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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.