There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics

there isn’t, especially not in america (though you said democratic… :) )

> The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.

If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.

> But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.

"Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.

You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.

"None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".

Make up your mind.

The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.

Almost as if countries were closed systems and imperialism never existed. As if the US has not acted a neo-imperialist superpower post-WW2.

Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?

Unclear why Europe's capabilities are a relevant come-back to a comparison between the US and China.

May be correct, the EU as an organisation isn't very powerful compared to member states, may be false, EU member states are much more diverse than American states.

The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).

The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.

The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.

Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.

The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.

The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.

If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.

The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.

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As my mother once said during her time as a hospice nurse, “We’re all dying, some just faster than others.”

Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month.

The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage.

From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live.

It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.

You are both the exploited and the exploiter.

I’m a moderate American who lived in China for 9 years. China is a mixed bag, they do some things right (their transit build out, their investments in green energy/tech, healthcare, employment) and some things bad (real estate bubble that makes 1980s Japan blush, environment was in tatters until recently, autocratic, youth job opportunities kind of suck right now, 996, welfare doesn’t really exist).

As far as the simplistic “X good Y bad”, those are never right anyways.

I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.

To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.

As a "softcare leftie", my understanding is that China does in fact have a weak welfare state.

I think it's better for pensioners than working-age poor — typical gerontocracy. I think some healthcare stuff exists on paper but it sucks.

China has very little to do with left except in the names maybe.

The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China

During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.

OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)

The Czech offence was called "Příživnictví", which is just "Parasitism".

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BEivnictv%C3%...

If a given person's labor is of poor enough quality such that its value is not enough to provide whatever is considered a reasonable quality of life in a given circumstance, adding a UBI or other welfare payment is not just subsidizing employers

From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA.

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...

Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.

"Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.

Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.

With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.

I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.

Labor income, just as before?

Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources.

Ironically, not too different from the US.

This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.

IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.

> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.

I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.

What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".

I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.

All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.

Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)

A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"

Because China has a dual housing system to ensure availability of affordable housing, something almost nonexistent in the West (other than Vienna).

Yes people invest in housing. That's not the point. The point is China has a policy goal of making sure people have access to housing, something again almost nonexistent in the West.

You won't see a land value tax for the same reason there are constraints on housing supply: because existing homeowners are essentially single-issue voters when it comes to do with anything about housing. Aesthetically progressive people turn into raging fascists the second you propose building slightly higher density housing near a train station that they're nowhere near.

In my ideal world I would:

1. Massively hike property taxes on non-income generating housing;

2. Make anyone owning housing subject to state, local and federal taxes on their worldwide income;

3. Get rid of preferential property tax rates and caps on property tax increases (eg Prop 13 in California). If you want to not force old people to sell immediately, defer their property taxes until death. This is exactly what Texas does;

4. Build for transit; and

5. Have the government be a massive supplier of social housing.

I think their point is many americans are simply not capable of having an honest debate about the pros / cons of living in both countries. It’s OK to not like a country and give them credit where credit is due.

They just say china has NO FREEDOM and CANT TRUST THE CCP, and shut down the conversation, as if the debate has been won? As if no other metric matters in a society. There is nuance - which 90% of the comments on this post have missed.

Most importantly, most commenters are not entering the discussion with an open mind. In which case there’s not point in debating anything. It’s a waste of time.