> CCP membership means nothing.

I know. But that's not the point. Not that long ago people were speculating all over the place that Jack Ma's CCP membership means that Ant is a wholly state-controlled company and a national security threat. The 180 degree turn of all the comments, shows that at the end of the day, people don't actually know anything about China, and therefore we should be critical of speculations.

The disappearance of Jack Ma only confirms that all big Chinese corporations are an extension of the party. You don't follow the party line, you disappear.

That leaves us with a conundrum since the dealings of the ruling class in China are almost completely opaque. Speculation is often all we have, so yes of course we need to be judicious in what we believe, but we also need to keep open minds.

Since there are many factions within the upper echelons of the CCP, many of these speculations may not even be contradictory. It's quite plausible that Ant group was planned as a stalking horse for Chinese state infiltration of foreign banking systems, and also that Jack Ma and Ant were seen as conflicting with power groups within the CCP who eventually took them down.

It is far more plausible that people are just deliberately looking for reasons to fit a 'CCP bad' narrative.

X happens: "CCP is bad"

Opposite of X happens: "CCP is bad"

What is this, a children's story? Where is all the nuance? Reality can't be reduced to a simple "X is bad" narrative.

This narrative overshadows the actual issues, and thus produces nonsense. Note that nearly nobody talks about the ACTUAL financial issue, which is that Ant's way of dealing with money is very dangerous and has the potential to cause a financial crisis.

Yes I know the regulator's timing is suspicious. But to completely ignore the actual issue, or to casually brush it away as an illegitimate distraction, and instead to focus 100% on just the 'CCP bad' narrative, is just sensationalism, stereotyping and oversimplification.

You’ve hit on the fundamental problem of intellectual discussion.

It’s impossible to competently discuss entities more sophisticated than oneself, by definition. If one comprehends all the competing and confounding factors involved in the actions of the CCP, for example, then they would at least be as sophisticated as the CCP, by definition.

If not, then sooner or later reality intrudes.

Of course it may be that no human is intelligent enough to actually comprehend all the dynamics within an organization of 100+ million. Therefore no one on this planet, even in China, fully understands all the factions, factors, reasonings, etc., of such an organization. And actions may happen for mysterious reasons because no one fully comprehends all the underlying reasons.

> If one comprehends all the competing and confounding factors involved in the actions of the CCP, for example, then they would at least be as sophisticated as the CCP, by definition.

> Of course it may be that no human is intelligent enough to actually comprehend all the dynamics within an organization of 100+ million.

"The knowledge of some principles easily compensates for the ignorance of some facts", a.k.a. you really don't need to know how shit tastes to keep away from it, you just need to know what it looks like.

What if the ‘shit’ you mention was capable of self organization and self-modification and self-evolution towards goals, and through techniques, that may confound your senses?

In fact this example is a bit humorous because there is a type of fruit called the ‘miracle berry’ that is sold commercially to trick the taste receptors on human tongues, turning sour foods into sweet tasting foods temporarily.

I am sure if it doesn’t already exist one day products will be created to do so for the entire taste spectrum and beyond that all the human senses...

Genuinely beneficial things may be disguised as harmful and vice versa in such an environment. And then we would be back to the original point.

> What if the ‘shit’ you mention was capable of self organization and self-modification and self-evolution towards goals, and through techniques, that may confound your senses?

What if we could see how phenomena draw projections in the fourth dimension and reveal that the same underlying traits of these self-modifying and self-evolving entities? a.k.a. we can play imaginary worlds infinitely deep.

But the bottom-line of the previous comment was that people are conceptually-reasoning beings, and we can build and refine meaningful ideas and abstractions that help us to properly orient ourselves in the world. The proof of that would be the fact that you and I are interacting here on HN, and neither of us comprehends the full complexity of the systems (and relations between them) that provide us this ability.

Regardless of Jack Ma's CCP membership, any major firm in China has close ties to the government at every level of the organization (including the officially embedded Chinese Communist Party cell).

The recent Jack Ma + Ant kerfuffle started after he gave a public speech that was mildly critical of the CCP's financial regulation. He probably should have known better given the current political environment in China, but alas.

He knows better, we would never know what pushed him to say that.

He clearly doesn't.