What I like about China is, it illustrates how effective a mostly benevolent dictatorship is. It is the optimal political system imho, provided it remains benevolent of course, which is no small feat.
Provided they don't trip and fall, if China is not the absolute supreme leader of the planet in 25 - 50 years I will be shocked.
Yes, I think that's the point. There are decent numbers of places where government has neither the ability or desire to regulate heavily. None of those places seem to have blossomed into oases of free enterprise and infrastructure construction.
What countries have small states that you are referring to anyway? Zimbabwe? Burma? Equador? Places in the jungle? There are lots of other reasons these places might not be economic powerhouses. It takes a lot more time to trade coconuts through a deep jungle.
Just because it seems difficult now under a heavy antiquated state-controlled system, doesn't mean, say, something like a crypto-currency-backed decentralized world isn't possible. We very well could one day be paying taxes just to local governments, and many local governments compete for our citizenship through things like low taxes. Cut the 25% u pay in taxes that goes to military related expenses (because, say, china now becomes the world's "supreme leader" as someone else said), and now we are well on our way to a small-state government.
I hope we can fix these problems. Things are so inefficient. I'm excited to see how far decentralization can take us.
Note that building infrastructure "too far" in advance is wasted effort. You end up with infrastructure designed for yesterdays needs that needs updating when you need it. (ie houses with coax that cannot handle digital TV, not wired to internet.) You also lose any useful advances that might happen (brand new never used air conditioners that use so much energy you can buy a new one just on the energy savings over a couple years)
Use you need to plan and build for tomorrow. However do not do too much as you don't know what tomorrow will bring.
And here are some counterexamples to the claim that the CCP is "well meaning and kindly" --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1...
http://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/blog/chinese-gov...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/political-prisoners-chin...
http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/extreme-torture-inside-chi...
http://thediplomat.com/2017/03/chinas-urbancide-in-tibet/
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-environmental-crisis
China's government is to "benevolence" as the Ministry of Love is to love. As far as "optimal political system" -- I'll simply disagree as we are all entitled to an opinion. However, the facts indicate that China is pretty much the opposite of "well meaning and kindly."
I lived there many years and love China -- but it certainly isn't because of the "benevolence" of the government.
The interesting thing is that nearly every one of the links I posted is blocked in China. I guess the government wouldn't want the people to find out just how "benevolent" they really are.
Ask yourself this: do you think things are getting better or worse as time goes on for the typical Chinese citizen, and to what degree? (And as a followup: what information sources are you using to form this conclusion?)
The Chinese government has managed the country reasonably well, for a authoritarian government. However, I think the evidence shows that the less of the Chinese government authoritarianism there is, the better off the people are.
But rather than getting bogged down in quantifying the exact degree of its benevolence, it's key not to let your larger and more important point get lost alongside that red herring, and it's one that gets little press here: China and SE Asia have shown, over a period of decades, that heavy-handed state-guided development alongside market forces is a credible third alternative to the One True neoliberal agenda the West has pushed since the 1980s.
Japan and South Korea also "grew up" in a heavily state-sponsored manner and with closed private economies. Despite its visible lack of conformity to official American prescriptions about how to do things, the US tolerated it during the Cold War as part of the general bargain with those countries, in which they were allowed to develop as they saw fit and to have unrestricted and preferential access to America's bottomless consumer market. In return, they paid in unwavering anticommunist allegiance.
Thank you for being a refreshing voice of reason.
I think China's "benevolence", if that's what it indeed is (only time will tell), may not look like it because they are working towards a longer term goal, and for reasons of prudence, sometimes you have to make unfortunate compromises (such as absolutely violating basic human rights of some of your citizens) to achieve goals in a timely manner (strike while the iron is hot).
This is just my theory, there's no way of knowing if it is correct.
