These actions can all be traced back to China's increased tendency towards authoritarianism, for example the elimination of the term limit for Xi Jinping in 2018,[1] which stands in contrast to China's economic liberalization in the early 1990s.[2] It's important to understand that this liberalization is more or less the sole reason China is the "young superpower" we see today (just look up the GDP numbers from 1990 onwards), so the question is how a reversal of this attitude will serve future Chinese interests. Although unconfirmed, there are claims that Xi's grip on power may be decreasing somewhat, and that there is "widespread opposition" from within the party, but for obvious reasons few are willing to speak out.[3]

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-jinpi...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/china-xi-jinpi...

A mature legal system is the only reliable way to combat problems like corruption. A legal system is much more reliable than a single powerful executive. China could have gone beyond mere convergence in its economic success. Different egos are running things now than during the start of the economic reforms, but in a better timeline I think some successful institutions from Hong Kong would have been adopted in more areas of China.

However, the west isn't in a position right now to say that in spite of it being harder work to run a system where political influence doesn't affect the legal system that strong institutions are the source of our prosperity. We're simultaneously in a period of dismantling established institutions, and less capable when it comes to managing crises than we used to be.

https://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Yuen-...

Chinese corruption focuses on access money (steroids) to coordinate massive development projects and a cadres ability to graft is directly correlated to their projects success. The flip side is pervasive corruption is socially destabilizing as recognize in the 2000s, which is why Xi inaugurated his office with the anticorruption campaign. Yes, there was some power consolidation involved, but most of the effort was genuine - CCDI has investigated close to 2,000,000 officials, even Xi doesn't have that many enemies. Despite some terrible human rights campaigns that affect <1% of the population, this is very much the "better" timeline. The legal system is being improved, it's _not_ (<-edit) going to be modelled after the west, the most optimistic outcome is Singapore, whose political institutions has trained 50k+ Chinese officials until a few years ago. Incidentally, Singapore style single party dictatorship was about the best HK could have ever hoped for - people keep insisting HK's role as financial centre is predicated on it's western values yet in the same breath suggest HK's loss will be Singapore's gain. Authoritarianism + capitalism are absolutely compatible.

Your last paragraph hits the nail on the head, western institutions are failing. They don't have to be, but as long as they are, China will be more reassured in it's model.

I think western institutions are being underestimated. The whole point if democratic systems is their flexibility. We will simply adapt and grow new institutions. We have the dynamic systems of social discourse and public accountability to do so. Authoritarian systems find this hard to do because their top down architecture limits them to solutions envisionable by a single authority. They have no way to do public input or to generate a range of options, or try things and have them fail. It’s fine. It’s part of the process.

Xi became president as a compromise candidate between the internal factions, so he didn't have much support or allies. CCP officials are corrupt by default, of course the effort would be genuine, even though the true intention was to consolidate his power inside the party.

Re. CCP lifting 500m out of poverty -- I'd argue that the Chinese people prospered and lifted themselves out DESPITE of what CCP has done. Looking at the potential alternative and what KMT has done to develop Taiwan, I'd think that's the case. But there is no way of testing that.

> Authoritarianism + capitalism are absolutely compatible.

I agree with this in the case of Singapore. But when CCP is actively exporting its brand of authoritarianism to other countries and influencing the freedoms of other countries' citizens as part of an ideology war [1] using unrestricted warfare [2], then that organization becomes a threat to the world. The best case HK can hope for is the collapse of CCP.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/chinese-comm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare

Do the ends justify the means? A long form piece entitled "Why Do Chinese People Like Their Government?”:

> But, with only very few exceptions, they really conceived of liberalism not as an end in itself but rather as a means to the decidedly nationalist ends of wealth and power. They believed that liberalism was part of the formula that had allowed the U.S. and Great Britain to become so mighty. It was embraced in a very instrumental fashion. And yet Chinese advocates of liberalism were guilty, too, of not appreciating that same contingency, that whole precarious historical edifice from which the liberalism of the Enlightenment had emerged. Did they think that it could take root in utterly alien soil? In any case, it most surely did not.

> It must be understood that liberalism and nationalism developed in China in lockstep, with one, in a sense, serving as means to the other. That is, liberalism was a means to serve national ends — the wealth and power of the country. And so when means and end came into conflict, as they inevitably did, the end won out. Nationalism trumped liberalism. Unity, sovereignty, and the means to preserve both were ultimately more important even to those who espoused republicanism and the franchise.

> […] By the mid-1920s, the overwhelming majority of Chinese intellectuals believed that an authoritarian solution was China’s only recourse. Some looked to the Soviet Union, and to Bolshevism. Others looked to Italy, and later Germany, and to fascism. Liberalism became almost irrelevant to the violent discourse on China’s future.

* https://supchina.com/2019/07/22/why-do-chinese-people-like-t...

I did not read the article, but I'd point out that this is in opposition of what Sun Yat-Tsen and Chiang Kai-Shek believed in. KMT take over happened around the 1920's, they believed the road to rebuild China was through [1]

> three steps: military rule, political tutelage, and constitutional rule. The ultimate goal of the KMT revolution was democracy

And indeed, this is what Taiwan had gone through under the rule of KMT, evolving into the democracy today.

> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.

- Hannah Arendt

I would add that several totalitarian singularities, that each are closed off from one another or perceive each other through a completely controlled ideological filter, might also constitute such total control.

Why USA has historically entered into so many treaties?

They reason is is because USA's constitutional arrangement makes it really hard for the US government to declare a war... on the paper.

So, by giving a treaty, USA was giving the strongest assurance that by turning a treaty into its own law, it prevents the chance of anybody in the constitutional order of precedence stopping, or reneging on the obligated retaliation.

From a political standpoint, one of the purposes of the defense treaties has been to discourage allies from building up their own militaries. This was an explicit policy in the wake of WW2 to promote both US hegemony, but also to promote stability - the theory being a world with one dominant military power is less likely to see large wars like WW1 and WW2.

WWI was caused by an overuse of treaties.

"Declaring" war had meant almost nothing since 1789.

You can't give a pass by saying "They're just testing waters". Everything in war is testing waters.

What? What could the US have done beyond what we did other than all out war? The US response to this was very harsh.

We undid 50 years of diplomacy with China, and have started building a sortof SEA equivalent to NATO.

Chinese/American relations have probably never been as unfriendly as they are right now, and Hong Kong is a major part of that. Seriously I don’t know what the next step would be that wasn’t a de facto, weapons-hot war.

Edit-might be this one: https://youtu.be/U4bBftiRo2Q

Except when it does, quietly accepting losing Vladivostok to Russia (Chinese [1] Google translate [2]). Vladivostok was lost during the same era Hong Kong was lost.

[1] https://www.rfi.fr/tw/中國/20200703-俄羅斯微博高調慶祝海參崴建城160周年-網民怒批-官...

[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

Vladivostok was never part of any inherited territory dispute which CCP inherited from ROC who inherited from Qin. Settling border disputes is not analogous to ceding sovereignty, i.e. CCP has no issues settling 12/14 border disputes, most with more Chinese land concessions. But when it comes to core sovereignty issues like Tibet, XJ, HK, Taiwan, part of the century of humiliation narrative hole CCP has dug itself into, they do not compromise on or at least have sunk too much political legitimacy in the last 50 years to ever renege on. Historic exceptions being Mongolia and 11dash down to 9dash in the 50s, when CCP was an infant. Contemporary loose end is pretty much Arunachal Pradesh which CCP is willing to package swap for Aksai China with India which will also resolve Bhutan border.

Signing the TPP could have helped _a lot_. DT gave China _a lot_ of diplomatic leverage there, for free...

This isn't just a Trump thing (though he has accelerated pulling the US out of leadership positions) but it goes back to the lack of response to the Crimea annexation (and Russia's continual pushing of it's Ukrainian boundary).

China has spent the last several decades smartly becoming more diversified in what countries they depend on, while at the same time making sure the whole world was heavily reliant on themselves. Due to that no one country can do anything to keep China in check, and in normal times that would be OK. However, the world has relied on the US to form global coalitions that would work together to push back against things like this, and now that the US has made it clear it will not work with anyone else (even allies), China knows that no other country has the influence to form such a coalition. That means it doesn't even need to be coy about what it's doing (as we are seeing with Hong Kong).

So yeah, I agree that in 2019 and 2020 the US and Eu/Britain couldn't have done anything meaningful, but what's happening right now is heavily caused by the US' pulling out of the world stage leading up to it.

At least now that CCP is showing its true colors, the world is more aware of its threat.

Also discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701333

I am absolutely no fan of the current UK admin but on this issue I think they've done the decent thing (which surprised me, tbh).

Goes both ways though.

True territorial disputes can invoke different measures. Grouping HK and other human rights topics like Xinjiang with territorial disputes I think muddies the waters.

As for actual territorial disputes,

> ...China, which has displayed a willingness to negotiate in many such situations. In just over 60 years, China has gone from 23 land disputes down to just six. In the majority of its settlements, China accepted less than one-half of the territory it originally claimed.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/territorial-disp...

The article prefaces by saying this

"One way to cement a claim to a disputed territory — and to anger others who think it belongs to them — is to build on it."

Then goes onto describe the disputes almost being exclusive between China and the US Navy, and further reinforces that point by saying,

"The U.S., the longtime guarantor of freedom of navigation in Asia’s waters..."

I'm sorry, but isn't it sort of ironic that Bloomberg accuses of territorial disputes mainly with China as being the aggressor, when most of their maritime incidents are almost exclusively against the US Navy?

China is clearly the "aggressor" in this situation because they are building military installations in an area that was previously not a militarized zone.

China was the 5th out of 6th claimants to weaponize their holdings on the SCS. The last being Brunei who has nothing. China was merely responding, not initiating SCS weaponization (but mostly in response to US pivot to Asia and increased US basing in the area to contain China - same reason Russia took Crimea in response to NATO encroachment led by US). The difference being China reclaiming land with 2% of Chinese GDP will vastly outscope Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines or Taiwan. The irony is US pushing Philippines for PCA case against China using a dispute system China opted out during her UNCLOS ratification while US not being signatory to UNCLOS. Or US not recognizing features of other claimants that was also invalidated by PCA ruling which applied uniformly to other parties in the SCS.

I'm not sure there's a big difference between claiming they're territorial US waters vs claiming that the US gets to decide who's waters they are. In both cases the US has sovereignty over those waters

That isn't true. Some of the dispute involve the Americans, most involve the Vietnamese and Filipinos, and then some from the Indonesians and Malaysians. That only the USA has the resources to keep these disputes from being one sided shouldn't muddy those waters.

There's a reason Russia and China are bold right now.

EDIT: I get it, it's politically charged, but I remind everyone to discuss, rather than downvote, based on your own political opinion.

Globalization unified Chinese elites with oligarchs in the US and Europe so they both could profit from exploitation of the Chinese labor force. But now that the country has developed past the point of this being easily profitable for all parties, the Chinese regime has to resort to ever more authoritarian tactics to keep the wheels spinning. Average people in western countries might oppose all of this, but the people who rule them put as much stock in these objections as the Chinese leaders do their dissenters.

This is confirmed by John Bolton (I guess if you believe what he wrote in his book that the President attempted in court to block).

Trump “turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome.”

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/trump-lies-china...

Trump is schizophrenic on China. His "anti-China" attitudes right now seem more of a function of a need for an external enemy to blame/distract from his domestic failures. His trade war with China occurred around the same time he initiated trade disputed with even allied nations. There are even indications that he is not bothered by, and perhaps even approves of, Chinese human rights violations (e.g. IIRC Bolton has said he expressed approval of the Xinjiang camps directly to Xi).

I believe some of his advisors are more opposed to current Chinese government actions, but Trump's shown a willingness to do foreign policy 180s against their advice before.

Frankly, it doesn't even strike me as that different from previous administrations (it's not like the US particularly cared about what happened to the East Timorese, for example), he mostly just seems more short-sighted, by focusing on money rather than power.

If you want more explanation there are plenty of past explanations at these links:

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Do whatever you must do.

There's another issue, which is that we don't see everything that gets posted to HN, even in the same thread. There's far too much material here for anyone to read it all. So if you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or emailing us at [email protected].

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

The hope is that long-term economic integration will progressively reduce these problems, by turning "national spheres of influence" into "European spheres of influence". But at the moment, EU foreign-policy mechanisms (and appointees...) are fairly weak. We'll see what happens after we digest the loss of Britain, which was an extremely vocal (and followed / respected) member on these topics. Maybe we'll finally grow up a bit.

Why? What would the benefit be? What would the benefit have been?

See also: cointel on BLM while white supremacists plan and execute with freely. Team America: World Police reflecting our actual police.

Also, victims of the Atlantic Slave Trade, anti-union riots, and lax labor safety law. I get that Mao is a high hurdle to pass but I think we've done it and then some.