Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.
They've steered a massive ship (and its crew) well enough to corner the manufacturing market for everything, globally, in less than 30 years. They've steered that same ship well enough to create mirror (and sometimes superior) industries in pretty much everything else. They also created global soft power in the process.
If they need to retool/manage gig work, the command and control economy in China has a much better chance at figuring it out than waiting for the "hand of the market" in US.
Not to detract from the fact that China did indeed do a lot of things right, but I wonder how much of this was not going to happen anyway since the country was the most populated in the world and had low wages compared to the west.
The US, for the record, also steered it's economy well enough during Covid. But that was a 2016 Trump administration, which still had adults in the room, and a 2020 Biden one.
The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.
The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.
If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.
