The very reason that China can bulldoze thousands of homes for a new highway or train, are the very things that would make an American scream “fascism” at an authoritarian government

How about this:

I’d never want to live under Trump's censorship, lack of civil rights, the weird errors caused by centralized economic control

"China" isn't "China". Like everywhere else, there's a maze of conflictiong incentives. The CCP measures regional governments on their stats. Gaming there. Regional governments measure administrative areas, ditto. More gaming. No stats can be trusted in a society that does not prize allegiance to the truth above all else.

> If they can build things faster, what need is there to manipulate the statistics?

A lot to unpack here. You completely blipped over the part about “no property rights” which is pretty clear when you look at, for example, how their rail construction projects go. Choochoo, rail is coming through, time to move this village, no eminent domain payments necessary.

> If the chinese don't have property rights, then how come they own so much property?

If ownership of a half-finished concrete shell by a bankrupt construction firm on the 33rd floor is counted as “owning property”, then the statistics will look pretty good.

> 90% of Chinese own their own properties

By "own" you mean 70 year leases with ??? renewal conditions?

> Urban land use rights in Mainland China were typically granted for fixed terms: 70 years for residential, 50 years for office or industrial, and 40 years for commercial purposes. As these terms approach expiration, the question of renewal becomes paramount. The legal framework, primarily the Property Law and the Urban Real Estate Administration Law, provides a general outline but leaves specific implementation to local governments.

> Mainland China’s Property Law (Article 149) and The Civil Code of Mainland China (Article 359) guarantee automatic residential land use right renewals but provides no specific arrangement in respect of non-residential terms. Currently, without detailed implementation guidelines, local governments devise varied approaches, skewing valuations and unsettling investors. This uncertainty hinders market efficiency.

https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/greater-china/insights/b...

But yeah, you could argue that you have to pay property taxes in USA and if you don't, you'll eventually lose your land

Give the average person in china the opportunity to move to America, and vice versa, there is no comparison. China has done some things right but to pretend it is some model for America is absurd

Theres the little matter of the US imposed Plaza Accords that have been skipped in the timeline there , which are widely acknowledged to have precipitated Japan's lost decades.

> Proof? Okay:

It never fails. I knew someone would post a wall of links to compensate for the lack of actual evidence. And of course all these links are just repeating the same talking point.

> Standard communist playbook: as soon as something is embarrassing (like the youth unemployment rate in China), declare it a state secret. T

But I thought these "damn commie"s manipulate the data? I thought we couldn't trust the data they put out anyways? Nevermind why these commies would put out data to embarrass themselves? Why are you so upset about losing access to manipulate data? Oh, you mean the data that the "commies" put out are accurate? And you are upset they are no longer making accurate and unmanipulated data from you?

> The list of things they're hiding is getting pretty damn long: internal trade statistics, housing sales, population numbers (first in the "ghost cities", then border regions, now all of China),

What difference does it make? They are all untrustworhty "manipulated" data?

This is the problem with you anti-china propagandists. One says the "commie stats" are manipulated and worthless? The other says "it isn't manipulated but these commies are hiding it".

> Because, of course, in Soviet Russia and other communist states it wasn't.

Which was readily apparent by anyone who visited the soviet states in the 70s/80s. Millions of people actually visit china every year. And many post videos of it on tiktok, youtube, etc. Even of uyghers. If china was on the path to a soviet style collapse, you'd see it in the cities, towns, etc.

> A big question a lot of people are starting to ask: is the data the government itself is operating on still accurate?

Is it a question? I thought it was all manipulated and unreliable data.

> so odds seem good the same is unfolding in China.

Then why are you crying about them hiding the bad data?

You just regurgitated the same nonsense anti-china propaganda that's we've been seeing for 10+ years. By the way, what happened with the ugyhur genocide? Still going on? And what happened to the promised china collapse? We've been waiting for many years now.

You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?

China had many famines before that during the century of humiliation. Maoism was itself a reaction to the dire social conditions of the time.

This doesn’t absolve Maoism of its policies which led to millions dying. (And yet we shouldn’t absolve the global capitalist system either which leads to millions of preventable deaths each year.)

Colonialist exploitation has been major historic driver over this timeframe (shifting to neo-colonialism in the world system post WW2). Admittedly it hasn’t been the only one. But our understanding of world history loses nuance if we gloss over colonialism and neo-colonialism over this period and treat historic events as due to the supposedly essential traits of this or that nation.

> because … and I mentioned

An action is not a justification for itself

I don't know why you think everything is so bleak. Yes, Europe is inter-connected to the world. We export a lot and we import a lot. Unemployment in Europe has been not been terrible for a long time.

Of course there is room for improvement and there are political challenges, for instance to enact the pension reforms needed for the demographic changes but Europe has achieved also a lot we can be proud of. Without Europe and without the single market, we would be facing the same issues Britain is facing: Being too small, unable to regulate anything on their own, dependent on foreign trade partners, etc.

The gotcha's don't work on me, sorry.

They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.

If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.

Better than most, if these stats are to be believed: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/covid?Metric=Excess+mor...

Hard to get reliable numbers, but if you go by reported deaths then yes better than the US.

They steered it well enough.

The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.

Post 2024-MAGA isn't able to steer a bicycle.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've been doing it repeatedly and we've asked you many times not to.