In America, the rich controls the government. In China, the government controls the rich.
In America, the rich controls the government. In China, the government controls the rich.
123 comments
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Not gonna lie, china felt like the enemy a few months ago. Now they feel like the sane alternative to being allies with the us. Not saying they are the good guy, but certainly better than the us is.
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China = USSR USA = N@Z Germany
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Starting to look this way
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Fascists
Vs
Communists
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again
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Wish we had the communists.
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I dont think China counts as Communist, kinda like how the USSR was state socialist. Although personally I would call China mixed economy state socialism.
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I don't think China really counts as Fascist.
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FYI
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One could check with any state how many properties of fascism they align with
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I think the key difference is that Xi has a very strong vision for China and is actually practicing what he preaches; enriching the nation rather than enriching himself. Like a strict father, head of the family.
While the debacle that is the US government is all about enriching themselves and their associates rather than the nation. Like goblins in a mine.
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Like a strict father
Is politics just the spectrum of daddy issues an individual might have?
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That's less a consequence of specific individuals in power and more the systems at play that lead to differences between those in power. "Great Man Theory" largely takes away from actual Materialist analysis.
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Very Confucian
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Trump is a Russian agent
BlueMAGA liberals try not to blame all of America's problems on foreigners challenge (impossible)
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Just the fact that financial crimes over a certain amount are punishable by death in China (and people have actually been executed for them) says a lot. It's a law that literally applies only to the rich because a normal person would never even get to glimpse the amount of money required for execution to be on the table.
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George Carlin skit about executing corrupt bankers on live TV
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He was right, too. A few bankers and politicians get the wall and, what do you know, suddenly being very rich is good enough for a bunch of these corrupt fucks.
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The fact that rich people are routinely executed in China is one of the clearest indications that dictatorship of the proletariat has been achieved. And this is precisely why China terrifies the west so much.
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Nobody deserves the death penalty. It's just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.
That said, I'm all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.
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Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of. I don't care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they're not worth the manpower required to get them there.
Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won't do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.
If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you'd see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn't be worth an arm and a leg.
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tbh you can't exile people anymore and getting staggering rich requires sustained campaigns of oppressive violence and exploitation.
It's self defence, you're talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.
These aren't like people with FAS trying to do anger management courses because their brains got damaged. They're unrepentant, remorseless, and cruel. They had the resources to do literally anything to demonstrate contrition and chose not to every single day.
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It's really about what's more important to you and where you set your priorities. Or maybe it's actually about being short-sighted or far-sighted.
The US seems to believe that having "rich" people and a poor-rich divide will somehow foster or speed up technological development. I would say that is an almost religious belief. I don't really agree with it too much personally, and also i don't like how they approach their population as "wave slaves" who are threatened with starvation and homelessness if they don't work; but also i'm not gonna interfere with US internal affairs.
I really do think that all the "corporation" things are short-sighted, and it is wise to take the "long-run" perspective and ask what will be in a 1000 years, in a billion years.
I do think that being a bully like the US is is short-sighted, an in fact disadvantageous in the long run, because it makes people distrust them, and that's a thing that puts you in a disadvantageous position in general.
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I mean, it's a really competitively efficient system. We outpaced the rest of the world on a lot of things for a while there. We even have the 1% self-exploiting with highly specialized skills, 3X as likely to work more than 50hrs a week. All gas, no brakes.
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The competition = efficient / spurs invention is mostly a myth.
The peak period of US inventions, was from ~ 1930-1980, when it was forced (by the USSR's rapid growth) to adopt a similar public-planning model, and allocate a ton of resources to public projects. This article gets into it.
There's also the book, The people's republic of wal-mart, which isn't the best, but it does contain one good argument: companies like Wal-mart and Amazon are many times the size of the GDP of even many countries, and they don't compete internally, and use full-scale planning, with information provided at every level. It shows a few cases where companies tried to emulate the "compete = win" by splitting their company into many competing divisions, and of course the companies quickly imploded because of the massive waste of resources.
Another good book on this is CJ Chivers - The Gun. It compares the history around the development of the AK-47 (which was collectively designed and had input from many state-level entities), vs the M16's development, and how these two different development models affected their success.
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"can i run the government?"
yes, just place your head through this hole and we'll pull the big lever that makes you god-king
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the dictatorship of capital vs the dictatorship of the proletariat
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gets reeducated, reappears as a productive member of society
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I'm not living in USA but I think people got exactly what they voted for, didn't they?
Now the question of it being an educated vote and people being equipped to navigate modern media with modern disinformation techniques is another subject.
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Not really. The people get only two choices of candidates who are selected by campaign popularity. Those candidates have to raise the money for it by themselves, which means making truthful private campaign promises to their donors while making false promises to the public.
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I mean, if you count the (registered) non-voters, which I think is more than fair considering the fact that Harris and Trump only represent a fraction of the (electorally viable) politics expressed in the US, Trump only scrapes about 46%.
The American political system has been designed to disenfranchise as many people as possible. Some ways are overt, like disenfranchising and deregistering black, ethnic, and imprisoned citizens (the latter don't even count towards that 54%!). How about the ways democrats and republicans explicitly outlawed "third" parties such as PSL, Greens, Libertarians on some state ballots?
Less overt ways are how most of the American electoral process is carried out during the working week, with zero affordance to workers to vote unless by post (inherently less secure) or by the altruism of their bosses. Disabled and elderly people are simply ignored if they wish to vote in person.
Then the final way Americans are disenfranchised is the simple act of alienation of the political class from the working class. No matter who won in November, most of these crises would be playing out in some form.
Elon may accelerate some of the rot, but oligarchs have had direct control of the American political system for its whole existence. American bombs would still be raining across the middle east, the Ukrainian war would be unjustly spilling blood in the name of empire, abortion would still be illegal across most of the US, and the govt would do nothing to challenge spirally costs of living for workers.
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I mean, the electorate is definitely unqualified to pick their own leaders, but that's what decades of gutting education funding with absolutely no public pushback gets you. An unqualified electorate elects unqualified representatives.
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Power and wealth control governments ... every government.
Once humanity figures out how to provide more equitable power and wealth to every person everywhere, then we might be able to evolve beyond jungle rules.
In the meantime, it doesn't matter what you want to call it ... communism, socialism, capitalism, liberalism, whatever ... as long as we allow unlimited wealth and power to flow to small groups of people, any system will always end up with the same results.
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Inequality absolutely needs to be eliminated to have a truly equitable society. That said though, it's pretty clear that China does have a dictatorship of the proletariat in place. If it didn't then same things we see happening in capitalist societies would be happening there as well.
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I don't support the CCP, but I do think about these things. How do you create an open system like a democracy that leverages some of the benefits of capitalism, while also insuring economic inequality is minimized and every citizens basic needs are met, without gradually seeing the rich gain influence in that system over time, corroding the protections that make it work? I think as long as the system is open, the rich will use their power to gradually gain advantage and then destroy the system itself. I think the only real shot at it would be for wealth to be seriously capped. Like, no one person can have more than 100% more wealth than the bottom 1%. Anything above that should be taxed away. Also, corporations are not people and corporations should not have shareholders that are not workers.
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I think I would extend it thus:
In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).
...and with a bonus few:
In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the "just remember we have nukes" flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing "I meant to do that", and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn't screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.
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Bonus evidence of Chinese government screwing everyone in the country.
Here's the report explaining how a typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes
Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j
People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&%3Blocations=CN&%3Bstart=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
If we take just one country, China, out of the global poverty equation, then even under the $1.90 poverty standard we find that the extreme poverty headcount is the exact same as it was in 1981.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/07/5-myths-about-global-poverty
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15.
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
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Completely vibes-centric analysis. If the Chinese government were screwing the population, how come every western polling org agrees that the government has at the very, very least 86% approval rates, far above any EU nation, let alone the US?
I don't even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
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The number drops a bit when the polls are done in secrecy. Still far higher than any western government, mind.
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Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as "analysis" sits that low.
I'm not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.
I don't even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.
Did you notice I used the word "extend"? ...and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human "bot" with the naive agenda of waving one team's flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the "winning side" of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as "leadership" pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no "winning side" for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I'd just say they (who am I kidding, "he") needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.
I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people's lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->"fake nice" spectrum, and getting on the "actual kindness" and "mutual respect" bandwagon. But lately I'll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.
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Without an educated, informed population and effective, constantly maintained checks and balances on those in power, the end results of either communism or capitalism are going to be exactly the same.
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you're right actually, guess who said this
What is the working-class movement without socialism?—A ship without a compass which will reach the other shore in any case, but would reach it much sooner and with less danger if it had a compass.
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There is no end but the present, which is the summit of time itself
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123 comments