The Core

If not for the extensive capacity of the surveillance state, I would say China is looking more and more like Eastern Europe in the last days of the Soviet Empire.

Of course, the US is looking more and more like Central Europe in the last days of the Weimar Republic, but who's keeping score?

>>surveillance state

The Stasi in East Germany were legendary for capturing massive amounts of data on everyone, including party loyalty. They had a spy network almost unparalleled in history. Spouses and children reporting in their spouses and parents.

The problem is they had no way to process and aggregate the data, so they had no means of drawing actual conclusions from it. That's why the whole collapse caught them by surprise.

Thirty years has made a huge huge difference in the ability to process big data. In 1988, the fastest computer in the world was the Cray-YMP, having taken the title from the Cray-2 released in 1985. It had a 4GB SSD and could run at about 2 gigaflops, with peaks up to almost 2.7gf [1]. We'll call it three to be generous and note that no country other than the US was allowed to have one.

An iPhone 12 A14 bionic processor is capable of 11 teraflops [2], which is 4,000 times better than the Cray-YMP and roughly 1,000 times better than Deep Blue that defeated Kasparov [2]. Even a $37 (if you can find one) RPi 4 is 5-8 times faster than a Cray-YMP  [3], maxes out at double the max memory of the Cray and probably has more storage too.

The top supercomputer at this point can run at 1600 petaflops[4], so roughly 1.5 million times faster than than the fastest computer available when the Soviet Union fell.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_Y-MP
2. https://www.bigcompute.org/blog/from-apollo-to-fugaku
3. https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/raspberry-pi-4-good-enough-for-gaming
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500

This is kinda a crazy situation.  Apparently, their equivalent of the FDIC is only going to pay out a max of $7,400 and they only agreed to that after massive protests.