Young Chinese are sick of working long hours

Here's what my Chinese wife says about all that. People go to a monthly meeting. You hear a "sermon" and sing some patriotic songs. Then people go on with their lives. Not everyone who goes to church necessarily really believes. Not everyone necessarily believed even in the 1800s.

That said, the social/theocratic hegemony of western Christianity wasn't all good, but it also wasn't all bad. The same probably goes for the secular ideological "religion" you see in communist countries.

> The surveillance of citizens and credit scores don't apply to the US?

Strawman. Your credit score won't legally lock you out of being able to fly in the US and is not a government punishment enforced through violence. Surveillance in the US is not similar to the extreme oppression occurring in China and the almost complete lack of freedom of speech, freedom of demonstration, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of press. This HN forum can't exist in China.

> Absurd overtime expectations?

Nope. The US works about as many hours as New Zealand, which is not infamous for very punishing work hours. It sits at the OECD average and is comparable to Italy and Canada.

> Or the obscene ballooning of rents without a corresponding increase in wage?

Non-qualified setup. That entirely depends on where you live and what your job is. If you're trying to be a janitor in San Francisco, you have a problem. Most of the US is not in fact outrageously expensive, it's quite reasonable.

...oh. Forgive me for not reading my own link too thoroughly. Maybe it's not so universal then!

There is a difference between volunteering for overtime and getting forced to in a way.

> No it isn't actually true. Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA.

This doesn't really have much do with superior governance though, does it? It has a lot do with the country's recent history.

a) It help government approval tremendously when you can censor bad news and disproportionately cover positive news.

b) It's also really difficult to assess how much credit the Chinese government actually deserves for China's economic success. Every other old-world power that has embraced capitalism has achieved similar success. China has also had the benefit of playing their economic catch-up from 1980-present, starting from an essentially pre-20th century economy. Is there really some amazing government wizardry (that couldn't be replicated by any of the governments of developed countries) in achieving immense growth by applying highly advanced (relative to yours) foreign technology to your gigantic populace through a market system?

Is censorship, stoking nationalism, and violation of human rights really the magic formula? I'm really skeptical there.

c) It's easy to overlook the immense inequality in China, both in economic terms and in terms of human rights. If you're a Han Chinese living in a first-tier city, you likely have a very different experience with the government that a Uighur or Tibetan. The CCP, to stay in power, really only needs the support of the Han population (they make up 90% of the population). This distorts incentives for treatment of minority groups significantly. If it's good for Han, it's good for the CCP.

On the other hand, the whole "censor the bad news" thing means that Han Chinese don't necessarily hear about how minority ethnic groups in Xinjiang or Tibet are treated... removing the historically most powerful feedback mechanism for improving the treatment of the oppressed. Which, obviously, is the dominant ethnic group being aware of the plight of minority groups, feeling human sympathy, and calling for change.

Worse still, as China's sphere of influence grows and yet the censorship remains, the same dynamic will occur--the CCP is incentivized to keep the Han Chinese population happy, and the Han population feels none of the guilt that a population with a free press provides when reporting on the its government's less-than-acceptable actions elsewhere.

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I'm happy for the Chinese people and their economic success and progress so far, but it's dangerous to overpraise the its government model given the misaligned incentives that exist. I understand that rapid change can be dangerous and believe steady progress may be preferable, but that's a very different position than promoting China's governmental model as something to be praised and replicated.