The real question is whether your picture of ordinary Chinese life is accurate. And IMO it mostly isn't. This is not North Korea. Mainland residents made 291 million exit/entry trips in 2024 alone. There was a survey that found many respondents were willing to complain to the government or even protest over concrete issues like pollution, which is not how people behave if society is defined mainly by universal terror. So the better description is that China has hard political red lines, but normal daily life for most people is not "stay silent or vanish".

> They've disappeared countless heads of companies or organizations and prominent individuals as well (#WhereIsPengShuai).

The Peng Shuai case became a major Western media story, yet the controversy lasted only a few weeks before the international attention faded. Meanwhile, the WTA eventually backed down from its boycott threats. This illustrates how these incidents are often weaponized for geopolitical narratives rather than representing systematic policy.

More broadly, every country has mechanisms to deal with corruption, fraud, and abuse. China's anti corruption campaign has prosecuted hundreds of thousands of officials. The difference is that in China, accountability flows through Party mechanisms rather than Western style independent judiciaries.

> It was not that long ago that hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in Tianenmen Square (which is wiped from the record in China of course).

That was over 35 years ago in 1989, so longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Berlin Wall. You're basicallt judging present day Germany by conditions in 1945. China's government, economy, and society have transformed fundamentally since then.

> I don't think that really negates my point about Chinese citizens needing to stay in line for fear they will also be disappeared or worse.

The assumption that 1.4 billion people live in constant terror is simply not consistent with what we observe. If the level of fear you describe were accurate, would we not expect to see mass emigration rather than the world's largest annual outbound tourism? Would we not see economic collapse? The voluntary return of over 100 million Chinese travelers annually many of whom have the means to stay abroad tells you something significant about where people actually want to live.

Predictions that Chinese society is one downturn away from revolt have been made for decades, and they have repeatedly been wrong.

An authoritarian system can be repressive and still enjoy genuine mass support. In China's case, the evidence strongly suggests that both things are true at once.

The CCP's legitimacy rests not merely on performance but on a coherent worldview that China's developmental challenges require a unified national direction rather than gridlocked partisan competition. For a country that experienced a century of humiliation, civil war, and famine, stability is existential.

You wrote that quality of life improvements "don't really negate" your fear based argument. But I'd ask: at what point does aggregate human welfare matter more than ideological purity? If a governance system has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty while maintaining social order and national dignity, on what grounds do outsiders declare it illegitimate?

The Chinese people are not waiting for Western validation. They're building a civilization according to their own traditions and values.

Around 100 million Chinese people travel abroad every year, and they all return to their country of their own free will. Go to China and see it for yourself. Talk with people, you would be surprised. Go to Shanghai and visit the provinces. This is not North Korea, you can talk with people normally. The majority of them will tell you that they are happy with how much their lives have improved over the last five decades. Every five years during those decades, life got better and better for most of them. And if you read about their history, you will see that this is their natural state. China has a long history of centralized, bureaucratic governance (more than 2,000 years since the Qin Dynasty) in which stability and order are prioritized over political pluralism.

How many Sacklers are in jail for what they did to people? None. Purdue pleaded guilty, but no Sackler family member went to jail. The settlement totals about $7.4 billion, with roughly $6.5–$7 billion coming from the Sacklers and about $900 million from Purdue. Earlier estimates put the family's wealth around $11 billion, so they remain enormously wealthy. Hundreds of thousands have died in the opioid crisis, ruined families got no real justice, and no Sackler went to prison... great punishment.

> A heavily bureaucratic system of bureaucrats incentivized to spend massively to boost their own appearance, and cover up losses/inefficiencies.

In China, if you want to move up politically, you generally need to show results, meaning the province or area you govern is expected to deliver measurable performance (even if politics and connections still matter too). In that sense, you could argue it's more performance driven in some respects than the US.

EVs and solar were clear priorities, and China has been very successful at scaling both and driving costs down. Domestic competition has been so intense (especially in EVs) that margins have gotten extremely thin, and officials have recently signaled they want to curb "irrational" price wars.

> Ghost cities

Sure, some exist, but many of the developments that were circulated online years ago have filled in over time. That said, there's no question a lot of projects stalled or collapsed during the property downturn, especially after China Evergrande and other developers ran into trouble.

> empty high speed rail lines,

I can't speak to every route, but overall the high speed rail network is heavily used. When I traveled in China, it was excellent and extremely extensive. Some lines and stations likely see weaker demand than others, but the idea that it's broadly "empty" doesn't match reality.

> solar cells being mass produced at a loss

With overcapacity and price wars, many firms have faced serious margin pressure and losses though that doesn't mean every producer is losing money on every panel.

In the end, the real question is whether the capital allocation is efficient enough for citizens to benefit and for the country to remain competitive. Empirically, the answer looks closer to yes in industry and infrastructure, while real estate has been a major exception, with real costs and inefficiencies.

If that's how it worked, they wouldn't lead in anything, they'd be bankrupt already. They burn state money like VCs burn cash. DeepSeek, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc., disprove your point.

But soon they could, that's the problem.

> Considering China is ok to supply Russia, I don't see how your second point has any standing either.

Supply? China supplies Ukraine too. Ukraine's drone sector runs heavily on Chinese supply chains. And if China really wanted to supply Russia, the war would likely be over by now, Russia would have taken all of Ukraine.

Relevant article from two days ago https://www.latent.space/p/adversarial-reasoning

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46975471

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Can you name a few? Demis Hassabis (Deepmind CEO) in his recent interview claims that LLMs will not get us to AGI, Ilya Sutskever also says there is something fundamental missing, same with LeCunn obviously etc.

And it's not just food. Europe is a major producer and exporter of fertilizers. If European industrial and agricultural output collapses, the ripple effects hit global food supply chains hard. Countries that depend on those imports will face famine.

Then there's the knock-on, hundreds of millions of people in food-insecure regions losing a key supply source, simultaneous disruption to Atlantic weather patterns affecting rainfall in West Africa and the Amazon, potential shifts in monsoon systems affecting South and East Asia. It's a cascading global food security crisis.

> lots of time to adjust

This assumes a gradual slowdown, but paleoclimate evidence suggests AMOC transitions can happen within a decade or even less. The idea that we'd just smoothly adapt to one of the most dramatic climate shifts in human civilization is not supported by what we know about how these systems behave.

How many agents did they use with previous Opus? 3?

You've chosen an argument that works against you, because they actually could do that if they were trained to.

Give them the same post-training (recipes/steering) and the same datasets, and voila, they'll be capable of the same thing. What do you think is happening there? Did Anthropic inject magic ponies?