How is China different, or how different is China?

After the Russian Revolution Lenin et al. realized that Russia was nowhere near close enough to a level of wealth at which Communism could even make sense: there was basically precious little means of production for the state to appropriate. So they declared a period of a "New Economic Policy," or NEP, which allowed a certain amount of capitalist practices to flourish in Russia to produce some wealth, with the intent of later tightening the reins. Stalin duly did so in 1928 as he kicked off the purges.

Much of the global south has labored under a similar problematic for a long time. Marxist regimes came to power and instituted heavily top down economies in poor places, resulting in poor societies dominated by corrupt states with heavy-handed bureaucracies. Not a great recipe for human flourishing.

Which is not to say that unfettered capitalism and liberal democracy would have just done the trick either. The evidence for that is limited. The prosperity of the US and the West is based on a lot of complex stuff, including imperialism and slavery which allowed us to extract wealth, not just because we're hard-working, freedom-loving and God-fearing. But that's a topic for another post, indeed a small library of books.

But the question remains whether China is different. Or whether we might look at the period of Deng Xiaoping through Xi's consolidation of power as a "long NEP" for China. Has China gone through a period of building enough wealth where it can yank back freedoms, have a top-down economy and flourish on an ongoing basis? I sincerely doubt it. There are lots of signs that China will hit a wall and falter. Its demographic crisis is a key one. China's population has topped out and its median age will rise and its dependency ratio will get worse and worse. To deal with this problem, it will like other societies need to become more friendly to immigrants. I neither see that happening nor see lots of people wanting to move there unless it opens up.

Recent stories about unemployment amongst Chinese university graduates point to another big problem: at scale, kids don't want to work in the industries where the party wants them to do. In a freer society, this problem would work itself out more fluidly.

Anyhow, time to hop on the clock. Lots of questions here. If the West can manage past this moment of conflict without fomenting WWIII, open societies can continue to facilitate human happiness, however unevenly. But we have to make it through. We also need to accept that the balance between the interests of the individual and the collective will look different in different parts of the world. The world will never be an exact mirror of the USA.