Commonalities I see. (Reflecting both how the US is now, and how I could see it evolving on its current path.):
Mass surveillance with access to careers and positions of power dependent on living and thinking according to the party line. Wrongthink on social media results in real world consequence. (See political criticism in general in China, the reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk in the US.)
Mass tracking of citizens. Every movement of every citizen is tracked and recorded 24/7. Every action they take with a computer of any kind is recorded. Every corner of every city is monitoring 24/7 by camera networks and surveillance drones. All these records are constantly trawled by AI for patterns of dissent. The invasive surveillance state the Uyghurs are subject to is the future our leaders want for all of us.)
Heavy police intervention in everyday life. (Checkpoints and showing your papers is the norm. Heavy integration between national and local law enforcement. Local law enforcement co-opted for political enforcement. Compare how China requires visiting foreigners to regularly check in at local police stations to the American ICE.)
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
Massive military spending for a military used to project power beyond national borders. (US more like Iraq or Iran wars. China more getting into wars you could call either revanchist or expansionist depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Think Taiwan or some of China’s land border disputes. Though admittedly the US is currently the far more interventionist of the two. But at the very least, both still maintain massive military-industrial complexes as major pieces of their national economies. China either has or will soon have the world’s largest navy. They currently want to use it to take Taiwan, but when you build a tool like that, an expeditionary Navy has all sorts of uses as a tool of national policy. Once you’re paying for the world’s largest Navy, the leadership of that Navy will constantly be pitching uses for it. No Navy admiral wants to see the size of the Navy cut. It will always be tempting to deal with a meddlesome trade dispute by dropping some bombs on people far away.)
Leadership chosen by performative but ultimately rigged and pointless elections.
One party political control. (Communist Party, Republican Party.)
The top leader is surrounded by a cult of personality. (Not sure to what extent Xi has done this. My impression is a lot less than Mao, but a lot more than other recent Chinese leaders. The Trump personality cult is more obvious. But at the least, both countries now have a clear precedent of the top leaders using cults of personality to maintain power.)
Nonexistent or co-opted labor unions
Birth rates maintained through state coercion. (I am not aware of any punitive measures implemented by China to raise birth rates. In the US, this looks like banning abortion and birth control. I think China is currently taking the carrot rather than the stick approach, but China has a clear precedent of using overwhelming state power to forcibly control the birth rate. See the One Child Policy. If they could justify that to lower the birth rate, coercive methods to raise the birth rate are also likely. Maybe tie access to careers to having children.)
Lead by a group of leaders seeking to cement permanent control through mass automation and artificial intelligence.
Close personal connections between the corporate and government leadership class. Through the Chinese lens, it looks like party members owning the big companies. Through the American lens, it looks like billionaire presidents and cabinet secretaries. The Venn diagram of the corporate leadership class and the government leadership class is a circle.
The US and China really seem to be converging to the same form of government. I suppose as both countries are heavily influenced by a class of billionaires with more loyalty to each other than to their respective nations, this shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s a reason Trump cozies up to dictators. These people are all copying each other’s homework.
On paper, China will remain nominally Communist and the US nominally capitalist. But both are converging towards what is probably better called techno-fascism.
I felt it could be helpful for others if I provided a more in depth response.
China certainly has political limits, but criticism and complaints are not remotely absent from the system. Local Party and government offices, petitioning channels, public consultations, and the 12345 hotline exist entirely to receive complaints about officials, services, and governance. That is very different from the fantasy that ordinary criticism automatically destroys your career.
China does have surveillance (as every modern state does), but the idea that every citizen’s movement and every computer action are constantly recorded and AI-scanned for dissent are complete fantasy. Xinjiang did experience much heavier security measures, but that policy arose after a real period of (US backed) terrorism and jihadist recruitment. On that note, compared with the Western response to terrorism, which involved invading, bombing, occupying, and destabilizing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, China’s emphasis on domestic security, education, policing and deradicalization was hardly monstrous.
Foreign visitors are also not required to repeatedly report to police stations. Their accommodation has to be registered, generally once at each place they stay, and hotels normally do it automatically. Nor is coordination between national and local police somehow inherently sinister. A coherent national legal system is preferable to fragmented local authorities acting as semi-independent fiefdoms.
The economic comparison is plainly ridiculous as it completely ignores class character. Both China and the US contain markets, corporations and state intervention because those are forms that can exist under very different systems. The real questions are who controls finance and strategic industry, whether private capital commands the state or is subordinate to it, where investment is directed, and what the system actually produces.
China directs credit and investment through planning, retains public control over strategic industries, and regularly disciplines private capital when it conflicts with public priorities. Billionaires exist because private property exists, but they do not exercise anything like the structural political power American billionaires do. In the US, capital openly dominates through ownership, lobbying, campaign finance, media power and the revolving door between business and government.
The military comparison is especially unserious because it compares America’s documented history with speculation about what China might someday do. The US has actually invaded, bombed, occupied, sanctioned and destabilized countries across the world. The China side of the argument is basically that China has a large navy, might fight over Taiwan, and therefore perhaps one day its admirals will invent overseas wars. One side is historical fact while the other is fan fiction.
It also ignores why China has expanded its military. China is surrounded by an American military architecture running through Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and the wider first island chain, while the United States spends vastly more on its military and maintains hundreds of overseas bases. Chinese military modernization does not occur in a vacuum.
Calling Chinese elections “performative and meaningless” is something only someone who knows nothing could say. That description does however fit the United States, where elections are enormous media spectacles financed by billionaires, corporations, PACs and lobbying networks, while vast amounts of real political and economic power remain in the hands of unelected owners of capital. Chinese elections are deliberately far less theatrical. Candidates are not expected to raise fortunes, buy national advertising campaigns or turn politics into celebrity competition. Deputies at the county and township levels are directly elected, with higher people’s congresses elected through the congress system, and these bodies form part of the actual machinery of state power.
China is also not literally a one-party state in the sense implied here. The CPC holds the leading role, but eight other recognized political parties participate through the united front and consultative system. They are not opposition parties competing to remove the CPC, but comparing that structure to the Republican Party controlling the United States is absurd.
The personality-cult comparison is similarly shallow. Xi has unquestionably overseen greater political centralization and has a much more prominent ideological role than some recent Chinese leaders. But Mao-era mass politics, Xi’s position within a Leninist party-state, and Trump’s highly personalized electoral movement are very different phenomena. Calling all three a personality cult obscures more than it explains.
Chinese unions are not nonexistent. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has hundreds of millions of members and operates throughout Chinese workplaces. There are valid criticisms about bureaucratism, insufficient worker initiative, and how effectively particular unions confront management, but that is very different from saying labor organization has been abolished or reduced to nothing.
The birth-rate claim is almost entirely speculation. China’s present policy is based overwhelmingly on subsidies, childcare support, tax relief and reducing the cost of raising children. The One Child Policy can and should be criticized for coercive implementation in earlier decades (even still said criticism must be situated in the context of the material reality of the time famine, underdevelopment etc.), but saying that because China once restricted fertility it will probably someday force women to have children is not evidence but once again more fan fiction.
The same applies to AI. China and the US invest heavily in artificial intelligence because it matters for industry, science, logistics, medicine, military capability and productivity. Claiming that both leaderships are secretly building AI in order to establish permanent political control is simply mind-reading unless evidence is provided.
The idea that the Chinese corporate and political leadership classes are basically identical is also false. Party membership among businesspeople does not mean that private companies somehow own the Party. The relevant issue is political supremacy. In the US, wealthy capitalists possess enormous independent power through ownership of production, finance, media and political funding. In China, private capital exists inside a system where strategic assets remain publicly controlled and where the state can regulate, discipline and redirect capital according to national priorities.
That is the central error throughout the whole argument. It sees police, cameras, corporations, markets, political parties, warships, leaders and AI in both countries and concludes that the systems must be converging. By that method almost every modern industrial state is the same.
A serious comparison has to examine property relations, class power, ownership, planning, political institutions, historical development, foreign policy and actual social outcomes. This argument largely avoids all of that.
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
What? Exactly which industries is the US in the business of nationalizing??
Commonalities I see. (Reflecting both how the US is now, and how I could see it evolving on its current path.):
Mass surveillance with access to careers and positions of power dependent on living and thinking according to the party line. Wrongthink on social media results in real world consequence. (See political criticism in general in China, the reactions to the killing of Charlie Kirk in the US.)
Mass tracking of citizens. Every movement of every citizen is tracked and recorded 24/7. Every action they take with a computer of any kind is recorded. Every corner of every city is monitoring 24/7 by camera networks and surveillance drones. All these records are constantly trawled by AI for patterns of dissent. The invasive surveillance state the Uyghurs are subject to is the future our leaders want for all of us.)
Heavy police intervention in everyday life. (Checkpoints and showing your papers is the norm. Heavy integration between national and local law enforcement. Local law enforcement co-opted for political enforcement. Compare how China requires visiting foreigners to regularly check in at local police stations to the American ICE.)
Economic system consisting of market economies with heavy state intervention in key national industries. (Both are taking outright ownership stakes in companies in certain key sectors.)
Massive military spending for a military used to project power beyond national borders. (US more like Iraq or Iran wars. China more getting into wars you could call either revanchist or expansionist depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Think Taiwan or some of China’s land border disputes. Though admittedly the US is currently the far more interventionist of the two. But at the very least, both still maintain massive military-industrial complexes as major pieces of their national economies. China either has or will soon have the world’s largest navy. They currently want to use it to take Taiwan, but when you build a tool like that, an expeditionary Navy has all sorts of uses as a tool of national policy. Once you’re paying for the world’s largest Navy, the leadership of that Navy will constantly be pitching uses for it. No Navy admiral wants to see the size of the Navy cut. It will always be tempting to deal with a meddlesome trade dispute by dropping some bombs on people far away.)
Leadership chosen by performative but ultimately rigged and pointless elections.
One party political control. (Communist Party, Republican Party.)
The top leader is surrounded by a cult of personality. (Not sure to what extent Xi has done this. My impression is a lot less than Mao, but a lot more than other recent Chinese leaders. The Trump personality cult is more obvious. But at the least, both countries now have a clear precedent of the top leaders using cults of personality to maintain power.)
Nonexistent or co-opted labor unions
Birth rates maintained through state coercion. (I am not aware of any punitive measures implemented by China to raise birth rates. In the US, this looks like banning abortion and birth control. I think China is currently taking the carrot rather than the stick approach, but China has a clear precedent of using overwhelming state power to forcibly control the birth rate. See the One Child Policy. If they could justify that to lower the birth rate, coercive methods to raise the birth rate are also likely. Maybe tie access to careers to having children.)
Lead by a group of leaders seeking to cement permanent control through mass automation and artificial intelligence.
Close personal connections between the corporate and government leadership class. Through the Chinese lens, it looks like party members owning the big companies. Through the American lens, it looks like billionaire presidents and cabinet secretaries. The Venn diagram of the corporate leadership class and the government leadership class is a circle.
The US and China really seem to be converging to the same form of government. I suppose as both countries are heavily influenced by a class of billionaires with more loyalty to each other than to their respective nations, this shouldn’t be a surprise. There’s a reason Trump cozies up to dictators. These people are all copying each other’s homework.
On paper, China will remain nominally Communist and the US nominally capitalist. But both are converging towards what is probably better called techno-fascism.
I felt it could be helpful for others if I provided a more in depth response.
China certainly has political limits, but criticism and complaints are not remotely absent from the system. Local Party and government offices, petitioning channels, public consultations, and the 12345 hotline exist entirely to receive complaints about officials, services, and governance. That is very different from the fantasy that ordinary criticism automatically destroys your career.
China does have surveillance (as every modern state does), but the idea that every citizen’s movement and every computer action are constantly recorded and AI-scanned for dissent are complete fantasy. Xinjiang did experience much heavier security measures, but that policy arose after a real period of (US backed) terrorism and jihadist recruitment. On that note, compared with the Western response to terrorism, which involved invading, bombing, occupying, and destabilizing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, China’s emphasis on domestic security, education, policing and deradicalization was hardly monstrous.
Foreign visitors are also not required to repeatedly report to police stations. Their accommodation has to be registered, generally once at each place they stay, and hotels normally do it automatically. Nor is coordination between national and local police somehow inherently sinister. A coherent national legal system is preferable to fragmented local authorities acting as semi-independent fiefdoms.
The economic comparison is plainly ridiculous as it completely ignores class character. Both China and the US contain markets, corporations and state intervention because those are forms that can exist under very different systems. The real questions are who controls finance and strategic industry, whether private capital commands the state or is subordinate to it, where investment is directed, and what the system actually produces.
China directs credit and investment through planning, retains public control over strategic industries, and regularly disciplines private capital when it conflicts with public priorities. Billionaires exist because private property exists, but they do not exercise anything like the structural political power American billionaires do. In the US, capital openly dominates through ownership, lobbying, campaign finance, media power and the revolving door between business and government.
The military comparison is especially unserious because it compares America’s documented history with speculation about what China might someday do. The US has actually invaded, bombed, occupied, sanctioned and destabilized countries across the world. The China side of the argument is basically that China has a large navy, might fight over Taiwan, and therefore perhaps one day its admirals will invent overseas wars. One side is historical fact while the other is fan fiction.
It also ignores why China has expanded its military. China is surrounded by an American military architecture running through Japan, South Korea, Guam, the Philippines and the wider first island chain, while the United States spends vastly more on its military and maintains hundreds of overseas bases. Chinese military modernization does not occur in a vacuum.
Calling Chinese elections “performative and meaningless” is something only someone who knows nothing could say. That description does however fit the United States, where elections are enormous media spectacles financed by billionaires, corporations, PACs and lobbying networks, while vast amounts of real political and economic power remain in the hands of unelected owners of capital. Chinese elections are deliberately far less theatrical. Candidates are not expected to raise fortunes, buy national advertising campaigns or turn politics into celebrity competition. Deputies at the county and township levels are directly elected, with higher people’s congresses elected through the congress system, and these bodies form part of the actual machinery of state power.
China is also not literally a one-party state in the sense implied here. The CPC holds the leading role, but eight other recognized political parties participate through the united front and consultative system. They are not opposition parties competing to remove the CPC, but comparing that structure to the Republican Party controlling the United States is absurd.
The personality-cult comparison is similarly shallow. Xi has unquestionably overseen greater political centralization and has a much more prominent ideological role than some recent Chinese leaders. But Mao-era mass politics, Xi’s position within a Leninist party-state, and Trump’s highly personalized electoral movement are very different phenomena. Calling all three a personality cult obscures more than it explains.
Chinese unions are not nonexistent. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has hundreds of millions of members and operates throughout Chinese workplaces. There are valid criticisms about bureaucratism, insufficient worker initiative, and how effectively particular unions confront management, but that is very different from saying labor organization has been abolished or reduced to nothing.
The birth-rate claim is almost entirely speculation. China’s present policy is based overwhelmingly on subsidies, childcare support, tax relief and reducing the cost of raising children. The One Child Policy can and should be criticized for coercive implementation in earlier decades (even still said criticism must be situated in the context of the material reality of the time famine, underdevelopment etc.), but saying that because China once restricted fertility it will probably someday force women to have children is not evidence but once again more fan fiction.
The same applies to AI. China and the US invest heavily in artificial intelligence because it matters for industry, science, logistics, medicine, military capability and productivity. Claiming that both leaderships are secretly building AI in order to establish permanent political control is simply mind-reading unless evidence is provided.
The idea that the Chinese corporate and political leadership classes are basically identical is also false. Party membership among businesspeople does not mean that private companies somehow own the Party. The relevant issue is political supremacy. In the US, wealthy capitalists possess enormous independent power through ownership of production, finance, media and political funding. In China, private capital exists inside a system where strategic assets remain publicly controlled and where the state can regulate, discipline and redirect capital according to national priorities.
That is the central error throughout the whole argument. It sees police, cameras, corporations, markets, political parties, warships, leaders and AI in both countries and concludes that the systems must be converging. By that method almost every modern industrial state is the same.
A serious comparison has to examine property relations, class power, ownership, planning, political institutions, historical development, foreign policy and actual social outcomes. This argument largely avoids all of that.
Thank you for your efforts here.
What? Exactly which industries is the US in the business of nationalizing??