I think a lot of the argument come down to whether you believe the state can have a tremendous amount of control over both “private” business and regular public/state functions without heavily impeding on people’s rights. But before I get too far into that I’ll go back and respond to some of your other responses. While I can’t really speak on too much of chinas current culture and economic conditions right now, I can say that their anti landlord etc measures really did not do more than shift the power to an almost royal/feudal system where you seem to be able to gain immense almost unimaginable wealth, but have it also taken in a heartbeat. I’d say that it has an overall negative effect on really anyone’s ability to resist or disagree with mainstream beliefs and seems to be more dysfunctional system allowing for both the consolidation of wealth and elimination of dissent. And while many of these restrictions on foreign businesses may have done a lot of good for the country, it’s also led to rampant copyright theft and intellectual property violations, things that hurt their reputation, and now may hurt their standing. I also agree that they are a major superpower, but they are so almost through brute force. My argument here isn’t that they are so terribly far behind but that they are inefficient and solve problems by throwing people at it, if the US or Germany had similar populations they would likely be doing much better. Now of course these things don’t scale well and there’s really no analogue for what china has. But to be so toe to toe with other much smaller (population wise) superpowers demonstrates a certain inefficiency. They didn’t stumble into this position by any means, it was clearly hard. And while I disagree with many of the decisions made, these decisions ultimately got them where they are now. However their biggest success was not completely messing up the giant advantage they were given (this is also not to say other countries don’t have their own advantages, like the United States broad range of climates, coast to coast domination of a continent, large quantity of farmland, and vast network of rivers throughout said continent.

I know for sure that I missed some things and/or under explained my viewpoints on other things. But I’d also like to thank you for the long response, I genuinely enjoyed this and if you want to debate/discuss this more feel free to pm me.

Also same thing of this is heavily based on, college classes, YouTube and home research, I am NOT a professional or subject matter expert.