• KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    4 months ago

    well obviously, authoritarianism is a method of governance, you can have that mixed with literally anything. I just don’t believe that china has generally social left leaning objectives, like i said, unless we’re talking like classical liberalism or something, they’re pretty socially conservative, and they’re not super economically left either.

    They’re like a weird mix of ethno nationalist (china is not very diverse) and capitalist-authoritarian, combined with social conservatism.

    I think if we’re talking about general social status, china is probably doing something productive, though it’s questionable how much longer that will run on for. But general social status is boring.

    economically, china is experiencing quite a lot of pressure, as more authoritarian controlled economies tend to do. And this is historically aligned with how their society has gone throughout the years. Things get unstable, they vie for power as their influence starts to wane, and then it accelerates until social collapse and “rebirth” as is pretty typical for all human society, though most places don’t really have the history to show it, so it’s not unusual.

    If they can make it out of this pressure, which is debatable, they’ll do well, currently they’re debt farming smaller countries in the hopes of gaining outside control of them through the debt. That could be a significant liability, they have quite a significant portion of debt wrapped up in simply building wealth, which is sketchy and can implode if not properly controlled, similar to the US, but perhaps without the sheer productive capability of the US.

    if they can’t make it out, they die and implode a horrible death rising from the ashes sometime later. Probably through a few rough leaderships along the way.

    A big problem with poverty status in china lowering is that wages are rising, so china has to ship to a higher quality production base, which they have the capacity for, but the economic incentive to produce in china compared to somewhere onshore, or near shore drops off a cliff at that point. Especially when you factor in stuff like shipping. Ethical product sourcing, and all kinds of other stuff that’s more socially acceptable now. People are generally willing to pay more for a more local service/good. Especially as economic status increases in the west as well. Though that might also be related to bad financials so.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      4 months ago

      Yeah the big question really is “were those gains sustainable?” which in turn links with “can they adapt to this new stage of their economic growth cycle?”.

      I don’t think things are going anywhere as well now there as they did before (it’s even unclear of the country is growing at all for the many) hence why I kept making an exception for “the last decade” in the comments I’ve been writing here about China.

      We can come up with a thousand reasons why they’ll have problems and a thousand ways in which they can succeed, but those “what ifs” are just a bit of informed fantasism so I’m refraining from such futurism as it’s a practice riddled with wishful thinking, selective picking of what suits one’s theories and building theories based on an information sparse basis that’s somewhat poluted (as in, there’s way more we don’t know than there is that we do know especially at a detail level, and especially here in the West what we do know tends to be mostly the things that certain political forces believe will make us think bad of China).

      It’s hard enough to try and form a fair and honest opinion of present day China and doing futurism based on this shitty informational basis would just be building castles in the air, which there is no point in doing.

      So I’m just acknowledging their past success, with the caveat that it’s been a while since that achievement and it’s unclear of late if they’re even still going forward and if they’re even still in practice left-of-center in what they’re doing.