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The author makes an incorrect assessment without considering the appropriate context for China.

The gaping hole in his assessment of "Chinese cultural exports" is the failure to account for China's population and GDP per capita, which currently is only about $17k PPP. This is no position to be exporting culture to the globe from; that would just be a waste of resources. Culture is a result of being rich, not a cause of being rich.

In other words, China is not "culturally-stunted" than any other country with a similar GDP per capita PPP.

Chinese culture is also all in the Chinese language, and China has no strategic reason to make any effort to export it globally into English, a foreign language, where fitting translations would cost even more resources.

> paranoid presumption

There is no "paranoid presumption", that's literally what the comment I'm replying to was doing.

So, look at reality instead of sitting on your high horse, believing that all defenses of China are "paranoid".

> The point was not to make fun of the word choice “harmonious”, but rather to point out [..]

Again, read the comment. You are denying reality. They literally said nothing concrete, only imply negative connotations about the word "harmonious".

You seem to have a bit of sour grapes that a non-Western country dares to talk positively about their own policies.

You should understand that translations often lose some cultural context, so when you have a prejudice against the English word "harmonious", understand that the Chinese equivalent is used much more freely in everyday speech. "Solidarity" might have been a better translation.

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Reply to the comment below:

> I recall that, in the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony, China celebrated its ethnic minorities by having Han children dress up as them [..]

In a big place like China or the US, there are always going to incidents like this. Furthermore, most news stories will exaggerate the headlines or twist the details, so I am not even sure if this particular incident is as you described. What matters is what the policies are doing for the larger scale of individuals. You can't judge anything about this larger scale by looking at a few incidents, especially when Western media have a vested interest in showing you these news items and ignoring the vast majority of what is going on. (To be fair, the vast majority is quite boring.)

"Ask the people themselves" is used typically in these discussions as a weasel phrase, as if Western liberal democracies are truly "asking the people themselves". You have mass media bombarding the general population all the time with pre-ordained narratives. Nobody votes in elections with an independent analysis. So sure, it depends on what you mean by "ask the people themselves". There's lots of content on social media including from ethnic minorities, people are generally happy with their lives and the amount of freedom they have. Are you going to pick holes in that? Why not pick holes in what's happening with mass media de-jure "independent" de-facto manipulative elections in the West?

China is not a totalitarian regime - you shouldn't believe all the propaganda out there, you should actually go there yourself and you'll find that you can live your life quite normally and happily.

China's identity isn't based on a single ethnic identity - the various restrictions (such as the now-3-child-policy, and permanent immigration between cities) apply to everyone. In fact ethnic minorities generally get preferential treatment - e.g. looser restrictions, affirmative action in various places such as state examinations - because it's recognised that a majority ethnic groups have disproportionate power.

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Reply to the comment below:

> As long as you don't stick out, or criticize the government positively quite frequently.

The ways in which this statement is both true and false in its details, is not particularly different from the West.

In China, there are local protests quite regularly, and local governments respond.

In Hong Kong the protests were incredibly violent and disruptive. You cite the crackdowns by the government, but you don't cite the actions by the protestors and opposition legislators, that also attack innocents and filibuster the legislature for years, much more disruptively and disrespectfully than anything that's happened in the West, including shouting "Fuck China" during legislative oath-taking.

In China, mass organised protest against the national government is not tolerated, but nobody cares if you write some stuff on social media. In the West, in the rare case that actual mass protests ever get too rowdy they are shutdown quite brutally by the police. In China the government stops the situation before it gets to that point. In the West, anyone that sticks out enough to really be a bother, like Julian Assange, gets shut down very brutally too.

In both cases, these types of mass protests don't generally change anything in the political system. And in both cases, most ordinary people actually really just don't care to do these things, because the situation is fine in both China and the West - certainly not like the levels of the revolutions in the 1800s or the wars in the early 1900s. So when you criticise China for not allowing these things, this comes from a position of privilege, you have forgotten what it's like to be hungry. Not being hungry matters more, and China has found an efficient way to do that, so I am happy for them (and "us" as far as I can claim that). Maybe later things will become more relaxed, but it's not a particularly big priority.

> brutal suppression they do in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, or Inner Mongolia A-OK?

Most of the "evidence" regarding Xinjiang is fabricated, the Hong Kong stories are exaggerated and one-sided. I'd be against any actual specific cases of brutal suppression that's going on. But that still wouldn't make me "anti-China" in the same way you're not "anti-US" or "anti-West" presumably (I am not either). But that's what Western media portrayals seem to be trying to do - saying that, oh China is doing some bad things, they are evil, they need to be stopped. China is not evil, the world is a complex place.

> we all know it was would be like Putin and Medvedev, with Xi still controlling,

Nobody really knows the details of these things high up, it's all conjecture. It's sure convenient that Democrat and Republican policies, compared to the rest of the world, are very similar. How do you know they're not essentially in cahoots and just putting up a show of being "opposites" for the rest of the world?

I'm not the person you spoke to but I can answer this question from my own perspective:

I'm Chinese, grew up in the UK, but I do consider moving back to China as a long-term option that I'll have to think seriously about. The main barrier for me is language & culture, my Chinese skills are awful; for other similar people I'd expect finances too but luckily that's not the case for me.

My parents came to the UK from China to study because they wanted a better life. That was in the 90s where China was admittedly a bit of a shithole, relative to other countries including the UK. My dad went back to China after a few years of working, because he felt he'd do better in a country where he understood the culture better. My mum stayed in the UK because she really really dislikes the Chinese government (for historical reasons). These days they occasionally mention that some of their classmates, that stayed in China, are doing better than them. My mum is quite stubborn though so she doesn't consider moving back as an option.

My cousin visited the UK a few years ago and told me "oh is that all it is" - there's still a cultural impression that western countries are really great, so he thought it'd be way more impressive (he only visited Aberdeen and Manchester, never London, but still London is not that much better), and that's why rich parents still send their kids to school in the west; similarly there's still a cultural impression from western countries that China is a bit of a shithole & authoritarian to boot - but reality has changed a lot in the past 30 years.

I do not believe there is any systematic suppression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang (where they are a majority), this is not consistent with Chinese history. As far as I can make out, a very small minority of people are being held for anti-extremism purposes; but generally the Uighur population and culture are thriving in Xinjiang - there are lots of primary sources on this, search "life in xinjiang" on youtube for example.

The media is certainly currently waging a disinformation war against China, blowing the reality up into "genocide", "cultural suppression", "sterilisation", etc - this is all inconsistent with the masses of primary sources, and the cheap propaganda tactics are disgusting and shameful. The few concrete individual reports that we do have, many of them have also been debunked or are obviously inconsistent (e.g. changing stories multiple times).

The camps may not be great compared to regular life in a first-world country, but compared to what the US did in the middle east - killing 100ks-millions of muslims - Xinjiang is probably the best result that a country has achieved in the world (so far) in fighting terrorism, and that's why most muslim-majority countries in fact support China on this issue. Of course, everyone can strive to do better, but that's not how western media is portraying it.

This methodology is biased towards a western perspective on how democracies "must" be run. Taken literally, a democracy is a direct democracy, but no country today is a direct democracy because everybody recognises that it has flaws. So every democratic system tries to make a balance.

Yes, China fixes a 1-party state, but how does that differ from fixing e.g. the judicial branch in the US system which also cannot be elected?

The minorities angle is just weird and shows you have no understanding about China - minorities generally have preferential policies in many aspects of law, e.g. the One-Child policy (now Two-Child policy). That's more than you can say for the US.

China's censorship system is not that sophisticated it's just large scale. The purpose is more to ensure large-scale stability, and they don't care about small-scale private conversations between individuals. The US is currently grappling difficult questions about how to moderate fake news, large corporations are stuck in a difficult place - on one hand they are accused of promoting fake news, on the other hand they are accused of suppressing free speech. So just because China took a strong stance on this, does not mean they are "evil" for doing so.

Again, you need to have some cultural background of China before judging it, rather than judging it based on western preconceptions of how a democracy "must" work like.

Haters gonna hate, I predict a TSLA.

From the slew of negative nitpicky comments here, it seems that Hacker News has been taken over by MBA and not technical types. Yes the nerds you looked down on in high school are doing way better than you, no hard feelings. :)

I agree with the article, but there's also a much simpler answer. To be successful in a world-changing sense, you have to actually care about making a good product. People get MBAs to make personal money, not to make world-changing products. People in these leadership roles got into software because they were interested in making cool products. Nowadays we see some people getting into software primarily to make some personal money - they won't succeed either, not in this world-changing leadership sense.