In America, the rich controls the government. In China, the government controls the rich. : memes

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Very Confucian

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago

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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[+] [email protected] -14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 4 days ago

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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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%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

[+] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

These are some extremely racist tropes you're parroting.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn't be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don't just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The only cognitive dissonance here is your own buddy. The reality is that no human society is perfect and people who keep comparing societies that exist in the real world to some Platonic ideal of society are not serious. China has problems like any other country, however it's crystal clear that life for the vast majority of people in China has been steadily improving since the revolution, and that the government of China works in the interest of the working majority. People such as yourself will continue regurgitating empty rhetoric, while others will continue to improve their conditions.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:

Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.
I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don't reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation "rule breaking") sentence from my comment:

Kindness and humaneness is not measured in GDP and hot-button topic popularity polls

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago (7 children)

My post was about two different social systems. The government is a product of the way society is structured. Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor is at odds with reality as the citations I provided above clearly show. Talking about core values, shared humanity, moral codes, and so on, is all nice and good, but it's ultimately meaningless unless you can show how that translates into something tangible.

Real kindness and humaneness is measured by how society is able to lift people out of poverty, provide them with education, housing, jobs, food, and healthcare. That's what the government in China achieved for 1.4 billion people. Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 days ago (6 children)

Fascists

Vs

Communists

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago

again

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

Wish we had the communists.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 days ago

"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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