Comment by FredPret
2 days ago
China only started doing great when they relaxed their ultra-centralized economic rules a little bit in the 1990s.
Read business books and news from the 80's - 90's, and they almost never mention China - it's all Germany, UK, Japan, USA. The stats tell the same story - China spent half a century going nowhere fast.
After liberalizing their economy, China spent the 90's quietly growing, and only started making real waves in the news around 2000.
All this to say that economic authoritarianism has never worked and there's no reason to suppose that the social kind is going to fare any better for anyone either.
Economic liberalism isn't really relevant to the question of social authoritarianism. While an enterprising individual in guangzhou can sell whatever he wants to the world without much state involvement, he can't really go around discussing Tibetan sovereignty for example.
My current theory is that one leads to the other but we’ll see how that works out for our friend in Guangzhou.
My point is centralization doesn’t work, so maybe social authoritarianism has deleterious cultural effects that will show up generations from now.