Who are the first two, then?
China and Japan? Though Japan's is more dystopic because of a national overworking fetish rather than because of systemic things. Maybe the system is pretty fucked too IDK.
Not sure if China really counts. Dystopia, sure, but it's not definitely not capitalist.
The economy is.
Sort of. On the international level, very much so. Internally it gets a bit weird.
I picked up a pretty interesting perspective from an exceptional East Asian poly-sci scholar I studied under. Essentially, the PRC's government is still devoted to their model of socialism. Note the first article of their constitution:
The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
The socialist system is the basic system of the People’s Republic of China. Disruption of the socialist system by any organization or individual is prohibited.
What a lot of the West perceives as moderating policies and a shift towards capitalistic economic policies is in fact thoroughly misinterpreted; the PRC's government is allowing these reforms to help stimulate their economy and modernize their industry with the intent of rolling them back once they reach their development goals. The only real question is whether the PRC will actually be
able to stuff the cat back into the bag when the time comes, given how thoroughly a lot of their citizens have embraced it.
That's the extremely abbreviated gist of it, at any rate. It doesn't deal much with the tangential issues of corruption, profiteering, &c.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14958769 times)