The issue with your analysis is that if you spend more than 10 days in China you quickly realize that it is a chaotic self driven society full of people who start small businesses and enterprises with the state barely keeping control over this mass. In addition, the way the system actually works in China(or how it used to) was “pay x% of revenue and do what you want”. Also the government structure was historically incredibly decentralized with mayors and local party officials having the vast majority of power and a lot of autonomy, wayyy more than most elected officials have in the US. The US is choked by its many and massive unelected and unaccountable federal agencies which have passed millions of regulations that essentially strip away all form of local autonomy and democracy. The US also spends a lot on welfare while china spends almost nothing, which allows it to build a lot more infrastructure.
"For all its material successes, the CCP cannot offer its people a satisfying answer to the question: What is the point of all this efficiency?"
This question does not currently appear to bother the public in China very much. National greatness and a stable, prosperous society seem to be good enough answers for most Chinese (at least for the time being; attitudes may change). While there is arguably a "spiritual emptiness" at the heart of modern China, most of is people don't see changing the political system as the answer, even if they sense the problem.
The question is to what extent people in the rest of the world would be willing to accept a model like this.
“we need to remember what we are competing for: the right to define what human dignity looks like in the modern world”. This reflects the unfortunate tendency to conflate our right to conduct our society as we choose with what the rest of the world should do. Different circumstances lead to different choices. China’s choice is informed by recent history in which the absence of a strong central order led directly to chaos, detestation, starvation and death. We’ve been more fortunate.
A core challenge to (re)articulating the American Idea is that we--as a nation--are still reëvaluating what that Idea even is.
For my part, I'm taken by the American Idea as a promise: "I don't care who you are; if you Do The Work, you will reach prosperity." But a lot on the right flatly reject that the United States is an idea--instead they see the country as a culture based on a land and a Western heritage (and maybe a discrete ethnicity). And a lot of people on the center-left are still pondering Howard Zinn's charge that all this patriotism is a cover for three-plus centuries of increasingly wide-ranging plunder--hence the land acknowledgements and hesitancy around the American flag.
That's all part of the competition--we don't have consensus on the point of this nation, but we have agreed that "Compete with China" is part of that goal without asking if we agree on _why_ we're competing with China.
The issue with your analysis is that if you spend more than 10 days in China you quickly realize that it is a chaotic self driven society full of people who start small businesses and enterprises with the state barely keeping control over this mass. In addition, the way the system actually works in China(or how it used to) was “pay x% of revenue and do what you want”. Also the government structure was historically incredibly decentralized with mayors and local party officials having the vast majority of power and a lot of autonomy, wayyy more than most elected officials have in the US. The US is choked by its many and massive unelected and unaccountable federal agencies which have passed millions of regulations that essentially strip away all form of local autonomy and democracy. The US also spends a lot on welfare while china spends almost nothing, which allows it to build a lot more infrastructure.
"For all its material successes, the CCP cannot offer its people a satisfying answer to the question: What is the point of all this efficiency?"
This question does not currently appear to bother the public in China very much. National greatness and a stable, prosperous society seem to be good enough answers for most Chinese (at least for the time being; attitudes may change). While there is arguably a "spiritual emptiness" at the heart of modern China, most of is people don't see changing the political system as the answer, even if they sense the problem.
The question is to what extent people in the rest of the world would be willing to accept a model like this.
“we need to remember what we are competing for: the right to define what human dignity looks like in the modern world”. This reflects the unfortunate tendency to conflate our right to conduct our society as we choose with what the rest of the world should do. Different circumstances lead to different choices. China’s choice is informed by recent history in which the absence of a strong central order led directly to chaos, detestation, starvation and death. We’ve been more fortunate.
A core challenge to (re)articulating the American Idea is that we--as a nation--are still reëvaluating what that Idea even is.
For my part, I'm taken by the American Idea as a promise: "I don't care who you are; if you Do The Work, you will reach prosperity." But a lot on the right flatly reject that the United States is an idea--instead they see the country as a culture based on a land and a Western heritage (and maybe a discrete ethnicity). And a lot of people on the center-left are still pondering Howard Zinn's charge that all this patriotism is a cover for three-plus centuries of increasingly wide-ranging plunder--hence the land acknowledgements and hesitancy around the American flag.
That's all part of the competition--we don't have consensus on the point of this nation, but we have agreed that "Compete with China" is part of that goal without asking if we agree on _why_ we're competing with China.