It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
Yes, this is all true and really important, regardless of what you think about China re: AI policy.
I think a missing mood in a lot of discourse is that the US has historically been an imperfect standard bearer for these principles, and today is straying further from them in alarming ways. But that doesn’t make it less important that the CCP explicitly rejects them. Conversely, there are some things the CCP can be admired for in terms of state capacity and effectiveness. “Communism with Chinese characteristics” is actually pretty good in some ways; they just need to drop the “communism” part! This is of course extremely unlikely / unrealistic, but if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around, the whole world would be better off...
Yes, this is all true and really important, regardless of what you think about China re: AI policy.
I think a missing mood in a lot of discourse is that the US has historically been an imperfect standard bearer for these principles, and today is straying further from them in alarming ways. But that doesn’t make it less important that the CCP explicitly rejects them. Conversely, there are some things the CCP can be admired for in terms of state capacity and effectiveness. “Communism with Chinese characteristics” is actually pretty good in some ways; they just need to drop the “communism” part! This is of course extremely unlikely / unrealistic, but if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around, the whole world would be better off...
as the author says
glancing at the details of how this works, one could stipulate they’re already one third of the way to George