"I think we will one day come to see access to open weight models as an inalienable right to defense against tyranny." I don't think this kind of rhetoric about individual civil liberties is realistic any more when the next centuries belong to China, and even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model.
The reason the China model is working in China is because their economy is booming. As soon as it slows down, which it will, they're going to be in for chaos. This is also very historically precedented, where China has always gone through dynastic cycles of flourish, stagnate, decline, chaos, reset.
China isn't doing well because of their model, they're doing well because of their economy. Their success is in spite of their governmental model, except in as much as having a dictatorship that can, for example, meaningfully deter corporate malfeasance, or do other such things that can help contribute to their economic growth. That part other countries could certainly take a thing or two from - instead, they just seem to want the censorship and surveillance.
Disagree. I think with modern tech China has built a surveillance panopticon that will continue to ensure social harmony through any economic downturn, and this is precisely the model that is appealing to so many other countries now.
Mass surveillance is nothing new. The USSR had an absurdly wide surveillance net paired with endless on-the-ground informants making people terrified to speak pretty much anywhere, yet as soon as things started slowing down the entire system collapsed with a shocking rapidity, because these things don't create social harmony, they create a dystopic nightmare that people want to overthrow.
However, people are willing to tolerate dystopia when real wages are skyrocketing, your nation is doing wild things (like radically advancing human spaceflight), and more. But as soon as all of this slows down you're left with the same uninspiring directionless stagnation that plagues all nations eventually, and a dystopic social system on top.
> yet as soon as things started slowing down the entire system collapsed with a shocking rapidity, because these things don't create social harmony, they create a dystopic nightmare that people want to overthrow.
Different read: command economies collapse because they invariably have higher levels of corruption and inefficiency.
Both of those are tolerable during boom times of economic growth, and China has kicked the can down the road by pursuing intermittent corruption purges.
Ultimately though, when things start to slow down, the system attempts to conceal the slowdown, which causes even more economic dysfunction, which eventually paralyzes the whole system and leads to collapse.
Making a command economy work sustainably means solving the "People lie to avoid consequences of bad news" problem.
China isn't a command economy. Internally they're more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition. It's a big part of the reason they're able to bring the prices on basically everything down to absurdly low levels.
Even politically they're paradoxical in that they're a dictatorship but also quite decentralized. For each instance each 'region' down to a few thousand or so people has a local representative who has meaningful political power. It'd be like if the House of Representatives had actually continued growing with population, as was initially envisioned.
There's really quite a lot to learn from China in things that they're doing right, but stagnating Western powers only seem able to see what they want to see - the censorship, surveillance, and propaganda apparatuses which are largely uninspired and more likely to cause their downfall rather than meaningfully contributing to their rise.
> more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition.
I'd argue that the US and Europe are bad benchmarks, given the entrenched quasi-monopolies the governments refuse to break up.
But we'll see how that goes for China.
It's still early days for their capitalistic ambitions, and tensions between party and corporations are starting to show (Jack Ma et al.).
Personally, I think the more destructive moment is going to be after they have large national champions competing globally. Is the CCP going to have the discipline to let an Alibaba, BYD, or SAIC be supplanted, if an external or internal more efficient competitor starts growing? Or will they become too big to fail and intertwine with government?
In general I'd agree with all of this. I think the biggest challenge they're going to face is that Xi Jinping isn't immortal. The nature of a dictatorship is such that benevolent and skilled leadership can achieve amazing things, but incompetent leadership can completely destroy a society. And relying on good leadership to choose good successors is rife with precedent of failure.
By contrast in the US whether we have a vegetable or a clown in the driver seat, the system remains relatively more stable. But that also means that even if somehow we managed to find a skilled and benevolent leader, the amount of good he'd be able to really do is just as limited as the amount of harm the aforementioned can do.
The thing about inalienable rights is that they are not rhetoric, they are an intrinsic recognition of rights that do not require the recognition of authority: Governments which do not respect these human rights should not be modified; not the other way around.
China is an authoritarian government and its policies have no more bearing on what people settle for than the currently socially unacceptable regime in the US.
In my opinion, if one lacks the motivation or resolve to fight for these rights, they should do so quietly and not attempt to patronize others who still stand by these rights as not being "realistic".
>even countries with a liberal democratic tradition are converging towards the Chinese model
What specific examples of this do you have in mind? I can’t think of any liberal democratic countries converging on a combination of (a) single party rule, (b) nearly universal intrusion of state or party actors into private sector entities, (c) financial repression of private investments, and (d) the associated suppression of domestic consumption.
I meant more generally: many countries are recognizing, just like China has, that the fundamental challenge of our modern era is ensuring social harmony. The OP's belief in individual civil liberties as a good in themselves is anachronistic now.
