Should China exist?

Initially I was wanted to write about whether we should tolerate the existence of China as an example when authoritarian crazy state is successful and serves everyone else, an example and a license to be the same.
Then I thought that this is kinda the question which is way outdated to be asking even.
They are already here. They are already this way.

Well, if you think about 20 years ago, when one just seeing and taking the presence of authoritarian regime means immediately working to stop this regime ever getting more powerful. But it is too late.

However, they did not go over your typical evil state, continuing to do evil things. They did not become some horrible entity like Iran is.
Surprisingly so, they have taken the part of being a very valuable and important alternative against the hypocrisy of the West and are the providers of liberty in some areas.

An easy scapegoat

Many would very love to see the destruction of them, everyone in the so-called free West would love to see them crumble and so on and so on. Potentially. Not all, but many would love it. Without understanding what value they actually provide still.

Sadly, nowadays nobody thinks about the targeted approach, they try to limit the entire country at once, without thinking about all the people who live inside and consist of.
They attack the country as a whole, the entire nation, thinking it is everything and all CCP and only that and only that, instead of thinking differently.

Well, a small note here, but I’m not saying that thinking about it would help anything at all. Just maybe rethink your position and attitude. Like, it’s not like you have any hopeful chance to topple CCP with any external effort. But you can reconsider their role they now provide to humanity.

The difference

Okay, I’ll give you a clear example. Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and so on. They are pure evil. They do an export of international terrorism, they terrorize their own, they terrorize others, they supply the world with discord.
I don’t see them being and providing any good alternative to anything. I don’t see them doing any particularly good job at improving the global freedom. They are clearly and definitely focused on just establishing their own kind of tyranny.

Yet China is a different case because while they do promote their kind of tyranny, surprisingly so, they also are providers and sources of liberty against the current world order.
Or you just say they provide the alternative without anyone trying to control it.

Especially because they oppose our woke-dominated world and they do not participate in any so-called international agreements – which again were pushed by establishment in the first place.
They are valuable for whole world as an alternative way to get something when "geopolitical players" shun you down.

A long list of goods

• You get banned from SWIFT? Fine, you use CIPS. Maybe it is not as huge as SWIFT yet, maybe it still leans on parts of the existing system, but that is exactly the point. You have another payment rail. You are not completely at the mercy of one financial switch controlled by someone else.

• Some banks do not want to support your country’s development because your democratic standards are not good enough? You can use a Chinese bank instead. Maybe they have their own interests, maybe they are not doing it out of pure kindness, but at least you have somebody else to ask. You are not forced to beg the same institutions forever.

• Somebody does not want to manufacture your thing? China can do it without asking a million ideological questions first. Your project might be politically awkward, your country might be sanctioned, your product might not fit the approved worldview. They can still say: give us the specifications and the money.

• You have to use American software with spyware? Try a Chinese alternative instead. Yes, they might spy on you too. I am not pretending that China gives you magical privacy. But maybe it is a different threat level, controlled by a different power, with a different set of incentives. Sometimes you do not need a perfect option. You need an option that is not the same option. Btw now in argentic age they make as much open source now as any other country.

• Do not like American GPS – why tho? Still, use BeiDou. More channels means better redundancy and potentially better coverage when somebody wants to jam or degrade one system. And if Western satellite services do not want to sell you maps, services, or access, you have another system. You are not banned from navigation just because one geopolitical player decided to make your life harder.

• Nobody wants to build your nuclear reactors? Because they are so afraid that the fuel is going to be stolen or blah blah scary scary. China says: we do it. Infrastructure is more important than endless fear-mongering. If a country needs reliable energy and Western suppliers refuse to build it without seventeen pages of conditions, another supplier is not a luxury. It is the difference between building and not building.
  Same with clean energy but thats another angle – its just cheaper.

• For any important medicine like vaccines, those big Western companies are always going to prioritize their own. During a crisis, rich countries get in line first and everybody else gets told to wait. You would be glad to have an alternative manufacturer who cares less about protecting every patent and more about putting doses somewhere else too.
  Will China prioritize its own citizens first too? Of course they will. But at least you have an alternative once they satisfy their own needs. One supplier is a queue. Two suppliers are a market.

• Your media, movies, films, and games are full of woke narratives? Try something else. Chinese entertainment is biased too, obviously. But sometimes you do not understand every cultural reference, so you do not have to sit there arguing with the message. You can just enjoy the game, the drama, the animation, or whatever weird thing you found. A cultural alternative can simply be a fresh air.

• Soon they may be able to make more of their own chips. Imagine if computers became 50% cheaper because there was another giant producer competing in the market.
  More compute means more experiments, more labs, more simulations, more drug discovery, more engineering, and more science everywhere. Science as a whole does not need a monopoly on computers.
  A university in Nigeria, Vietnam, India, or anywhere else should not have to wait for one approved country to decide how much computation humanity is allowed to access. Drug discovery, protein folding, climate models, materials science, physics simulations, and AI research all benefit when more people can afford to run more experiments.
  You sanctioned them and brought a doom upon human progress because you decided that geopolitical games mattered more than letting people build more machines. And now you cry about chip shortage? Who stopped a competitor who can actually scale?!

• Want quality things without overpaying for the brand? Here we go. A car. Maybe something comparable to a Tesla, but without paying for the logo, the status, and the Californian executive’s third yacht.
  Imagine the rest. Phones, tools, appliances, batteries, machines. And I am not talking only about cheap trinkets for your kitchen. They have entire industrial processes that are comparable to everyone else, sometimes at a lower price, and those processes can be adapted much faster when somebody wants a different product or a strange specific modification. The cheap product is only the visible end of it. Behind it is a whole industrial process that can build serious things and change direction when the customer asks for something else. Yes, some of these products are subsidized. So what? For a limited time, you get to enjoy the lower price, and maybe your own government finally gets an idea to subsidize something important instead of just protecting the old company.

• Even what you call "knockoffs" are important. When your products are buried in a thousand lines of standards, certifications, checks, and all that so-called consumer protection, they can become five times more expensive.
  You may want an alternative that is much cheaper and comes with a different risk-reward balance. Maybe it breaks sooner. Maybe it is less safe. But you are an adult. Sometimes you want to choose the cheap thing instead of being forced to buy a luxury version with mandatory insurance (half the cost lol) bundled into it. For a rich person, the difference between an $8 charger and a certified charger is an amusing little consumer choice. For a poor person, the five-times-more-expensive version may mean not buying it at all. The uncertified solar panel may be less perfect, but it can still charge a phone. The cheap medical device may carry more risk, but no device carries no access. You are not choosing between the safe product and the unsafe product. Sometimes you are choosing between the risky product and nothing.

• A taste of pure capitalism. You may hate capitalism as a whole, but sometimes you want the part where you can say: here is the money, make me the thing. China can adapt quickly, manufacture your specific quirk, and do it cheaply. You want 50,000 weird units by Thursday? Some factory will at least try instead of sending you to six departments and a legal review.
  They have to. That is the beauty of it. There is less friction between your request and the factory floor. If one factory slacks on bullshit, you are already calling another.
  Their competition is not necessarily about competing with each other but rather racing to provide the outside customer with the best service, the fastest adaptation, and the lowest price.
  They compete internally so they can serve the external market better.

• A different engineering culture. Shenzhen shanzhai culture.
  Your factories are slow to reform, your manufacturers have to think about a million costs before they try anything, and everybody is terrified that somebody will steal a trade secret.
  In China, all the useful things are nearby. Suppliers, components, factories, and people who already know how to make something. Everyone shares with everyone because the race is not necessarily about destroying the factory next door. It is about getting the best service to the outside customer before somebody else does.
  You can experiment in one factory, discover that another factory has better equipment for this particular thing, and jump over there without treating the first experiment as a sacred corporate secret.
  There is no fucking IP protection in the romantic Western sense. Knowledge, workers, designs move around with less friction.
  You all love your universities for being an open field where everyone can experiment and participate? They turned that vibe into the industrial scale.

• And sometimes it is not even about inventing a new system. Sometimes China just makes the existing thing a million times cheaper when you pricks dominate the market and extort people with huge prices.
  Solar panels, wind equipment, batteries, phones, cars, electronics, factory machinery. They come with angel wings and throw your prices down the drain. Suddenly the old monopoly has to explain why its thing costs five times as much.

Space as the perfect example

You kicked them out of space and decided not to cooperate? Good fucking idea. They developed everything independently and now serve as an alternative to your decrepit space station. As if the Cold War and the Space Race taught you nothing.

You may have just cost humanity five to ten years of space progress because geopolitical games were apparently more important than letting our whole civilization participate. Instead of sharing knowledge, you pushed China to build its own station, its own capabilities, and its own path into orbit.

And the interesting part is that everyone else may have more incentive to go to Chinese companies to work in space. They are interested in getting ahead, interested in working with more people, and potentially more open to conquer the stars together.
The country you tried to exclude can become the one offering everyone else another door into space, without all of this geopolitical crap.

"But all of subsidy of the state!"
And what?! Would you still not prefer when things are cheaper and more accessible? I’m sure you throw away all your moral high ground the moment you actually have no choice or want for cheap.

"But we will use it later in trade wars against us"
Then you have to remember who was starting all these trade wars at all. Who has been doing all this protectionism?
Well, yes, they do that too. They do that for internal market. But they never claim to be fully open.
While you all operate on principle of open market or claimed to be and then cry when your trade war methods would be used the same way against you.
Yet I have a feeling that they are doing their own version of internal protectionism for the benefits and prosperity of their citizens, while you are doing it for geopolitical points.

The sad part

You may ask, well, those alternatives are fancy, but the question here becomes why would you have a need of alternative in the first place?

Maybe because so-called "Free West: is not free anymore? And is hell-bent on putting everyone onto the same ideological position? And the vibe shifted from being a provider of goods, services, technology to the whole world at once, it becomes a weapon and tool of control.

Today they sanction you for aggressive wars. That is justifiable.
Tomorrow they sanction you for ideological reasons. Because they don’t like your views or something. Even tomorrow, again, they would sanction you if you would be more free than then. When you start to treat your citizens with respect they deserve. When you go against their "rules".

But our actual sad part is not even that.
The actual sad thing that they provide liberty to the external world at the expense of their own citizens.

That is already a crime against humanity that you might want to see them destroyed.
So we are in a heavy dilemma here. China as an alternative to now illiberal West has to be the opposing source, a source of sanity, which provides goods for everyone without endless terms and conditions.

And why is it sadly that we might want to keep the status quo.
Because we need an alternative. We need somebody to oppose the now illiberal western monoculture and do something different.
Even if Chinese people will continue to suffer.

The bad way

The worse way would be to just continue to attack them economically, to attack them their right to grow their economy and therefore to create more alternatives for everyone else.
This way you are punishing entire nation, who want to both benefit themselves and humanity, you denying them right to exist and actual capacity to do so.

Not only that, because they are the alternative to the current hegemony. Any attack of them is an attack on humanity itself. Because humanity would always benefit from real competition, from having a lot of choices, from having many players on the market, from having to be able to choose and be free from single monopoly.

Consider what they now, not only just the world factory, but also contribute massively to the science and technology all around.

They actually won

You think here I’m praising China all over and over, but that is not the point. The point is to show you the failure that the West created.
They created the monopoly when we started to utilize it as a weapon. When we have to praise Chinese for being our saviours from it. See how it is fucked up when you have to turn to an authoritarian nation to be the provider of liberty.

If you attack them right now, that is very unjustified war against many.
Anyone who benefits from having cheaper stuff, from having the alternative you do not serve for them, from having a choice for an option without conditions and so on.

You immediately go against half the world, who enjoys being their customer. Because you yourself become a sketchy business to deal with.

The West made China valuable by making itself into a gatekeeper.
Now everybody has to praise an authoritarian country for providing the alternatives that a supposedly free world stopped providing.

The ideal

Okay, what the ideal version would be?
Well, if one can hope that every Chinese people start to value liberty more, they’ve thrown down CCP and established a normal constitutional democratic government.

But more: A real 180 reverse from full authoritarianism to full libertarian.
If they start to mimic the West, then despite being free, we all might actually lose. And we are all as humanity doomed to suffer under a single regime.

They should not change the practices tho, they should not change any other practice except for political regime.
Because they are now value of liberty above else and they must continue to be the same providers of liberty as their main export.
That means no heavy international cooperation that limits the sovereignty and puts people’s liberty as a negative. No bending down the knee for wokes or nationalists with their ideals.
Ideally, they would continue saving humanity from any other authoritarian practices.

But, that ideal may never come – to turn to being liberal you have to have an example.
Somebody to copy from, somebody to take practices from. Something that would show you that there is a civilization alternative to what they are currently experiencing.

There is no such alternative anymore. There is no true libertarian nation in this world we can copy from.
It even worse, entire world now drifting towards being more China rather than the opposite.

The dilemma

What brings us to a dilemma: you can clearly separate the bad nations. Ones who mostly ruin.
This one is good at the global scale, but very bad on their local scale.

As with a sweat shop in African nations where kids sitting working all day long to provide you with cheap t-shirts so you can resell them at 100$ price. What you can ignore, what you just can’t close your eyes to. You can also close your eyes how Chinese people live under tyranny.
But on the second case we can do nothing much.

Because they are an important alternative to a monopoly. You cannot attack them without hurting everyone else in the process.
Nor can you actually do much to change it from inside.

We need them as provider of alternatives in a market as much as they need a market to supply to.
And any attempt to slow them down, to limit the CCP authoritarian aggressive tendencies are also at the same time an attack on the whole prosperity of humanity.