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

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you compare this subthread to the much higher-quality—because more specific, and specifically about this story—comments elsewhere in the thread, you'll get a sense of why we have this rule.

Xi is rattling his saber against Taiwan because he can and he will face no consequences.

Xi is sending police to Hong Kong because he can and he will face no consequences.

Xi is clamping down on religion because he can and ...

Maybe Xi is a bit paranoid, but you don't become a lifelong dictator of a billion people by doubting yourself. If I have to guess, Xi is convinced that he's leading China into an age of unprecedented glory, and he's surrounded by people who talk the same and mostly think the same.

China has Hong Kong. Full assimilation, normalization would eventually happen. The local's were onboard and content. Why make a fuss now?

Taiwan also wanted full normalization, eventually. So much upside. Wait another generation and few people alive would even remember what the fuss was about. Call it reunification, cousins remarrying, federation, whatever.

China's subjugation of Tibet and the western provinces were fait accompli. The critics were completely impotent. Why prove them right, breath oxygen into their opposition?

Harassing foreigners, thereby pushing them out of the country.

My guess is Xi felt compelled to act aggressively now to head off upcoming crisises. Something the insiders see better than is yet publicly discernible. One or more things that will rock the legitimacy of the ruling party. (The upcoming demographic bust is even worse than expected. Public finances are terrible. To forestall any correction of official GDP measurements. Widespread accounting fraud and corruption. Environmental degradation leading to food shortages. Exodus of manufacturing to Vietnam, Malaysia, others is faster than admitted. Probably a dozen other credible threats.)

The timer on him is still ticking. He himself may well secured an n-th term, and party's temporary obedience at gunpoint..., but I feel he is very desperate, and have sleepless nights in anticipation of 2022.

Any fault of him, whether it is flagging economy, or any concession on the foreign front, or him not scoring just enough of political capital on that, would be 1000% used to undermine his position by whomever wanting to unseat him.

Unlike the oligarchates of ex-Union, CPC has very real internal conflicts. CPC's size ensures that there will never be enough posts, titles, and entitlements for every member of the establishment.

Xi will never be safe from the party. The moment he runs out of steam, and presents a chance for power to be taken from him, someone, out of many millions of ranked party cadres, is just ought to take advantage of the situation.

Remember, both Kruszev, and Deng were relatively small fish at the time they seized power, as was the case for power takeovers in a lot of single party regimes.

Kruszev and Deng wouldn't have been able to seize power without substantial supporter.

The way I see it, the failure of those in power (from their perspective) was of not recognizing that well of support as it built.

Or, put another way, this is why authoritarian regimes are always paranoid: they have no objective methods for gauging public / party / military support, as dissent is always private.

(Well, aside from secret police)

Edit: Although I still don't think the circular firing squad is a great strategy.

China is going to be facing a demographic crisis soon - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/17/world/asia/ch...

CCP leadership might still think they have a chance for true reunification, or maybe they're just saber rattling. Personally, I don't think full reunification is possible until Chinese propaganda is able to compete with American ones.

I see this, but I also see the "We're [Taiwanese] the real China, and the mainland isn't" mentality as well (they'll get upset if you call them Taiwanese). It does get a bit complicated, especially if you think back to what happened during the cultural revolution and the people that stayed in mainland vs those that went to Taiwan.

Another generation and hardly anyone will have Chinese identity, I imagine. An example I hear a lot is that the Vietnamese and Koreans also used to be Chinese.

What term would you use?

Look at how the US responded to Chinas aggressive actions against Hong Kong. They imposed sanctions which basically treated Hong Kong the way the US did the rest of China. The punishment is exactly what Xi wanted!

I'm not a sinophile, but I have pro CCP friends (we get in a lot of arguments). I think the reason to support Xi is very simple. Look at Shanghai in 1990 and 2010[0] and GDP[1]. While many are still poor in China, it is nothing to what it was in the 80's and 90's. Many families went from living in impoverished conditions to being wealthy. Living conditions improved dramatically for the average Chinese person and cities appeared out of nowhere and many of them are quite successful. This is just fact. But when you look at it through this lens it is easy to understand why people support Xi. Their lives got better. Then think back to Mao, where no line couldn't be crossed if it was for "the greater good."

It is important to keep this in mind, because it is easy to ignore things like human rights violations, racism, colonialism. I mean the same thing happened in America. It is also easier to not compare things on a spectrum but discritized (e.g. you're either "racist" or "not racist" there is no more racist or less racist)[2]. So what do you see in China? Your country is booming. You see America talking shit. You see Americans revolting and complaining about their own government. You see George Floyd. But you don't see Xianjiang. You don't see Hong Kong the same way we see it in the west (it's just a few protestors). You see "We, the powerful China are trying to help our fellow Chinese people gain a better life" and the average mainlander doesn't understand "why they don't want our help" (something my Mandarin tutor said to me). They don't see HK as successful, they see it as falling behind the rest of China.

So my understanding is that it is more about that they fully trust their government. They have real evidence to point to too. The other issue is that the viewpoint is different as well. Uyghurs are seen as terrorists and the term "reeducation camp" is not synonymous with "concentration camp" for them. There's a high level of nationalism and sense of being a part of something bigger. You can also see this in how the history of China has been taught differently through history and how the definition of "Han" has changed (as well as what "China" is and called). The terms China and Han have become great unifiers for the country and people (there's something to say to creating less racial division points). It really comes down to perception and flow of information. And I'll be honest, seeing a lot of this makes me question a lot about the flow of information we have here in America.

To be honest, watching China (and America, Africa, Europe, Russia), I've come to believe that political support more comes down to human psychology and emotional appeal than it does to logic and morals. That might be why the current state of the economy is a good predictor of the next president (not 100% accurate, but pretty good). If you weren't doing well before and you are doing well now, well it must be the leaders, right?

[0] https://i.redd.it/9rcoznoiwol21.jpg

[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/800/cpsprodpb/14997/production...

[2] I'd say that this binary thing is an important aspect (one that has also become a problem in America). But like I have friends that say that America is hypocritical because it complains about censorship in China but not about it on Twitter. There's no nuance. There's no taking into account if an individual is expressing consistent ideology (complain about censorship in China and in the US) vs hypocritical (complain about censorship in China but not in the US, or vise versa). There's also some confusion that complaining is an essential part of democracy as criticizing your government in the west is seen as a way to improve and iterate as opposed to tearing it down.

Basically Xi's nightmare is the disintegration of the Soviet Union and he's running the opposite playbook that Gorbachev used.

I'm just a westerner reading reports from other westerners. I'm relating my perception, as gleaned from western media.

"The characterization of Hong Kong..."

IIRC, I read there's a huge swing in the self identification of HK residents from "Chinese" to "Cantonese". Slim evidence, I know. But maybe directionally correct?

"Xinjiang and Tibet..."

I didn't say that. Western media has related that ethnic Tibetans and traditional Muslims have struggled, since I began reading the news in high school (80s).

This is certainly what it looked like from Russia in the 90s, when China was just starting to meaningfully rise. I think Gorbachev's main mistake was that people were given political/personal freedoms before economic ones, and it was done way too quickly. After some 70 years without these freedoms, people did not know what to do with them, so a lot of bad shit happened in late 80s and "wild 90s". Economy was decimated, Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia itself was close to falling apart as well. Just read any US geopolitics text from late 90s or early 00s - they all prognosticate that Russia will be no more, salivating to divvy up the spoils. What got in the way of that was Putin, or, to be exact, Russia's national security establishment which installed Putin, since nobody knew who he was 6 months before he became president.

So the way the Chinese policy was perceived from Russia, it was something more sane. For one thing their stated timeframe for the transformation of the country (50 years IIRC, but I might be wrong), seemed more realistic. For another they started introducing capitalism first, rather than give a bunch of dirt poor people completely unrestricted political freedom a-la early 90's Russia, which could only lead to anarchy and disaster.

And I do believe they will succeed in the long term. The best analogy I have is the current obsession in US corporations with quarterly results, leading to suboptimal long term outcomes. This is what the US itself behaves like, except the "quarter" is 4 years long.

China doesn't have to worry about that, they live on a different time scale and can enact consistent policies spanning many decades. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's easier for the US to course-correct, which can be beneficial because most long term plans do not survive contact with reality. But if China gets the big picture right (which to me it seems like they do), and is able to course correct on the margins, they don't really need the randomness that the US system has.

I just wish they'd knocked it off with the concentration camps and child labor at this point. It undermines their own progress.

As to Ma, oligarchs with political aspirations need to be periodically reminded who runs the country. This is why Khodorkovsky ended up in prison for a decade. He got way too powerful, exerted a lot of ifluence in Duma, and thought taxes were optional. None of those three things were acceptable to the Kremlin.

I find it funny by how hard people of Western upbringing try find some "higher meaning" to what villainous characters do, the more powerful, and scarier they are.

And they do not want to take the most obvious, explainative, and floating on the surface explanation, because according to them, "it can't be that simple!"

A phrase I hear often is "I don't believe in cartoonish evil characters!!!"

And that despite much of 3rd world dictators very much being such, and their actions being very well explainable by "evil guys, doing evil deeds, because they are evil, arrogant f..ks," and that being their primary motivations, with all their "roleplay" obligations, and nominal official duties coming second to that.

I don't agree with you about Westerners not seeing the villainous wood for the evil trees, but I think it's moot when there's an even simpler explanation: they do not want to lose control.

Take a look at Bin Rasheed, or Li.

I feel like you just want to make a point about the CCP being evil. Fair enough, but that doesn't really have any connection with what you were trying to say about Western critical thinking.

Western critical thinking seem to be hell-bent on thinking that some grand totalitarian regime cannot be just "dumb evil," and it must always come with some kind of equally grand conspiracy, secret agenda, maybe even some semi-valid point, as they probably think "it must take some brains, complex motive, and talent to run you evil empire at such scale."

It's beyond them to concede that their grand political theories are not the case, and the man is driven just by your regular arrogance, greed, and cowardice, aka lust for power, even if his ways of achieving those may be quite sophisticated at the time.

The fact that the communist party made extensive studies of the fall of the Soviet Union has been well documented.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303755504579207...

Western people are not misunderstanding China, they just are content with a myopic tiny view, and happy to apply whatever judgement they can at the whim of the moment.

Discussing any China related issues on HN is like arguing with mobs. You either are drowning in downvotes, like saying Mr. Xi is not just a dictator; or arguing with someone who questioned any minor details you raised as a Chinese, often make me questioning did I lose touch with China so much that a random HN visitor actually knows better than myself...

I'm sorry, but the US actually is scared of Russia and China and it's whole point in having a large Navy with carriers and such is to counter them. Those two countries are the only adversarial countries to have any meaningful naval presence, so there really wouldn't be any treason to maintain such a large carrier fleet unless they were scared of them.

The average citizen, however, may fall under your "accepts" criterion. It doesn't matter what nation I suggest, indeed I have made up nonexistent nations before, and most people will allow that, yes, given sufficient winding-up on the part of "news" organizations and politicians, they would accept bombing them to hell and back. In the long view of history, this will be why USA and Germany are discussed together in the same chapter. The public does not desire ruinous horrific ridiculous pointless endless war, but it does accept that, after enough gaslighting by MIC's paid employees in government and media. That's on us. I don't really like my team.

China (Russia can't even entertain the dream of it any more) doesn't have a dozen carriers, it's a totally different side of the geopolitical scales.

> Maybe Xi is a bit paranoid, but you don't become a lifelong dictator of a billion people by doubting yourself.

It's worth citing Nixon as an example of someone who while maybe not doubtful of themselves but was utterly paranoid and belligerent towards any and all dissent and opposition, but still made to the very top of the world.

Trying not to do the apology of a terrible regime, but I can see why Xi would see himself as "leading China into an age of unprecedented glory".

If things go south there are plenty to blame(i.e China, Russia, EU, rebels, etc). It is never the leader to blame. As the party leader controlls the police and the millitary there are really very few that would dare to consider a coup/leader change.

Even North Korea's Kim is "officially" supported by his party members but we already know what happens when they question him.

It's only a dream, but it could be so beautiful.

As Hyman Minsky would agree - there's only one way to handle volatility, take it in your face. You can't suppress it.

It's not so much "they're pumping the numbers by cooking the books", it's more of the regime being at the right place at the right time. Other east asian countries industrialized at the same time without the CCP, for instance.

In fact, by making himself basically dictator in life he has added the potential for tremendous instability in Chinese politics that did not exist before he took those actions.

Of course, you'd have to be wearing rose-colored glasses to take that portrayal at face value, and you'd also have to ignore significant atrocities the leaders were responsible for.

I agree that the US isn't scared of Russia or China, but I think the US is afraid of the idea of not having military dominance.

> Xi is clamping down on religion because he can

My source may be dated, but as of 1988 policy making in China was a protracted, incremental process involving negotiation among numerous different groups (central and provincial governments, bureaus and departments)[0]. Things may be more centralized now, but I think it's safe to say that if something is happening in China, it's because multiple government entities at different levels have agreed to it. Who knows what the reason is.

[0] Policy Making in China, Lieberthal 1988

b. China has substantially centralized post-2000.

I would go so far as to say it is close-to-useless to cite a 1988 book on modern China unless to reference its history, that's how fast things have changed.

My own experience was seeing a huge commotion right in the city centre of Guangzhou, a megalopolis bigger than New York, without single mention in the media the next day besides some random youtube uploads.

I can co-sign that there are often incidents of civil unrest in China that are not reported in the media. However, from what i can gather, these are not explicitly anti-establishment. Most of them appear to be localized labor disputes or middle class NIMBYs making a fuss about development that inconveniences them.

For reporting on the former, you can check out China Labour Bulletin[0].

[0] https://clb.org.hk/

At least in 2012, there were apparently 500 protests _every day_: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/ho...

When I was there in 2014 there was a HUGE protest in Changsha. None of these are reported in the media inside or outside China.

I concede that my source on policy-making is dated, but I highly doubt the the functioning of a country as vast and complex as China can be completely transformed in forty years. Still, I'm not sure, so I emailed the author to verify.

I think there is a world of difference between protests (usually over eminent domain related concerns, not always) and an "uprising." I've tracked to track down some of these claims of 180,000 protests a year (following the links) and it's been hard - I find it hard to believe that these are very large protests.

A truly confident, powerful man would not fly into a blind rage if compared to Winnie The Pooh.

For what it's worth given the ... disastrous state of the US, the deep rifts in the EU and the total retreat from anyone not China from Africa, that is a very valid, yet frightening, assessment of the future.

Yeah I guess Xi and co are scared, but for a different reason. Nothing about the foreign policies or whatever you think "freedom" is.

Everything will be fine until the central bank raise interests, or if economy goes down the shitter. The new regulation limits the leverage cap from infinite to about 15, closer to bank's 10. This limits risk, and is considered a reasonable move.

A truly desperate move would be to allow these bubbles to go ahead and IPO. Which almost happened, everything will be fine and dandy for a while, until it's not. Whether it's due to Xi's insecurity or not, I'd say that China dodged a bullet here.

Ant was running some really shady and risky lending practices. They were not relevant when they were a private company, but once they became public, it instantly became a serious matter. The risk of failure is very high, and it risks bringing the whole system down.

What the government told Ant to do, was to have more collateral on their books. To increase it from 2% to 30%. Plain and simple. Then they can go forward with their IPO.

How does a private company able to have only 2% collateral ?

There was no regulation on this before, leading to some very shady practices.

> They are afraid of Taiwan because Taiwan is the living example that China can prosper without the CCP.

Not really, 20 years ago maybe? but now that the first tier provinces have mostly caught up economically it's really just a matter of time before rest of china catches up.

> They are afraid of Hong Kong because it's an example of resistance to the regime.

again, most chinese think the hongkong riots as a bunch of misguided youth manipulated by western media. you may not agree with it, but that's the view held in china right now.

> They are afraid of religions because no matter how much you punish someone, you won't be able to make them worship you instead.

or maybe the fact religion has been the main drivers for a whole bunch of wars?

> They are afraid of wealthy people because they can taste freedom and they can vision a China without the CCP.

is that why more and more wealthy chinese people are expressing their support for ccp abroad, but are instead labelled as brainwashed?

This isn't even remotely true. Taiwan has a GDP per capita of $54,000.[1] The two wealthiest administrative division in China are Shanghai at $38,000 and Beijing at $37,000[2]. Moreover it's not an apples-to-apples comparison because those cities are consistently drawing the best and the brightest from the entire country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

Would you take a 40% raise at your current job?

Prosperity doesn't have to be economically. It can simply mean financial and overall governing independence. OP's point is not that Taiwan is better than China, but to point out that Chinese people can do well without CCP and this is what CCP doesn't want people to know. Also Taiwanese economy has many sections from CCP so I'd imagine it'll do well above current standards without them

More likely that they consider religion a powerful fictional structure competing with their own fictional structure. No natural law dictates that either of them should dominate, so they chose to suppress the competition.

Gross.

Contrary to what most people think, I think Xi Jinping and company are really scared, but not for the reason you mention.

Xi is said to be very afraid of Shanghai clique, and this is the reason they are still around, and not crushed like everybody else.

Who owns Ant? Speculations are that a number of people from the Shanghai clique are, with the biggest one being public knowledge: grandson of Jiang Zemin got Ant's shares for noticeably less than market price.

I believe, this explains why this case was handled remarkably tactfully, and why Ma still walks in one piece. Anybody else would've been disappeared the same day for much less in today's China.

I just assume Xi Zinping is Andy Grove style paranoid. Isn't that how power works? If it wasn't the Shanghai clique, it'd be 5 other aspirants.

There's a reason that England's split from the Catholic church lead to a civil war and eventually the 1689 Bill of Rights: it was a coup.

Only in the Papal States. Most of the rest of Europe had Dukes and Kings and such, which may have had some friction with Bishops and the Pope.

Every one of these threads is full of people doing a ctrl-f find/replace Russia/China on their cold war propaganda lessons.

China's a different country, with a billion and a half people and a few thousand years of history that most Americans are completely ignorant of, but that doesn't stop them from being supremely confident in their takes.

Islam is worldwide. Christianity is worldwide. Judaism is worldwide. And many other faiths are worldwide.

This thread is full of people who've never seen any of it confidently asserting How China Feels About Religion.

But in the next five years, the number of Chinese Christians is projected to grow to half the population of the entire United States—150 million. That may only be 15% of the population, but that's still significant.

I wonder why. [1]

[1] https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/essays/freedom-of-relig...

Stop trying to white wash crimes against humanities

Tell that to the Uyghur's.

Religions can create allys. Saving this Islamic branch may go a way to reconnecting/reunderstanding the west and Islam.

Wealth inequality is crazy in China (not as crazy as the States in terms of standard deviation, but crazy in terms of the scale: as of 2020 China has over 600 million poor with 140 USD monthly income[1] i.e. almost twice the population of the States)

Since I was young, my parents (both born and raised in mainland China in the 50~60s i.e. had experienced Mao before he died as well as the Cultural Revolution) would tell me that back in those days this whole communism bullshit managed to operate itself in such a large popullation because it was like the religion of the people. And properganda [2] is the way to reinforce that, in those time as well as in today.

You will immediately start seeing giant properganda billboards about how great Xi Jingping is when you visit countrysides in China. The poorer the places the more billboards there are, and the more worshipping you would see.

Even to these days you would find espeically among long-distance driviers little Mao Zedong ornaments in their cars as protective talismans because people (esp the older generation) actually thought of Mao as some kind of deity, one which they would seek blessings from. (It's often hard to tell if they are joking or they actually believe it. That's one aspect of this CCP-as-a-religion culture. And the true victims are the poor and uninformed.)

[1]: https://www.thinkchina.sg/600-million-chinese-earn-1000-rmb-...

[2]: In tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you would certainly find less properganda today simply because it doesn't really work against the well-educated. But dezinformatsiya is still rampant. If you can read Chinese, you would see that so many news articles people consumed on WeChat, Toutiao, Douyin, Baidu, etc, are just full of shit. Sometimes they are state-sponsored (showing false information about HK during the protests), and sometimes it's just sensationalism in its worst form (e.g. reporting on covid protests in the States and in EU with gifs that were not from those protest but somewhere else)

I don't think Xi is scared per se, but he definitely doesn't want China ending up like the U.S.

Might have something to do with loss of face perhaps which is an important concept in many asian countries [0]. From my understanding you have to be very careful with criticism in many Asian countries, especially with regards to authority. If someone has higher authority than you (e.g. boss at work) he can generally do no wrong or if he does wrong in some way (e.g. makes bad business deal), you don't confront your boss.

---

[0]: https://www.tripsavvy.com/saving-face-and-losing-face-145830...

When is the last time you as a westerner, which I assume you are, bragged to your friends about losing face that time you slipped on a banana peel?

You couldn't have said it better. But it's much more attributable to the now waning elites, than anybody else.

Those are people who grew up being spoon fed with success for life, and are envious beyond measure of people who got to succeed without paying a dime for party membership.

They are taught they are amazing with a long history (that they are trying to erase in real tie), but that is hard to reconcile how amazing they are with having sat out the scientific revolution the last 200 years or so.

Even if they are running scared, it looks like they’re running extremely successfully.

Of course, it helps that the only country that could have put pressure on them was led by a moron who though mispronouncing China’s name was the heights of showing them up, while not taking any effective long term actions.

It is the total opposite. Xi Jinping is keeping all the key holders to the kingdom satisfied impeccably well.

They aren't afraid of Hong Kong, the other perspective is that Hong Kong has much less relevance than it had during the handover, 20% of GDP down to 3% of GDP. Hong Kong is an example and cautionary of tale of "late stage capitalism" that all cities around the world experience, high rents and living costs and no consensus on how to help. Whereas mainland China gets large living spaces and welfare for all while inheriting exposure to high growth market based systems and its working extremely well right now, Beijing's state capital system is working. They can deal with Hong Kong as is for the next 17 years no problem.

Taiwan is just there. They can saber-rattle about that for a long time too.

The status-quo in China is good enough, some people get their money out, others provide services in mainland. That status quo involves the implicit threat of party members doing anything to you if you fall out of favor.

Chinese unity and territorial sovereignty is the primary common denominator of everything Xi does, if you do or say anything that can be seen to harm the state or the idea of China, then you've done it wrong.

I read the transcript of Jack Ma's speech, it wasn't very egregious, but all he had to do was skip the thoughts about the current state of how debt is negotiated in China.

Xi does this because he can.

If you can quarantine 1B people in two weeks, that means Xi's power has reached an unbelievable level. He can start a war if he wants to, no one in China can object to that.

Alibaba is nothing but a pawn to him. The fear created by halting of Ant IPO will ensure no other entrepreneurs will publicly challenge the authority as long as Xi is in power.

That Jack Ma said anything at all surprised me. Ma's had always been wholly obsequious, in public at least.

I guessed that Ma's spoke up for one of the reason's I've done so in the past: Ma was done and decided to stop playing. He felt he finally had enough juice to make some kind of a power play. He felt that Truth and Duty were principles worth dying for.

Whatever the reason, I'm sure he now wishes he hadn't.

I'll be doubly surprised if Ma doesn't have an exit strategy. Opting for that seaside villa and teaching poetry to local school kids.

Or are these Truth and Duty? I'm very confused. Ma criticised the regulators for 'holding back innovation', innovation we've seen and paid for in 2008.

Like I tried to say, poorly, I'm just surprised Ma spoke up, and can only guess why.

The internation banking rules force the banks to adhere to a set of conduct, regulations and rules that make the banking environment predictable for all actors. Looking at money flow: speed, volume and diversity, it is in China's interests to have a predictable and understandable banking landscape rather than continuing on this path of reinventing the wheel. The more Western banks trust the banking system within China, the more predictable and easy it will be to keep the economy growing. ANT's move is only establishing a state within a state and certainly hurts national security by creating a gap in one core service within any modern country: the financial system.

In those seventy years it has led a country which grew to have the second largest GDP in the world.

-- writing this from the USA, where Covid is spiking, where there are armed right wing Covid open for business riots at statehouses, as well as against police kneeling on black men's throats killing them leading to nationwide blm antifa riots, where the president won't concede the election, where U3 unemployment is currently 6.9% etc.

(I heard about the Hong Kong riots in the US News until the open-business/blm/antifa riots happened with a much higher body count)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/biden-elec...

Consider: other countries have their own civics classes where they get fed a similar line about their systems.

That said, it's pretty clear from many comments on HN that people have no clue how far along China is, perhaps stuck in a early 2000s mindset. Nor do they seem to have any serious understanding of Chinese government.

I don't see there being a next clear world power because I don't think the world works that way anymore.. capital is way too trans-national at this point.

I feel the same way when Peterson-types try to say it's impossible for atheistic ethics to "exist" logically, the argument is again just too long to do justice outside a monograph.

Civics classes are not the intellectual battlegrounds of the past or future.

Whether those ideals are destined to prevail is not really a scientific question.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/born-red if you're interested in a more nuanced take.

But just like with the chicken and the egg, I cannot rightly tell if either the CCP or the American far left are acting out of fear, or if they are just exercising newly-gained power. It may simply be that they're putting new power to work, testing the waters to entrench their positions further.

You can not compare the racially and culturally homogeneous Taiwan to the whole of China. A country like China has 0 chance of remain whole without authoritarian leadership.

>They are afraid of Hong Kong because it's an example of resistance to the regime.

They are not, they crapped their pants and with time things will get worse for them.

>They are afraid of religions because no matter how much you punish someone, you won't be able to make them worship you instead.

They just don't want the west of China to become a playground for Islamic terrorists.