Hi I agree with a lot of what you say and thank you for your insights. However, as someone who has seen and experienced authoritarianism in the West and never in China, I take exception to your comment on needing to address authoritarianism in China. We regularly see police brutality in the West but never have I seen any equivalent brutality in China. If China censors social media, it is almost always to restrict prejudicial content, not reasoned discussion in policy matters. Whereas the West expressly censors debate about the Zionism and the British government even tells the media not to discuss certain topics at all. If China comes across as “authoritarian” it’s because capitalists do not set policy in China the way they freely do in the West. Also, the CIA and the British MI6 (and who knows what other Western and Israeli secret service do) think nothing of destabilising other societies, forcing non-Western governments to restrict protests instigated or encouraged by the CIA front known as the National Endowment for Democracy.
If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white. Think about this before you pontificate about authoritarianism in China.
To be clear, there are genuine areas where China could do better. For example, I wish Chinese censorship were subject to review by a “media tribunal”, so censorship comes across as less arbitrary. But please don’t propagate prejudicial attitudes about China!
Thank you for this extremely informative, and persuasive, article. However, the following gave me pause: “Labour conditions can be brutal: precarity and intense competition in the labour market are visible realities. The welfare state remains thin. These are real structural problems…”. One wants to believe that China since the Deng / Opening Up period has remained in essence a socialist society, albeit one forced to make (NEP-style) large concessions to the prevailing international economic system—and so constitutes a genuine alternative to global capitalism. But that sentence of yours makes it difficult to hold to that belief! I would be very interested to know whether your research leads you to believe that contemporary China is indeed “socialist”—and any recommendations for further reading on this question would also be much appreciated.
Hi Peter. That's a great observation and a big question! I am actually intending to write a post in my newsletter about this soon. The short answer: I believe China is a socialist economy that embraces market dynamics (i.e. a "socialist market economy", the label the Chinese government officially uses). There's of course lots more to this that I will aim to cover in the post. I had a recent conversation with Michael Walker on Novara Media that touches on this. Here it is: https://youtu.be/UK3KE1MQI7Y?si=Nd01sP0O0yohXVJM.
China today actually resembles the pre-WW2 (but even elements of the initial post war decades) USA with big structural similarities. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.
It’s a market economy where “the money” doesn’t decide policy…is more accurate than calling it socialist. “Socialist” is so freighted with varying definitions, it just doesn’t fit what I live in.
I live in Wuhan, been hanging around about 18 years, and agree with the bulk of your commentary. I don’t spend time in the Dream Coast cities or Beijing; I travel the national roads and countryside and all the places no one hears about, and you’re right; the overall improvement in the lives of an approximate billion people is amazing.
You're providing a deflection to a serious question.
I respect China’s remarkable technological accomplishments, clever and restrained geopolitical manruvering, and strategic approach to growth.
China faces many headwinds, which are endemic to any modern society, however, the issue of the Uyghurs is neither trivial nor a byproduct of growth snd modernization.
It's a crime against humanity and deserves a response.
It's not a serious question. It's not a serious issue. I never was a serious issue.
It's a 100% bogus issue, like WMD and many, many others. You should have studied the subject before making a nuisance.
Some leads I recommend"
"The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, is anathema to any state". US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, 1979-1981. 8/31/18
Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation BY QIAO COLLECTIVE
The story of the rise and fall of the Uyghur Genocide Hoax is a stunning example of the power of Langley and Washington DC in global brainwashing. Full details in the video, but some key points are below.
1.) The idea of fighting Islamist terrorism by creating tough re-education camps to instill patriotism came from France, NOT from China. China’s de-radicalization program was different, focused on vocational training, education in the arts, and language courses.
2.) The stunning plan from the CIA-adjacent group known as the NED was to rebrand China’s vocational program as a series of “mass killings” and “atrocities” amounting to “genocide”. The plotters met at a June 2019 conference in Washington, where NED leader Carl Gershman said the goal was to leave China “on the ash heap of history”, adding: “I believe that will happen.”
3.) But the US call for the world to back their claim of genocide in China flopped badly. Most of the world’s 200 countries refused—only seven (UK, Canada, Netherlands, Lithuania, France, Belgium and Czech Republic) agreed to back Washington’s completely evidence-free allegation.
4.) By the end of 2019, the press was printing a stream of “atrocity” reports from five different Uyghur “human rights” projects. But ALL FIVE were western organizations financed by the NED—a crucial detail that NO western mainstream media outlet chose to include.
5.) By 2020, social media was carrying a huge number of allegations saying the number of Chinese Uyghurs who had been killed had now risen above six million—all using identical words and phrasing. In reality, there was no evidence of any sort of mass killings, as the US State Department’s own lawyers warned in print. The sole image that the western mainstream press repeatedly printed as proof of the existence of the 2019 “concentration camps” was really a 2017 photograph of addicts at a drug rehab center listening to talks by a Muslim speaker, a recovered addict, and his mother.
6.) One US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, strongly argued that despite the total lack of evidence, the Chinese had definitely committed genocide.
7.) In 2021, the NED financed a one-sided tribunal. A judge asked about the actual number of the “two million or three million” in the “internment camps”. The NED-financed witness, clearly embarrassed, said it was 5,567. One NED-financed “database” was found to contain images of Hong Kong movie stars.
8.) The US changed strategy. Okay, so China was not actually killing its Uyghur minority. But the birth rate of Uyghurs had fallen—and this could be taken as a genocide in itself, Washington argued. Scholars of genocide disagreed.
9.) Sex scandals hit the most prominent leaders in the NED’s Uyghur exploitation operation in 2024. Western mainstream media chose not to report this to their readers—but quoted these “human rights” groups less.
10.) In 2024 and 2025, the entire world was horrified to see a real genocide underway in Gaza. Western mainstream journalists abruptly halted reports on the entirely imaginary genocide in China—where the number of Uyghur Chinese continued to grow higher than the number of Han Chinese, both proportionally and in real terms.
No idea why you're blathering about "genocide hoaxes" when the issue is the treatment of Uyghurs as virtual slaves, which is extraordinarily well-documentedm
You're response reads as though it were generated by a mixture of Grok and YT Chinese cutouts.
The only thing we agree upon is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
There is zero point in further discussion with someone who sources material from dubious sources (charitably speaking).
It is propaganda wearing disappointment as a costume.
Yes, China’s infrastructure and industrial capacity are real.
But turning that into a lifestyle meme while ignoring censorship, coercion, debt stress, youth unemployment, property collapse, Taiwan pressure, and surveillance is not sophistication.
It is selective vision.
The trick is simple:
show the subway,
hide the system.
Sell efficiency,
bury the cost.
That is not understanding China.
That is consuming China as aesthetic revenge against Western decline.
And the flying cars are yet to come. Not a joke on sci-fi aesthetics, but written into the current 5-year plan: Low Altitude Economy about to be rolled out.
What I especially appreciate is that you take China’s developmental achievements seriously as something that deserves explanation rather than immediate ideological filtering.
One small addition from my own work on China messaging: I increasingly think the core of “Chinamaxxing” is system visibility. For decades, China’s rise was mostly statistical. Today, through travel, short videos, infrastructure, digital payments, logistics, electrification, and everyday urban experience, people increasingly encounter the visible outputs of an operating system.
In that sense, China’s strongest messaging may not be messaging at all. Performance is the message. People become curious because they see a system that appears capable of building, scaling, organizing, and delivering — often at surprising speed.
I am predisposed to be sympathetic to your point of view as there is a very close match between our intellectual interests and motivations (development economics, economic history, reducing as much human suffering as we can as quickly as we can). What has been achieved in China is incredible and unprecedented. But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I keep find that missing from the analysis in the China cheerleading posts. What about the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan, being under a steamroller that nothing can stop? Gutting! (I will try to read more of your work to find out if you've addressed this elsewhere)
Also wondering if you have read Branko Milonovic's Capitalism, Alone book which lays out the trade-offs between the two types of capitalisms (US/UK with European subtype and China/Authoritarian type) where does say basically that people will be voting with their feet and tolerating repressive regimes as long as economic growth translates into tangible benefits for people. The conclusions were very depressing to me as it seems that systems that suppress dissent and explicitly rely on corruption rather than elections will continue on unchecked. This is not to say that there are not major problems with the post WWII US-led world order but I hate to see the bullies win (including here in the US).
Hi I agree with a lot of what you say and thank you for your insights. However, as someone who has seen and experienced authoritarianism in the West and never in China, I take exception to your comment on needing to address authoritarianism in China. We regularly see police brutality in the West but never have I seen any equivalent brutality in China. If China censors social media, it is almost always to restrict prejudicial content, not reasoned discussion in policy matters. Whereas the West expressly censors debate about the Zionism and the British government even tells the media not to discuss certain topics at all. If China comes across as “authoritarian” it’s because capitalists do not set policy in China the way they freely do in the West. Also, the CIA and the British MI6 (and who knows what other Western and Israeli secret service do) think nothing of destabilising other societies, forcing non-Western governments to restrict protests instigated or encouraged by the CIA front known as the National Endowment for Democracy.
If you have not personally experienced authoritarianism in the West, I respectfully suggest that it’s because you are male and white. Think about this before you pontificate about authoritarianism in China.
To be clear, there are genuine areas where China could do better. For example, I wish Chinese censorship were subject to review by a “media tribunal”, so censorship comes across as less arbitrary. But please don’t propagate prejudicial attitudes about China!
Well said!
Thank you for this extremely informative, and persuasive, article. However, the following gave me pause: “Labour conditions can be brutal: precarity and intense competition in the labour market are visible realities. The welfare state remains thin. These are real structural problems…”. One wants to believe that China since the Deng / Opening Up period has remained in essence a socialist society, albeit one forced to make (NEP-style) large concessions to the prevailing international economic system—and so constitutes a genuine alternative to global capitalism. But that sentence of yours makes it difficult to hold to that belief! I would be very interested to know whether your research leads you to believe that contemporary China is indeed “socialist”—and any recommendations for further reading on this question would also be much appreciated.
Hi Peter. That's a great observation and a big question! I am actually intending to write a post in my newsletter about this soon. The short answer: I believe China is a socialist economy that embraces market dynamics (i.e. a "socialist market economy", the label the Chinese government officially uses). There's of course lots more to this that I will aim to cover in the post. I had a recent conversation with Michael Walker on Novara Media that touches on this. Here it is: https://youtu.be/UK3KE1MQI7Y?si=Nd01sP0O0yohXVJM.
China today actually resembles the pre-WW2 (but even elements of the initial post war decades) USA with big structural similarities. And that is that old America was and current day China is a system with highly decentralized economic, governmental, scientific, and financial structures. In both systems, most all real decision-making occurred locally and regionally, provincial and municipal developmental competition in China; state, municipal, civic, and regionally based industrial systems in the older USA.
In fact, in the latter 1970s and early 1980s, CPC some local party branches actually referenced the reforms of the mi 19th century American Jacksonians to argue for the reforms that ended up being enacted, and the Chinese system has in key ways looked remarkably like the system of America from the 1830s until some point after ww2 (although some of those features had been diminishing over time, but they were still quite there), for example, the Guangzhou Municipal Party School in the late 1970s, there are reports from interviews with later reform officials (such as in Deng era memoirs) that Guangzhou’s reformist intellectual circles made reference to designs established during the period of Jacksonian Democracy such as infrastructure financing models, local tax share-dominance and retention, the benefits of city-led economic experimentation, etc. And the Shanghai Economic Research Institutes in the early 1980s compared 19th-century American city-state relationships to their desired trajectory for Chinese coastal cities, which were strong port cities with fiscal and legal tools to manage foreign trade, investment, and currency operations.
It’s a market economy where “the money” doesn’t decide policy…is more accurate than calling it socialist. “Socialist” is so freighted with varying definitions, it just doesn’t fit what I live in.
I live in Wuhan, been hanging around about 18 years, and agree with the bulk of your commentary. I don’t spend time in the Dream Coast cities or Beijing; I travel the national roads and countryside and all the places no one hears about, and you’re right; the overall improvement in the lives of an approximate billion people is amazing.
Many thanks, Jostein—I look forward to that post (and to the Novara conversation). Cheers, Peter
You haven't mentioned the humanitarian nightmare of the horrific treatment of the Uyghurs.
How do you reconcile the slavery of 1M people with your sunny Chinamaxxing?
Be serious.
You're providing a deflection to a serious question.
I respect China’s remarkable technological accomplishments, clever and restrained geopolitical manruvering, and strategic approach to growth.
China faces many headwinds, which are endemic to any modern society, however, the issue of the Uyghurs is neither trivial nor a byproduct of growth snd modernization.
It's a crime against humanity and deserves a response.
It's not a serious question. It's not a serious issue. I never was a serious issue.
It's a 100% bogus issue, like WMD and many, many others. You should have studied the subject before making a nuisance.
Some leads I recommend"
"The CIA programs in Tibet, which were very effective in destabilizing it, did not succeed in Xinjiang. There were similar efforts made with the Uyghurs during the Cold War that never really got off the ground. In both cases you had religion waved as a banner in support of a desire for independence or autonomy which is, of course, is anathema to any state". US Ambassador Chas. H. Freeman, Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, 1979-1981. 8/31/18
Xinjiang: A Report and Resource Compilation BY QIAO COLLECTIVE
https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/xinjiang
Full Playlist of Uyghur's statements: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLkbOIKUddMBtp0_xEFqn4zey48kkgJq5w
The story of the rise and fall of the Uyghur Genocide Hoax is a stunning example of the power of Langley and Washington DC in global brainwashing. Full details in the video, but some key points are below.
1.) The idea of fighting Islamist terrorism by creating tough re-education camps to instill patriotism came from France, NOT from China. China’s de-radicalization program was different, focused on vocational training, education in the arts, and language courses.
2.) The stunning plan from the CIA-adjacent group known as the NED was to rebrand China’s vocational program as a series of “mass killings” and “atrocities” amounting to “genocide”. The plotters met at a June 2019 conference in Washington, where NED leader Carl Gershman said the goal was to leave China “on the ash heap of history”, adding: “I believe that will happen.”
3.) But the US call for the world to back their claim of genocide in China flopped badly. Most of the world’s 200 countries refused—only seven (UK, Canada, Netherlands, Lithuania, France, Belgium and Czech Republic) agreed to back Washington’s completely evidence-free allegation.
4.) By the end of 2019, the press was printing a stream of “atrocity” reports from five different Uyghur “human rights” projects. But ALL FIVE were western organizations financed by the NED—a crucial detail that NO western mainstream media outlet chose to include.
5.) By 2020, social media was carrying a huge number of allegations saying the number of Chinese Uyghurs who had been killed had now risen above six million—all using identical words and phrasing. In reality, there was no evidence of any sort of mass killings, as the US State Department’s own lawyers warned in print. The sole image that the western mainstream press repeatedly printed as proof of the existence of the 2019 “concentration camps” was really a 2017 photograph of addicts at a drug rehab center listening to talks by a Muslim speaker, a recovered addict, and his mother.
6.) One US ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, strongly argued that despite the total lack of evidence, the Chinese had definitely committed genocide.
7.) In 2021, the NED financed a one-sided tribunal. A judge asked about the actual number of the “two million or three million” in the “internment camps”. The NED-financed witness, clearly embarrassed, said it was 5,567. One NED-financed “database” was found to contain images of Hong Kong movie stars.
8.) The US changed strategy. Okay, so China was not actually killing its Uyghur minority. But the birth rate of Uyghurs had fallen—and this could be taken as a genocide in itself, Washington argued. Scholars of genocide disagreed.
9.) Sex scandals hit the most prominent leaders in the NED’s Uyghur exploitation operation in 2024. Western mainstream media chose not to report this to their readers—but quoted these “human rights” groups less.
10.) In 2024 and 2025, the entire world was horrified to see a real genocide underway in Gaza. Western mainstream journalists abruptly halted reports on the entirely imaginary genocide in China—where the number of Uyghur Chinese continued to grow higher than the number of Han Chinese, both proportionally and in real terms.
No idea why you're blathering about "genocide hoaxes" when the issue is the treatment of Uyghurs as virtual slaves, which is extraordinarily well-documentedm
You're response reads as though it were generated by a mixture of Grok and YT Chinese cutouts.
The only thing we agree upon is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza.
There is zero point in further discussion with someone who sources material from dubious sources (charitably speaking).
A lot of “Chinamaxxing” is not analysis.
It is propaganda wearing disappointment as a costume.
Yes, China’s infrastructure and industrial capacity are real.
But turning that into a lifestyle meme while ignoring censorship, coercion, debt stress, youth unemployment, property collapse, Taiwan pressure, and surveillance is not sophistication.
It is selective vision.
The trick is simple:
show the subway,
hide the system.
Sell efficiency,
bury the cost.
That is not understanding China.
That is consuming China as aesthetic revenge against Western decline.
And the flying cars are yet to come. Not a joke on sci-fi aesthetics, but written into the current 5-year plan: Low Altitude Economy about to be rolled out.
Excellent thesis!
What I especially appreciate is that you take China’s developmental achievements seriously as something that deserves explanation rather than immediate ideological filtering.
One small addition from my own work on China messaging: I increasingly think the core of “Chinamaxxing” is system visibility. For decades, China’s rise was mostly statistical. Today, through travel, short videos, infrastructure, digital payments, logistics, electrification, and everyday urban experience, people increasingly encounter the visible outputs of an operating system.
In that sense, China’s strongest messaging may not be messaging at all. Performance is the message. People become curious because they see a system that appears capable of building, scaling, organizing, and delivering — often at surprising speed.
I am Europeanmaxxing
You should listen to Yuri Bezmenov’s teachings on subversion.
Understanding THE CHINA CONUNDRUM - Free Download.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19lU5Fg930POis2wNzK-xbfACd1pRh_l-/view?usp=sharing
it's about gradient not the level
and that's what only matters
https://inconvenienttruthteller.substack.com/p/the-calculus-of-decline-why-shakespeares
Excellent Article Jostein. I always look forward to reading you work.
I am predisposed to be sympathetic to your point of view as there is a very close match between our intellectual interests and motivations (development economics, economic history, reducing as much human suffering as we can as quickly as we can). What has been achieved in China is incredible and unprecedented. But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I keep find that missing from the analysis in the China cheerleading posts. What about the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan, being under a steamroller that nothing can stop? Gutting! (I will try to read more of your work to find out if you've addressed this elsewhere)
Also wondering if you have read Branko Milonovic's Capitalism, Alone book which lays out the trade-offs between the two types of capitalisms (US/UK with European subtype and China/Authoritarian type) where does say basically that people will be voting with their feet and tolerating repressive regimes as long as economic growth translates into tangible benefits for people. The conclusions were very depressing to me as it seems that systems that suppress dissent and explicitly rely on corruption rather than elections will continue on unchecked. This is not to say that there are not major problems with the post WWII US-led world order but I hate to see the bullies win (including here in the US).
But what about the suppression of dissent in China? I’ve never found any and I’ve looked for years. Can you provide an example?
Not an allegation, a documented case and a link?
They want, NEED it to be be true. They care so much about Chinese people that they need them to be suffering. That's how much they care.
https://lucid.substack.com/p/as-china-disappears-people-and-histories?utm_source=publication-search
No allegations, Monica.