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Comment by Mindless2112 | Hacker News Reader

That was already China's stated goal in their "Made in China 2025" initiative.

> The initiative encourages production of high value products and services, like aerospace and semiconductors, to help achieve independence from foreign suppliers.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025

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What other countries have long term plans and initiatives and effectively execute on them as China does?

The US has a long term plan to outsource all those things. We're about 2/3rds of the way there.

Chinas success in doing this can in large part be traced to the unwillingness of the U.S and the west to challenge and stop the pure theft of IP from basically all advanced industries and unfair trade practices. This has enabled an immense transfer of IP which gives China an amazing foundation to build upon. Now China has to do the final push to become self reliant, but it's much more feasible than it was say 10-20 years ago.

As far as i am aware no country except for different eras of communism(specifically Soviet) have operated somewhat effectively on production output plans on the scale of entire economy.

> Chinas success in doing this can in large part be traced to the unwillingness of the U.S and the west to challenge and stop the pure theft of IP from basically all advanced industries

I don't know if that had such a large impact. How much quality innovation is either secret or patented? How many patents are simply low quality, low effort trash[1]? Seems like most groundbreaking research is published relatively quickly.

[1] https://www.eff.org/issues/stupid-patent-month

Feasible in 10-25 years, IF there is no political turmoils, persistent calamities and foreign invasions. Recent 3 decades of positive progression doesn't really extrapolate well when it comes to China historically. Take a look at it's 5,000 years of civilization. Usually when into any succession dynasty, she frequently stagnate. If there are major calamities AND foreign invasions, the internal political struggles will initiate a dynastic change and balkanization. China frequently unite (now) and then breakup repetitively throughout the history.

China balkanized repeatedly during its 5000 year civilization because it was a premodern empire. Premodern empires don't have the same tools as modern states to enforce control down to the local level, so they run by co-opting local elites to do their work for them. However, co-opting local elites means that when the center weakens, these elites start raising militia and become independent states. In modern times, no local militia has the firepower to overcome a centralized military. Therefore, you don't get balkanization as long as the political leadership is united and willing to put down uprisings. Balkanization only happens when, in the case of the USSR, the central leadership loses faith and tells the army to stand aside and let it happen. The CCP has studied what happened in the USSR and they've been careful to make sure nobody in the government gets any funny ideas to let balkanization happen.

I would be cautious about using history prior to the industrial revolution in any predictive capacity because the industrial revolution was a major shift in technology, economics, and societal organization. Yes, humans are still motivated by the same wants and fears, but many of the mechanisms that drove premodern events no longer exist today.

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