As someone with parents who experienced the USSR, this is what really terrifies me about China's rise, and the reason I can't say I'm against a trade war if it hinders them more than us.
Imagine a world in which China holds more control... a country with little legal or social respect for individualism, where your fate is 'centrally planned' by how impressive your maths skills are. By contrast, ~30% of American billionaires are dropouts. We highly value ambition in the U.S., and we attract (and reward) people who have it; those people, upon coming here, largely have the freedom to create and build and be in charge of their own future.
It just seems like the U.S. will self-select for the ambitious and the inspired and those who desire freedom, and it would be immensely worrying if this model we have appears wrong.
> where your fate is 'centrally planned' by how impressive your maths skills are
Is it better than a fate that is generally determined by how rich your parents are? I give you that there are more options in the States, but this plays a huge role. Social mobility has been declining in the US.
This isn't really a good comparison. The US has its problems and rising inequality has been a huge one for sure. But the biggest strength of the US has been its institutions and a society and economy that is based on laws. The independent Universities, Judiciary etc. are all extremely hard to get it right and the US has managed to do so (mostly; there are still many many problems e.g. school-prison pipeline, unequal treatment for minorities and poor communities etc.)
It seems much more likely to fix the US's problems with inequality rather than try to build all these institutions from scratch in China, at least in its current environment.
And in addition to the rule of law, the US gives it citizens the opportunity to rise above their situation (some would use the term "class"). There are few countries where this is the case. In most countries, the state determines your fate.
Most countries don't allow this? You need to give some evidence of that.
European countries have free markets and most have better social mobility than the US. If you check the link in my original post you will see the US has relatively low social mobility for a developed nation.
My European friends have indicated that kids are "tracked" from grade school, and your career is basically determined by your scores in 6th grade. In America you can flunk out of high school and still choose to pursue your chosen career. I have many friends who did just that, and have become very successful in their careers.
Do they really? The compensation for Software Engineers at least seems to be ridiculously low compared to those in the US, moreso in SFBA. I get that the social safety nets are very good but I don’t agree that social mobility is any easier in Europe.
Salary levels don't say anything about social mobility. Social mobility is about how easy it is to climb to highly paying jobs such as software engineering for people from underprivileged backgrounds.
There seems to be evidence that Americans overestimate social mobility in the US while Europeans underestimate social mobility in European countries. In practice, European countries also perform better in that regard. https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2018/02/daily-...
you become a party member after you become a billionaire. Then there is responsibility comes with it, you will need to help the government with jobs and other things. Sometimes you will need to help to revive a bankrupt company for example.
Yea I agree, it's far from an exact analogy. Some certainly did get very rich from Party power, and some were invited to join once already rich... does anyone refuse such an invitation, and stay rich?
I think that's a severe misrepresentation of China. They're communist in name, but extremely capitalist in practice. Jack Ma is the man behind Alibaba and now one of the richest people alive, let alone Chinese alive. Check out his background [1].
In my opinion, the main difference between China and the US is nationalism. And that's also what I think that slogan is indicative of. It also, I think, explains their government actions. Supporting their companies is not about nationalizing them, which implies a motivation of state driven control, but growing and improving Chinese companies on the national scene.
I think we have a great analogy in the US today versus the US in the past. Think about our space program in the 60s. We dumped immense amount of money into US companies and managed to, in 7 years, go from having never even put a man into orbit to putting a man on the moon. The primary motivation there was nationalistic - showing how kick ass America, and implicitly capitalism, was.
Compare that space program to today where there's no real nationalism. Now a days we're building the Space Shuttle 2.0, known as the SLS. And we've spent 8 years on it so far, obscene amounts of money, and it's still not going anywhere. The thing is now the motivation for the spending is not about America, but about a handful of congressmen using it as a job's program for their election campaigns, and of course shelling out kickbacks everywhere. If we handed out a fraction of the SLS money to a private company like SpaceX we'd have a man on Mars in the 2020s, but again - the goal is no longer about America or space. It's become about the individual, instead of the nation.
So essentially I think China's goal here is not state control, but about showing dominance of the Chinese system. If there is any problem with the American system it's that I think we've become somewhat conservative with ideas. Elon Musk's ideas should not be as unique as they are. I mean they aren't - everybody has them, but funding for revolutionary ideas seems (based on the lack of these sort of companies) to be much more difficult to come by. Ostensibly it makes sense. Investors want to invest in things likely to turn a profit, and investing in something that's never been done before is not the easiest EV to predict. But with our technology and wealth today we could be doing so many much more interesting things than we are.
> In my opinion, the main difference between China and the US is nationalism. And that's also what I think that slogan is indicative of. It also, I think, explains their government actions. Supporting their companies is not about nationalizing them, which implies a motivation of state driven control, but growing and improving Chinese companies on the national scene.
I've noticed that a few times recently when comparing American and Chinese policies.
In the United States we've made a cargo cult religion around individual freedom, to the point where we often don't do what's best for the country and society as a whole.
The Chinese government seems much more concerned about making their country and society better as a whole.
Unfairly dismissive of the deep philosophy involved in the founding of this country. There are many solid underpinnings of American individualism, whether you agree the principles or not.
I think the gulf between individualism and collectivism is more similar to what has become of left versus right, which is to say it's completely insufficient by itself. With left versus right it's now also critical to consider libertarian versus authoritarian. So too with individualism and collectivism, I think you need to also factor in nationalism versus globalism.
The US was certainly driven by nationalism, but the individualism vs collectivism component is not clearly individualistic either. For instance in our founding, states were viewed as entities in and of themselves. Institutions like the senate and the electoral college are very clear reminders that the state was seen as more relevant than the individual.
In either case today we've gone more individualistic and globalistic. This diminishes the strength of the state. And I think many see that as a positive today without considering that things we consider rights and privileges we take for granted are not inalienable, but a product of our nation which creates that inalienability. The reason you can burn a flag as a protest without being rounded up and summarily 'removed from society' one way or the other, as would happen in many parts of this world, is because of what that very flag represents.
If we created a nation that was an aggregate of this world, it'd still be quite an awful place. This is in part why, though I'd hardly consider myself nationalistic, I think that keep our nations strong and independent is so crucial. I also find it trite that the push for extremes of globalism is largely coming from corporations and other power non-state entities. Guess who rules a society where the nation or state is secondary? Many would like to think it's the individual, but it's not. Globalism is analogous to union busting on the international scale. Many people were led to believe that unions were not in their best interest. That worked out well...
> The Chinese government seems much more concerned about making their country and society better as a whole.
They do what is best for themselves, which at times means doing what's best for the Communist Party. Suppressing dissent, denying Chinese people freedom and self-determination is only good for the people in power.
In case someone wants to argue that authoritarianism provides better governance (which is BS anyway - if it's so great, then hold an election and people will vote for you; who are you to decide that it's so great for everyone else?), all the most wealthy, most stable countries in the world have those freedoms (Europe, the U.S.), including the most wealthy and stable parts of China (Taiwan and Hong Kong).
> They do what is best for themselves, which at times means doing what's best for the Communist Party. Suppressing dissent, denying Chinese people freedom and self-determination is only good for the people in power.
The United States is often nearly as bad as China on human rights. At least China is overt about it. Nobody denies they're watching everybody, but it took an NSA contractor leaking information to bring up the issue in the United States.
For example, here's a story about 1300 people in jail >4 years with no trial:
Our systems punish people for different things, but they're both pretty bad.
> In case someone wants to argue that authoritarianism provides better governance (which is BS anyway - if it's so great, then hold an election and people will vote for you; who are you to decide that it's so great for everyone else?), all the most wealthy, most stable countries in the world have those freedoms (Europe, the U.S.), including the most wealthy and stable parts of China (Taiwan and Hong Kong).
I'm not saying China's system is absolutely the best without any downsides, but in a lot of cases it's clear that what they're doing is good for nearly everybody. For example, when they cut off imports of foreign waste and when they build and maintain infrastructure to their rural regions. Likewise, there are many cases where the American system has results that are clearly bad for us, like paying our teachers so little that they strike or move away because nobody wants to pay extra taxes.
I don't know what your point is, but you haven't provided any evidence that the United States is better than China on human rights.
And since it's on topic, just today I read an article about a state government trying to use eminent domain to kick people out of their own houses and build a FoxConn factory: http://beltmag.com/blighted-by-foxconn
I live in the United States, and love it here, but it doesn't do us any good to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we don't have human rights problems of our own.
> They're communist in name, but extremely capitalist in practice.
Which is orthogonal to individualist.
State power serves individuals largely to the extent that influence is well-distributed over a population (and that population cares enough to be attentive and thoughtful).
Markets serve individuals largely to the extent that purchasing power and a reasonable level of information symmetry are well-distributed over a population (and mostly for areas in which incentives are well-aligned).
I'm definitely romanticizing the U.S. quite a bit. At the same time, that romanticization is inspiring (at least to me) and largely true today when you compare us to countries like China, where you have much less control over your future. Also, moving to a country that provides greater freedom and opportunity at the cost of less of a social net and lower taxes will almost definitely self-select for the ambitious.
Slavery also continued in practice in China until at least 1949 [1]
What do you call a US prison farm? [1] Even Wikipedia acknowledges that "the concepts of prison farm and labor camp overlap." Labor camps are even explicitly permitted by the 13th amendment "... which ended slavery, specifically perpetuated the concept of penal servitude – i.e., unfree labor as a punishment for a crime."
There is a difference between political prisoners and criminals. There is a rule of law in the US which means you cannot arbitrarily imprison anyone; there is due process and a trial. That is missing from the Chinese Judicial System which makes it much more akin to Slave Labor.
You are just human. So that means in general you are xenophobic, nationalist, racist and operate on the unstated assumption that you and your fellow nationals are 100X more worthy than any foreigner.
"moving to a country that provides greater freedom and opportunity at the cost of less of a social net and lower taxes will almost definitely self-select for the ambitious"
That's flawed logic.
1. There is no study that stated less social net and lower taxes will definitely self-select for the ambitious.
2. US does not have the lowest tax in the world.
The vast majority of physical and intellectual labor that “built” the United States was performed by free men. I’m not saying there wasn’t slavery, but your assertion is absurd.
If you were running the largest network of communications in any country you would also have a political requirement to maintain a public hat-tip to government at all times as well as private cooperation. While the brusque visual nature of this sculpture is admittedly unnerving, I can assure you based on nearly 20 years in the country that it is not some sort of oppressive symbolism but rather more likely a PR designed retro-communique to traditional party socialist mores in order to stave off criticism from party hardliners. Government interface is simply the nature of society and a requirement of big business everywhere. The US included.
Go ahead and not put that sign in there. See how long you last.
Also, it's possible that they believe it, say, "China needs this to be a strong country" even if some freedoms are sacrificed. A necessary evil for a while.
As for nationalizing: they are in a sense nationalized. You must x, y and z or you're done. The Party is judge, jury and the executioner.
The sculpture outside the front of Tencents Shenzhen HQ. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXRIsWrVQAAJgjl.jpg