Your comment has made me think rather hard on the nature of China and America. The two countries definitely have different political philosophies. On the question of how to avoid dictatorship, you could say that the American system relies on representation of the individual via the vote, whereas the Chinese system relies on representation of the masses via the party. If an American leader becomes an unpopular dictator, American individuals will vote them out; if a Chinese leader becomes an unpopular dictator, the Chinese masses will force the party back on track.
Even before these modern political philosophies, the old world recognized that popular discontent could be justified. That’s the other side of the mandate of heaven: when a ruler is oppressive, the mandate is withdrawn, and revolt is justified. Power in the world of monarchs and emperors was not just about who’s the better killer; there was a moral dimension, just as democratic elections are not just a matter of who has the most donors and the best public relations.
Returning to the present and going into more detail, America is, let’s say, a constitutional democratic republic in which a party system emerged. There’s a tension between the democratic aspect (will of the people) and the republican aspect (rights of the individual), which crystallized into an opposition found in the very names of the two main parties; though in the Obama-Trump era, the ideologies of the two parties evolved to transnational progressivism and populist nationalism.
These two ideologies had a different attitude to the unipolar world-system that America acquired, first by inheriting the oceans from the British empire, and then by outlasting the Russian communist alternative to liberal democracy, in the ideological Cold War. For about two decades, the world system was one of negotiated capitalist trade among sovereign nations, with America as the “world police” and also a promoter of universal democracy. In the 2010s, this broke down as progressivism took over American institutions, including its external relations, and world regions outside the West increasingly asserted their independence of American values. The appearance of populist nationalism inside America makes sense as a reaction to this situation, and in the 2020s we’re seeing how that ideology acts within the world system: America is conceived as the strongest great power, acting primarily in the national interest, with a nature and a heritage that it will not try to universalize.
So that’s our world now. Europe and its offshoots conquered the world, but imperialism was replaced by nationalism, and we got the United Nations world of several great powers and several hundred nations. America is the strongest, but the other great powers are now following their own values, and the strongest among the others is China. America is a young offspring of Europe on a separate continent, modern China is the latest iteration of civilization on its ancient territory. The American political philosophy is an evolution of some ancient European ideas; the Chinese political philosophy is an indigenous adaptation of an anti-systemic philosophy from modern Europe.
One thing about Chinese Marxism that is different from the old Russian Marxism, is that it is more “voluntarist”. Mao regarded Russian Marxism as too mechanical in its understanding of history; according to Mao, the will of the people and the choices of their political leadership can make a difference to events. I see an echo of this in the way that every new secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has to bring some new contribution to Marxist thought, most recently “Xi Jinping Thought”. The party leader also has to be the foremost “thought leader” in Chinese Marxism, or they must at least lend their name to the ideological state of the art (Wang Huning is widely regarded as the main Chinese ideologist of the present). This helps me to understand the relationship between the party and the state institutions. The institutions manage society and have concrete responsibilities, while the party determines and enforces the politically correct philosophy (analogous to the role that some now assign to the Ivy League universities in America).
I’ve written all this to explain in greater detail, the thinking which I believe actually governs China. To just call China an oppressive dictatorship, is to miss the actual logic of its politics. There are certainly challenges to its ideology. For example, the communist ideology was originally meant to ensure that the country was governed in the interest of the worker and peasant classes. But with the tolerance of private enterprise, more and more people become the kind of calculating individual agent you have under capitalism, and arguably representative democracy is more suited to such a society.
One political scientist argues that ardor for revolutionary values died with Mao, leaving a void which is filled partly by traditional values and partly by liberal values. Perhaps it’s analogous to how America’s current parties and their ideologies are competing for control of a system that (at least since FDR) was built around liberal values; except that in China, instead of separate parties, you have factions within the CCP. In any case, China hasn’t tilted to Falun Gong traditionalism or State Department democratization, instead Xi Jinping Thought has reasserted the centrality of the party to Chinese stability and progress.
Again, I’m writing this so we can have a slightly more concrete discussion of China. There’s also a bunch of minor details in your account that I believe are wrong. For example, “Nationalist China” (the political order on the Chinese mainland, between the last dynasty and the communist victory) did not have regular elections as far as I know. They got a parliament together at the very beginning, and then that parliament remained unchanged until they retreated to Taiwan (they were busy with famines, warlordism, and the Japanese invasion); and then Taiwan remained a miitary-run regime for forty years. The Uighurs are far from being the only significant ethnic group apart from the Han, there are several others of the same size. Zhang Yiming and Rubo Liang are executives from Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok (consider the relationship between Google/Alphabet and YouTube); I think Zhang is the richest man in China, incidentally.
I could also do more to explain Chinese actions that westerners find objectionable, or dig up the “necessary evils” that the West itself carries out. But then we’d be here all day. I think I do agree that American society is politically friendlier to the individual than Chinese society; and also that American culture, in its vast complexity, contains many many valuable things (among which I would count, not just notions like rule of law, human rights, and various forms of respect for human subjectivity, but also the very existence of futurist and transhumanist subcultures; they may not be part of the mainstream, but it’s significant that they get to exist at all).
But I wanted to emphasize that China is not just some arbitrary tyranny. It has its freedoms, it has its own checks and balances, it has its own geopolitical coalitions (e.g. BRICS) united by a desire to flourish without American dependence or intervention. It’s not a hermit kingdom that tunes out the world (witness, for example, the frequency with which very western-sounding attitudes emerge from their AIs, because of the training data that they have used). If superintelligence does first emerge within China’s political and cultural matrix, it has a chance of being human-friendly; it will just have arrived at that attractor from a different starting point, compared to the West.
Your comment has made me think rather hard on the nature of China and America. The two countries definitely have different political philosophies. On the question of how to avoid dictatorship, you could say that the American system relies on representation of the individual via the vote, whereas the Chinese system relies on representation of the masses via the party. If an American leader becomes an unpopular dictator, American individuals will vote them out; if a Chinese leader becomes an unpopular dictator, the Chinese masses will force the party back on track.
Even before these modern political philosophies, the old world recognized that popular discontent could be justified. That’s the other side of the mandate of heaven: when a ruler is oppressive, the mandate is withdrawn, and revolt is justified. Power in the world of monarchs and emperors was not just about who’s the better killer; there was a moral dimension, just as democratic elections are not just a matter of who has the most donors and the best public relations.
Returning to the present and going into more detail, America is, let’s say, a constitutional democratic republic in which a party system emerged. There’s a tension between the democratic aspect (will of the people) and the republican aspect (rights of the individual), which crystallized into an opposition found in the very names of the two main parties; though in the Obama-Trump era, the ideologies of the two parties evolved to transnational progressivism and populist nationalism.
These two ideologies had a different attitude to the unipolar world-system that America acquired, first by inheriting the oceans from the British empire, and then by outlasting the Russian communist alternative to liberal democracy, in the ideological Cold War. For about two decades, the world system was one of negotiated capitalist trade among sovereign nations, with America as the “world police” and also a promoter of universal democracy. In the 2010s, this broke down as progressivism took over American institutions, including its external relations, and world regions outside the West increasingly asserted their independence of American values. The appearance of populist nationalism inside America makes sense as a reaction to this situation, and in the 2020s we’re seeing how that ideology acts within the world system: America is conceived as the strongest great power, acting primarily in the national interest, with a nature and a heritage that it will not try to universalize.
So that’s our world now. Europe and its offshoots conquered the world, but imperialism was replaced by nationalism, and we got the United Nations world of several great powers and several hundred nations. America is the strongest, but the other great powers are now following their own values, and the strongest among the others is China. America is a young offspring of Europe on a separate continent, modern China is the latest iteration of civilization on its ancient territory. The American political philosophy is an evolution of some ancient European ideas; the Chinese political philosophy is an indigenous adaptation of an anti-systemic philosophy from modern Europe.
One thing about Chinese Marxism that is different from the old Russian Marxism, is that it is more “voluntarist”. Mao regarded Russian Marxism as too mechanical in its understanding of history; according to Mao, the will of the people and the choices of their political leadership can make a difference to events. I see an echo of this in the way that every new secretary of the Chinese Communist Party has to bring some new contribution to Marxist thought, most recently “Xi Jinping Thought”. The party leader also has to be the foremost “thought leader” in Chinese Marxism, or they must at least lend their name to the ideological state of the art (Wang Huning is widely regarded as the main Chinese ideologist of the present). This helps me to understand the relationship between the party and the state institutions. The institutions manage society and have concrete responsibilities, while the party determines and enforces the politically correct philosophy (analogous to the role that some now assign to the Ivy League universities in America).
I’ve written all this to explain in greater detail, the thinking which I believe actually governs China. To just call China an oppressive dictatorship, is to miss the actual logic of its politics. There are certainly challenges to its ideology. For example, the communist ideology was originally meant to ensure that the country was governed in the interest of the worker and peasant classes. But with the tolerance of private enterprise, more and more people become the kind of calculating individual agent you have under capitalism, and arguably representative democracy is more suited to such a society.
One political scientist argues that ardor for revolutionary values died with Mao, leaving a void which is filled partly by traditional values and partly by liberal values. Perhaps it’s analogous to how America’s current parties and their ideologies are competing for control of a system that (at least since FDR) was built around liberal values; except that in China, instead of separate parties, you have factions within the CCP. In any case, China hasn’t tilted to Falun Gong traditionalism or State Department democratization, instead Xi Jinping Thought has reasserted the centrality of the party to Chinese stability and progress.
Again, I’m writing this so we can have a slightly more concrete discussion of China. There’s also a bunch of minor details in your account that I believe are wrong. For example, “Nationalist China” (the political order on the Chinese mainland, between the last dynasty and the communist victory) did not have regular elections as far as I know. They got a parliament together at the very beginning, and then that parliament remained unchanged until they retreated to Taiwan (they were busy with famines, warlordism, and the Japanese invasion); and then Taiwan remained a miitary-run regime for forty years. The Uighurs are far from being the only significant ethnic group apart from the Han, there are several others of the same size. Zhang Yiming and Rubo Liang are executives from Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok (consider the relationship between Google/Alphabet and YouTube); I think Zhang is the richest man in China, incidentally.
I could also do more to explain Chinese actions that westerners find objectionable, or dig up the “necessary evils” that the West itself carries out. But then we’d be here all day. I think I do agree that American society is politically friendlier to the individual than Chinese society; and also that American culture, in its vast complexity, contains many many valuable things (among which I would count, not just notions like rule of law, human rights, and various forms of respect for human subjectivity, but also the very existence of futurist and transhumanist subcultures; they may not be part of the mainstream, but it’s significant that they get to exist at all).
But I wanted to emphasize that China is not just some arbitrary tyranny. It has its freedoms, it has its own checks and balances, it has its own geopolitical coalitions (e.g. BRICS) united by a desire to flourish without American dependence or intervention. It’s not a hermit kingdom that tunes out the world (witness, for example, the frequency with which very western-sounding attitudes emerge from their AIs, because of the training data that they have used). If superintelligence does first emerge within China’s political and cultural matrix, it has a chance of being human-friendly; it will just have arrived at that attractor from a different starting point, compared to the West.