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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

It is actually a very simple formula, one which has already seen a number of iterations - Japan, ROK, ROC all followed the same path: Strategic endurance provided by single party governance over several decades, investment in education, central planning on core industries, protectionism to nurture, before expanding globally to dominate. PRC is really just a scaled up version of the 'East Asia Tiger', albeit one with monstrously sized domestic market.

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Single party effectively shuts out poor people from demanding a welfare state. The west kind of accomplishes the same goal by just keeping poor people outside its borders and outsourcing the single party governance of poor people to China and rest of wold. The filibuster effectively creates a single party in America though. you just need a little bit of top down governance, a la Trump, or Xi Jin ping. It’s when you have opaque , behind the curtains governance, behind Biden / Kamala that you get a dis coordinated, hard to rationalize mess.

That will never work for an economy the size of China. If China really starts producing it will easily satisfy the full demand of the entire world. So this can't happen.

But, China is a centrally planned economy. Every centrally planned economy died (or went into a state so bad people starve, like North Korea) because it gives higher ups an incredible incentive to lie about everything. This is made easy by the fact that centrally planned economies suppress dissent.

> If China really starts producing it will easily satisfy the full demand of the entire world. So this can't happen.

(flips over random stuffs nearby) ... yep it can't happen. It never happened.

China is not a centrally planned economy.

There are five year plans. The 14th Five Year Plan is just finishing up, and the 15th Five Year Plan is in final discussions, with formal approval in October. Comments from outside China indicate that about 80% of the goals of the 14th plan were achieved. High speed rail, energy, electric cars, mechanization of agriculture, and consumer goods worked out very well. There was overbuilding and a crash in housing and commercial construction. Areas of technical trouble are jetliners and high end semiconductors. That's about what was expected. The five year plans have been ambitious but realistic in recent decades. Up until the 1990s, they were totally unrealistic. Famines resulted.

These plans mostly drive capital allocation. It's not like the USSR's GOSPLAN, which actually set production quotas for factories. That worked badly, especially with a one-year update cycle.

Some economic planning is not central planning. Otherwise the US in the 30s and post-war France were both centrally-planned economies.

For a while, both were. Certainly once the US entered the war it was a centrally-planned economy.

I don’t think you actually disagree with the person you replied to. The point of saying China isn’t a centrally planned economy wasn’t to say there is no central planning at all, but that it’s invalid to conclude that the level of planning China does do condemns it to failure.

correct - it is a centrally directed economy, where the implementation is successively and 'pyramidically localised'

As long as 4b in developing world slowly develops the pie will continue to grow and PRC going to be in position to capture most of it, even/especially if it steps on toes of western incumbants.

Also we're in 12g surveillance state era, central gov can soon monitor every production line and get granular metrics via variety of oblique indicators, we're a few years away from heaven is high and the emperor is far away, to camera and microphone is in your face and emperor is omnipresent because every thing a bureacrat says will be cross checked by sensors and llm. The thing about centralized power is it actually cares about truth (which is orthogonal to suppressing it) because ultimately their heads on the line.

VS US polity where polticians lie and no one really gives a shit, this is made easy by the fact that democracy basically means government by the people of the people for the people. But the people are retarded and fundmentally they don't care enough that higher ups have incredible incentive to lie about everything.

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