Comment by panarchy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panarchy | Hacker News Reader

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Is this a moderated debate?

And that's not a false dichotomy? If I say which sport is more exhilarating to watch football or basketball? It's not a false dichotomy and it's weird if someone were to butt in with "What about baseball? Why didn't you mention baseball? What about soccer, what about tennis, this isn't a fair discussion!" I wasn't saying and didn't even imply those are the only options they just happen to be the ones we're talking about and it would be absurd to bring in the thousands of other sports to figure out which of the two is more exhilarating to spectate.

Tokyo has been considered a high tech utopia for a long time no one is surprised by its modernity (similar with Hong Kong) whereas China over the last decades has been portrayed as being little more than poor starving farmers and slave labor in worn out factories, and that juxtaposition is what makes it an interesting point of contrast.

Also I did see a barrage of articles praising Japan in the last few decades. There's literally multiple terms for westerners who are obsessed with Japan.

Also if it hasn't been unique to China at all (although I never said it was) why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?

>And that's not a false dichotomy? If I say which sport is more exhilarating to watch football or basketball?

Except the Chinese model is literally based on the Four Asian Tigers' models. Making this analogous to different sports isn't really a correct analogy, because it's more like if a sports team that was previously doing terribly decided to change and copy what other, more well known and succesful teams were doing and predictably started finding more success.

So okay, you praise the success of this specific team, but if this has already happened 5 times (if not 8 times if you count Germany or Spain or Vietnam) with the same strategy that is well documented and understood, then it's quite iffy that you don't mention that prior context or successes at all. Is it really that country or is it just the strategy, then why not mention the strategy if you are using as basis of comparison to improvement back home. It's a highly naive and misleading way of portraying things, unless if you are just focused on nationalist triumphalism or mypoics.

>why doesn't the country with a similar population and similar location (India) seem to have the same sort of reduction in poverty, economic prosperity, high tech buildings, and extensive modern transportation?

India is a highly diverse and multicultural state with dozens of different languages. Their political system is a compromise between those varying interests, not a single party that conquered everyone else. They pursued ISI, not Export-Driven Policies. South Asia is isolated from East Asia via mountain ranges, and does not have rich neighbours nor is a nexus of trade. India itself is largely the invention of the British Empire as recent unification. India is obviously not similar to China at all. The fact that you mention them as a basis for comparison is already quite strange.

When we talk about East Asian Tigers, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Korea, and then also Japan, these are all largely homogenous (if not fierecely integrationist as in Singapore) societies, they are literally the same region, one of them is literally an off-shoot of China, are the closest comparisons. And so if you have closest similarities become successful in the 70s following similar strategies, and you decide to copy such policies in the 90s, then it's utterly banal that you would follow a similar path as your most similar societies. So it's not unique at all, it's just the general trend, so why all the triumphalism now..

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