No, that says nothing about how we'll run a country is. China imported a lot of ideas and technology which enables progress without competence. You can compare median per capita earnings after modernization to get an idea of competence but so far China has taken much longer to modernize than for example Japan or South Korea suggesting huge issues even if the GDP numbers are not quite terrible. Further, they where starting from huge self inflicted wounds due to massive incompetence, a 30% drop in output, and corruption leading to millions of deaths from starvation.

Yes, they are starting from huge self-inflicted wounds, which you accurately quantify. My own personal view is that China is not fixable. I don't think it has a bright future. It's Japan with less education, less innovation, and a bigger biological time bomb. That doesn't change the fact that I respect the heck out of its modern day government post-Deng Xiaoping. They were dealt a horrible hand, and they are staying in the game longer than I thought possible.

That's astonishing. You think so little of your fellow countrymen that you don't trust them to receive information from sources other than the government?

Look at other countries that have introduced freedom of speech laws. I cannot recall countries being destroyed by such unproductive frenzies, but I do remember corrupt politicians being forced out of power, and people standing up for the rights of individuals, etc.

Now the press is as vital as ever – Trump's favourability ratings are at historic lows, and there are countless stories about the disarray in the White House. That's good (from my perspective). None of that would be possible in China, as there's no press to hold leaders to account.

In the US, the populist Trump is trying to get the same effect with the "the press is all lies, trust only what I say" rhetoric.

The antidote to lies is education, and it's not in the interest of an authoritarian regime to educate its population to the point where they can question the state's propaganda. So the only way out to freedom seems to be to start with independent (even if illegal) press.

He clearly said that he was Canadian.

I'm American, and my countrymen just elected someone who's clearly incompetent to the highest office in the land (and in the primary elections before, the other party chose someone who's clearly corrupt as the opposition candidate). I don't really trust my countrymen either.

>Look at other countries that have introduced freedom of speech laws. I cannot recall countries being destroyed by such unproductive frenzies, but I do remember corrupt politicians being forced out of power, and people standing up for the rights of individuals, etc.

Have you forgotten the Arab Spring? That wasn't really from free speech laws per se, but it was fueled by social media which acts the same. A bunch of dictators were forced out of power or killed, and then the people proceeded to elect Islamic extremists to power, as in Egypt where they elected the Muslim Brotherhood, who then proceeded to oppress minorities. Libya is a complete mess now, and Syria has been going through a brutal civil war for over 5 years now. Those countries were better off under their previous dictatorships. I think all evidence points to democratic systems and freedom of press and information being a very bad thing in places where the populace is uneducated and incapable of electing decent leaders. It isn't even working very well in America. It works great in places like Norway and Switzerland though, places where the populace is highly educated.

No, it was fuelled by decades of oppression by leaders propped up by Western powers, most especially the oppression of Islamic elements that had nevertheless enjoyed widespread public support.

To ascribe that failure to "freedom of speech" is, it seems, a gross violation of reality.

Well, yes, we do.

I also can't imagine how Chinese people could ever know those without a free press. They can at most gather some anecdotes about them and their family, such anecdotes are almost guaranteed to be highly correlated and thus useless for knowing any overall trend.

That said, are you suggesting that highly-correlated, anecdotal evidence of having more wealth, better quality social services, and not currently suffering in a retrogressive cultural revolution can't be trusted because there is no free press to tell people that their quality of living is definitely trending upwards?

0: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/26...

The US government can not lie too much about the US wealth. Somebody would immediately call the lie, and people would become mad. Even here at Brazil, that scales way lower on press freedom, the government can not lie about any objective measure of wealth (but has extensive lies about subjective ones). The Chinese government seems to lie about their numbers every single time - everybody just discounts them by now, but there is no reason to assume the official numbers have even the correct signal.

And yes, I'm saying exactly that. People there have no way of knowing if for anybody they see progressing in life there isn't a dozen other having their life ruined, because those later dozen are invisible.

If you want to make claims, you better have evidence to back it up. Because what people experience in China is a significant increase of quality of life at all levels. Yes, the income inequality is huge. Yes, a huge amount of wealth is generated by capitalists on the backs of factory workers. That doesn't mean that the poor are worse off than they were before. Lifting tide truly lifts all boats in China. Yes, there are significant suspicions that China lies about its numbers. That doesn't change the seeing eye test that people in China are way better off than they were 10 years ago. I know a girl who moved to Shenzhen at 16 years old to join a factory. She's approaching 30 now, just finished her university degree, and has a career in advertising. She started out as an uneducated country girl. Her story is common. Those who never make it out of the factory? Fact of the matter is, their quality of life is still better than if they did something else. The book Factory Girls by Leslie Chang is an incredibly insightful look into the lives of these people.

An incompetent government turns its potential into garbage. See Argentina, Brazil, India, and others. Each of those countries could be so much farther than they are, but they shot themselves in the foot due to corruption, poor economic planning, and poor infrastructure planning. China started at the same starting line as many of them. I remember attending the Asia Pacific AmCham thingy in Beijing in 2010. The big story was how India was the future poised for becoming the big story. Here we are seven years later with India still treading water in the same place it was before due to political deadlock and corruption.

But as the saying goes, a big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.

As such, it's possible to verify whether or not things are working. Whether or not things will last, that's a completely different story that's yet to be told. I'll admit my own prediction is that China's problems are too big for any human institution to solve, it will likely implode. But that's neither here nor there regarding this topic if we're comparing past to present, given the complexity of their problems.

That same system of government killed more than 30 million people during the Chinese famine.

How do you know? Honest question. Who's done and published those statistics?

So was in USSR, and how it fared, you know.