[scoopertrooper]

They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track.

A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.

[leodler]

Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

[Arainach]

"Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.

[chii]

> To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.

that is what it means to have property rights.

It prevents your interests from being usurped by someone else without first consulting you. Of course, like anything, it can be taken too far, but getting the balance right is important.

If it tips too far towards gov't authoritarianism, the people who are not connected tends to suffer silently (while the majority who gets told these "nation building" projects benefits them).

If it tips too far towards the private individual, then you get nimby-ism and such.

[tshaddox]

Presumably many of the people who currently attribute China’s ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism would also attribute America’s past ability to build infrastructure to authoritarianism. They would presumably also decry any future attempts to build ambitious infrastructure in America as authoritarianism.

[Jackpillar]

Yeah lets talk about them tax rates at the time of these accomplished generational projects (comment is in support of them)

[EGreg]

Actually, the US didn’t have a famine, it had the opposite. Automation like combines and tractors obviated the need for oxen and farmhands to plow and reap manually. The farmers competed in a race to the bottom (depleting the soil and causing the dust bowl). They fired most farmhands and still had a surplus. Food prices plummeted while giant dust storms became the norm.

The government had to step in and pay farmers NOT to plant, to extricate them from the downward spiral / race to the bottom that the “free market” had producted in the face of automation / massive supply shocks.

Meanwhile, the laid-off farm workers (20% of USA used to be employed in farm-related jobs) migrated to cities but it would be a decade before the manufacturing base was built up to employ them. They lived in Hoovervilles and shantytowns set up to house them. A third of the country’s banks failed and the money supply shrank. The fed sat that one out. You can read books by John Steinbeck and others describing life at that time (eg Grapes of Wrath).

So eventually, projects like the Interstate Highway System, and even weapons manufacturing and mobilization for WW2 caused mass employment. At a time when people needed jobs, this was a good thing for the economy and didn’t need communist propaganda to attract workers. Capitalism’s race to the bottom created the desperation the workers needed for undertake large state projects. And it is about to happen again.

Ironically, around the same time the US had a massive surplus, Russia and China were experiencing massive man-made famines under collectivization. Whether that horrific economic experiment ultimately led to more prosperity through 5-year plans is a contentious question (ideological leftists like Noam Chomsky have told me, quoting Amartya Sen, that supposedly China had less deaths from malnutrition afterwards than India, but that’s hardly a high bar considering their population density).

PS: I don’t mean to pick on communism alone for extreme ideological economic system enforcement leading to famines. The Irish Potato Famine could probably be squarely put into the ideological capitalism column (landlords and property rights trumping people’s lives), or how Britain (a capitalist country) exploited India and the famines in Bengal were also largely due to requisition of grain, similar to the Volga famine during the Russian civil war.

[omikun]

The interstate was for the military. The new deal was in part thanks to left wing communists/unionists voicing for the gov to do more for the people. Then came McCarthyism.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

I'm a yimby but to be fair the welfare system is so broken in the US that it's kind of a de facto ongoing famine

[throw0101c]

> The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda.

Other countries were able to successfully develop with less authoritarianism than China (Japan did it twice: Meiji Restoration and post-WW2), and were able to move to more democratic systems.

See the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell for various case studies on what works and what doesn't:

* https://profilebooks.com/work/how-asia-works/

* https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-asia-works-success-and-fail...

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16144575-how-asia-works

[jopsen]

> They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects...

Lack of free press makes it easy to look successful.

It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

[deadfoxygrandpa]

> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

yes. the soviet union was wildly successful for most of its history. it went from a backwater poor agrarian country to an industrial superpower near peer with the US in a single generation, while simultaneously going through multiple brutal wars and crushing nazi germany at immense cost. despite all that, the soviet union had the fastest and greatest economic and quality of life rise of any country in the 20th century.

of course it had problems that led to its collapse but you cannot be serious and say it was never successful at any point

[dangus]

China is plainly and obviously many times more successful than the Soviet Union ever was, even if you ignore all the propaganda and just rely on yourself as a primary source - I.e., “hop on a plane and see for yourself.”

[overfeed]

> It was the same thing with the Soviet union, was it ever really successful at any point?

America had to go to all the way to the moon to win a "first" against the Soviet Union in space.

[forgotoldacc]

You can go to China and see it for yourself. The USSR made itself inaccessible to foreigners for the most part, but you can hop on a train and visit nearly any place in China freely. It's pretty easy with their extensive train system.

I see a lot of cope with "c-China is lying! It's not really that good!" But lots of tourists such as myself have been all over the country, and tbh, I think the "propaganda" undersells it a bit. I thought there was no way it could be as nice as the travel videos I saw, but it was even better.

[ActorNightly]

You don't need press for everyone to see that China is straight killing it in almost every sector. Manufacturing, compute, you name it. Sure, they aren't without problems.

And as for free press, look at where freedom of press took United States. You have companies like Fox news that "aren't actually news, just entertainment", who blatantly lie about election fraud. You have podcasters like Joe Rogan who are at the same time "just bullshitting", while also pushing ideological narratives. And most republicans still believe election was stolen in 2024.

And overall, the party that was all about free speech, free trade, and small federal government power is pretty much doing the exact opposite in every single aspect, and people voted for them.

Im glad China has reigns on all of that. It allows them to pass laws like this https://www.cnbctv18.com/world/chinas-new-influencer-law-wan...

And yes, from a pure statistical standpoint, having centralized power isn't optimal since you don't want someone crazy having lots of centralized power, but at the same time, you also don't want what US has, where on the average 7/10 people simply just don't give a fuck about US being destroyed financially and socially.