It all comes down to corruption. In the west we are accustomed to thinking we are much less corrupt, but that is proving not to be less and less true every day.
Corruption is loyalty to a man over a mission. All systems that have good outcomes are when the man that people are loyal to (because he can punish dissent and reward loyalty, such as with wages) chooses a mission over their own self interest and enforce subordination to a mission over themselves.
China is a country that is capable of punishing their richest citizens, while the US and most of the west are not. China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula. Here in the US, our "law" let the Sackler Family promote addiction and then gave them a slap on the wrist while letting them use the "law" to reduce/avoid consequences.
China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.
Rule of law was thought to be a system where all citizens, including the rich, are protected from the government by due process, but rule of law is when the rich and powerful have limits on their arbitrary executions of power. Law exists to protect the weak from the powerful, law exists to bind power. In the west the rich have co-opted law as their tool.
> crippled by rules of their own making.
No, not our own making. The making of our richest. The rules in the west exist to solidify and cement the power of our richest and they use their money to pay for power consolidation giving them increasingly more power to compromise our laws for their interest.
China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
> lack of bureaucracy
Who do you think is doing these things? Literally their bureaucracy. It requires people to organize and do those things. Bridges and tunnels don't get built without planning, funding, and execution, which is exactly what bureaucracies do.
The rich people in the west have been so effective at compromising institutions of power that "bureaucracy" is synonymous with "inefficiency." Their bureaucrats are trusted with the power to make things happen, while our elected officials bind their behavior and set them up for failure in order to justify privatizing their functions.
Not quite. You either don't realize or are overlooking how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation. But the US under Trump is quickly heading down the road to where I can see it being worse than China in that respect.
> China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
I can't disagree with your criticism of the West, but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
> China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula.
That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017. Bo Xilai is a prime example.
But back to the original topic of public transportation: That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
some of them do; the well educated ones don't.
> propaganda can be true
except that it's not
I lived in China for years and am pretty well versed in life there under Xi and how the "rule of law" actually works there.
> unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age
I left China in 2017 so it's _possible_ that things have dramatically changed since then, but from all accounts it hasn't. So it's not ironic because everything still runs on guanxi rather than on the rule of law.
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."