> You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.
> Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism.
You mean the half of the world that enriched itself by inflicting "authoritarianism" on other populations - or indeed, their own populations too - unless you don't consider the treatment of Black and Native people in the US to be authoritarianism, or the Irish in the UK, etc etc?
If you truly want to know what I think and why I think it, feel free to email me and take this discussion off HN. You can find my contact through my profile.
If you can’t make the case for China’s authoritarian capitalism here, I don’t see how picking it up over e-mail is going to help.
It’s also counterproductive to take the debate offline, as further discussion would be for the benefit of anyone else that might read this thread. I’ll never agree that lifting people out of poverty requires authoritarian control over the populace.
It's not necessarily that it requires authoritarian rule, but rather that if you grew up in a rich country, you have a very different view on what is important.
Internet censorship generally ranks very low on your list of concerns if you're struggling to put food on the table. People in China have seen a complete transformation of their lives for the better, in just a few decades. They've gone from bicycles to electric cars, from not having reliable electricity to paying for everything with 5G-connected smartphones. From the point of view of how people live their everyday lives, things are better than ever.
Issues like censorship will become more important over time, but right now, they're still secondary. There are other issues at play as well, such as the legitimacy the Party still enjoys from the revolution and from its management of the economic boom of the last few decades, and people's fear of the sort of chaos that consumed China for much of its modern history.
You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.
Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism. We’re discussing basic human rights, not “VPN annoyance”.