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Comment by Gareth321 | Hacker News Reader

>Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power.

Historians would be making the classic correlation|causation fallacy. Your French example is apt because China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy. Historians might say that China has learned from history and ensured that their powerful class cannot be usurped.

I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them. Chinese values are miles apart from French values, and their citizens are just much more comfortable with submitting to authoritarian rule. I base this on living in the country, as well as cultural research such as this: https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison/china/

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> China has created a bourgeoisie class which is also the effective monarchy

I don’t think you understand the functional meanings of these terms.

People like the modern Russian “oligarchs” or their Chinese equivalents are, in function, nobility, whether they are granted any formal titles or not. You’re a noble in function if 1. you helped the current regime gain power; 2. you can use your ongoing necessity to the regime’s hold on power to coerce the current regime into granting you more semi-sovereign autonomous power; 3. this semi-sovereign autonomous power (the classical example being private armies; the modern example being control of state industries) could be used to topple the regime if enough of it were concentrated.

To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state. Rather, the borgeoisie have such power as a block — they could, together, strangle the economy — but they are by definition not monopolists, and so none of them has any chance of starting or winning a coup on their own.

To put it another way: if Facebook was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would still be a member of the borgeoisie of America. However, if Boeing was a private company with a single 100% owner, that owner would be a functional noble — an “oligarch” — title or no.

This was a very interesting clarification, but I don't get the last part. Why would Boeing be nobility?

presumably because boeing has influence over government policy.

The American military needs Boeing (and Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.) to supply parts for their jet fighters, missiles, etc.; enough so that if these companies were owned by selfish individuals rather than profit-driven corporations; and those selfish individuals pressed the issue of "maybe not making any more missiles for the military" at just the right time, then they'd not only not be charged with treason, but instead would get whatever they wanted, up-to-and-including having laws rewritten to serve them.

As well, such a hypothetical individual owner of Boeing, together with a few other such individual owners for other military industries, could independently declare a "vote of no confidence" in their country, and "hand over" power to some foreign nation invading them, simply by cutting off war-time logistical supply at just the right time.

These types of power, are exactly the sorts of power that made classical aristocrats, aristocrats, rather than just courtiers.

"To be in the borgeoisie, on the other hand, is to be a capitalist — even a magnate — but to not have any individual semi-sovereign autonomous power over the state"

Just need to become a donor and provide campaign contributions. You get semi-sovereign autonomous power pretty soon.

> I think it much more convincing that social values determine the direction in which a country allows government to rule them.

There's some truth to this, but you can do event studies to show that economic conditions play a very large causal role too. e.g. the massive quantitative spike in Hitler's popularity 1 year into the depression (this is the main data point I want to bring up, because it's quantifiable by polling numbers), or the 1917 Russian Revolution which only was successful because of the dire conditions brought about due to WW1, or the CCP only getting into power because of Japanese occupation and degradation of the KMT.

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