Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
That's not a completely new model, either - Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore all went through remarkably similar phases. Countries have tended to become freer and more democratic as they grow wealthy enough to build a sustainable middle-class and a genuine civil society that enjoys some basic independence from government.
The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.
But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.
If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...
From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
The second wave of "sanctions" (after those against Huawei done to eliminate the competition of Qualcomm) have been enacted when Chinese companies were ready to take a dominant position on the SSD market. Even Apple had decided to use the Chinese SSDs in their products.
Without the so-called "sanctions", the market of memory devices, both for SSDs and for DRAM would have looked extremely different today and we would have not been hit by this shamelessly huge increases in the price of memory modules, SSDs and HDDs.
The so-called US "sanctions" have never been true "sanctions", because they have never been tied to any kind of political demands. They were just measures taken to destroy the competitors of certain US companies, which were implemented through various kinds of blackmailing methods that are available, for now, to the US government.
If you can make memories, selling them at half the price demanded by Micron and the like is not selling at a dumping price, but it is selling with what in normal times would have been considered as a huge profit margin.
Selling at a modest loss and making the volume happen eventually means you're not selling at a loss anymore.
No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal.
You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.)
You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.)
You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.)
You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert).
Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days.
But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.
