>>24846319
>That's not what liberalism means. Ive already laid this out. Liberalism doesn't mean liberal democracy, which is a political system that evolved within liberalism, which is an economic system.
There are both political and economic aspects, and the political aspects (individual rights, and limiting state power) reflect the economic aspects of free markets and private property. A really radical liberal (i.e. a libertarian) would say something like "free minds and free markets." This all came out of the Enlightenment in Europe. The idea is that political liberalism and economic liberalism are linked. At any rate, one of the arguments today is whether that will continue or not, or whether it might be replaced by something else. Like you could have an illiberal state that is authoritarian in many respects but that also turns out to be compatible with a market economy.

>>24847558
>Are there any indications that China is gearing up for an invasion of Taiwan.
Not imminently but they are "gearing up" or investing a lot of money and training in what they'd need to do to pull something like that off, for sure. Like building / training with amphibious landing ships, expanding their version of the Marine Corps, and building up their navy in general while also doing exercises that have them encircling Taiwan. I don't think it's a near-term risk though. This kind of thing is the most difficult military operation to pull off and they'd have to do it on large scale without any IRL experience at war. Doesn't seem like a good deal.

>Last I checked, most of their economic growth in the last fifty years came from investment in capital, not in any technological innovation--even as their pouring more and more money into R&D.
Yeah. Well they have some high-tech companies, like my 3D printer is Chinese. There are these sleek tier 1 cities, but there's a crazy difference between those cities and everywhere else, like the fact that there's 600 million people there making $5/day. That's what I read the trade war is about, China produces way more stuff than its own domestic economy can absorb. Trump wants the U.S. to make more stuff, and the U.S. wants China to buy more of its own stuff, but China can't do that because it's economic model isn't built that way. There's really no social safety net there either and the population is rapidly aging.

>>24847652
>As an aside, the reason the Russians actually invaded Ukraine, which you might be tempted to think of as a counterexample, is because the Russian state is in a much more precarious position than the CCP, for a host of reasons that mostly boil down to less competent administration.
I think that's right. The Russian state is some kind of half-built loony bin and I don't think Putin and his top guys really know how to maneuver without generating some kind of crisis or emergency situation.