> China has had, in terms of national continuity, a couple millenia more hard-work-and-sacrifice-time than the US, FWIW, if those qualities are inputs to being "better."
The CCP has no continuity with the previous imperial government. They love to make that claim when it's convenient but it's bullshit. It would be like the US claiming they have a national continuity with Britain going back millennia.
The US does have a national continuity with Britain going back millenia.
Half of jurisprudence is grounded not in writings that came after the Revolution, but English Common Law. We lean on the First Amendment for issues of free speech, but we lean on the Magna Carta for questions of whether you've produced the right magic slip of paper to prove you own the land your outhouse sits on.
... hell, many of the states have a right to grant exclusive ownership of that land that's fundamentally rooted in a king having granted them that right.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can't ignore that we're mostly speaking English for some reason...
Basing laws off laws of another country isn't national continuity. The British didn't just accept the Declaration of Independence and remove their agents from the US. The CCP wasn't formally recognized by the imperial government as the new government of China. There's no continuity of government in either case.
"Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson (August 26, 1936 – December 13, 2015) was an Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian who lived and taught in the United States." ~ (guess the source)
With respect, between the work of a Cornell professor and an internet rando, I'm going to defer to the professor on the topic the professor wrote on.
The CCP has no continuity with the previous imperial government. They love to make that claim when it's convenient but it's bullshit. It would be like the US claiming they have a national continuity with Britain going back millennia.