"Overcapacity and low profitability" [1] is how I understand the difference, i.e. different competitive ecosystem from a different policy and intervention style.
There's no English-language article that can fully capture the system because it's a moving target to begin with, and anything official is vague on purpose (to be fair, much of the legislation in the US is too, except the Constitutional backstop and co-equal judiciary does not exist in China). The official messaging is always targeted and curated with a specific audience in mind and how much truth is contained within varies. The best way to describe it without turning it into an essay is that it's "aspirationally market-driven" system that is not defined by a fixed and consistent ideology but rather the constraints of the capacity of the administrative state to control the parts of the economy that is legible to the state. It's not a free market except for the black market, but the black market is frankly huge if nothing else to compensate for the state asserting not just a monopoly on the use of violence but also the monopolistic determinator of morality, which the people are less willing to buy into, but that disconnection itself creates an opportunity for arbitrage. That is the relationship dynamic that have retained some degree of stability, but everything else is effectively subject to change on a dime without notice. The party will never accept openly that it is capitalistic and in some sense that's not even a lie, but what the state is able to impose and what the people actually do are very different things. As the state excludes 99% of the population writ large from politics, full stop (you are either born into it, or you're not eligible to participate, with some narrow exceptions that occasionally pop up), there's not much of a ground-level appetite for dogma and doctrines. Instead you end up with a pragmatic, descriptive market that exists differently within and without, and just like the socialism label being basically symbolic, same goes for capitalism.
People have been talking about late capitalism in the west for a century. The Chinese state would argue that we cannot be in late capitalism because we're actually in the first stage of socialism, and the people would wonder how we got to late capitalism when they never got to experience early or middle capitalism. But really the only thing we know that definitively does not work is implenting Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and its offshoots as doctrine. Whether that means that the default is a prescriptive version of capitalism is, well, open to debate, and probably too simplistic.
There is no "Chinese capitalism" or "Western capitalism" - capitalism is applied thermodynamics, once you remove the limiting factors (both material and political), it's the same everywhere.
Like the 10th Rule of Acquisition says, greed is eternal. Structures and behaviors that flow down from this tend to be the same everywhere.
The problem with this reading is that Western capitalism has been effectively removing the thermodynamics analogy through monopolism, conglomeration, regulatory capture, etc.
In the set of all possible working implementations, there are one or more that are novel enough to become a moat legally or otherwise. If everyone has the same power (number of tokens) then capability (experience and understanding) becomes the differentiator to “find” that moat first.
That’s just not how things work. Some one with experience and knowledge will be measurably more productive and build a better whatever no matter how much spicy autocomplete they have at their disposal.
Even if you eventually figure out all the right questions to prompt, the experienced person is long done
Athens can’t build flat, stable, standardised side walks. The Italians own and operate their trains and when 50 students died in a very preventable head on collision no one has been held accountable in any real fashion.
Solar panels? They gotta fix the brain drain first. Anyone with the capability to bounce understandably does.
The only people with money are Israeli and Qatari real estate investors.
Going from one CDN to another can be infuriating even at a surprisingly small scale. Mostly (imo) from caching semantics and counting.
reply