If Russian invaded Ukraine, would you favor or oppose war against Russia?

[DGuller]

Chinese growth has been pretty phenomenal though.

The best way to achieve rapid growth is to completely tank your economy first.

[viper37]

No, we need to keep our commitments to our NATO allies like the Baltics, but full war over the Ukraine is too much.

And just like Germany, when they do actually overtly attack a NATO allie, they will be ready for us.  Better strike now when we can avoid a long, bloody and costly war.

And the US, under President Trump's second term might not even respond when a NATO ally is attacked.  So there's that...  Now or never.

[Sheilbh]

Russia and China would need to increase per capita GDP almost 50% to hit the dizzying heights of Poland, but that isn't seen as disastrous because the soviets and Mr. Mao set a really low bar.

Sure, but it depends where you draw the line, right?

China in 1950 was at a similar place as India - both were basically at subsistence levels. India was a little ahead on GDP per capita. Even taking account of the catastophes of Mao and the Great Leap Forward by 1980 when the World Bank do their first report on China (which Adam Tooze has written about really interestingly) China's ahead of India on GDP per capita, life expectancy and education. And then Deng and the reform period happen - someone retiring now started work around then at a point when the average earnings were below $100 per month, they're now over $1000. That's basically the shift that's happened in China in the course of two generations and a huge source of, I think, output legitimacy for the Chinese regime.

Because if we look beyond the specifics of the really low bar set by Mao, I think the relevant really low, disastrous bar is when countries have achieved independence from colonial or imperial powers. In that context, which is most relevant for lots of the world (at least most of Asia and Africa), China's model has worked. If we're talking about a long run 300 year view of this stuff then for the first two thirds of that period it's not really accountability or liberal democracy that's delivering for the "successful" systems, if anything I'd argue it the ability to effectively use force.

Again - the point is not that these are necessarily better systems or that they work better, but I don't think we should automatically assume that what these other systems are doing is bound to fail and self-evidently bad. I think that's hubristic and complacent. Thinking like that, I think, leads to ossification or wrapping ourselves in formal liberal democracy without necessarily delivering what that model should. Especially at a point where I think across the last twenty years we've had two unsuccessful wars, one global recession, a pandemic that has badly affected Europe and North America and a leader of the free world that had a fluffed peaceful transition of power. This isn't a point to lean in too hard on the idea that our system obviously works - or is particularly accountable (I can't think of anyone who's really had any accountability for those failures).

And I'm absolutely certain that, say, the Russian or Turkish leadership worry about how to placate elites and the public once the pie stops growing (which is happening in Russia). Similarly, I'm certain Chinese leadership think a lot about how they can avoid losing their results based legitimacy. I think, for example, some of Xi's aggressive moves in the economy in the last year is directly linked to the perception that China's model "worked" in dealing with covid and that people were willing to take costs for that. I think there were genuine fears around that in January 2020 and they will be very happy at how things are now in comparison.

[alfred russel]

India is a disaster area. China comparing favorably to India is not a great achievement.

[Josquius]

India is a disaster area. China comparing favorably to India is not a great achievement.

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China was even more so. Yet it has left India in the dust.

[OttoVonBismarck]

"If you select the best 30 year period of Chinese government in the past 300 years of authoritarianism, then you see a model that works." - Sheilbh, 2021

[OttoVonBismarck]

India is a disaster area. China comparing favorably to India is not a great achievement.

.
China was even more so. Yet it has left India in the dust.

India has also outgrown China economically every year since 2014. I would also argue India had a much more difficult path forward than China did due to its religious / ethnic / tribal issues. I think India is much harder to govern than China, I'd even argue the sort of government China has would not even be possible in India. India is almost like a quilted together society with long history of its territory hosting multiple independent Kingdoms who spoke different languages, had different religious customs etc etc. I also think India's situation in say the 1950s is probably a bit deceptive, its aggregate numbers were likely as good as they were (which was not good) because of a concentration of colonialism driven wealth in a few major trading cities, but the Indian countryside I think was even less developed than Qing China's was, with some areas having long histories of being almost not governed at all. Much of China's primary agricultural territory has had relatively consistent history of being governed by a central government for over a thousand years. That system fell into deep corruption and dysfunction by the time of the Qing collapse, but parts of India basically were never even governed at all until the 1980s, and even some now are barely so.

[grumbler]

India's infrastructure was also designed around moving resources to the ports, while China's was designed to move value-added goods and food.  India had more miles of railroad, but the railroads weren't particularly useful for the kind of economy India was trying to create.

One of the aspects of China's authoritarian system that served them well was the control of population movements.  The poor from the countryside were simply prohibited from moving to the cities as families, so China's cities did not get clogged with massive slums like India's.  In China, individuals could come from the countryside as guest workers in the cities, but only so long as they had jobs, and they had to leave their families behind.

The countryside in much of China is still very poor, but they are better off than those in India's slums.

[Sheilbh]

"If you select the best 30 year period of Chinese government in the past 300 years of authoritarianism, then you see a model that works." - Sheilbh, 2021

It seems safer to say the Chinese system has delivered in the last 40 years - which roughly coincides with the West's neo-liberal period which went well for 20 years and then bad for 20 years - and we should be aware of the possibility that it might continue delivering rather than just assuming it's all going to inevitably fail at some point if we just wait long enough. And the same goes for the illiberal democracies.

My view is that we are out of the end of history. The period is over when there was no alternative to a liberal democratic and market capitalist model, and when even most dictatorships tried to imitate at least the forms of those models. Illiberal democracy and China's development model (which was hugely influenced by Singapore) look to me like viable alternatives. They're not ideologically driven, like the USSR was, but flexible ideologically. And my view is if you believe in liberal democracy or Western democracy, because it's right as Berk put it, then we need to make it work better (certainly than it has over the last 20 years - some accountability would be great) and a more attractive plausible model for others (an approach to development would be key because I can't think of an obvious "success story").

Edit: I'm not saying we necessarily immediately slide into a new Cold War - but it is something I find really striking about the US right now. Suspicion of China seems to be one of the few genuinely bipartisan positions in Washington. The view that China is a threat and a rising one that needs a response, seems to be held across both parties. There's no effort at making Washington work or building common consensus around other issue, because if you don't do that and have some common ground you can't plausibly face up to China. I find it amazing and, frankly, a little bit decadent to have election fixing attempts and the other weirdness on the right while those same leaders seem to think the US may be entering into something like a new Cold War. One of the features of then was a high level of elite cohesion, working together etc, which helped make the American system work.

[PJL]

I think a new cold war against Russia/China in the next 5 years is highly likely. It arguably has already started. After all the UK/US & the USSR went from allies to enemies within 5 years.

[Eddie Teach]

Err, you're referring to during the Bush years, right?

[OttoVonBismarck]

"If you select the best 30 year period of Chinese government in the past 300 years of authoritarianism, then you see a model that works." - Sheilbh, 2021

It seems safer to say the Chinese system has delivered in the last 40 years - which roughly coincides with the West's neo-liberal period which went well for 20 years and then bad for 20 years - and we should be aware of the possibility that it might continue delivering rather than just assuming it's all going to inevitably fail at some point if we just wait long enough. And the same goes for the illiberal democracies.

My view is that we are out of the end of history. The period is over when there was no alternative to a liberal democratic and market capitalist model, and when even most dictatorships tried to imitate at least the forms of those models. Illiberal democracy and China's development model (which was hugely influenced by Singapore) look to me like viable alternatives. They're not ideologically driven, like the USSR was, but flexible ideologically. And my view is if you believe in liberal democracy or Western democracy, because it's right as Berk put it, then we need to make it work better (certainly than it has over the last 20 years - some accountability would be great) and a more attractive plausible model for others (an approach to development would be key because I can't think of an obvious "success story").

I think it's important to consider how it works and how sustainable it is, though. It's basically always been true that if the decision makers in any system are very narrow, you're going to be able to push big changes fast. You saw that with Mao's Great Leap Forward, with the rapid industrialization of Russia in the early Soviet era--and even with the things FDR did in the 1930s--while a democratic leader, FDR enjoyed majorities of over 70% in both houses of Congress and had almost a dictatorial level of power in many respects. The massive military build up that made the United States into the world's pre-eminent Naval Power that started in the 1930s, the huge and sweeping social welfare changes etc, none of that would be possible in a more divided government seen in most periods of U.S. history.

Taking just the U.S. for an example though, while periods of strong one-party rule might introduce sweeping changes, there's almost always a somewhat predictable result--after enough time the ruling party starts to accumulate "problems", almost like cancer cells growing in the system. Corruption, lack of respect for the electorate, self-dealing etc. This eventually reaches a point where the ruling party collapses and you move onto a new era of the party system. This happened to the New Deal coalition in 1968. I think you saw a similar process in Canada and the United Kingdom at various points in relatively recent memory--long term Liberal Party rule with large majorities (for roughly 13 years) ended in the collapse of the Liberal Party and Harper ruling for years; arguably the UK is even more prone to these long periods of party domination than the U.S. is, with very long stretches of single party domination.

These unfree societies in some respects are akin to those periods in democratic systems, except there is no mechanism to bring them down when their excesses grow out of hand. This used to in a sense just be how governments worked, especially in the era of hereditary monarchies when there were virtually no accountable governments anywhere. So, it didn't really matter, everyone was prone to periods of misrule, and you just had to hope your country didn't suffer too many such eras consecutively or bad things might start to happen.

Unfree societies doing well even for a few decades is not particularly new, it's been a thing forever. The question is over the long term how well they compete with systems that tend to better sort out the sort of morasses that accumulate when you have the same unelected, unaccountable people in power forever. A more complex question is how unfree and unaccountable are the current crop of autocrats. Putin seems virtually invulnerable to domestic opposition. Xi likewise, but we in the West tend to know a lot less about the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party than we should, so it may be Xi at least is still held quasi-accountable to some degree (I just really don't know.)

Some of these autocrats / quasi-autocrats like Erdogan and Orban, I'm not even sure are really in power out of anything like government competence, they're appealing to revanchist nationalist interests. That's fine too as a way to hold onto power, but actually lets the leadership get away with even more than maybe in a system where the public is buying into the strong leader because they believe he will make the country better.

I don't think Western style, liberal democracy is the only way to run a country. I do think that without some strong evidence, the history of the last 200 years is that over longer stretches of time countries with entrenched, unaccountable leadership, have progressed slower, been stable less, experienced more setbacks etc than countries where the political leadership is held to account for its rule. That's a different matter from "how stable is that accountable form of government", some societies simply don't tolerate democratic norms well, and any democracies that have ever flashed up in them are only transient at best.

I also think we need to update ourselves a bit on the last few years, because to some degree these talking points made more sense 5 years ago than now. China is actually showing very serious cracks in its economic development model, to the point many are now worrying about the possibility of a major Chinese economic depression on the horizon. Some of this is directly attributable to Xi steering the country away from the approach of Deng and Deng's first two successors--and that very steering is possible because Xi is not accountable to anyone, and is more of an ideological nationalist than were Ziang and Hu.

[Berkut]

I would go so far as to speculate that the point of Xi steering things away from that approach is *because* his goal is to consolidate power, and those approaches make that more difficult.

He is, IMO, actively sacrificing economic and social progress in return for more consolidation of power. This is *why* these systems do not work in the long run - because the Dengs eventually get replaced by the Xi's.

Or because after the authoritarian uses their power to fix the obviously screwed up system (Hitler gets those trains running on time!) as a means to consolidating power, it becomes pretty clear that getting the rains running on time was never their goal, it was just a means to their goal - which is always power and control.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Right, like for all that authoritarian power lets the government implement policies very quickly, it has an uneasy at best relationship with a very fundamental issue that democratic (liberal or otherwise) capitalist societies have--private property rights, right to contract, and the "ancillary" privileges and rights that usually need to take root for those rights to operate to their maximum potential. Things like predictable government regulators, predictable court systems, standard licensing schemes from the government, easy ability to do business with whomever you want be it a local company or a multinational, access to international capital etc etc. All of those are doors into a society that can undermine a pure autocrat, and when they are crushed, you don't get left with all the benefits and none of the costs--you lose the benefits too.

[DGuller]

I wonder if the logic extends to corporations.  Are there any corporations with a true "democratic" system of governance (not just a matter of a dictator choosing to be a benevolent dictator)?  If there are, I wonder how they work out.  It seems like most of the reasons why democracy should work better for the country should also apply to corporations, but it doesn't seem like anyone moved away from the authoritarian mode of governance there.