China’s Evolution Beyond Past Radicalism Risks | Generated by AI
You’ve identified some important structural changes that do make movements like the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward less likely to repeat in their original form:
Information flows: You’re right that information is harder to control now. Even with China’s sophisticated censorship apparatus, the COVID lockdown protests showed how quickly dissent can spread through social media and VPNs. During the Cultural Revolution, the state had near-total control over what people knew about the outside world and even what was happening in other parts of China. That monopoly is gone.
Economic model shifts: Your NVIDIA example captures something crucial. Modern wealth creation depends heavily on knowledge workers, technology, and global integration rather than pure labor mobilization. A campaign that destroys educational institutions and technical expertise (as the Cultural Revolution did) or that disrupts skilled workforces would be economically catastrophic in ways it wasn’t in the 1960s-70s. China’s leadership is acutely aware that their legitimacy now rests significantly on continued economic growth and technological advancement.
Memory and experience: The generation that lived through these periods is aging, but the collective memory of their failures remains strong within China’s leadership. There’s institutional learning about what happens when ideology overrides basic economic and administrative rationality.
But some cautionary notes: These same technologies that make people value peace and prosperity also give authoritarian states new tools for control—surveillance AI, digital payment tracking, social credit systems. And while information flows more freely, that doesn’t automatically prevent mobilization around nationalism or perceived external threats. The question isn’t just whether people have access to information, but whether they trust it and how leadership channels social energy.
What do you think about the tension between these democratizing technologies and the new authoritarian capabilities they also enable?