Is Japan BETTER Than China? - Our First Impressions (YouTube video)

[Jana]

I have always been much more interested in China than Japan, because it was always culturally superior and much more diverse than Japan.

Don't care about development, Japanese society seem overly westernized and oddly robotic and I def. prefer China (as a destination).

[Dandelion]

I don't think you know much about China. Most Westerners do not, it's honestly a very complex and large country.

Also, China is developing right along the pace that other East Asian countries were once they had the fundamentals of a stable political environment and a market economy. So I don't know what shortcomings you are talking about, China is going to be a first world country within 30 years. It's already night and day from where it was 15 years ago.

I mentioned a shortcoming. Extreme censorship to very silly heights. Shutting themselves in from foreign influences basically and making as much as possible state-sanctioned. Even something as Wikipedia, which is free to edit, is forbidden in China for the state doesn't and seemingly cannot trust its citizen with access to it (even if it can get circumvented rather easily, the principle is an odd one).

It's a shortcoming when you can't trust your own people, a huge handicap. A society is better when it can in my opinion. And in that regard Japan > China in my book and probably for a long time to come at that. But that's a subjective question of personal ethics and values, not one of material progress.

[zhaoyun]

I mentioned a shortcoming. Extreme censorship to very silly heights. Shutting themselves in from foreign influences basically and making as much as possible state-sanctioned. Even something as Wikipedia, which is free to edit, is forbidden in China for the state doesn't and seemingly cannot trust its citizen with access to it (even if it can get circumvented rather easily, the principle is an odd one).

It's a shortcoming when you can't trust your own people, a huge handicap. A society is better when it can in my opinion. And in that regard Japan > China in my book and probably for a long time to come at that. But that's a subjective question of personal ethics and values, not one of material progress.

A lot of that is derived from current circumstances and also the fate of history. When Japan was industrializing, it was an authoritarian state under an emperor and had military rule. The same can be said for a great deal of Western countries such as Germany, Russia, etc. Remember, it only became a democracy because it was under US occupation. And really only after it had already developed.

I do agree with some of your points. At the same time, I am not dismissing them but China is a work in progress, it is changing very fast and I don't think we have seen anything like what the finished product will be, which will show itself in 30-40 years. I think eventually China will be much more open and be more democratic, but it will have it's own system and not be a copy of Western liberal democracy. I used to be more idealistic and wished that China would automatically become a Western style democracy but I guess with age and personal experience seeing both the magnitude of the country, the wide variance in developments, the population, etc. I can understand why an authoritarian system is needed during this period of incredibly rapid industrialization. Since everything else in China is changing so fast, social change, values, economic wealth, development, etc, the political system remaining very solid seems to be a necessity, even though that comes with a lot of downsides too.