A human life is inconsequential in an authoritarian regime. The only thing that counts is that the dictator stays in power, trumping all other concerns.
This holds in both China and Russia.
This holds in both China and Russia.
This has nothing to do with the reality of the Russian military on the ground.
Surely, the Iraq invasion was over so fast exactly because so much of the Iraq military did not want to die to defend Saddam Husein.
The will to fight is so asymmetrical in Ukraine. Surely, the Russian military is not oblivious to what the world thinks of this. So one side is willing to die to defend their country and the other side probably just wants to get back home alive and get this over. The Russians also can't just level every city to the ground and call that victory. They have to break the will of the people without destroying everything.
It is a recipe to lose the war even if you win some battles. The Russian path to victory is extremely small and maybe even impossible in this situation.
Watch the inner circle security council meeting in Russia for some idea of how afraid everybody is of him.
That matters more IMO than what the military brass thinks.
In the US, the needs of the individual outweigh the needs of the many. In China, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. If an individual or a group is disrupting the collective good, they need to be managed.
China has done amazingly well for improving the general welfare. It was a very poor country until just a few decades ago. Extreme poverty is on-track to being eliminated, if it hasn't been already (depending on where you place the threshold). Thing like access to housing, food, and medicine are improving. Schools are excellent.
Once you have those basic needs met by everyone, China seems to be moving onto handling issues like stress; the human load of the progress, in terms of work weeks, was tremendous, and China is trying to curtail that, perhaps not to Western standards, but to something manageable.
China has increasingly started cracking down on corruption too.
It has problems, and I'm not trying to downplay those, but it's not Russia, where an oligarchy is draining and bankrupting the general population for their own betterment.
If you are Russian and reading this, fight to end authoritarism in your country.