (from ~1800 to today) is basically an introductory chapter to the book China is writing today. You can’t understand “modernity” without understanding China. The West is no longer driving history.
great comment.
Please learn about purchasing power parity.
Excellent and fair essay. I visited Beijing and Shanghai many times pre-covid, and recently spent 10 delightful days touring Yunnan. All of your observations align with what I've personally seen.
That’s Shanghai
Not nearly as amazing as it was a decade ago….and let’s all shed a tear for Hong Kong 😥
My point though was that the first photo is mis-captioned ("Tianjin on August 6.") 😆
Yascha, your insights are precious gems. China obviously gets a lot of things right, consequently challenging Western assumptions on democratic liberalism as the preconditioning for high living standards, innovation, decency, and what not. Thus transpires the double squeeze from the allurement of the Chinese model and the nihilism of the right.