It's maybe a trade-off? Sure we have bozos for politicians in the US, but in the US government corruption usually doesn't lead to people 'disappearing.' Though we're definitely making great strides in that direction.
The United States still has, overall, a much better set of governance, courts, regulation, etc. than China. But the USA is trending gradually downwards and China is trending quickly upwards.
Now it's interesting, countries can catch up a lot faster than they can lead. If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch. But many of those rapid modernizations peter out once a lot of the proven methods are implemented.
Sometimes that means flat growth, like Japan. Sometimes collapse, like Nazi Germany. Sometimes gradual decline, like the USSR. Singapore has done a pretty outstanding job of keeping their upwards trends going and they're about 50 years into their building phase - I think that's the longest rapid sustained modernization in history?
So anyways, yes, I'll take the USA's system over China's today. And tomorrow. And probably 5 years from now. But maybe not 20 years from now if all else stays equal, and China can adapt after they've caught most of the low hanging fruit.
If a country is a bit backwards, with the right set of leadership, they can very quickly modernize, becoming extremely important economically and geopolitically in ~30 years when starting almost from scratch.
It's not only leadership. If there is a long track record of commerce and admiration of scholarship, a culture can enable rapid modernization. I think this is why Japan, Korea, and China have done very well for themselves.
The USSR modernised very rapidly and it started off with mass illiteracy.
Yes, but look at them now. The territories of the former USSR do not constitute the best climate for business. Cultural antecedents are not a necessary pre-condition, but they seem to help.
>But the USA is trending gradually downwards and China is trending quickly upwards.
In population, wealth, etc. sure. But in terms of corruption? Having people who do no harm in power is often better than having people who do great good. If a great leader is just that - great. Not good, but great. Greatness has the capacity for evil and good. The advantage of a less skilled leadership is that they're only really able to do middling things, whether middlingly evil or middlingly good.
Back in the 1990s economists found that the major cause of improvements for the "Asian tigers" was due to increases in inputs -- that is, people and material were actually used for the first time. But productivity per person or unit of capital is actually quite poor and in the long run, this places a limit on that rapid growth.
We're already seeing work being outsourced from China to even cheaper countries as China's supply of labour becomes fully engaged.
You're right, but the trend in the US is towards more repression, while the trend in China is towards less. We are destroying our middle class, they are creating and growing theirs at an incredible rate.
The attitude that I get from a lot of Chinese is that they feel the present government is a necessary evil - i.e., in exchange for many political and religious freedoms, they get progress, and an immense improvement to the quality of life of hundreds of millions... where before there was only starvation and misery. And progress they have gotten, which is more than I can say for us in the last decade or so.
The Chineese exchange students, that is, the ones who are not nationalized in America, the off the boat people, at my school think rather differently. They consider the government of China, for the most part, simply the nature of china. It isn't a necessary evil, its just the way things are.
I've had Chinese coworkers openly feel sorry for me because I have asian features and I don't know how to read/write Chinese characters, and I'm not even Chinese!
We've all got different friends, but I'd offer a different perspective. Most Chinese I know dislike their government, but are apathetic towards it, or too busy trying to live their own lives.
And China is recently tending towards more sophisticated repression, rather than less of it in general. Perhaps the US and China will end up in the same place!
