Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…nto capitalism. He's going to push the party into the private sector more strongly than it was before. Board directors, party officials. CEO, party official. Private sector people who don't cooperate? Destroy them, make examples of them, including in the tech sector, so that people get the message that the party is the boss here. You have a kind of natural progression where you open up the system economically in order to drive jobs, prosperity, wealth, because you've destroyed. People say the Communist Party brought 700-800 million people out of poverty. No, the Communist Party put those people into poverty. Why are a billion plus people in poverty? Because of the party's rule. It's the people themselves, they lift themselves out of poverty. The Communists have to reassert their control, their Leninist monopoly on power, because the very thing that has rescued them—the diligence, entrepreneurialism, ingenuity of the amazing Chinese people and of that society—is now a threat to Communist rule. I agree with the mechanism by which the growth happened, but I don't think it's the case that it was their inability to have true Marxist communism which led to liberalization. If you look at the creation of these special economic zones, the imperative at a national level that you must have growth, and then Deng's Southern tour… Jiang Zemin, he tries after Tiananmen to clamp down on opening up. Deng says, "No, we must open up. If you don't, we’ll remove you." All of that is a sort of positive. Maybe positive is the wrong word, but… Policy driven, that’s true.…

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