A lot of similar innovations ~20 years ago at German and Italian companies like Siemens VDO or Magneti Marelli. The issue is none of them were ever put into mass production, they were just left to rot on shelves while the Chinese out innovated them. It's the exact same story how Kodak invented the digital camera but shelved it to keep its film business alive till Canon and Nikon out innovated them.
>It's an impressive success of long-term planning.
China and CCP really shined at this, contrary to western expectations who thought it would be another USSR 2.0 waiting for it to collapse under state mismanagement and have them sweep in and buy the nation's assets at a discount. Then in a twist of irony, the opposite happened as China turned out to be better at maneuvering capitalism than the inventors of capitalists.
While the western business leaders only plan for next quarter and western politicians only plan for next election, all of which leads to short sighted greed driven "get rich quick while you still can then pull the ladder from under you" decisions on all fronts, leaving the future generations to pick up the tab and try to fix the past mistakes, all of which bogs down development, China moves at lightning speed.
I've often wondered if this long-term planning and foresight is fundamentally incompatible with a democracy running on sub-decade cycles. I imagine the two could coexist if voters themselves were more aware of their candidates' long term effects, but they need to trust politicians to actually produce results (and not get voted out next cycle).
>but they need to trust politicians to actually produce results (and not get voted out next cycle).
Due to the lack of accountability of politicians and the greed of wealthy elites who own them, most of the democratic west became low trust societies, where people can't trust politicians to have their interest at heart anymore.
That's why you see people voting the most extreme and destructive anti-establishment candidates in almost every major democracy, because voting the least worst option as was the norm, simply resulted into a slow march towards feudalism: unaffordable housing, higher taxes, stagnating wages, decline in quality of public services, increased illegal migration, etc.
So why would people choose to vote for the same thing for multiple decades? That would be the definition of insanity.
> Due to the lack of accountability of politicians and the greed of wealthy elites who own them, most of the democratic west became low trust societies, where people can't trust politicians to have their interest at heart anymore.
That is the core problem of the United States today.
In a low-trust society, it's hard to do anything low-margin but useful. The overhead of hostile action makes it unprofitable. Yet most of the goods and services people really need are low-margin.
China has formal Five Year Plans. Currently, the fourteenth Five Year Plan is finishing up, and the fifteenth, to start in 2026, is being worked on. They're published openly, but few in the West read them. They're general in the sense that they don't specify who does what, but specific in that they specify what should be emphasized and funded.
Historically, the Five Year Plans were aspirational and political through at least the 1980s.
There were some major disasters. Search "Great Leap Forward".
Some time in the 1990s, the planning system seemed to gain focus and started to become effective in guiding industrialization.
The Five Year Plans drive capital allocation. If a company wants to do something that's in the plan, it's easier to get money, loans, land, and such than for business areas not in the plan.
This is different from Soviet central planning, which was more like a very sluggish manufacturing scheduling system that told specific plants what to do.
Updating was annual, which is far too slow for that level of control.
Search "Gosplan".
A lot of similar innovations ~20 years ago at German and Italian companies like Siemens VDO or Magneti Marelli. The issue is none of them were ever put into mass production, they were just left to rot on shelves while the Chinese out innovated them. It's the exact same story how Kodak invented the digital camera but shelved it to keep its film business alive till Canon and Nikon out innovated them.
>It's an impressive success of long-term planning.
China and CCP really shined at this, contrary to western expectations who thought it would be another USSR 2.0 waiting for it to collapse under state mismanagement and have them sweep in and buy the nation's assets at a discount. Then in a twist of irony, the opposite happened as China turned out to be better at maneuvering capitalism than the inventors of capitalists.
While the western business leaders only plan for next quarter and western politicians only plan for next election, all of which leads to short sighted greed driven "get rich quick while you still can then pull the ladder from under you" decisions on all fronts, leaving the future generations to pick up the tab and try to fix the past mistakes, all of which bogs down development, China moves at lightning speed.