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(Second in a series. Read the first: “Is it more fun to be evil than good?“)

As I’ve repeatedly noted, China is now the most powerful nation in the world. If the US was to go to war with China, it would be crushed. After the first two to three weeks it wouldn’t even be close. China has magnitudes more ability to manufacture weapons, and there’s reason to believe that their missiles, drones and fighters are superior to Western ones.

It’s over. China won, and the US lost.

Why?

Well, one reason, bear with me, is that the people who ran China from Deng onwards were a lot less evil than those running America. Or if you prefer, more good.

One of the things you notice if you read Chinese documents about successes of government policy is that they almost never express success in currency. No “the new industry made ten billion Yuan.” It’s always “2 million apartments were built” or “12 nuclear plants are now operational” or “we have reduced the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere by X many thousands of tons” or “we now produce 50,000 tons more of wheat” or “we’ve built 5,000 of the 10,000 parks we promised and will finish the rest in four years.”

There’s no question that China had a lot of corruption till Xi’s crackdowns, and still has a fair bit, but China’s policy makers are focused on improving the lot of ordinary people. You can get rich helping do so, but you have to deliver. The CPC increased how long Chinese lived, gave them more education, gave them better homes, made access to health care cheap, and turned China into the world’s technological leader and primary industrial power.

This is because they were trying to make Chinese better off. It’s almost a side effect. If you make people healthier and better educated and give them good jobs, well, that’s good for the economy. China’s leaders weren’t primarily focused on making a small group rich, they were focused on making all Chinese richer, and on making China strong. You got rich by helping, not by hindering.

To give a recent example,  after Chinese complained that they couldn’t afford homes or rent, Xi said “homes are for living, not for speculation.” The government deliberately crashed the real-estate market, reducing the prices of both homes and rent.

Rent as proportion in income

 

It is literally inconceivable that the American government would do this. Developers went bankrupt, major landlords lost billions. Rich people were hurt! Instead, despite having far more homes than homeless people, the US has a homeless crisis and the response to it isn’t China’s (they cleaned this up recently by giving homeless people jobs and a place to live) it’s to put spikes anywhere people might sleep and when they form a tent camp to have cops kick everyone out violently and destroy their possessions. Some homeless people were even honored by having California’s government, Gavin Newsom, personally help kick them out and destroy their possessions. American values.

Next notice the lack of war-making in the last four and a half decades. Even in the recent clashes with India, weapons were forbidden. How many countries has the US invaded or bombed since 1979?  All that “not making war” has allowed China’s efforts to concentrate on China and Chinese. They focused on butter, not guns. Even today, the entire military is 2 million strong, in the world’s strongest economy (yes, it is) out of a population of 1.4 billion people.

There’s a trope that evil always wins. It doesn’t. I make no claim the CPC is full of Saints or always does good, but among major countries I can’t think of any where the leaders are as focused on the broad good of their people more than China right now. And polling all shows that Chinese agree—they’re far happier with their leaders than any Western population is. Turns out it’s not so much “democracy” that matters (not that we have that, as the EU is going out of its way to demonstrate) as whether your leaders are evil or not, and if the only choices you are allowed to make is “chocolate evil or vanilla evil”, the choice means nothing.

Good is very often stronger than evil. Evil consumes itself, as our elites have consumed their own countries power and real wealth in order to enrich themselves.

Good is bounty, it makes all those under its sway stronger and better.

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