It's awfully bold to claim that the US is obsessed with making rules, and China isn't. China is similarly full of rules (in fact, likely moreso), but they have less rule of law, so they aren't enforced consistently. The US has more rule of law (for now), so enforcement is (was) more consistent.

And of course, if anyone's too good at making rules, it's the EU.

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hilbert42 a day ago | parent | next [-]

"It's awfully bold to claim that the US is obsessed with making rules, and China isn't."

Of course China is obsessed with rules just like many countries are, and it's pretty clear it firmly polices its laws.

The difference is that after the death of Mao in 1976 Deng Xiaoping consciously and openly embarked on a task to pull China into the modern technological era, and to do that he deliberately set out to populate China's Politburo with highly educated engineers and like. (I gave references to this in a HN post a short while ago.)

Thus, for nearly 50 years China has been run by the best brains available rather than those who've the gift of the gab and promise the electorate whatever it takes to get them elected.

Sure that's not democracy and many of us in the West find it irksome. However, like it or not, over the last 50 years China's rulers have run a command economy and worked an economic miracle.

Deng Xiaoping's insight of getting the best and brightest to run the country was brilliant, unlike most dictators he chose a course of action that actually benefited China. There's no question about that, the evidence is there for all the world to see.

	▲	kelseyfrog a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Which poses an interesting consequence. It's not exactly controversial to generalize HN's sentiment that the US would be better off with more engineers and experts in elected office, which all other things being equal, implies that the US should be more like China.
	▲	insane_dreamer a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is that it’s more of a dictatorship now with Xi than it was after Deng. It’s not longer the best and brightest but those loyal to Xi. That’s how you got highly capable people like Li Keqiang sidelined and many others purged altogether on “corruption “ charges. A benevolent dictator can be beneficial for a country in crisis (the original Roman idea of a dictator which was a temporary position), like you could argue Deng was, but it’s not a good model for long-term governance.

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metalman a day ago | parent | prev [-]

china is obsesed with principals, from which rules can be derived in order to facilitate the realisation of those principals China makes a consistant policy of stateing the principals they are trying to follow and how they are doing that, like every time they stand in front of microphones, and lo, it is actualy working. The problem for us, is that the people in front of microphones here, use similar language, and we all stopped listening a long time ago, as it is just talky talk noise, and we are only concerend with who gets the money. China has scale on it's side, and they are lifting people out of the 16'th century, litteral mud brick dirt floor shacks, and moving whole villages into new apartment complexes, together, where they can go or stay, or go back and forth and continue to farm, and so there is a vast number of people, loyal to the state, and the jobs they get, and the astonishing oportunities that they can persue, should they have the wet ware and gumption......more engineers then, many more engineers, working on many more projects..... a litte known story, sometimes told in different ways, is of a very ancient temple built to honour the worlds first engineer, named Gun, which sits on an island in the middle of the headwaters of the yallu, who is credited with building the first flood control engineering for that same river, some number of millenia, ago though truth to be told, the mesoptaimians were at it first, but we have only there ditch digging songs and flood laments to remind us of what needs to be done first