> China is more stable than the Soviet Union was in the 1960s
Xi literally just purged “the country’s top military leader, Gen. Zhang Youxia, and an associate, Gen. Liu Zhenli” [1].
This is the mark of a dictator. Not the Soviet Union at its finest.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/us/politics/china-xi-mili...
Did the USSR ever manufacture 80% of the stuff in your house?
> Did the USSR ever manufacture 80% of the stuff in your house?
China makes about a third of the world’s stuff [1]. Soviet Union probably peaked around a fifth, though it might have been as high as a fourth.
China is undoubtedly stronger today, absolutely and relative to the U.S., than the Soviets ever were. But history is littered with self-obsessed autocrats ruining a good thing.
Part of what makes the world today frustrating is both America and China are squandering their advantages in remarkably-similar ways, with each regime’s defenders speaking almost identically.
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/china-worlds-sole-manufacturi...
wait so is
> history is littered with self-obsessed autocrats ruining a good thing.
referring to China or the US?
> Part of what makes the world today frustrating is both America and China are squandering their advantages in remarkably-similar ways, with each regime’s defenders speaking almost identically.
Personalist rule be personalist. Also glad to see you also appear to recognize our "Wolf Warrior" moment.
> China makes about a third of the world’s stuff
That isn't what the commenter asked. What percentage of stuff in your house is made in China? I would be extremely surprised if it's not more than 33%.
If they had manufactured 80% of the stuff in my house, wouldn't Reagan have concluded that they had won the war before it started? A country that manufactures 80% of the things you need to live might just decide to not sell them to you if you misbehave.
US Gov/cabinet in that period were basically so racist they thought they could outsource all the manufacturing to asia and nobody would ever figure out how to develop advanced technology like cars, desktop computers, telephones, jet engines etc, and would remain dependent on US controlled fossil fuels forever anyway. in a sense they thought India or LatAm in 2025 is where most of Asia would peak, and US giants would retain control.
both sides of the aisle, the old school Wellesley college democrats were just the same. they didn't even think China would be able to make washing machines! you must remember that in the early 1980s the majority of whitegoods (washing machine, toaster, fridge, etc) were made in the USA and the idea of moving it to China was about as crazy as space data centres or self driving cars
Yes, but the real question is if Reagan still would have pushed as hard for financialization and deindustrialization if he understood that he was ultimately selling American industry to communists.
I think he would have. I think he hated American labor more than he hated foreign communists. If his head were still around in a Futurama Jar to comment on the matter, I think he would be blaming American workers for the consequences of his own policies.
Reagan didnt push for deindustrialization and "the world is flat" world view didn't take precedence until after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 90s.
At the time, everyone was still optimistic that China would eventually become more open and even democratic, that Russia would not regress, etc.
It was still common for electronics and microprocessors to be made in USA well into the 90s. Reagan had nothing to do with the expansion of WTO and trade deficits with China that ballooned under HW, Clinton, Bush Jr and Obama.
You can't have financialization without deindustrialization and he didn't push in that direction, he shoved. This macroeconomic story is 500 years old. He knew what he was doing.
you give the 'elites' far too much credit. reagan was a tv cowboy that got elected because he was really popular, and cut taxes. Bush 1 was a cowboy and oil man from texas, and clinton was a cowboy from arkansas who made money trading cattle futures and doing land deals in the ozarks. Bush 2 grew up in rural texas and had a GPA of 2.35.
these people were really good at fundraising and getting elected, nobody after kissinger was competent in these ideas (kissingers morality is debatable, but he was very competent)
> I think he hated American labor more than he hated foreign communists
Ironic, considering his own history as a union leader.
Yeah but they don't design the stuff
glad to see you people think this way
What indication do you have that China doesn't design their own stuff?
They have their own Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, consumer electronics, car companies, aircraft carriers, chip companies, manufacturing, etc.
I agree there is a lot of chaos over there, and numerous challenges. But I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union. It's going to be a long-term space race.
> I don't see China collapsing anytime soon, nothing like the Soviet Union
I don’t either. But the Soviet Union’s space programme lost its steam in the 1970s. (Venus was its last ambitious achievement.)
If China gets bogged down in Taiwan because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him, that’s going to cost them the space race. (Same as if America decides to replicate the Sino-Soviet split with Europe over Greenland. We can’t afford a competitive space programme at that point.)
If China gets bogged down in Taiwan
The odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil. They could face an insurgency, but there isn't a whole lot of rural Taiwan for insurgents to vanish into and occupying cities is a lot easier absent language and cultural barriers. The could be isolated politically and economically, but realistically China's territorial claim on Taiwan is on far firmer legal and historical ground than many other territorial disputes (eg their control over Tibet).
I don't see the US involving itself directly. What are they going to do, counter-blockade? Start a naval shooting war with a full-on nuclear power on the other side of the world? I don't see Japan backing that either, despite their natural anxiety over the vulnerability of the Ryukyu islands. Support for US bases in Okinawa is ambivalent at best, and while Japan is surely not thrilled about Chinese regional hegemony it's also a reality they've dealt with for thousands of years.
> odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil
The odds of them winding up in a Russia-Ukraine are not nil. (Combined-arms war is hard even without ideological purges.)
America isn’t only outside power investing not only in helping Taiwan fight, but also making any victory pyrrhic. And following that, we’ll see Indian and Japanese containment go into overdrive. (To say nothing of the Philippines or Vietnam.)
I think Xi probably takes Taiwan. But that trades off China’s century of prosperity on economic and diplomatic fronts. That’s the trap the West has been laying, and Xi’s ego and internal constraints almost force him into it.
(Again, if China had showed its pre-Xi patience in the 2010s, we might have seen Taiwan voting to unify right now. Instead he rushed things for personal glory and enrichment.)
I really don't agree on the Russia-Ukraine comparison; I just can't see where the Taiwanese strategic depth is supposed to come from. In an earlier era it would have been feasible to conduct an insurgency from mountainous redoubts and infiltration around ports, but I really can't see that happening with a 21st century urbanized population, in the same way that Russia's strategic problem in Ukraine is the ability to maintain/grow its front, rather than difficulty sustaining its gains in the rear. However I've never been there so I'm sure I'm overlooking ground factors that might make a big difference.
I agree with you about Xi's impatience but I think you're overestimating the political and economic fallout in the same way that people overestimated the ramifications of China retaking and consolidating its control of Hong Kong. The latter is definitely not politically free in the way it used to be but nor has it fallen into decline or dystopia.
> The odds of them losing militarily are virtually nil.
Exactly. Everyone keeps acting like it's 50 years ago. China has the world's largest navy and the largest navy almost always wins. They also have a home court advantage. Anyone trying to militarily protect Taiwan would either get the pants beat off of them or suffer starting a world war.
> If China gets bogged down in Taiwan...
Look at the geography. Taiwan is a long, narrow island. All the important parts are in a narrow plain on the west side, facing China. There's only about 20km of depth from the sea.
The war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that.
> There's only about 20km of depth from the sea
Don’t underestimate the stopping power of water. Taiwan will be China’s first combined-arms assault with a critical amphibious component.
> war in Ukraine is like fighting over Iowa, one farm at a time. Taiwan is not like that
Wide-open plains are traditionally easier for large armies to conquer than mountains.
Although I agree the space program lost steam, I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements.
> I'd still count the Mir space station (1985) and Buran space shuttle (1988) to both be ambitious achievements
Mir yes. Buran was an ambitious project but not achievement.
I would rate this as an achievement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)#Orbital_fli...
Fair enough. If the Saturn V is an achievement so was Buran.
> because Xi fired every military expert who might disagree with him
Are they being fired for disagreeing with him, or for misconduct.
I mean its hard to tell the difference from a western country, but "Zhang was put under investigation for allegedly forming political cliques, promoting Li Shangfu as defense minister in exchange for large bribes, and leaking core technical data on China's nuclear weapons to the United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhang_Youxia
Seems fairly reasonable. Like the US Military would act in the exact same way, if those circumstances are correct.
There's a question as to whether China's surplus capability is enough to overflow the deprivation that a space program might suffer in a chaos Taiwan scenario.
Their resources and capabilities are obviously substantial and sustained (not going anywhere). The USSR had only a few patches of sustained serious economic output, the rest of the time was rolling from one disaster to another, one deprivation after another.
It seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan, and go to the Moon during the Vietnam War (plus cultural chaos).
That said, China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining. China will ultimately regret not moving on the island sooner when they see how easy it's going to be to take it and how weak the US response will be (the US can't sustain a stand-off with China in that region for more than a few weeks before folding, unless it's willing to go to full war mode economically (which it's not)).
> seems entirely plausible that China getting bogged down in Taiwan wouldn't be enough to deprive them of a run to the Moon. The US was able to sustain NASA during Iraq-Afghanistan
We probably lost basing on the Moon because Bush went into Iraq.
China getting bogged down in Taiwan means more political repression, more restiveness in Xinjiang and—if New Delhi isn’t totally stupid—needing to prop up Pakistan and its strategic fronts in the Himalayas. It also almost certainly means demand destruction in Europe, the EU and ASEAN.
> China isn't going to get bogged down in Taiwan. It's going to unfortunately be easier than most are imagining
The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.
China invading Taiwan demilitarized Japan and India. It fundamentally changes its doorstep in ways that incur costs. To the Soviets, Afghanistan. To America, Iraq and possibly Greenland. To China, Taiwan.
(And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.)
> And let’s be clear: this is a vanity project for Xi. Taiwan would have voted, eventually, to peacefully join China if pre-Xi trends continued. But he needed it on his watch. Hence the stupidity.
From what I've been hearing from my buddies still in the NatSec space what matters at this point is the 2028 Taiwanese Election and maybe the 2028 Philippines Election. If neither see a definitive victory for either side in 2028, it gives a face saving off-ramp for the Xi admin to argue they brought the "Taiwan Problem" back on track to the pre-2014 status quo. Of course they could be closeted KMT/TPP supporters but most delivery roadmap's I've been hearing align with a 2028 date.
>The same people saying this today had hot takes on Kyiv falling in ‘21.
Please note that Kiev not falling after a week in '22 (assuming you misspelled) was pure luck. Russians had extreme advantage in man and firepower. They made a big mistake by using their army against their doctrine - not bombing/shelling targets before attacking (what Russian army was designed for).
But them losing the war (at least the first week) is due to a few lucky dice rolls for us. Us both Europe, but also for me as a Polish expat, knowing my brothers and friends are not dying right now fighting Russian army with all the Ukrainians conscripted into it.
These lucky dice rolls that I can come up from memory: 1. Shooting down one of two military passenger planes with russian Seals that were to take Kiev's Hostomel airport and open an air bridge. The group from the plane that survived did take the airfields, but they couldn't decide on their own to move and take the airports buildings - no distributed command in Russia at that point. Thanks to that, local territorial defence managed to easily kill these elite forces. 2. Fast and generous support from England in form of Javelins that limited Russian heavy equipment advantage. Sorry if I don't credit the countries involved correctly. 3. Fast and generous aid with post soviet equipment from old Warsaw pact countries. These tanks could be used right away as they required no re-training. 4. General incompetence and duty negligence that was systemic in Soviets and is still systemic in Russia. To that we owe cars running out of fuel, or having their tires pop, because, against orders to regularly move them, they all sat with sun damaging one side of the tire so many years, while the responsible for maintenance were drinking vodka and eating pierogi with kielbasa.
> pure luck
this is actually skill, bravery, and fortitude
Putin ignored his army and tasked the FSB with the project. He fundamentally got fucked by putting loyalty ahead of merit. It’s what Hegseth is doing in America and now Xi, again, in China.
There's a better article about it in the WSJ of all places https://archive.is/48m3F
Missing from both is that Zhang Youxia was the last senior PLA leader to have seen frontline action in the Sino-Vietnamese war.
Vietnam frontline experience is irrelevant in 2026, when its more drone dominated.
Im sure China has plenty of observers/volunteers embedded at the Russian side in the SMO making plenty of notes, reports, and get modern warfare experience..
All frontline experience is valuable. It reminds the leader that in war, real people, people on your own side, people that you know, people that you will miss, will die.
and in this case the particulars match the archetype: my understanding is that Zhang was the "dove" while Xi is the "hawk." The hawk just ate the dove. We're going to war.
Xi appointed himself president for life in 2018, almost six years ago. China wasnt exactly a bastion of liberal democracy before then either. Sacking a top general is basically par for the course.
> Sacking a top general is basically par for the course
Yes and no. Military readiness and potency doesn’t require liberal democracy. It does require skill and command, and sacking military leaders for political reasons is how powers from Athens to the Soviets screwed themselves.
Yeah but the question of stability was relative to the Soviets. The US has a good amount of instability as well, and has been hemorrhaging scientists lately.
So if the argument is that sacking a top general implies that China is too unstable to prevail in a future space race I don’t buy it.
Except generals get sacked all the time in actual wartime conditions, it's not even clear why this particular instance is notable.
China isn't in wartime, it is in a build up phase and there's perfectly good reasons to dismiss underperforming generals.
Which isn't to say that's what happened here, but China sacking a general as a data point doesn't mean anything without appropriate context.
Which means China is indeed very stable at least when Xi is alive.
Our dear leader just purged the Pentagon and other hallowed agencies, what does that make us?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/latest-purge-hegseth-remove...
Very close to a dictatorship. It will be one if the midterms are not allowed to proceed fairly.
> what does that make us?
More vulnerable. More brittle. Not stable.
Purge seems like a strong word from what I just read. There definitely seems to be actual and power plays going on on his side. It's not exactly because he was out there doing the best for people.
But how is this less stable than even the United States now? Trump has literally purged nearly every single person leading federal agencies and institutions, including law enforcement. He also effectively stacked the Supreme Court with the help of Mitch McConnell, cheating the system to do his bidding.
This is the same trite bullshit we’ve been hearing for decades. Look at where China is today.
Keep in mind that China is not where it is today because of Xi. He could take it further for sure but so can he press the wrong buttons. It remains to be seen how China fares in the next few decades.
He's doing a better job than Zhao Ziyang, that's for sure.
I'm not convinced that it could be attributable to Xi. China has been on this trajectory before he became the leader.
Yep, China was on a massive and insane growth trajectory prior to Xi. Xi's policies and constant banging of war drums at Taiwan's door has cost China massively in terms of foreign investment and even knowledge transfer opportunities (by the ever-gullible West).
> the same trite bullshit we’ve been hearing for decades
Nope. It isn’t. Xi has ruled China like a dictator that breaks the tradition of intraparty competition the CCP has had since Mao.
When Xi ended his Wolf Warrior nonsense it seemed to signal a reset. Now we have this nonsense.
> Look at where China is today
Look at where America is today. Both are richer than they’ve ever been. More militarily potent than ever. Both are growing their economies, militaries and territorial ambitions. Both have serious issues, including the gerontocratic oligarchic consolidation of power at the expense of national interests.
> Look at where America is today. Both are richer than they’ve ever been. More militarily potent than ever.
just don't look at the first derivative vs china
The argument is the reflexive defensiveness works-and is raised—in both cases. Premature declarations of victory have never been a historic sign of strength.
Not that I disagree, but I’m curious how you define national interests.
> curious how you define national interests
My metric would be what the country’s population today and weighted populations of the future, if they could weigh in, would choose.
It’s possible to frame ex post facto and impossible to pin down in the present. And it’s inherently subjective and culturally relative. But it’s useful to reason with, including for finding patterns in history.
One pattern is the cost of corruption. If a leader is making billions off their power, they’re putting person about polity. That’s currently true in America [1] and China [2][3]. The difference is America has a chance to fix that in ‘28. China used to rotate leaders. But Xi fucked that up. (Note the language similarity between the above comment and how MAGA defends itself. “Trite bullshit.” Beijing has a hidden MACA problem, it’s just had a tougher time dealing with it because Xi reveres Mao.)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/world/asia/chinas-preside...
[3] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/20/us-intel-sa...
Can’t weighted population of the future change based on what is chosen? For example by immigration and deportations?
Also is MACA actually MCGA? Or something else? Aren’t there similar trends also in Europe and India?
The question is rather: Where could China have been today if it started opening up decades earlier?
> Where could China have been today if it started opening up decades earlier?
Or without Mao being a trash fire of a leader. (Flip side: where would they be without Deng or Zemin, or others in the CCP who put nation above personal interest? The folks Xi is killing because they threaten his personal interests.)
Maybe the combination of capitalism + democracy is so successful because it aligns the incentives of leaders and the masses best (to the extent possible).
My takeaway from China is democracy is less important than political competition. Between Mao and Xi, the CCP had the latter without the former. Today, America has the former and is struggling to keep the latter.
Yes agreed. But competition for what?
I'd say for the good of the majority of the people.
In other systems only those on top profit (maybe 10-20% max) even if they claim otherwise.
Thus democracy, through competition, aligns the leader's incentive with their people best.
I think not. European colonialism was hardly a democratic project, and the extreme success of the US is attributable less to ideology and more to being an entire continent with a relatively tiny indigenous population that had not exploited any of its natural resources. Ideological/paradigmatic competition is not some neat controlled experiment where you can normalize existing conditions to unity and then draw conclusions from measuring subsequent growth; initial resource distributions make a massive difference and geography, while not the only factor, is highly determinative.
China had fallen behind long before Mao, after being among the most powerful and advanced nations for most of recorded history. It appears to now be stepping back into that familiar role.
Neither China or the West handled the transition to industrial civilization well. A key difference is that most Chinese died due to incompetence on the part of their leaders, but in the west they mostly murdered one another on purpose.
Once again a Nazi is in charge of the western world's most advanced rocket program.
It's amazing. The American president is quite literally creating a parallel military force to jail and kill people on the streets, they're arresting opposing journalists, politicians, pressuring tv channels and news organizations to fire people, invading countries without congressional approval, threatening allies with annexation for no fucking reason, dismantling any social programs left, and all of that led by a proven pedophile billionaire that was the customer and friend of a huge human trafficker, as were most of his billionaire friends who he favors with absolutely no shame.
And this is just the latest news coming from over there. I won't mention the fact that there are people alive today who couldn't drink from the same fountain as other people because their skin is dark. It was never fucking great.
So if you are American and still talk all this shit about China being a dictatorship and authoritarian this and “purge” that, I wish you would honestly shut the fuck up. Really. You are in no position to have an informed opinion on this because all of your information is force fed down your throat by half a dozen mega companies that are in bed with your regime.
So yeah, I'm sure China has a lot of issues, but if you didn't live there for some time or even speak the language for that matter, just shut the fuck the up.
No. I didn’t vote for that, and I’m not going to meekly give up on talking shit about the US and other countries. This idea that you have to be perfect to comment on anything imperfect needs to die.
The US is not an autocracy, is a mix between a plutocracy and a gerontocracy.
> if you are American and still talk all this shit about China being a dictatorship and authoritarian this and “purge” that, I wish you would honestly shut the fuck up. Really. You are in no position to have an informed opinion on this because all of your information is force fed
Bit defensive there, eh?
China is an autocracy and Xi is acting in the predictably self-destructive ways a dictator does. The U.S. is heading down that same path, with Trump practically mimicking Xi. N = 2 doesn’t weaken an argument. And folks who lived through the Nazis saying they see similar veins today doesn’t undermine their credibility.
(The hilarity of it is if you take your comment and replace China and America with partisan or pro-American coding, you could pop it out of Hegseth’s office and it would be right at home. Your comment almost seals the point that Xi is all the problems of MAGA, except polling China instead.)
Yes, I'm aware how ignorant I may sound, but it's so goddamn frustrating to read this kind of bullshit everytime I come to an American platform.
Ok, China is an autocracy, right? Could you explain to me how China conduct elections? Can you explain to me how they approve laws? Do they have a constitution? A justice system? Try answering these questions without much looking up and even if you do, please note the sources. No need to answer me really. Just ask yourself whether you know this or not and how qualified are you to actually label a HUGE state like China with one single heavily charged word.
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btw just for comparison over in the US
Trump has purged dozens of Generals, the head Admiral of the Navy and Coast Guard, head of NSA and Cyber Command and many other top-level officials in the military
and there are only 1,000 women in various special forces (had to pass same physical tests as men) but he is trying to get rid of them all too
Now that is the mark of dictator, agreed
The Commander in Chief of the military, also known as the President, has the authority to fire at will, that is how it works in America for 250 years now.
Right, and everyone else has the right to an opinion on it. The point seemingly being made above is Trump's swingeing cuts seem to be driven more by ideology than administrative efficiency. Xi's dismissal of his top general (which seems to be equivalent to sacking the Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff) is perplexing due to the opacity, but it doesn't seem to be indicative of any bigger or broader trend.
Guess it works that way in China too...
Trump was elected by the people of the United States. Twice. Soundly. Not a dictator.
Xi was never elected to his position by the people of China.
Being a bad president isn't the same thing as being a dictator.
> Trump was elected by the people of the United States. Twice. Soundly. Not a dictator
Trump is not a dictator, but not because he was elected, but because of our courts and federal system (and theoretically Congress).