u/ModernirsmEnjoyer

China is f\*cked

1. The "Non-Chinese World" Within China

Today, more than 55 Chinese peoples live within the Chinese People's Republic, and many of them have their own autonomous districts. Those administrative districts are located at the heart and strategically important points of China

Population: Kazakhs form the largest minority group in China (approximately 5.3 trillion), followed by Uighyr and Manchus. Collectively, the non-Chinese population and Muslim peoples within China represent a very critical balance element in the country's demographic structure

2. Encirclement from the Outside (Asian Union)

The independent Asian states lined up along China's border (Japan, Choson, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam)—or countries extremely close to the Asians like Phillipines—have begun to form a direct geopolitical block rather than a "buffer zone" for China. The strengthening of the United Nations is breaking China's former influence (its "backyard" status) in this region.

Vietnam's NATO membership is the biggest military "stop sign" for China.

Article 5: NATO's principle of "an attack against one is an attack against all" is a legal armor that makes it impossible for China to make a direct military move against Vietnam.nuclear Umbrella: Vietnam is under NATO's nuclear deterrence umbrella. This carries the risk of any conflict evolving into a direct world war (total annihilation), a risk that China cannot take

Summary: China is experiencing a social sensitivity due to the trillions of Muslim people inside, and a military deadlock essicpaly due to the Vietnam and NATO barrier outside. This situation provides Vietnam with a vast diplomatic maneuver space and a "playmaker" role against China

My original post was deleted by the Reddit content filters for some reason, so I will write a shorter version of the post instead.

Many defenders of planned economy systems insist, that deficiencies of the economic system can be easily fixed through OGAS or Cybersyn type of system without any market mechanisms. I decided to look whether anything like that began to emerge in either Soviet Union or North Korea (as the country most committed to planned economy) to see if those ideas were ever taken seriously or rediscovered independently to see whether the whole idea is realistic.

I recently discovered an interview by Alexei Safronov, who is a Russian economic historian, about the OGAS and the information systems in the USSR. He did archival research on the computerization and the OGAS, and talked with three technicians.

He outlined that standard narratives overstated the bureaucratic rejection of the OGAS, instead discovering delays were faciliated by the conflict between the State Planning Committee and the Central Statistics Bureau over the control rights, and the OGAS authors faced rejection simply because he wanted to abolish the current system and replaced with a purely theoretical system, instead of actually supporting the current institutional priorities of the existing system.

He concluded OGAS as a policy goals continued to exist until the 1980s, and the central implementation node it was the State Planning Committee's own Automatized System of Planning Calculations (ASPR), which helped to reduce the labour intensity of intersectoral balance calculations and by the 1980s the annual plan of the socio-economic development was entirely digitalized. This, however, was met with the technical inadequacy of the equipment, that frequently broke down and failed operations (I would add computers were not reliant back then), and more importantly it had not addressed the lack of worker productivity incentives and capital allocation efficiency that plagued the Soviet economy (he would use Mises calculation problem in his Great Soviet Economy book, where he also discussed how to construct a better socialism).

Now let's take a look at North Korea. North Korea is the only country in the world that has not abandoned commitment to the planned economy system and has recently reaffirmed its commitment to communism and the general programme of "Three Revolutions". North Korea displayed interests in the various cybernetic methods, with the Korean Academy of Sciences Department of Automation leading research in the electronic counting machines in the 1970s.

The Third Seven Year Plan (1987) outlined the plan for the "computerization" and the "informatization" of the national economy. After the prolonged economic and nutrition crisis, in 1998 the top leadership outlined three pillars of building a Strong and Prosperous Nation - ideology, defence, and science and technology and the First Five Year Plan for Science and Technology has made concrete steps for the development of telecommunications, information processing, and the mass scale training of IT talents in the country.An important development was development and deployment of the CNC (computer numerical control) into the industry, especially defence industry, which enhanced precision manufacturing and allowed North Korea to improve productivity in the defence industry. In 2016, at the 7th Congress of the Workers Party of Korea Kim Jong Un has outlined the goal of transition to knowledge economy and development of domestic R&D capabilities.

However, at no point any evidence surfaced that North Korea has seriously considered building OGAS and Cybersyn style system, despite promises of them revitalizing the planned economy, even after 28 years of commitment to planned economy and science and technology. Instead North Korea has delegated responsibilities, increased autonomy of the combined enterprises and local people's committees, allowed them to engage directly in crossborder trade and produce beyond planning targets. For many enteprises planning targets were replaced by indicative planning through revenue, which then are turned over to the state. In 2019, the socialist enteprises management responsibility system, which practically put state enteprises on market conditions, replaced the Taean Work System in the constitution. It then all intersects with the private sector that exists in parallel to the state economy, and is extracted of resources to feed the planned economy reconstruction. Alongside it, an entire financial industry was created, as banks were opened throughout the country in order to mobilize unused money sums and invest into the economy.

As we can see, even the country as committed to planned economy as North Korea has not even begin to develop any cyber system, but instead reformed through limited market introduction and improving incentives.

In the end, we can see the same pattern in two countries with two different political systems, two different levels of development, and different paradigms of the role of science and technology in the economy, and neither have seriously invested in the Cybersyn style system.

The question is

How would you defend the thesis of cybernetic planned economy actually functioning, given the technical bureaucracy in the planned economy have largely failed to invest into it, while investing into the computer systems and informatization broadly?

つまり、詐欺被害者になってしまった