I never thought I’d wish for bigger hawks in the white house.
His successor, Deng Xiaoping started a lot of really great reforms, including term limits on leadership and granting Shenzhen & some other cities special/experimental economic status, to basically run autonomously as capitalist.
Several decades later, paranoia is too strong. Xi Jinping removed term limits because he doesn't trust others to run the country better than him. The One China policy has killed a number of vibrant cultures including those of Tibet, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs. A social credit system is being implemented. Now Alibaba is being nationalized.
These issues will likely only get worse, until another great famine event.
https://www.ft.com/content/055a1864-ddd3-11e9-b112-9624ec9ed...
Fraser Howie, author of "Red Capitalism", says that all Chinese corporations are either state owned enterprises or state overseen enterprises. It appears China may want to transition Alibaba from the latter to the former.
At this point its not even a question of whether we will see Jack Ma in public again. Overnight he went from billionaire to peasantry. We've seen dozen cases like this:
1) Billionaire disappears or is "killed"
2) Billionaire's company becomes nationalized
3) Rinse & Repeat
Everybody who isn't familiar with the inner workings of the CCP thinks that Jack Ma openly challenged the CCP. That simply isn't the case. They are using as an excuse to take over the company because they can.
As much as people in the West praise CCP's economic rise, and some even point to its authoritarian system as superior to our democracy, but little do they know the very laws that protect them isn't an option in China.
Imagine spending most of your life building a massive business and then one day it is taken from you by force by an authoritarian ruler.
This is why anyone that has money send their kids abroad and move permanently to a Western country that their kids despise and criticize their host for calling out the CCP.
The real hardcore bolshevik style communists have clawed their way back into power.
They are back. I'm very well convinced now that Chinese nouveaux riche class, and foreign capital in China are living on a leased time.
The country is on its way back to seventies, irreversably now.
This is what is eventually supposed to happen every Chinese company according to the Chinese Communist party. They just allow private ownership, "for now".
- internal turmoil
- political infighting
- encirclement by democracies (India, Japan, Australia, US, UK, Canada, France, South Korea, Taiwan). Once Merkel is out in sept 2021, Germany will be onboard
- negative sentiment from most of population in the world due to covid
- exploding debt/bankruptcies
- lack of efficient feedback loops to self correct, as dictatorship has little of that. Thus Jack Ma is no more.
If you have a foreign commercial presence in China, expect
- kidnapping of executives (for layoffs, unpaid bills)
- no delivery for paid merchandises
- seizure of molds/machines/factories (nationalization)
- seizure of tangible assets (nationalization)
- trademark/copyrights given to Chinese entities
with no recourses.
China does have one compelling advantage: its enormous population. Even if a horrible plague or even a civil war happened and 100m people died, they still have plenty of people to accomplish anything they want.
They have Ph.D. scientists, many trained at top Western universities, who are equal to anyone in the West. They are doing an amazing job in manufacturing and technology; virtually all high value objects are manufactured in China, and, increasingly, designed there as well.
They're pushing into automotive and aerospace and every other field. I don't see them slowing down any time soon.
In how many months do you expect your predictions will come true, in a way that will cause the majority of Fortune 500 firms to leave China? Three? Six? Sixty? Six hundred?
I, for one, have strong doubts that the majority of those firms will ever leave China.
I will also note that all of your criticisms can be applied even more-so to democracies. Internal turmoil, political infighting, negative world sentiment (for some of them), exploding debt, aging demographics, ossification of political structures and poor ability to self-correct, check, check, check. It's true that, say, the United States is not encircled, but it has a separate problem of having to over-reach to maintain an incredibly ambitious, and unsustainable overseas military presence.
If those criteria were sufficient for a social collapse, then we're all living on borrowed time, and I don't see why you're singling China out as a likely point of failure.
Here's a piece that draws quite different picture from yours.
https://worldaffairs.blog/2020/12/31/from-terrified-to-trium...
Now given that the judiciary in China is just another arm of the CCP, there is no rule of law, there's just the rule of the CCP and the whims of whomever is in charge.
So you build something successful, someone in charge gets envious, then one small misstep and it all gets taken away from you. I don't actually know if it needs an actual misstep or just enough people to conspire against you.
This is also what worries me about Chinese companies buying other companies and property outside of China. There's a danger that at any moment the entire company will get nationalised and therefore China (or rather the CCP) will own it all. I'm not against some foreign ownership and investment, but usually this has originated from a country where the law rules the land and not some arbitrary dictator. (Yes I'm also concerned about middle-east money flowing in, but to a lesser extent because they don't try to hide it)
Play that out long enough, and you have all the "China {X} Industries" being owned by someone whose chief qualification was working their way up the CCP hierarchy. To the detriment of the company's functioning, and the alternate candidates who could perform better in the position.
And that, ultimately, hurts China more than anyone else.
Anti-corruption drives are no substitute for constant, actual market pressures, because weasels will always corrupt the very vehicles you use to implement anti-corruption campaigns. Or equally inevitably, end up in charge of the entire apparatus.
I don't think most of the people praising the CCP or (any other similar system where one's life work can easily be taken) know what it's like to be in business for one's self.
The good news for the West and China's Asian competitors is that he is effectively helping slow and cripple China's progress. Xi advocates a return to Mao centralism while ignoring all the good that came with Deng Xiaoping's decentralization reforms. With this act, he is also introducing a lot of uncertainty for any foreign investors. This gives the West time to recuperate since the failure of the anti-BRIC TPP.
Everyone is talking like the CCP are the culprit here. There is big turmoil within the party right now, because Xi has taken absolute control of all areas of government.
He wants to be a Mao 2 and all the moderates in the party are gone (Deng, Chou, Bo, Hu) The good thing about this is hopefully when Xi dies it gives China an opportunity to change things maybe even away from the party. The bad thing is... well dictatorships...
Not to mention his deep ties with Steve bannon
I would agree that he often exaggerates, and some of his claims do turn out to be false, but I think we should recognize that he correctly predicted a series of unlikely events w/ regards to China. I think his general intuition of the inner workings of the CCP is correct.
And aren't there a lot of negatives by taking over the largest IPO in history only a few months later???
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO3pO3ykAUybrjv3RBbXEHw/vid...
They do? I don't think this describes a large population.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/alibaba-founder-jack...
I often wonder how much the CCP studies Scientology, as I think Scientology has been really successful in avoiding any real consequences.
Corporate geed is the reason CCP is so powerful today.
Every single corporation I have worked with is willing to comply with China,it's censorship laws, and it's atrocities on the work force.
Who is praising the CCP's economic rise? The American consensus as far as I can tell is that we need to shut them out and push them into decline.
The West should brain drain the best and brightest from China.
Did you miss the last 40 years in which US economic policy was underpinned by the thesis that shipping manufacturing jobs to China would give rise to a middle class that supports democracy?
Well, here's a reminder if you needed it.
A majority of Americans until relatively recently? China was seen favorably by most Americans until the last decade. An economic world power that we should strengthen relations with if polls are to be believed.
For example:
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...
Probably people who have some axe to grind about poverty.
China's rate of extreme poverty from 1990-2016 declined from 66% to 0.7%
During that time the US rate of extreme poverty more than doubled, from .5% to 1.2%
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
If people counter me and reiterate stating that the EU deal is going to miraculously discipline China somewhat, boy do I have a bridge to sell to you. Maybe some gutter oil to go along with it too.
That's why the superich in these countries buy any asset they can in countries like USA and EU. 20 billion is funny money and can disappear...might as well have plan B, C and D ready
It's quite disturbing to see an uptick in this claim in the recent years, as if democracy in principle is not American and ought be discarded in favor of a more illiberal system of governance.
(Also, the pledge is not law, so it's a curious reference to cite as some authority on the matter.)
One is Greek for a concept. The other is Latin for the same concept. How this concept expressed itself in Greek and Roman society and law is complex and there were cultural differences, but what has happened between 1789 and 2021 is a whole lot of tea leaf reading into nothing.
We don’t have a King, nor Nobility, nor Serfs, nor Knights, and slavery has been abolished, so we’re a Republic. Or a Democracy, because we govern ourselves and this is the concept these words describe.
A serf or knight can always blame their Lord for their problems, and Lords can always blame a King, but we get no one but ourselves to blame for our problems because they are entirely of our own making. That’s self-government, that’s democracy, and that’s responsibility.
doesn't change the fact it's shit
He's responsible for the abomination of misinformation that is gnews and gtv which has been consistently spreading absolute bogus regarding the pandemic, the election, and politics, for a really long time.
Yes, Guo is right about some things every now and then, and yes he without a doubt knows more about the inner workings of CCP than 99.9% of people.
But let's not give him more credit than he deserves, he's not a fucking prophet. Let's not build another political cult of personality around an eccentric billionaire. If you take a look at gnews/gtv, a Guo cult of personality really is the only description you can think of.
Pick a random guy from the street of Shanghai Beijing Guangzhou, any college educated person, they'll prefix the same.
> the CCP lying/withholding information on the transmission and the origins of the virus;
This was largely accepted as a fact of any government handling an emergency. CCP of course is worst at this.
> billionaires being kidnapped/murdered after conflict with the CCP
Think about it, if this is true, how Mr. Guo still milking money from his cult followers. It's either that he is producing nonsense that CCP doesn't care, or he is protected by “deep state” or Trump? You probably want to accept the fact that Mr. Guo is producing junks, otherwise you are leaving with a worse alternative...
"Objective Nonpartisan Insightful", really now! I think your source needs to learn how to write non-editorial English.
Regarding covid, Taiwan did very well, despite being very close to China.
- The government responded quickly, tracing everyone who entered Taiwan to control for spread of covid.
- The civil society took it seriously, with the experience of SARS.
Taiwan beat covid because the society has trust in science and the government [1].
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/how-taiwans-unlikely-digital-min...
P.S. your link has a very pro-Beijing tone throughout:
- It calls India and Australia as the vassal states of the US, and framing China's actions towards Australia as sending a warning to other vassal states.
- The numbers cited there are not comprehensive: when measuring space launches, not counting SpaceX.
Firms will leave China once democracies around the world make a multi-lateral trade agreement and put our money elsewhere that's aligned with our core beliefs including or primarily free speech, say India. Get the agreement in place, have it come into effect in 2 years ahead of time, provide investment grants or loans to businesses (globally if they're aligned with democracy/free speech) who want to manufacture whatever will fill a gap in production for what the 80% of what consumers buy currently from China.
CCP could easily prevent this redirection of resources by allowing free speech and having elections.
The fine people of India believes that cows are sacred gods. They also believe that drinking cow piss is good for you. They also believe that bathing and wallowing in cow sh*t is healthy for you, because it’ll help strengthen your immune system.
India has a very very long way to go.
But hey, India has free speech and elections. So maybe you should tell all your multi-national corporations to relocate to India.
Xi is just a little red guard grew up from the culture revolution the only economic solution solution was follow Mao's "Nationalize" way.
It's easy to make non-specific, non-committal predictions of doom and gloom. I can say with absolute certainty that, say, the Euro will become worthless sometime between now and the heat death of the universe. My prediction is as useless, as it is accurate.
What kind of prediction, with what kind of error bar, are you ready to commit to?
As part of the 'pivot to Asia' initiated by Obama, America has helped many neighbors of Israel make peace with it formally. Iran vs. Saudi Arabia is the only other major engagement in the region. America will also likely extricate itself from Afghanistan completely in order to focus its resources on containing China.
- Non compulsory voting - first past the post - superpacs - the electoral college
All contribute to an oligarchy, not a democracy. The US system seems to be designed to “feel” like a democracy while actually preserving the power of moneyed interests and land owners. It’s crazy to me that the UK has less if an oligarchy despite still having a monarchy.
Of course the media is still an impressive machine of control (see Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent), but again even the media is a little bit better outside the US.
I will answer that: no it shouldn't. You can have a certain level of engagement even when you strongly disagree with another country. Showing aggressive behaviour, specially taking into account the history of agression and colonisation by the West as recently as 50 years ago, will not do anything at all to make life better to the victims of Chinese prosecution. By engaging with the Chinese, the EU may at least have some leverage to politely request that the Chinese , as sovereign people, start displaying a little more respect to other cultures within their own borders.
Now, with technology, in fact things are getting worse. Everyone is required to have a cell phone, everyone is spied upon, a "social score" is maintained and if your score dips below a certain threshold, you may not travel etc.
If the EU thinks that making more trade deals with China is going to temper any of these, they're naive indeed.
Yes. Sanctions can be very effective in curbing China's outsize influence worldwide and cut their economy by half. Just embargo them as long as they persecute Uighurs and HKers.
Unfortunately that can't be done, since American and European companies were too stupid to give away their schematics and let the Chinese copy them outright, while also simultaneously reducing their indigenous production capabilities in important sectors such as rare earths mining and refining, solar manufacturing and extraction technologies.
Now the one child policy has been relaxed, but it will take a while before extra kids are available to work, and at this point it’s sort of a cultural norm to have one kid (plus prohibitively expensive to raise two kids and provide them decent resources).
Meanwhile, the West has its own implosion well underway... but, unlike China we have immigration. The U.S. population is still growing thanks to immigration, as is Europe's, even though both regions have replacement-level or below-replacement birthrates by natives. Immigrants tend to have higher birthrates however.
China suffers brain drain to the West. Many of Chinese Ph.D students and scientists I know curse the day Xi Jing Ping declared himself to be the emperor, and is actively moving their families out of China as quickly as possible after 2018.
China has had very little luck in advanced semiconductor or airplane engine productions
Not to disagree, but I believe it's just a matter of time. They're working hard in these areas.
Also, recent stats I read somewhere say Chinese Ph.D.'s are returning to China in increasing numbers these days, somewhere around 50% or more compared to the old days when the majority stayed in America or Europe.
Turns out, people with the means generally prefer living in countries with (a) individual freedom and rights, (b) freedom of the press, (c) an independent judiciary, & (d) economic surplus that responds to demand for luxury goods.
We can whataboutism on where the West currently stands with regards to these things, but if you're pro- and con- ing various options as an educated professional then you have a choice.
And if culture is a major consideration, then you could do worse than the Chinese communities in neighboring democratic states, or the literal democratic Chinese island...
Which so far translates into ability to outcompete robots on cost and not much else.
Uncle Xi is killing China. After Mao the whole political model was "collective" so no one could become so strong he would become an Emperor, Xi changes that by removing the two term (10 Yrs) rule of leadership. The CCP had one thing for legitimacy, economic growth. For 30 years China become richer and freer. In 2007 even people in HK were proud to be Chinese. That is not the case anymore. China peaked internationally in 2017.
Post-Xi China whenever that occurs will be a large poor country surrounded by enemies without easy access to global markets. It is impossible to use any Chinese product without the possibility of the use of slave or child labour within the supply chain.
China is more likely to return to Warlordism than become rich.
TL:DR - China became richer and freer post-Mao and now that process has reversed and China is becoming less free and poorer.
A cursory search seems to show this is a regurgitation on a sourceless Radio Free Asia article (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/alibaba-probe-1225202...) from December?
There's a long tradition of "$Person hasn't been seen in public -> gigantic dramatic narrative" in media stories about authoritarian countries. No doubt it's great for clicks, but these things mostly turn out not to be true. If this one turns out to be true, we'll certainly find out and discuss it then.
Edit: also, there have already been a bunch of major threads on basically this same story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
"Deep ties to US agencies" is sensationalizing the facts. It's part of the United States government, and nobody has ever tried to keep that secret. Not RFA, not the U.S. Government. Nobody. "Deep ties" makes it seem like it's trying to be covert. It's not.
It isn’t really a credible source.
It's one of the more credible sources of news in Asia. Especially for more authoritarian countries. I used to know a number of its journalists, and they strive for neutrality and factual reporting in places where that is not allowed.
It's the Asian version of Radio Marti, or Radio Free Europe. Funded by the U.S. taxpayers, run by the U.S. government, to bring information to the world. There's nothing new here. This has been going on longer than most of us have been alive.
It's like BBC News, but without all of the sensationalism that has crept into the Beeb over the last couple of decades.
Trying to paint it as some kind of covert propaganda machine illustrates a lack of knowledge, or a personal political agenda.
Some of Chinese audience see the news in somehow opposite direction: True is likely(but not certainly) False. It's a little more than "not credible".
There is another group always fighting against non-believers and saying they are "wumao"
To some point VOA (A lot of Chinese think they are the same but actually not.Just content similar) was criticized by US government that they are helping CCP. What they really did was put some objective/neutral news. It's likely that the management tried to improve their impression and make them more conceptional because Chinese editors of VOA seem quite delusional to fabricate stories. They are much better now that they misleading with some events really happened but mixed with their interpretations.
A lot of their content show up in: https://www.backchina.com/news/ You have to under Chinese though.
are there any "credible sources"? nowadays eveything is biased. the trick is being aware of the biases in your sources and reading sources with different biases.
"These nationalizations are definitely happening, and [the antitrust investigation] will likely speed up that process," Song said. "It's also, I think, about making an example of [Ant and Alibaba]."
So I would trust the article as much as I would trust Song Qing.
What does that mean in this context? What do you know about Song Qing that the rest of us don't that makes him untrustworthy? A quick search didn't come up with anything. Do you have an informative link?
The discourse about China, misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions, and lack of even a basic interest in getting a realistic view of China are rampant. The average view of China in the US is so cartoonish it's quite ridiculous. If you talk to an educated, middle-class Chinese audience about the US people generally have actually a surprising amount of understanding of the basic structure of government, values and so on. You go to a very educated audience in the US or other Western nations and it's still embarrassing. And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/jack-ma-missing-232138645....
Best, semi-legit source I can find, there's other news postings, but from more tabloid and sources that aren't as sincere as Yahoo Financial News.
Which, itself is curious, because CNBC spins it differently:
"https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/05/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-is-l..."
Which also falls under the AU-CN struggle, but also curious about how CNBC did not outright say he's missing yet.
And technically, both could be correct, imprisoned means missing from society but not exactly "missing" in terms of knowing general wherebouts.
Meaning - take the money now, grow the businesses and the economy and then at some point say "It's stupid that we're letting foreigners have 20% (or whatever) ownership of our economy" and just deem it illegal / confiscate that equity.
Obviously it will prevent future foreign investment but if China is in a place where they don't care about that, it would be the move.
Also "this isn't Reddit" is just delusions of grandeur, HN commenters are self-selected around technology for the most part not politics.
Then again, maybe this is no longer anything surprising at all, given the multiple recent precedents, including e.g. the ridiculous "chromeisbad.com" post.
The. State. Will. Take. Your. Property. And. Kill. You. If. You. Step. Out. Of. Line.
People should be taking this with Kilograms of salt.
Food for thought: if this was to be true we would be seeing several bit coin whale operations going on from insiders, and this isn't the case even with the substantial drops in bitcoin value in the last 24 hours.
Obviously they aren't getting more Chinese business, but they've struggled there already. But it makes it a lot easier for them to compete everywhere else. Competing against CCP is going to be a lot easier than competing against Jack Ma.
How is this scenario likely to develop after that point?
Also, with Bezos being the (second) richest person in the world, and with Amazon being very much a household name, I wonder if they would risk the backlash from Western governments and private entities if they were to carry out a "disappearing act" on Bezos.
I started my post with the assumption that Amazon is never going to get big in China. Regardless of whether Bezos is nice to the CCP or not, the CCP is not going to allow Amazon to displace Alibaba.
My comment is referring competing for business in the rest of the world. Other countries where Alibaba and Amazon are both trying to gain marker share.
Either way, a standard if frequently-forgotten message to innovators in such regimes.
https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
996 doesn’t sound bad at all if it’s my own Company and I’m not constantly worried about Cash flow or run rate. Maybe that’s why in the quotes they say stuff like “996 is a blessing” :P
Perhaps it's simply the Overton Window [2] delta between the US and China.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/china-sentences-ex-banker-to-death-for...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
(nothing in this comment should be construed as approval, support, etc for the actions of the CCP; this is only intended as an observation)
Yes, I did actually. There's every reason to believe that the people installed to run Alibaba / Ant after Jack gets sent off to "re-education camp" will be unable to propel it to further heights. Stagnation is likely as good as it'll get and there's every reason to believe it'll be run into the ground eventually.
I see Jack Ma as a sort of Chinese Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. Shooting yourself in the foot like this seems to be incredibly stupid. American government officials would never consider even hobbling someone like Jeff Bezos... that could be partially out of fear (he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution), but its more because of the incredible value someone like a Bezos, Musk, or Ma brings to your economy.
Twitter, Facebook and Apple is doing the same thing at the same time with the US president means that US control is getting more centralized over time, which makes sense with the FED's money printing going on.
The real question is why this wouldn't be able to happen in the US in 10 years.
They look bribery the other way the great majority of the time. Everyone does it, but when they want you, they have air tight, iron clad evidence against you and everyone they need to take down.
I did kind of imagine that, yes, Jack Ma and CCP would be a bit different, but hey, goes to show that CCP still has all the power in China.
Makes you wonder about other power vacuums in the world.
>Did Jack Ma think he was going to tell the CCP how it is?
It all seems so over the top that I'm almost convinced that the US has infiltrated the higher echelons of the CCP and is working hard to make China shoot itself in the foot economically. Is that any crazier a notion than the pretty widely held belief that Donald Trump's election was a Russian plot to undermine the US on the world stage?
Because, the only results of this over-the-top crackdown by China are likely to be that:
* More Chinese entrepreneurs are going to 'get the hell out of Dodge' as soon as they can, rather than risk the same fate. By emigrating from China and setting up elsewhere.
* Western businesses are going to be extremely reluctant to enter into any partnerships / large contracts / investments with Chinese companies, for fear of the rug being pulled from under them.
* AliBaba & Ant will stagnate under government management
It just doesn't make sense to me:
* Lots of reports recently predicting China will become the world's no.1 economy before the end of this decade.
* China's economy first out of the starting blocks on the road to recovery, after the Coronavirus pandemic
* Chinese companies outdoing technologically & commercially their US counterparts [so much so that it led to Trump's spurious sanctions against HuaWei et al].
All of this should have led to the CCP becoming more pro-capitalist in outlook and more supportive of Chinese entrepreneurship from people like Jack Ma. Why suddenly shoot yourself in the foot, when you're finally 'winning'? I just find it really hard to believe that the leadership of the CCP which, if nothing else, has demonstrated itself to be extremely pragmatic over recent decades, is so thin skinned as to risk massive and ongoing damage to their economy over such an innocuous remark.
As I say, in my tinfoil-hatted opinion either the CCP has been infiltrated by the US who are attempting to destroy the Chinese economy from within, or there's a lot more to what Jack Ma has actually done than we're being told.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/ant-group-ipo-suspension-reg...
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/08/954046428/alibaba-founder-jac...
The ability of the government to take on actors with vast amounts of private capital is, in my view, one of those things worth learning from.
Many are worried that America's rule of law is also being slowly deteriorated. Once you go down the path of authoritarianism, there is no turning back.
Only in extremely rare cases like South Korea managed to go from authoritarian military junta that came to power, built up its economy by exploiting and oppressing labor movements, , to a democratic state with civil elections only really started in 1993.
Even now South Korea still has problems with following the rule of law. It used to be that the judicial committee is "independent" from the President but recently the Moon administration has completely destroyed this delicate mechanism that was built to prevent authoritarianism. UNHRC openly calls Moon a semi-dictator now and Moon is getting cozy with the CCP and turning its back on the US. Before, this setup allowed for the arrest of past two military dictators that came to power after Park Chung Hee's assassination by his own spy chief. Now it's gone.
What I'm trying to say is that democracy is truly a gift when it works, its noisy, people fight but thats exactly what is needed but it can easily be taken away.
This is what worries me most about Trump, with the recent military manuevers within the country (squad of apache helicopters, troop transports, Trump heading to a USMC command bunker) makes me suggest this is a man with nothing to lose and evrything to gain with the military and police behind him (police were seen removing the barricades in capitol hill rush).
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alibaba-jack-ma-idUSKCN1N...
This is a classic power struggle between ideological and technocratic elements. Jack Ma vs Xi Jinping. Jack Ma, a communist party member, challenged party Chairman. As we can dispense with the notion that Jack Ma lacks the necessary wits, the actual interesting question is why did Jack Ma think it opportune to openly challenge Xi Jinping at this time?
In the US, this struggle is a non-issue as the ideological element (venture capital) finances and controls the technocrats (such as Jack Dorsey). We just however recently were treated to a purported “outsider” ideologue locking horns, via technocrat proxy of FANGs, with the ideological establishment. Given that this outsider also happens to (still) be the head of state in USA, I guess we need not wonder too deeply as to the logic of CPC reminding a prominent party member and fellow travelers of who still calls the shots in China.
Movements like the Chick-Fil-A boycott and #deletefacebook do hurt companies and billionaires and can force a change in behavior quickly. There's no feedback loop like that with the CCP, and the US gives citizens more power but having to wait 4 years to vote on a change is a very slow feedback loop.
The CCP will not be opposed.
Or maybe in order to archive such success in China one must have connections to people in high places and people with said connections can't imaging their connections turning on them.
don’t think the US acrually expected the oligarchs to overthrow china as they are in bed with the ccp.
The same thing happened in my province, where the power generation industry was nationalized for economic reasons and ended up being a massive economic advantage, along with the lowest unsubdsidized rates everywhere in the world.
I think this kind of dogmatic viewpoint is dangerous.
> But if China goes down this route, it looks like fears of China economically overtaking the US are overblown.
Agreed also. This would be the worst possible thing the government could do to China's tech economy.
They never really stood a chance. Militarily, economically, socially, culturally and spiritually they offer no better alternative to the American one. Similar to how "China owns US treasuries and can crash the US dollar" was the common trope until recently, the US called them out the trillion dollar loan to Qing dynasty which was transferred from KMT to CCP after Chiang Kai Shek's defeat (and really a symbol of CCP's legitimacy over Taipei), and China began buying more US treasuries to increase its US dollar dependence. Without HK, the yuan-hkd-usd peg is collapsing and CCP is running low on US dollars. Kyle Bass's interview with Guo Wengui explains this in detail [1]
I even had Chinese students condescendingly tell me that China is taking over and everybody will be speaking Chinese by 2020 back in 2005.
If Winnie the Pooh, censoring wikipedia, university students protesting over Tibet, Tianmen Square massacre, organ harvesting of Falun Gong (they are "scientology" so its okay they said) causes the security apparatus kick into high gear then you really are the complete opposite of anti-fragility which is what the US is.
US is anti-fragile, authoritarians are not because they are susceptible to even the smallest shock in the economy or the mindset of its citizens, so they use excessive violence and fear to maintain its power. They don't last at all.
It's more likely that people who made a lot of money working with/in China have an extremely skewed view of the world.
How does this action demonstrate that China isn’t going to overtake the US economically?
Coming up with leading edge technologies or business models – as opposed to mere incremental improvements on stuff invented elsewhere – is not China's strong suit.
China's problem is that authoritarian regimes in the long-run are worse at innovation than freer ones. At one point it was hoped that China might address this problem through gradual liberalisation, but recently under Xi China has been moving in the opposite direction.
They needed a slow burn to achieve world domination, but he's much too eager.
The CCP has pretty explicitly said and proved that it places itself and its interests above Chinese and/or international law.
It's playing nice with international investment for now, because it's free money, but ultimately any investment in China is only valued to the extent the CCP feels it's in its best interests.
The West's intent was to make China dependent on the international banking and trade system, such that they would provide additional levers to control China's behavior, but we're talking about a government that starved its population to prove a point...
Nothing shy of being able to melt down the Chinese economy is going to change their decision, if they make it.
What is interesting is China is even powerful enough to do this. This isn't new - it's what Iran tried under Mosaddegh, and it's a story oft repeated in South America, and each case there is suddenly a CIA backed coup who fights against nationalization.
I don't think China would see any blowback from this - the idea that it would prevent future investment in China is like saying Europe would stop investing in the US after the American revolution; as long as there is some alpha to be made in an economy as large as China's, I'd expect them to still see foreign capital.
I think what it more interesting is the concentration of power in the CCP elite and how that power is wielded. On one side you have the "communist" dream where the nationalization of Alibaba is felt by all Chinese citizens who are given more through socialization - one can imagine what China would look like in another 15 years if they focused on further educating and strengthing their citizenry; its the progressive left's "dream" for America. On the other hand, it's also likely you end up in a situation where power corrupts and nationalization is just an excuse to enrich Xi and his inner circle.
In that case the state can still get sued. see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos_shareholders_v._Russia As for actual compensation to the shareholders, it can range between money seized from foreign accounts (think US treasuries) to sanctions.
Because if the latter, then the CCP is not going to give a monkey's what happens to that property. The CCP has been trying to stop rich Chinese from investing outside China for years now.
Chinese people are jointly invest in that venture, by (not limited to):
* Sacrifice family and personal time, by hundreds of millions of passent migration workers.
* Sacrifice health and life quality, even today 996 still a norm, and you can imagine what have been since the opening up
* Environment, early pollution has harmed the people's health and well-being
* Mental health, stressful working time, lack of support
At the top, it was CCP and Western capitalists grabbed most of the profit, but leaving the waste to be suffered by the people.
Case in point, Alibaba's success is a CCP sanctioned monopoly and unfair market competition. I pity Jack Ma's treatment from CCP, I don't pity him as a citizen, he already enjoyed too much beyond what he actually deserves.
As such, I do welcome campaign like the poverty elimination [1]. If CCP does nationalize alibaba and use that to help rural areas to gain access to market, I consider that a positive thing for the vast majority of the poor.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-11-27/china-...
Which is inits entirety a propaganda campaign. I have peers from all across China, poorest parts included. All what 6 people saw were a photoshoot, and a potemkin village.
That framing seems disingenuous given that per capita income in China has increased something like 10x in the last few decades and hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty.
That would be a very dumb move since they own over a trillion dollars of US debt.
Still, I would prefer to "quotient out the money", and say either the demand is met or it isn't? To the extent it is met, perhaps there are imports of material goods or domestic labor (nurses?)
I don't think it makes sense to worry about "domestic debt" in the same way, given the non-liberal political economy. Of course that doesn't mean there aren't limits, but the limits maybe would take the form of e.g. rising discontent and decreased productivity if it feels like an old-people-focused service economy with nothing in it for the workers.
You can't just blindly apply the economics of traditional liberal economies to a 21st century high tech illiberal economy.
That doest' mean we should praise the CCP (at least not in its current form!), though. Far from it!! Now that people have a decent life standard, they should, and probably will, raise against injustices being committed by the governing party.
Maybe they don't want a democracy modelled on the West, and that's ok!! We need to understand that there may be other ways to govern a country as big as China. But everyone in China definitely wants to be given a fair go to live their lives as best as they can, and to have at least a level of freedom that lets them live a happy life without causing problems to others (after the last few days, even the most avid defender of free speech in the US seems to agree a level of moderation in the public discourse is required, the only point of disagreement seems to be in how much).
It is really painful to see China moving back to authoritarianism in this way after a couple of decades in which it looked like they were embracing, slowly but surely, more freedoms and human rights. Let's hope that they find a way out of this instead of incessantly criticising them as if they were the devil all the time!! I honestly believe that even the CCP highest party members want to see the improvement of the Chinese people's lives, it would be completely irrational to believe otherwise... they are just humans like all of us... the problem cannot that they are evil!! The problem is that they have misguided fears of what may happen if the people is given too much freedom and try to mercilessly prevent their fears from becoming reality (like, you know, a revolutionary government taking power by force, which is the worse that could happen anywhere, even in China).
It's completely rational to, especially now, when Chinese analogue of bolsheviks are now in power in the party.
USSR's elites lived in the most obscene luxuries, and the CPC has beaten that few times over.
Their raison d'etre was to get more of that.
Chinese civil wars (for lack of a better term to capture the sheer scale and complexity) have had body counts that make the American Civil War look like a drunken bar fight.
I'd argue against it on the grounds that the planet doesn't have enough resources for everyone to live a middle class lifestyle.
The only set of charts that matches your description re: Americans viewing China favorably is the first set of charts, which is in response to question 8b, do you view China _unfavorably_, for a worldwide survey broken down by country.
Question framing matters a lot on surveys, particularly for questions outside people's daily concerns. you'll get dramatically different distributions on the questions "do you view china favorably" or "do you view china favorably"
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/22/china-us-data-intellige...
Edit: misread your comment but the series is quiet good, not what you asked for tho from a neutral source.
That being said, the example I'm giving here is actually a lot more than just a utility company - there is also a profitable R&D arm that did a lot of work on LTO and LiFePO4 that found its way to market, as well as has a successful construction arm.
It also did consulting work for the Three Gorges Dam in China notably but also a lot of other projects.
There is also an electric bus project that is in current development with a partnership with Volvo and Novabus as well as a Chinese/Italian/American/Quebec electric motor manufacturing joint venture, that has shipped a few dozen buses locally and is being considered for international orders.
So, I think that it can fairly be said that nationalized companies can be successful beyond simply utilities and natural resource exploitation.
Unless they come up with robots or start opening up immigration (which will be a hard sell), you are going to have old single men competing for whatever economic avenues they can find. Single men living in dense urban zones in poverty is guarantee for unrest. ex) Syria
PRC is Qing Dynasty 2.0 and it will be divided up by foreign powers when its weak. Sort of like how NATO & EU prevents Russia from retaking its former satellites permanently and this is exactly why Putin is in Crimea, Georgia, and now Latvia (massive open terrain allows fast ground, air invasion of Moscow and this has always been the central core of Russia both past and the present security policy).
This time, it will not be allowed to unify. The West, China's neighbors who are after its loot, will simply allow all 55 minorities to declare independence, and massive civil war is a real possibility between competing regions.
If you understand China, they are forced to follow Beijing. People from South are more westernized and business minded. The southern coastal provinces are best poised for economic recovery and could be the favored state.
When the smoke clears, a unified Korea is in the best position to take over because of its soft power in the region.
Nobody forced people to become America, people put it on themselves to become American. This is the power of culture and China simply played its hands too early and were caught stealing chips. Figuratively and literally
This has not happened at all in the US with 5X the income per capita (at least in nominal terms), why are you expecting to happen in China?Maybe the relationship is inverse, the more money the Chinese have the less probable they will rebel, same as in America and the rest of the world
> It is really painful to see China moving back to authoritarianism in this way after a couple of decades in which it looked like they were embracing, slowly but surely, more freedoms and human rights.
No country moves in a straight line (assuming you can even trace its "movement"), you should notice that easily with the US. Compared to 30 years ago China is better in almost all indicators, and yes that includes things like freedom of expression, because despite of still having an iron hand on censorship the CCP cannot avoid the common folk to communicate among themselves in million ways. Western people are too naive or arrogant if they think the regular Chinese just buy wholesale everything that is told. This does not mean the other naive take of course, that they dont buy anything that the politicians say and they will align with the western countries if they just had the chance. It turns out, surprise surprise, chinese are as much people as the Americans.
> The problem is that they have misguided fears of what may happen if the people is given too much freedom and try to mercilessly prevent their fears from becoming reality
This fear is not misguided and it is not exclusive to the Chinese by the way. The external threat is very real, and the CCP as every power structure takes very seriously the internal threats too. If you think the US is different I kindly invite you to revise the history on how any political movement not called mainstream Democrat/Republican party has been treated covertly and in the open by the power structures in America. So again, you are not saying nothing new or particular about China that you could not repeat about your own country.
I suspect Apple is tolerated only because so much of Apple's manufacturing costs are in China.
But the actual rubber stamper voting group is about 3000 people.
However, since there was never any real independent and strong opposition (the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan) the only power struggles were very much about succession, and again that's like a minor clash in a royal family, whoever wins, it's still feudalism.
... yes, you said that Jack Ma is a CCP member, but he was nowhere near close enough to Xi in any aspect to challenge him. He's a useful idiot who got a sector allocated to (IT, cloud hosting and web/online/in-app payments), got big thanks to no competition, and thought he has actual power.
By membership I do -not- mean registration to vote for a party; meaningful participation in the political organization, from local office, all the way to national committee level, and of course actual elected and political appointments.
I don't have the numbers but wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be an even smaller fraction of total population than the Chinese single party.
Roughly take US as 1/3 of population of China, and then test expectation that 91/3 => ~30,000,000 politically active members of political organizations in US. Again, I don't have the numbers, but I would be shocked if actual party members in US even reached the 1 million mark, much less 30 million people. For fairness, let's throw in 18 million Americans that belong to unions. Let's make it 20 millions in total. That's still less than the required 30 million politically organized Americans to be at par with CCP.
[but p.s. /g! If we throw in the 18 million American millionaires, then we have a system that is a bit more representative than the CCP]
Chinese capitalism is cut-throat. I really think that will become the major risk of Chinese economy.
The problem with the US is that the class interests of those whose consensus is important in lawmaking is aligned with the interests of the ultra-wealthy.
Nor do I buy into the mythos that "lawfulness" is something universally applied in the United States. Laws, procedure, delay always play a large part when the interests of people with large capital are threatened, but lawlessness is the norm in many relations that impact ordinary people, like that weird clocking in rule that your boss at your retail job has instituted that is actually illegal under labor law or when the Federal gov't decides they will no longer enforce redlining law by going undercover to investigate racial discrimination.
Where is the basis of this not enough resources for middle class life style?
Tell me, what is middle class life style anyway? If you are talking about the American consumerism middle class life style, sure, I think most educated people nowadays do not really like that form of life style, or find it actually comfortable.
And even if that's the style everyone wants to. With tech advancement, why cannot everyone afford that, while still keep the environment health and sustainable for human?
Please enlighten me...
About as believable as when Sally at work says there's layoffs coming - but she's the receptionist.
That's why I want to know who this person is, and why I asked the critic for more information about him. I trust RFA more than I trust some rando commenter on HN.
This doesn't seem impossible knowing the CCP, but it would take more than a single source rumor before I'd consider it credible.
Does RFA have a much better reputation than I realized?
But I firmly support the whole idea of eliminating poverty with the accumulated wealth. Essentially a form of compensation by transferring some wealth.
No wealth ever changed hands. PM Li's saying of 600m Chinese still living on CNY1000 a month is 100% real.
Why would bolos would in their sane mind empower their enemies, by transfering wealth to them?
I don't know what to answer that except that it's the quickest way to get a fascist regime that doesn't even try to hide it's fascist. Monopolies don't need to compete with people's dollars.
> Movements like the Chick-Fil-A boycott and #deletefacebook do hurt companies
None of these movements really hurt these respective companies.
Chick-Fil-A stopped donating to anti-LGBTQ groups. #deletefacebook did work but most users just switched to instagram so it had a minimal effect on revenue.
And putting unelected billionaires in charge is going to do exactly that? No.
> #deletefacebook did work but most users just switched to instagram so it had a minimal effect on revenue
No it didn't. Neither case the bottom line of both companies was impacted in any meaningful way.
Perhaps in the China of the past, but I don't think the low-level bribery you see in places like Nigeria or India is incredibly common in China anymore.
It's important to have external checks to political power. It's pretty amazing that private companies (Twitter, FB, Stripe) were able to stand up to and effectively limit the power of the commander of the largest military on earth. That has almost never happened without bloodshed.
The US constitution is has worked pretty well, but it's just a document. History has not been kind to those nations that have centralized power by nationalizing companies. Doesn't that get us closer to fascism?
It's not sensationalizing the facts, it's minimizing the facts. It's a pure propaganda project meant to manipulate public opinion outside of the US. It's the Asian version of Radio Marti, or Radio Free Europe. Funded by the U.S. taxpayers, run by the U.S. government, to improve the image of the U.S. in the world, to strengthen friendly governments and to weaken government enemies.
It is an overt propaganda machine, but fully available for covert agencies to use as part of any project they wish. A great way to use it is to float a story, then get more legitimate outlets to report on the story using it as the source.
It's like BBC News, if the BBC didn't broadcast to British people and was explicitly conceived as a propaganda arm of the government. So not really much like BBC news.
If one listens to VOA/RFA in my country, one would think that the US is a shining utopia and did nothing wrong in Iraq/Afghan invasions (9/11 just happened a few years before I left the country).
The truth is that there is no objective news outlet in the world (even 'facts' fed to the unsuspecting reporters/journalists are dubitable).
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...
RFA isn't part of the CIA. It's part of U.S. Agency for Global Media. From Wikipedia:
an independent agency of the United States government which operates various state-run media outlets.[2] It describes its mission, "vital to US national interests", to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy"[3] and in accordance with the "broad foreign policy objectives of the United States".[4] USAGM supervises Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Televisión Martí, Radio Free Asia, and Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa.
Why is it so difficult for Americans to believe that the US engages in a war of propaganda against countries it labels as “adversaries”? [1]
[1] https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/14/u-s-repeals-propaganda-...
RFA is still run by the US Government, which is worth considering when talking about the possible biases of RFA... but the NYT article you linked has nothing to do with the current RFA.
The reason Radio Free Europe/Asia were founded was to broadcast the benefits of 'freedom' into communist-governed areas. You might think that we're qualitatively the good guys, and I'm all for freedom, but that's definitionally 'propaganda'.
The person who started this thread is trying to discount an RFA report solely because of the source. That seems unwarranted.
People who listen to RFA know this. People who don't only see that it's run by a U.S. government agency and think it's the equivalent of Soviet shortwave days.
Not everything the government does is evil. Not everything the government publishes is propaganda.
Propaganda is inescapable, like politics. It's all about whose you like the most at the present moment or which kind you're epistemically indoctrinated into. :3 (For me, I like scientific empiricism, but that position, too, is just a philosophical/political/propagandist leaning, frontloaded with all the assumptions and priors that go along with it. And I also think it's the best one, and I think it's dumb to disagree.)
The overused term is "unbiased" which doesn't mean anything. The closest meaningful word to it is "disinterested" which means that the person conveying the information doesn't particularly care about it.
We in America are much too obsessed with "one great man" theories of history. I also think we are inclined to underestimate the competency of Chinese governmental figures, which is structured very differently from the West.
> that could be partially out of fear (he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution), but its more because of the incredible value someone like a Bezos, Musk, or Ma brings to your economy.
I think it is actually much more about the former than the latter.
Eh... Do I think Bezos is a visionary responsible for all of Amazon's success? No. But culture comes from the top. There's a lot of ways to run a company poorly, especially if it's doing something novel and not just churning out mundane products. The big ones involve bureaucracy and short term profits. If Jeff Bezos died, I'm sure Amazon would be just fine. Tesla maybe not. How mature is Alibaba and Ant?
Seems to me that China also has this theory at the moment, with Xi.
I think they still have catch up to play with us, but I'm sure will be there soon enough.
That's a HUGE over exaggeration. Yes money matters, but only so much and it very much matters where that funding comes from. That's why McConnell still has a job despite his opponent spending three times as much. People knew that money was coming from outsiders trying to unseat him. Bezos or some other billionaire trying to pour an ungodly amount of money into a political campaign is more likely to backfire than help.
Sure, money can't do the impossible, but if you only need a few percentage points it's pretty likely to help
Or did you forget where Apple was when Gil Amelio got ousted for Steve to come back?
As for Apple, putting the questionable meaning of the stock market to one side for a moment, when was the last time they did anything truly exciting, that cut their competitors legs out from under them? The M1 chip? That's the only thing I can think of for a long time, and it's a bit unclear how much consumers will care vs geeks.
Just my opinion though.
Here’s the video if you want to form your own: https://youtu.be/WSKYWu-S2G0
Looks like missteps by Jack Ma were severe.
But I’d say it’s a bit unfair to compare musk to most people
The RFA from the 1977 article and the RFA today were separated by 44 years.
Perhaps you're confused because they have the same name.
* The linked story is way out over it's skis, pulling together partial opinions from a bunch of sources to make a definitive claim that is not really supported. I doubt the Party themselves have even reached a firm decision on the matter yet.
* The (minor!) Radio Free Asia link is a random person they were interviewing, who gave an opinion. It's not RFA's official opinion on the matter, but I'll opine that they pick and choose who they have on based on US interests, that's their charter and raison d'etre.
Whether that's still true today or not is not something that anyone here is going to agree on.
Why is it so difficult for Americans to believe
Suggesting that "Americans" suffer from a lack of introspection reveals your own biases. 350 million people. 350 million different worldviews.
Capital has very few "good" places to be allocated at the moment - really for the past decade or so - and COVID-19 put everything into hyperdrive for the tech sector.
Economics Explained on YouTube has a good video about this.
Low interest rates means that people will search for yields elsewhere, it doesn't intrinsically mean they would settle on Apple outside of solid management.
It's crazy how tied to a warped view of China people get.
Like, I have serious issues with China too, but the picture many people seem to have in their mind is just not modern China whatsoever.
https://supchina.com/series/sinica/
I'd also agree that because many of China's educated upper class (political and economic) have been schooled or at least traveled or met foreigners from the US or other democracies, they understand many of the mechanics. However, I would completely disagree that even a bare majority of Chinese have much conception at all how western politics work. Even those who are educated in the US/Europe rarely understand politics except at a single point in time.
I would count myself as one who has a fair knowledge of politics and business in China having spent almost 2 decades traveling and working with businesses there. I have some understanding of their history, socialization and education, as well as, business practices. What I can say is that they are very different depending on where you are (Shenzhen/HK vs Shanghai vs Beijing vs Chongqing). They speak differently, they live differently, and they do business differently. Also, China's politico-economic environment has changed very significantly in the past 20 years often with political leaders. and Xi has been one of the more rapid/dramatic changes.
I've learned that I do not understand the inner workings of China/CCP... even the workings of the US political system over the last 4 years border on incomprehensible. I would say that some of the business people I have seen most taken advantage of are Chinese expatriates who invested back into their homes and had relatively large businesses taken from them, because they thought they understood - align your interests carefully with someone who is on the ground or even family can take everything (this wasn't a single instance).
Why? China was clearly a communist project, and this is what they became. Why is the end result we see in reality less valid than the theory?
Words have meaning so unless you're using them as a proper noun or acronym (CCP, NAZI) you follow common usage. Just because a word is useful for demagoguery or insult doesn't make it correct.
Having seen my grandparents/parents/relatives escaping communist China and now my generation escaping HK, it has heavily influenced me on how even people who identified as Chinese and hoping for democracy and freedom for their own cousins in China are being played and lied to for multiple decades.
My people in HK are screaming that the West previous engagement policies have proven again and again to be ineffective. It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades.
I do not claim to know everything about how the Chinese system functions and can only observe how my immediate network is being oppressed but still hope that there's a way to engage the CCP if at all possible.
So, it's not surprising the average Chinese person has a decent understanding of how a basic democracy works.
In some ways, China is also not THAT much different, either. But it is more different than pretty much every other major economy in the world.
I mean, for one, it does not even put on a charade of being a democracy. It pretends to be communist (economically), but in a lot of ways it is more capitalist than a lot of the West. And the scale of the government is enormous. It's much more different, and there's really not much of a reason for many people in the US to have a decent idea of how it works.
China's government does not affect our daily lives that much - at least not yet. And Americans (like most people) are mostly concerned with themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_politics_is_local
And people are just people, once you scrape off the cultural and political veneer.
China definitely has big market aspects and private ownership, but I also think this can be overstated.
There is still massive public ownership of major companies and banks in China and land in all urban areas is publicly owned as well.
It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.
> And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
The West will mostly separate production within about a decade or two. It‘s not a problem at all.
> It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.
This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that is getting the West into trouble.
There is no dictatorship system. At most, it points to a non-democratic system. But that term covers an incredibly wide variety of regimes, from 1920s Portugal to Latin American Cold War authoritarian regimes to the USSR to Maoist China to contemporary China, and all of them are very different creatures. The differences between these are much wider than the differences between democratic systems (e.g. US vs Israel vs India), which are already very wide.
Western posturing and brinksmanship isn't going to bring about any meaningful change. It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]. All that a foreign enemy (that loudly proclaims their belligerence) does is unite people behind shitty leaders. (As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.)
Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government. At the end of the day, no government can govern without the consent of its people. It's just a much slower feedback loop than what you see in countries that have regular elections [2].
Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China, and its architects know that. China is not the target of their behaviour - looking strong in front of domestic audiences is. In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences. Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
[1] The USSR imploded in a combination of incompetence, complacency, and a desire for its leaders (Gorbachev and his allies, who won a power struggle against Brezhnev's circle) to stop the worst of its repressive practices.
[2] Which in itself operates on a timeline of decades, if you look at how long it takes to go from public sentiment, to the primaries, to actual results in elections.
Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell? That's the first time I've heard that take. I mean, obviously what killed the USSR was a failure to dictate an efficient economy (what is likely to kill the CCP as well), but the Cold War defenitely, in my opinion and in the opinion of every piece I've ever read on the subject, sped things up significantly.
>As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.
I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies. The most publicized actions are those taked by leaders in unilateral context, which are most often related to foreign relations and military operations, and thus not related to domestic issues. However, if you look at what the vast majority of these democracies spend their time on, on a man/hr basis, it's solving domestic problems. The US is a prime example. Trump represented <1% of the government's actions, but got 90%+ of the media time. Meanwhile the entirety of congress was working on nothing but domestic issues.
>Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Agree for the most part.
> Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government
The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.
>Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China
Posturing, no, but policies can and do have a large effect.
>In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences.
It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.
> Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
Well yeah. No one wants a war. It would pretty much destroy earth at this point. I think if you want to point to rising risk though, most of the blame needs to go to China itself. It's ever expanding territorial claims are the largest risk factor. We can talk about how the US lays claim to a large part of the Pacific, but then we have to start talking about the validity of most of the world's borders, so that's kind of moot in my opinion.
Cooperation with totalitarian states often prolong their existence. An example that comes to mind is the US subsidizing grain being sold to the USSR and thus preventing starvation, which would have arguably led to a collapse of the communist regime [a].
However, it is also possible to encourage the "feedback loop" that you mention by merely demonstrating the alternatives that are out there. Radio from the other side of the Iron Curtain [b] gave hope to many people in the USSR.
To sum up, thoughtful action from the outside can help bring down totalitarian regimes faster.
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Grain_Robbery [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Cold_War
China is basically another planet that also happens to be located on Earth. That's a good analogy I think. The CCP is the current planetary govt. If you are the government of Mar's you wouldn't really care much about happens on Earth would you? (I.E. the rest of the world).
Relations in China are the ultimate expression of realism. Politics is power politics, authority resides in he who controls the guns. The branches of government that matter are intelligence, military and security. Because at the end of the day, the only force is coercive force. This isn't particularly new or fascinating as it's been true throughout Chinese history. The rules of international politics applies to domestic politics in China. I.E. the law of the jungle. It's a very old political culture so I imagine a lot of methods were tried and ultimately centralized authority backed by a strong army came out as the most efficient way to unify and govern the land. The governing method of China has and always has been for the last 2000 years some variation of Legalism. Dress it up as communism or socialism with Chinese Characteristics or any other neologism but Legalism has always ruled the land in an unified China.
I don't think the west is kowtowing to China, the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground" so to speak, but they have not communicated this in any coherent way to their domestic population which continue to cling onto the pretence of the economic and political superiority of the western bloc, hence the dissonance between what is preached and what is actioned.
As for the article I don't put too much stock (no pun intended) in it, mostly because I follow BABA stock quite closely and while it has lost a lot of value recently, news like this should really cause big moves if it is true. I could be wrong and maybe in a month's time we will all be nursing big losses from the rug being pulled from underneath us. But as it stands this has not been picked up any major newswire as far as I know (FT, WSJ, Bloomberg) so I am holding my positions, not shorting or placing puts. Money talks, bullshit walks.
What’s a “Western Elite”? Russia, India, Japan, Australia? What “power” are we talking about? Military power? Economic power? Intellectual power? Cultural power? What are the “facts of the ground” you are talking about? How have the Western elites accepted “facts”?
These are all open questions to the unbiased reader. Could you elucidate? Otherwise it sounds like you are just juicing Chinese stocks...
The population of the PRC is 1.4 billion people.
The population of NATO countries is 941 million [0]
The population of Japan, South Korean and Australia combined exceeds 200 million.
That's 1.14 billion without including any other "protectorates". Far exceeding half of 1.4
[0] https://www.worlddata.info/alliances/nato-north-atlantic-tre...
If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers.
If you would like a local insight into more young/liberal perspectives, Sixth Tone[3] is fairly interesting. Be aware that this is a state-owned media source, so it has an interest in presenting China as progressive in ways that outside of middle class communities in top tier cities it usually isn't. Just because it's state-owned doesn't mean it's not informative, though! China Media Project[4] is perhaps a useful accompanying source to try understand exactly how the state media is biased.
Of the western media, New York Times probably does the best reporting on China (they even have a Chinese language version), but like all western media they struggle to get access. Inside China, Caixin is probably the best newspaper, but unfortunately it is pay-walled.
From left wing perspective I can also recommend Made In China Journal[5].
[1] https://chinarrative.substack.com/
[2] https://chinesejournalreview.substack.com/
The only way that will work will be dropping few tank divisions on direction to Beijing.
I've dealt a lot with people like Xi, and Putin in my life, during my childhood, and youth in worse parts of Russia. I've tried everything, nothing stops them, they will keep pushing with brazen arrogance.
I had once such guy taken away by police, he came out on bail, and came back to bully me the next day.
They are pretty much like cartoon zombies, keep coming back until they cannot.
The CCP has been around for about a hundred years, founded in 1921. They haven’t changed their name in almost 100 years.
“Officially, the CCP is committed to communism and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties each year. According to the party constitution, the CCP adheres to Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, socialism with Chinese characteristics, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought. The official explanation for China's economic reforms is that the country is in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. The command economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy under Deng Xiaoping, the current economic system, on the basis that "Practice is the Sole Criterion for the Truth".”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party
Not saying your anecdatum isn’t correct, but it’s a higher hill to climb than that. If someone described a person to me as the description above, I’d say “Gee, that’s most likely a communist.”
The Nazi party was founded in 1919 and ended, rather spectacularly, in 1945. That’s only 25 years.
This has the unfortunate property that at least for China the end-state is constantly evolving, but only in relatively unimportant ways. China has a freer market than the USSR did, but even the USSR had to abandon completely planned economics almost immediately after Lenin took power. After that it was mixed, just like China's. And in all other ways they are the same: no democracy, rampant censorship and propaganda by state-allied corporate entities, no real private property rights (if you can lose your IPO by giving a single speech criticising the government, it's fair to say whatever private property rights you thought you had don't really exist).
> Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell?
That's correct. The cold war wasn't the reason the USSR fell. Neither was 'Ronald Reagan', or Star Wars.
To elaborate on that point - it wasn't outspent by Star Wars - Soviet planners were not seriously proposing that the USSR maintain parity in that arena, just like they weren't proposing that the USSR maintain 11 carrier strike groups. MAD would still work, and with stockpiles of thousands of nuclear weapons, its territorial integrity was assured. "We outspent the reds" was more of a domestic justification for bloated DoD budgets, than it was an actual, credible, Soviet-empire-ending military threat.
The disaster in Afghanistan contributed to Brezhnev's circle losing power, but it was entirely self-inflicted. The USSR over-reached, only to discover, to great embarrassment that it was no longer actually capable of projecting military force outside its borders - half due to its domestic economic problems, and half due to Afghanistan being an empire-killing quagmire. It's not the first waning empire to come to this realization, nor will it be the last.
> I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies.
You're correctly observing that the purpose of foreign-affairs-posturing is media optics. I agree. The thing is that, to take Trump as an example - the observable impact of his domestic politics was... Not dramatically different from the status quo. He branded himself as a fireball reformist - and he did it by loudly complaining about Mexico, China, Iran, etc. Meanwhile, domestically - which is what really matters to his constituents - he has accomplished nothing. (To be precise, he accomplished less than nothing - COVID would have probably been handled better if he went on vacation for all of 2020.)
It's a stretch to say that Congress was working on domestic issues - Congress was spending their past year, keenly focused on doing... Nothing. That's the result of congressional deadlock. (To their credit, that's better than active sabotage.)
> The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.
I believe you are overstating the importance of economic dogma. The people of China, just like the people of the United States, or Myanmar, or Sweden, ultimately don't care about whether or not their economic policies are liberal, conservative, or martian. The political axis on which your economic policies fall on isn't interesting to anyone outside of a tribal political argument.
What they care about is results.
What they care about is answers to questions like:
"Do I have a job? Does my job let me make ends meet? Will my children be better off than I am? Do I feel secure in my economic future? Will I be better off five years from now, then I am now?"
Those questions are how you should be evaluating economic success, or failure - not where the policies fall on an economic compass. The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about the legal structure around a foreign-owned branch office in their country, or how some billionaire is treated. The average person cares about whether or not their government pension will be honored, and whether or not they'll be able to afford to buy an apartment, so that they can marry, etc, etc.
Of course, if you are consuming media that is written from the perspective of an un-average person - say, a foreign business owner, then of course it will make it sound like the most important question in the world is "But how neo-liberal are your economic policies with respect to foreign ownership?"
For the past twenty years, ever since the 'China will liberalize because foreign investment' meme was making the rounds in the newspapers (which sounded quite ridiculous to me at the time, but what did I know, I was 12...), all discussion of the subject was focused on the latter question, as opposed to the former. The only time the former was ever mentioned, was to argue a point about the latter.
To summarize - economic policies surrounding foreign ownership are not a bellwether for feedback loops of political sentiment in China. They are a bellwether for the sentiment of foreign business owners about China. There's an ocean of difference between the two.
> It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.
I am under the understanding that the elimination of leaded gasoline was the only meaningful factor for falling crime rates. Countries that did not undertake tough-on-crime legislature fared just as well as tough-on-crime did, without subjecting themselves to the social disaster that surrounded it.
So, the way I see it, it didn't 'have it's problems'. It was nothing but problems.
> Well yeah. No one wants a war.
I disagree. There are factions in the US that want a limited shooting war, because they think they can win it, without it going nuclear. There's the occasional post on HN calling for this sort of thing. I don't think one's likely to happen, but history tells us that its not outside the realm of possibility.
The reality is that the CCP is a dynamic organization, which has the ability to react to new situations and effect new goals in creative ways, in some ways better than Western liberal democracy. "Dictatorship" rhetoric obscures that reality and encourages lazy thinking about liberalism reigning triumphant at the end of history.
In recent times, its response to the COVID outbreak is a good example. It's the only "continental" country which has successfully contained COVID, by leveraging its ability to put the whole of China on a wartime footing. That's despite the disease originating in China; them being the first government to have to figure out an approach, with limited biological knowledge of the disease; and initial missteps that led to a full scale disaster in a major city. Today, amazingly, the CCP has more domestic support than it did a year ago, having received credit for defeating COVID.
Other examples of successes: pioneering a way for a government to harness the Internet to increase its own power; the subjugation of rebellious regions (which, by contrast, many countries including the USSR failed at) while mitigating international fallout; wresting control of the South China Sea from competitor states.
Its richness vs SK's and TW's is an interesting discussion, and Maoism set mainland China back decades. But mainland China was a poorer area in 1920 than either SK or TW, with a more rural and isolated population, and SK and TW avoided the worst of WW2 and the ravages of the Chinese Civil War while reaping the benefits of being maritime states and allied to rich countries. A better comparison would be to India, which is a country with a similarly large landmass, massive rural peasant populations, and isolated inland villages. In 1950, it had a similar GDP per capita as China, but today China's GDP per capita is almost 4x that of India. (SK and TW, by contrast, started at a ~50% higher GDP per capita in 1950 than either, though they're now both ~200% higher per capita). It's actually pretty shocking that India did so badly for half a century, considering how badly China mucked things up for three decades.