Ask Lemmy

There should never be a global super power. Ever.

Linguistically, I want neither English but Chinese, but an auxiliary language to be the lingua franca. I already know Esperanto, so this would be a good candidate as far as I'm concerned. There's no way I'm learning Chinese.

I want to see as much nonfree closed source software replaced by FOSS as possible, no matter who makes it.

The others (pop culture, companies) wouldn't bother me much at all. But I don't think Christmas would stop being popular at least in Europe.

Can it become a global superpower without becoming “democratic”?

Because that means a liberal western style democracy right? Where policies enacted by representatives only benefit 1% of the people? Like scientific research has shown that like 10% of laws passed actually represent the will of the vast majority of people. And 50% represent the will of the 1%.

While in China people are constantly polled (like monthly or weekly sometimes) about their opinions, situations, desires, and then laws are formed from that. They participate in local government in councils, and directly decide how their immediate community lives.

What even is democracy? To me it’s to have the will of the people represented in our states.

This doesn’t happen anywhere in the west. When was the last time a government in any major western country was POPULAR. And did what people actually wanted?

How is THAT democracy?

No. Even if they dramatically changed on all fronts, became a democracy, promoted LGBT+ and racial civil rights, broke up their concentration camps, stopped surveiling citizens, gave people true elections, and stopped cracking down on political opponents, their nation is facing an extremely serious gender and population imbalance, one that will have drastic impacts on their society and stability in the next 30 years. A large portion of their workforce is going to retire and cannot be sustained by the smaller population that are kids and teens now. There's also a severe gender imbalance from the One Child Policy favoring boys over girls. There's no getting off that train, and shit like incel culture and a ton of retirees causes bad political instability. Or wars, to distract from problems at home, like what Russia is doing.

It's going to be a massive problem since they don't have much in the way of immigration, and even if they got a ton of people pregnant now, they are still facing down a 10+ year deficit of people.

Hell, the only reason why we aren't in the same boat is that we didn't implement boneheaded policies like that, and immigration helps offset our birthrate being below the replacement rate of people. We depend on immigrants as much as they depend on us.

This reads more like "do you care if Chinese culture becomes popular and dominant" and I am not sure. Except for the language (which I don't think I could learn before I die) I don't care, the music is good, movies, dance. And China and India are both so populous it would make logical sense to me that one might be the trend-setting culture.

But politically I think it more likely that the US finds its way back to democracy, than China finding its way there.

no.

why?

because democracies don't work in a world devoid of consequences against the rich and powerful.

I wouldn't have a problem with any actually democratic country being a superpower since I've always lived in a democratic superpower. Though it's flawed and not the greatest, it sure as Hell would beat growing up in an authoritarian superpower.

As for the things listed, I wouldn't mind the whole Chinese becoming the defacto world language considering I could probably learn it and if not, translation tools are better than ever before in most cases. I wouldn't mind Chinese Hollywood so long as they were making quality animated films (which is way more than possible for them currently, just look at films like Legend of Hei and Big Fish and Begonia). Fengshui as a spiritual practice I can't get behind personally, but have no problems with.

Got no complaints about where UN headquarters would be moved to in this hypothetical so long as it's not an authoritarian country. I don't mind Lunar New Year becoming a major holiday since it's fairly harmless as a concept (just don't go blowing yourself up with firecrackers somehow). So long as the safety and privacy measures are roughly the same and I'm not being uber spied on, don't really care who has control of business manufacturing, no authoritarian country though.

Knowing Baidu, without the government requirement to censor, they'd become the new gøøgle in this hypothetical world, so you wouldn't catch me directly using it. Don't have enough info on harmony to make a statement about it since I usually just use budget samsun phones with their android tweaks. As for windows/Linux, there are already whole entire Linux distros (like Deepin) that may be forks of one of the big distros but are their own thing. But knowing me, I'd still stick with whatever Linux I am using at the time, so little to no impact for me there.

All in all, I don't have a problem in this hypothetical. But that's something we're pretty far away from ever becoming a reality, though.

1. China already is a superpower

2. There can be more than one superpower

There has to be more than one superpower. Humanity is too immature to behave itself without the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Most of the bullshit American hegemony really started to ramp up after the fall of the USSR when the US found itself unchecked. It could basically go in and fuck up whatever country they felt like. At least during the cold war, they had to consider the possibility of a power equal to their own countering them. Without a check and balance on the world stage, the U.S. has proven itself repeatedly to be without a doubt, the villain of the story.

Depends on whether or not China shifts demographically as well. They’re currently too xenophobic and monocultural. Look at most western developed country and you’ll see quite a bit of diversity. I don’t think you’ll ever have a global superpower that is so set on race or where you were born.

China is definitely not immigration friendly.

I don't care which country is the global super power as long as it adhere to the liberal world order and all that comes with it.
I want to leave in peace, enjoy my human rights and not have to worry about other countries using arms to push their will.

But also: a lot of those points have nothing to do with who the global super power is

Appendix: maybe I was vague but my answer is that as long as the super power follows the rule-based order (as it is supposed to be obviously) it doesn't matter who that super power is. China, Russia, USA, Albania, the Vatican, Congo, w/e.
Understand that might does not make right and follow the same rules as the lesser states and I'm happy.

Sure why not?

If China becomes democratic it is no longer China anywhere as we know it. The agenda is still, AFAIK, that the totalitarian regime is necessary for another undisclosed amount of time with the end goal to transition into full communism.

The problem is of course that the party elite quite enjoy this position they are in and are in no hurry for any societal transitions in any direction whatsoever.

So, in my mind, your question is at best some imaginary world building for a fictional scenario that has no connection with reality.

You are wildly overestimating what "democratic" means.

Or maybe you mean more, but the term "democratic" does not contain that. Think about Russia, India, Philippines... they are democratic too, but that has very different meanings there.

So, before I am OK with China, they would also need many other major changes besides a democracy.

I don't understand why you would connect these two things. Since when does any power's foreign policy treat those in the rest of the world as if they have any of the rights afforded to their own citizens? The US certainly doesn't.

It wouldn't be any different, the US is NOT a democracy either and is a global superpower 🤷‍♂️

No because we can and ought to have a world without global superpowers and states overall.

While I’d support china going democratic 100% my experience of working and traveling in china makes me pretty certain it’s not happening in my lifetime. Obedience has been brutally beaten into Chinese citizens for so long it would take a long time to change that

When you say "Chinese" becomes lingua franca, do you mean Mandarin? Cantonese? Yue? Hakka? Other? If Mandarin, do you mean Jilu? Jiaolio? Other?

I don't think "Chinese" or any sinitic language ever becomes the global language. Translation is becoming so simple, I would expect any new global initiative can work in 3-4 languages simultaneously.

UN headquarters relocating - I think it would be more likely the UN collapses and is replaced by something else with China leading.

The Chinese movie industry is already huge, we just don't see much of it in the US.

Lots of Chinese people aren't into fengshui. That's kind of a bizarre stereotype for you to pick out of everything mentioned.

The aerospace industry in China has a ways to go before they can be classified in the same tier as Airbus. They are getting better, but still heavily rely on borrowing designs instead of creating their own.

Baidu, HarmonyOS, a computer OS - fine by me to add more options.

What I actually hope is the idea of a single global superpower dies completely. It's not even the current reality for the US; it's just propaganda.

In an alternate universe where Britain didn't went and colonise countries, US is so weak they got wrecked and conquered by Japan in ww2, and China become a democratic country at the end of ww2, then yeah i guess i wouldn't mind because it didn't matter.

In current universe? None of that will happen, even if a political party suddenly campaign against CCP and CCP suddenly got voted out next election. English doesn't became a lingua franca overnight.

I don’t think we have a choice, and the US having the largest military in the world doesn’t really mean anything unless we just want to kill everyone.

The only issue I see with your plan is keeping the Chinese writing system. Alphabets are superior, even if you write Chinese with them.

Otherwise as long as my ideas about how the world should function get put into practice, I don't care who does it. By chance of history US was the one who brought quite a few good ideas into the world, mostly in the second half of the 20th century. But there's nothing fundamentally American about having good ideas.