It makes sense, China started behind technologically and the only way they could catch up was by having a higher rate of technological progress. Now that they’ve caught up, faster rate of advancement necessarily means they’re starting to surpass the west.
For sure, technology is self reinforcing in nature. All the investments China made work together to allow them to build bigger and better things going forward.
Meanwhile, there’s little indication that Chinese system is prone to insane leaders. If you look at the history of leadership in PRC, it’s been competent and very much sane throughout its history. A big reason for it is that there’s an arduous and highly competitive selection process for moving up in the system. A random yahoo with a bunch of money can’t just become the president of China.
Consider the road Xi had to walk to get where he is today. Whether you come from a grassroots family or a political family, you have to go through every step. Only in this way, you can reach the top of power.
To get started, you have to own a college degree, at least for most Chinese govt officials. You have to take the national civil service examination and be admitted. In 2019, 92000 people took the exam and 14537 were admitted, with the admission rate of 1.58%.
The ruling party in China is the CPC. In addition, there are 8 other parties. You have to join one of them. If your ideal is to become the supreme leader of China then you join the CPC. You will be one of the 90 million CPC members. They are all your competitors.
Now, you’ve become a grassroots official. Your administrative level is “staff”, while President Xi’s administrative level is “national level principal”. There are 10 levels of gap between you and President Xi. Each level requires several years and multiple examinations.
In China, “Organization Department” at all levels are responsible for the management of civil servants. Every civil servant has to take part in the grade assessment every year. The assessment is usually conducted by your colleagues, subordinates and superiors by voting. The result of the assessment is related to your future.
If you work hard and are lucky enough, you will become the highest official in a district or county. As President Xi did in 1983, he became the highest official in Zhengding County. You have to own the experience to manage hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
Next, you have to become a city official in charge of industry or agriculture or education or commerce. Then, you become a mayor. It will take you another few years. In 1990, President Xi became the top leader of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province.
Now, if you want to become a governor then you need to repeat your previous work. The difference is that your responsibilities are greater and your work is more onerous. In 2000, President Xi became governor of Fujian Province.
After becoming the governor of a relatively small province, you have to be the governor of a relatively large province. Or you can go to border areas, such as Xinjiang or Tibet. President Hu Jintao, the former leader of China, was once the governor of Tibet.
The Political Bureau is one of the central leading bodies of the CPC. You must be a member of it. Members of the Political Bureau are elected by the plenary session of the Central Committee. It’s your next goal.
Deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC) are members of the highest organ of state power in China and are elected in accordance with law. You also have to be one of the NPCs.
If you can become a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, it usually consists of seven or nine people, which means that you have entered the core of China’s state power. In 2007, President Xi was elected.
Similarly, different standing committees are responsible for managing different areas of the country. Through fierce competition, you finally become the top leader of China. In 2012, President Xi succeeded. He still spent 40 years on this road!
The above is what anyone who has ambitions to become China’s top leader has to go through. It is based on a strict selection system and the election of deputies to the people’s Congress at all levels.
If I should add a comment it is that when so many people need to vet you, it’s also very hard to force change in the sense of the people.
People rights are still a massive problem compared to the west, and that might be the reason why. Or maybe it comes in a wave later on. People rights was not a thing in the west either if you go 150 years back.
I disagree with the notion that human rights are a problem in China compared to the west. First of all, we have to clarify what we mean by rights here. The types of rights people in the west enjoy are poorly defined and largely ephemeral such as the right to free speech. This is no more than jester’s privilege where you’re allowed to scream into the void, but you typically cannot translate that into any tangible action.
For example, people in the US have the right to vote and to elect politicians. Yet, the tangible outcome is that the political system represents the interests of the ruling capital owning class and not the voting majority. As Eric Li put it, the biggest difference in the political systems between China and US is that in America, you can change the political parties but you can’t change policies. In China, you can’t change the party but you can change policies.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is another great example. Majority of western public opposes this atrocity, but the regimes they live under actively facilitate the continuation of the atrocities. Here, not only the rights of the citizens of the west are nowhere to be found, but it’s also the rights of people living outside the west that are being trampled. The west is responsible for destruction of many countries in the past decades, and by extension the rights of millions of people who lived in them.
Furthermore, the western conception of human rights focuses on positive freedoms while largely ignoring the importance of negative freedoms, such as freedom from poverty and the fear of illness or a lack of financial security in old age. These are tangible, real-world freedoms that directly impact our quality of life. This brings us to the subject of liberal ideology and the fact that it is directly at odds with meaningful human rights.
Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
On the other hand, people in China enjoy genuine human rights, like right to housing, education, and healthcare. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. forbes.com/…/how-people-in-china-afford-their-out…
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. www.nber.org/system/files/…/w23119.pdf
This is kind of misleading, China and Japan are kind of competing to see who can launch the new generation of 600km/hr maglev trains. Both have test tracks, both have clocked at 600km/hr, both have the actual lines under construction (Shanghai to Beijing, Tokyo to Nagoya).
Neither will likely run at 600km/hr, that’s mostly just dick waving.
Construction in Japan has slowed to a crawl and probably won’t be done until 2027 at least, and the Chinese CRRC is supposed to start this year but I don’t think they have any official service start dates.
Looks pretty similar to the Japanese SCMaglev. But does that means the track would need to be active like the Japanese one? I tried to research this in the past and all the sources say that the Japanese Maglev has the linear induction motors on the track, in addition to passive coils that the train’s electromagnets interact with.
That’s in addition to Maglev’s intrinsic need for power delivery coils in the track (the bottom of the track basically needs to be primary side of one giant very smart transformer).
Imagine building from Beijing to Shenzhen’s distance in ultra high tech tracks that can’t interop with regular trains, where they’ll have to safely handle a 600 km/h train passing over them in the harshest weather conditions. And you can’t have very thick armor for it because you need the magnetic fields to be as close as possible to make the power delivery efficient, It’s both a construction and a maintenance nightmare. The tracks themselves will offset a lot of the ecological benefits of trains over flying.
SNCF set the wheeled train record at 500 km/h with a test train. Why not try to beat that?
I imagine that technical challenge is the whole point as it’s a demonstration that China is capable of building this sort of technology. China exports their technology and infrastructure to other countries in BRICS and BRI, and many of them don’t have any HSR infrastructure at all. China will be able to showcase how this infrastructure works in practice, and offer something no other country can.
threaded - newest
Seems like most innovative things come from China now. The US is done.
It makes sense, China started behind technologically and the only way they could catch up was by having a higher rate of technological progress. Now that they’ve caught up, faster rate of advancement necessarily means they’re starting to surpass the west.
And they will continue to do so because of automatic factories, and investments in clean energy.
We can hate on a centralisied government all we want, but when it works, it works really well.
It’s also a little more fragile being prone to insane leaders. But so is the US. Real democracy is all they need now to get fully on track.
For sure, technology is self reinforcing in nature. All the investments China made work together to allow them to build bigger and better things going forward.
Meanwhile, there’s little indication that Chinese system is prone to insane leaders. If you look at the history of leadership in PRC, it’s been competent and very much sane throughout its history. A big reason for it is that there’s an arduous and highly competitive selection process for moving up in the system. A random yahoo with a bunch of money can’t just become the president of China.
Consider the road Xi had to walk to get where he is today. Whether you come from a grassroots family or a political family, you have to go through every step. Only in this way, you can reach the top of power.
To get started, you have to own a college degree, at least for most Chinese govt officials. You have to take the national civil service examination and be admitted. In 2019, 92000 people took the exam and 14537 were admitted, with the admission rate of 1.58%.
The ruling party in China is the CPC. In addition, there are 8 other parties. You have to join one of them. If your ideal is to become the supreme leader of China then you join the CPC. You will be one of the 90 million CPC members. They are all your competitors.
Now, you’ve become a grassroots official. Your administrative level is “staff”, while President Xi’s administrative level is “national level principal”. There are 10 levels of gap between you and President Xi. Each level requires several years and multiple examinations.
In China, “Organization Department” at all levels are responsible for the management of civil servants. Every civil servant has to take part in the grade assessment every year. The assessment is usually conducted by your colleagues, subordinates and superiors by voting. The result of the assessment is related to your future.
If you work hard and are lucky enough, you will become the highest official in a district or county. As President Xi did in 1983, he became the highest official in Zhengding County. You have to own the experience to manage hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.
Next, you have to become a city official in charge of industry or agriculture or education or commerce. Then, you become a mayor. It will take you another few years. In 1990, President Xi became the top leader of Fuzhou City, Fujian Province.
Now, if you want to become a governor then you need to repeat your previous work. The difference is that your responsibilities are greater and your work is more onerous. In 2000, President Xi became governor of Fujian Province.
After becoming the governor of a relatively small province, you have to be the governor of a relatively large province. Or you can go to border areas, such as Xinjiang or Tibet. President Hu Jintao, the former leader of China, was once the governor of Tibet.
The Political Bureau is one of the central leading bodies of the CPC. You must be a member of it. Members of the Political Bureau are elected by the plenary session of the Central Committee. It’s your next goal.
Deputies to the National People’s Congress (NPC) are members of the highest organ of state power in China and are elected in accordance with law. You also have to be one of the NPCs.
If you can become a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, it usually consists of seven or nine people, which means that you have entered the core of China’s state power. In 2007, President Xi was elected.
Similarly, different standing committees are responsible for managing different areas of the country. Through fierce competition, you finally become the top leader of China. In 2012, President Xi succeeded. He still spent 40 years on this road!
The above is what anyone who has ambitions to become China’s top leader has to go through. It is based on a strict selection system and the election of deputies to the people’s Congress at all levels.
That’s a very interesting read!
If I should add a comment it is that when so many people need to vet you, it’s also very hard to force change in the sense of the people.
People rights are still a massive problem compared to the west, and that might be the reason why. Or maybe it comes in a wave later on. People rights was not a thing in the west either if you go 150 years back.
I disagree with the notion that human rights are a problem in China compared to the west. First of all, we have to clarify what we mean by rights here. The types of rights people in the west enjoy are poorly defined and largely ephemeral such as the right to free speech. This is no more than jester’s privilege where you’re allowed to scream into the void, but you typically cannot translate that into any tangible action.
For example, people in the US have the right to vote and to elect politicians. Yet, the tangible outcome is that the political system represents the interests of the ruling capital owning class and not the voting majority. As Eric Li put it, the biggest difference in the political systems between China and US is that in America, you can change the political parties but you can’t change policies. In China, you can’t change the party but you can change policies.
The US also practices modern day slavery which violates fundamental human rights even as the west defines them.
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is another great example. Majority of western public opposes this atrocity, but the regimes they live under actively facilitate the continuation of the atrocities. Here, not only the rights of the citizens of the west are nowhere to be found, but it’s also the rights of people living outside the west that are being trampled. The west is responsible for destruction of many countries in the past decades, and by extension the rights of millions of people who lived in them.
Furthermore, the western conception of human rights focuses on positive freedoms while largely ignoring the importance of negative freedoms, such as freedom from poverty and the fear of illness or a lack of financial security in old age. These are tangible, real-world freedoms that directly impact our quality of life. This brings us to the subject of liberal ideology and the fact that it is directly at odds with meaningful human rights.
Liberalism consists of two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on wholesome ideas such as individual freedoms and democracy. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
As a result, liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights, over supporting ordinary people, which contradicts the promises of fairness and equality. Private property is seen as a key part of individual freedom under liberalism, and this provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, the talk of freedom and democracy ends up being nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
On the other hand, people in China enjoy genuine human rights, like right to housing, education, and healthcare. 90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. forbes.com/…/how-people-in-china-afford-their-out…
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. www.nber.org/system/files/…/w23119.pdf
F
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Stupid Chinese instead of going with Hyperloop. /s
This is kind of misleading, China and Japan are kind of competing to see who can launch the new generation of 600km/hr maglev trains. Both have test tracks, both have clocked at 600km/hr, both have the actual lines under construction (Shanghai to Beijing, Tokyo to Nagoya).
Neither will likely run at 600km/hr, that’s mostly just dick waving.
Construction in Japan has slowed to a crawl and probably won’t be done until 2027 at least, and the Chinese CRRC is supposed to start this year but I don’t think they have any official service start dates.
Also the French TGV was already running at 574,8 km/h back in 2007. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_world_speed_record
No, this is misleading. Not in service, and only an engine car.
The Chuo Shinkansen is scheduled to open in 2034.
I was kind of hoping for a window view. I can't even picture what travelling 600 kph at ground level would look like?
Especially on a maglev. I spose it would feel pretty similar to flying.
Is it actually in service? It seems like not yet, but I do think they will beat the Chuo Shinkansen in both time and speed.
Looks like it’s just the prototype at the moment. A couple of links with some details here
Looks pretty similar to the Japanese SCMaglev. But does that means the track would need to be active like the Japanese one? I tried to research this in the past and all the sources say that the Japanese Maglev has the linear induction motors on the track, in addition to passive coils that the train’s electromagnets interact with.
That’s in addition to Maglev’s intrinsic need for power delivery coils in the track (the bottom of the track basically needs to be primary side of one giant very smart transformer).
Imagine building from Beijing to Shenzhen’s distance in ultra high tech tracks that can’t interop with regular trains, where they’ll have to safely handle a 600 km/h train passing over them in the harshest weather conditions. And you can’t have very thick armor for it because you need the magnetic fields to be as close as possible to make the power delivery efficient, It’s both a construction and a maintenance nightmare. The tracks themselves will offset a lot of the ecological benefits of trains over flying.
SNCF set the wheeled train record at 500 km/h with a test train. Why not try to beat that?
I imagine that technical challenge is the whole point as it’s a demonstration that China is capable of building this sort of technology. China exports their technology and infrastructure to other countries in BRICS and BRI, and many of them don’t have any HSR infrastructure at all. China will be able to showcase how this infrastructure works in practice, and offer something no other country can.