by maxglute | 2025-09-15 14:26:01+00:00
>independent observer from a third world country.

Have you ever lived in China or the west to see the systems work? What makes your observation worthwhile?

>clue

If it was so easy most developing countries more free, i.e. less politically controlled would be replicating PRC. But they're mostly not. Overwhelmingly not. What happens in most places is wealth/elite capture process grab most of the gains, which is typically meagre to begin with (i.e. not enough to lift out of low/middle income level), because most places don't have leadership in place to attract FDI to get that ToT to move past middle income. PRC didn't just "get" that all that because a commune did well and go lol free market, they playedout/engineered an entire Sino-Soviet breakup and slap Vietnam to invite US to the party after USSR (who was also tech power at the time) was stingy with ToT (due to other dram). Then it's meticulous process of state manipulating politics / organizing infra construction and JVs to get what's theirs.

THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS WITH ALL MODERN DEVELOPED SUCCESSES, i.e. asian tigers, they get on the good side of the rich hegemon + some competent execution. Even petro / resource state, muh free market isn't enough. Need to badwagon with someone who can offer ToT. Conversely all the resources in the worlds (IR, VZ) doesn't matter if you're sanctioned by the hegemon and prevented from muh free market activities if you can't even buy the tech stack to extract, or if you did can't see in the common market.

> pretty much all developed countries

Essentially all old stock developed countries developed from excess extraction from colonialisms/slavery. It wasn't freedom, it was some form of market + imperial industrial policy. Bluntly it was simply taking a shit load from others from barrel of the gun to accumulate riches that snowballed growth. Loot a bunch of people and use the gains to buy yourself nice things, put your kids and grand kids+ through school, and 200 years later they think it was because of the market.

PRC moving FAST without that stupid levels of external extraction or basically direct subsidies from US (most of the other tigers, or newly minted wealthy petro states essentially all US satraps) is wholly different scenario. It's actual state-building and domestic mobilization (bluntly: extracting domestic labour) maybe not explicitly by engineers, but by career bureaucrats under an incentive structure where their career path is tied to building national power. PRC also unique outlier in that they are large enough to resist US containment now that US decided to breakup and contain. Big enough to now be 2nd bandwagon option since PRC has enough tech stack to replace US in most categories.

Contrast to now shitholes like Iran and Venezuela, was doing well when band wagoning with US, then broke up, and US acrimonious in breakup, so they get less than nothing for spurning US in the first place. It wasn't because they somehow got more authoritarian / corrupt - scraps of pie usually enough in sufficiently rich countries, it wasn't because they can't free market inside country either, it's because they lost access to global market ran by US, which is fundamentally not a free market but a pay to access market, i.e. postwar PRC/CCP couldn't even pay to modernize postwar due to sanctions. Hence they turn into basket cases when that access is lost, because there's isn't a magic domestic configurable, free market or not that can make up for enforced isolation due to loss of global access.