Joke aside, what this guy wrote is completely false. If Alibaba is state-owned enterprise, it does not need to stop the Ant group IPO. Yes, the state is trying to influence enterprises with the introduction of party councils in place of unions. It is not essentially state-owned when it is essentially not state-owned.
EDIT: typo
TikTok may be independent as a US company or more but the IPO stopping is not proof of it.
Please, how do you go from "State-owned" to "everything is tightly controlled." I am genuinely curious.
I think I have become too political recently reading hacker news. Such a waste of time. I will not participate in any philosophy/political/ideology any more. Thanks for the reply.
EDIT: We all have a habit to use logic to understand events, but many times, we can bend events to fit our logic. It is so natural, and we don't even notice it. I don't believe the world is black and white, or labelling makes it easier to understand the world. Everywhere you go is just a bunch of humans. When we are happy we take time and try to understand differences, when we are not, we attack differences. It is how we develop and survive in the wild.
Ownership is much more powerful in an enterprise than outside government regulations in any cases.
No. Not really. CCP is not a big uniform entity. There are different competing entities.
Also, ownership is different from control. I am not sure how this simple fact is overlooked.
2. No one claimed ownership is the same as control, but so it happens most of the time in the business world ownership implies control.
3. Like you said, ownership is different from control. Ant is not state owned, literally.
A state-owned company in a totalitarian empire is part of a system that suppresses freedom of speech, uses forced labour, conducts genocide, seeks to undermine democracy overseas. That’s why it’s bad.
(Alternatively, you could say that all sufficiently large corporations are "partially-state-owning".)
While there are substantial differences between the two varieties of capitalism, if you squint it can be a difference of degree. For example in the West, we do have "crown corporations", and countries often put their own companies' interests above that of the global capitalist market (for example, the USA defending Boeing and going after Bombardier). One important difference is that in the West, our crown corporations/state owned enterprises are never run purely for profit.
As for "how", it varies. The State may just own a controlling amount of shares, or have board seats.
To put simply, in the West, often it's considered anathema for policy makers to pick "winners and losers" in the market. The idea is the market should decide. This isn't true in China. The CCP is happy to pick winners and losers, and in doing so it guarantees its own position. They user their power to make or break a company to effectively own it and use it to reinforce their strength.
The late David Graeber expanded on this point in "Debt: The First 5,000 Years".
I see dictatorship as monarchy in disguise. China's leadership as observed are not passed down within a singular family or families and the succession of which have not observed militarial coup. If the dictator can't have his/hers own blood-heir to take over, where is the dicatorship in this?
Then we can’t know if a country was a dictatorship ship until a ruler dies. Also, all countries with despots ousted and replaced by others, disqualifies as dictatorships.
I don’t like your definition. I’d rather look for rule of law and signs of democracy. Both of which are very scarce in China.
Many of those despots have every intent and actions that we have observed to have their heirs assume office, only that it was stopped. It's about that they have that power in their form of government where they make all the calls, not them actually achiving it.
On the other hand, many of Xi's predecessors are well-alive, well, two of them, if they are/were dicators, what is Xi? There are three dictators at different times in China, with one in the office and the other two well and alive? I doubt dictatorship would be an accurate account for what's really going on.
Communism doesn't mean everyone gets free groceries and doesn't have to work. The CCP, for all of their faults, seriously puts a lot of time and thought into the elements of communism and how the Chinese communism compares and evolves on it as a longterm form of government. Just because someone on the internet mistakes utopianism for communism doesn't mean Mao's party isn't communist.
Communism _does_ mean - among other things - that "everyone gets free groceries", in the sense that they would not exchange money or another commodity for the groceries, but rather get them through wider collective/communal/regional/country-wide arrangements.
I don't know why this is a popular misconception. You may have ration points or communism bucks instead of dollars, but you still need a hard currency to allow interpersonal trade. You may have resources that aren't obtainable through currency (housing), but you need currency because you need to settle preference/availability/tradeoffs. You probably also even still have some taxes for consumption.
The price of all goods is not equivalent on a fundamental labor level and the preference for goods is not flat.
As soon as the state decides to prop a failing business up, it's no longer capitalism and the state gets control of the companies decision making process.
I'm not a big fan of governments paying up to rescue big companies that made billions and in the end went bankrupt because in a free market is unfair. But that's far, very far from not being capitalism. The action itself may not be the most "capitalistic" but after that the government doesn't take control, it's not an expropriation.
Not exactly a 'free market' then if they're not free to fail.
But we're also a country with medicare and food stamps and we recognize pure capitalism isn't flawless. Had a company like GM been allowed to fail suddenly then entire major cities would have seen unemployment go up 3x or 4x, and that's a lot of people who don't have jobs in a city that just lost it's primary industry. Most of those people are not white collar professionals who can hop over to SV - there are very limited jobs building cars.
As a country where we do sometimes engage in non-capitalist behavior (FDIC insurance, jobs programs, so on) it's sometimes more efficient to prop up a bad business and let it fail slowly then to entirely take a hands off approach.