Comment by Hasz
6 hours ago
> Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles
Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.
I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.
We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
Plus, China's growth to this day is built on the back of foreign, primarily American, consumption. If they ever beat us too badly, they go down with us.
They'd need to find alternate consumer markets to alleviate this, and what are their options? Domestic is out, China hasn't managed to create a domestic consumer market with their current demographics, which are only getting worse as their baby bust deepens.
Europe? Similar demographic issues, simply not enough consumption to replace the US and greater economic protectionism.
The 3rd world? Maybe, but first you have to develop it, and even if you could manage that they have nationalist impulses of their own. You think India is going to willingly offshore their industry to China on the scale of the US?
The American system for all its many flaws is extremely dynamic. Trump and his policies are mostly bad adaptations, but they are attempts at adaptation, and the attempts aren't going to stop. The US has changed radically in the last 10 years; there's no reason it can't change just as radically in the next 10.
Why must the consumption be exported?
Why can't they build for themselves?
Because that would lead to mass unemployment and deindustrialization, as China lacks the wealth among the lower classes and the demographics to consume everything that it produces.
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The Chinese model is 100% not exportable. It is in essence a benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning. It’s exactly like having a good monarch and if you look at history, good monarchs, were not all that frequent.
Agree with this however I wonder how functional it would be in a war - benevolent Xi, like all those good monarchs of the past, still has to quash rivals and every so often purges his top brass to put loyalists in, which we can see how effective that is in Russia right now (no comment on current US administrative choices in this regard, but at least historically, our generals were career military)
The article explictly mentions trying to export it via belt and road, which is why I bring it up.
Can you qualify the benevolence maybe as a factor of the distance to Beijing?
The nobles and the courtiers were always favored more.
A benevolent dictatorship that actually seems to be functioning... at the moment. If you look at the last 30 years, it looks like it works. But if you look at the last 70...
This comment might hold water in 2006 or 2016 but it rings hollow in 2026. Who elected/congressionally-approved Jared Kushner to run US foreign policy?
I'm sorry to hear you feel it rings hollow. As you know, the secretary of state is Marco Rubio, who is appointed and confirmed by the senate (bipartisian-ish, I might add).
I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.
It is a fact that Kushner (plus Witkoff) has been playing the role of primary diplomat of the USA in critical matters of peace and war. In many cases, Rubio is not even present at these key foreign meetings.
The belief that autocracies will inevitably fall (or perhaps that "the arc of history bends towards justice") is hopelessly naive. Technology is a force multiplier with the power to entrench autocracy, forever.
Still you will not be able to give any existing example that lasted longer than 100 years. There are examples like Sayfawa dynasty which is counter-example to your claim about technology being multiplier
many autocracies in terms of social management systems lasted for many hundreds years.
Leaders of specific autocracies change, right (e.g. king got killed, but now we have new king), but governing structure persisted.
there is competition in technology field, and autocracies are not most competitive entities compared to say public corporations. Its still not clear who will win (common folks unlikely though)
They will all fail. The difference is how brutal the end will be.
Fall how? Please be specific. The people will rise up to take down their evil leaders? With what weapons will the people be armed? With what weapons will their evil leaders oppose them?
What if communism/socialism works with the assistance of technology?
Can you be more precise maybe?
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I find your framing somewhat historically inaccurate. China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people. Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture that originated in Europe and spread to the former European colonies (including to Venezuela and Argentina) and post-WWII to the allies. Although China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy those remained foreign concepts and did not permeate Chinese culture.
So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.
Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.
Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.
> China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people
For a good review: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/05/chinas-authoritarian-m...
Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.
> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture
cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.
> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy
Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)
> China, a fairly insular culture
Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".
"A republic, if you can keep it".
The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.
You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.
America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.
People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.
Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.
The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.
"Please consult your history?" You could replace "China" with "The USSR" in this post and be almost indistinguishable from arguments straight out of the 1950s.
You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.
As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.
Fair enough. We can point at each other or come up with examples all day long. Like I could say the United States didn't want to grant civil rights to African Americans as an example of some "high-minded cultural endeavors", but rather they wanted to avoid something like another civil war? Plus it made it sort of "awkward" shall we say for Americans to tell the Soviets and the world about human rights while bludgeoning black people in the streets for having the audacity to ask for basic civil rights.
I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:
The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?
They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".
You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".
Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".
It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?
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I am not Chinese, but the CCP loves to insinuate that the middle kingdom is 5000 years of uninterrupted rule. As we both know, that is hilariously untrue.
> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?
Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.
> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.
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