The problem is that the CCP has nothing to replace this cultural vacuum with. They want to legislate a return to "old" (post 1949) values by banning foreign tutors, suppressing dissent on WeChat and Weibo, and doing generally authoritarian shit to encourage nationalism. Meanwhile, young, educated people almost exclusively consume the cultural products of the West, Korea, and Japan. And they find the North Korean style propaganda embarrassing. The disconnect really cannot be understated.

>> The problem is that the CCP has nothing to replace this cultural vacuum with.

I am no expert, but I disagree and I think this is the kind of thinking that has failed the west for the last thirty years. I think the idea started with the fall of the Soviet Union. That culture and ideology was bankrupt. So a lot of western people thought that when there was a free exchange of ideas with China, the Chinese would eventually reject the CCP.

My experience of people in China-- admittedly a long time ago-- was they are generally very patriotic or nationalistic, like Americans. They appreciate the CCP and what it has accomplished. They have a strong domestic arts industry making movies, books, games. Sure lots of people disagree with the party, but that doesn't that they want a western liberal democracy. So lots of people will speak in favor of a benevolent elite and against populism or what they see as western chaos or oppression. When people are against the government, they aren't wishing for a different government system, just less corrupt or more benevolent authoritarians.

Anyway, that is the way I am thinking about these days. But I could be very wrong and I would love to hear from people who are from or spend time in China.

I think you're broadly correct. With regard to China, a lot of people's understanding is driven in large part by wishful thinking, which is a serious weakness and vulnerability.

> Sure lots of people disagree with the party, but that doesn't that they want a western liberal democracy. So lots of people will speak in favor of a benevolent elite and against populism or what they see as western chaos or oppression. When people are against the government, they aren't wishing for a different government system, just less corrupt or more benevolent authoritarians.

I think it's important to note those views are in large part created an reinforced a deliberate propaganda program. For instance, I believe one of the ideas the Chinese government pushes is the Chinese people "aren't ready" for democracy (while carefully preventing anything that could make them ready). When educated Chinese people were better exposed to ideas about liberal democracy, they were very clear that they wanted it (e.g. 80s leading up to Tiananmen Square, the Liberal Studies curriculum in Hong Kong), but the government has learned from those episodes and has taken action to get the ideological results it desires.

+1. When you take what you're saying with the parent above you, Xi is also pulling all the state media strings to play up the less-corrupt benevolence thing - using it to consolidate power. Check out this recent good article about their extrajudicial 'repatriations' which has examples of the bragging in their government controlled media about it (kidnappings).

It's both trying to show less corruption and simultaneously scaring everyone away from dissent. Gross but seems powerful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...

That's maybe true when young people in China first learned western democracy ideas. Nowadays I think most of educated Chinese believe democracy is not suitable for China. They didn't get the whole picture of western world, but who does nowadays. They see signs of culture revolution in western social movements and rejected those wholeheartedly.

> Nowadays I think most of educated Chinese believe democracy is not suitable for China.

Isn't that exactly 1) what the Communist Party wants them to think, and 2) an idea that they can manipulate the information environment to promote?

I don't see how this is a productive point. "Democracy is best" is 1) what the US government wants you to think, and 2) an idea that they can manipulate the information environment to promote.

Can they? The US government has very limited "hard" control over what information is published, e.g. there are no banned books in the US and it would be impractical for the government to try to impose any such ban, in stark contrast to the PRC.

the methods are clearly not as explicit and the US tolerates more diversity of thought on a lot of topics, but it absolutely exerts control over ideas it deems important. it's pretty hard to come out of our education system thinking poorly of ancient greece and rome, the liberal tradition, etc.

also note that the bar for success is a lot lower when up to 49% dissent is acceptable

>>> I don't see how this is a productive point. "Democracy is best" is 1) what the US government wants you to think, and 2) an idea that they can manipulate the information environment to promote.

>> I don't see how this is a productive point. "Democracy is best" is 1) what the US government wants you to think, and 2) an idea that they can manipulate the information environment to promote.

> Can they? The US government has very limited "hard" control over what information is published, e.g. there are no banned books in the US and it would be impractical for the government to try to impose any such ban, in stark contrast to the PRC.

Yeah, the massive amount of information control in China has no parallel in the US:

1. Almost all media is state-owned, and those that aren't are required to follow state directives about what and what not to cover (https://chinadigitaltimes.net/china/directives-from-the-mini...)

2. Huge numbers of people employed to implement social media censorship (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jun/29/the-great-firew...: "A considerable amount of censorship is conducted through the manual deletion of posts, and an estimated 100,000 people are employed by both the government and private companies to do just this.")

3. Ditto for books and other publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_China#Mainl...: apropos quote "In 2021, the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China announced a ban on books in school libraries that engage in 'Western veneration'").

4. Requirements that every single website account, network connection, and phone number be traceable to an particular individual's ID (typically implemented by requiring phone number validation). This encourages self-censorship (https://www.lawfareblog.com/shrinking-anonymity-chinese-cybe...).

5. The actual 50 cent party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

6. Etc.

Sure you can mad-lib a Western country into my comment, but the comparison is facile.

Assume for the moment that you're American, liberal, white collar and live in one of the more affluent blue coastal states. Now imagine that 75% of your countrymen are rabbid red state Trump supporters, of low education, get most of their news and information from low quality Facebook shares, and are clearly misinformed about the world in many ways. Now imagine that the Federal government is much more powerful than the States, and that representative democratic policy will mostly reflect the will of Trump True-believers, the people fully supportive of the Capitol riots. How principled are you really about the rule of democracy?

Now I'm not suggesting that this is a good analogy for the Chinese situation, nor that this is how highly education urban Chinese think about democracy (though I do know a few who do seem to think that way). What I am suggesting is that democracy is not always and everywhere the slam dunk win that some Western liberals appear to think it is.

I write this as a second generation immigrant raised since elementary school with Western democratic values. I do believe that despite some flows it is the best system for most of Europe and the US. My parents fled the madness of the Mao CCP regime, and they've probably seen the worst side of the CCP. Yet they are ambivalent whether a US-style democracy today would be superior for the Chinese citizens to the current CCP.

> Assume for the moment that you're American, liberal, white collar and live in one of the more affluent blue coastal states. Now imagine that 75% of your countrymen are rabbid red state Trump supporters, of low education....How principled are you really about the rule of democracy?

Though implicit in that fantasy is that, without democracy, the blue-state liberal gets to impose his will on the Trumpers. Something that can keep someone like that committed to democracy is (for instance) the thought that the alternative is could actually be a never-ending dictatorship of Mitch McConnell, beating humanity with its chin waddle forever.

> Now I'm not suggesting that this is a good analogy for the Chinese situation, nor that this is how highly education urban Chinese think about democracy (though I do know a few who do seem to think that way). What I am suggesting is that democracy is not always and everywhere the slam dunk win that some Western liberals appear to think it is.

Are you saying that educated urban Chinese are hesitant about democracy because they get to vicariously impose their will (or something close enough to it) on the rabble via the CCP?

> Though implicit in that fantasy is that, without democracy, the blue-state liberal gets to impose his will on the Trumpers. Something that can keep someone like that committed to democracy is (for instance) the thought that the alternative is could actually be a never-ending dictatorship of Mitch McConnell, beating humanity with its chin waddle forever.

Right. I don't think it's a given that democracy is demonstrably superior to meritocracy or even aristocracy or enlightened despotism in delivering better outcomes for the majority of people (working definition, GDP/capita, or some honest measure of life satisfaction).

> Are you saying that educated urban Chinese are hesitant about democracy because they get to vicariously impose their will (or something close enough to it) on the rabble via the CCP?

I'm saying that I do know some educated urban Chinese who seemed to believe that, at least the post-Mao CCP leadership probably did a better job than a counterfactual popular elected leadership. I have no idea how representative those few opinions are of the general Chinese urban population. I don't know the country or politics well enough to agree or dispute such views either, but I can certainly see where they're coming from. Mobocracy by the uneducated masses was also one of the largest worries of the American Founding Fathers if I recall my history correctly. Bear in mind that the urbanization rate in China ("blue states" from the educated Chinese perspective) barely reached 30% until 2000 or so. And some Chinese friends summarized Mao-China as basically mob-rule by the peasants.

The concern I have with China, right now, is that I suspect liberal democracy in China will be in favor of someone like Donald Trump, who will then have the power to turn it into dictatorship and this time 70% of the population will vote in favor of the Chinese Trump. Or likely a civil war would break out.

The ideological difference within China is not anything less then that of America. The gay marriage issue along could leave the country 80% to 20%, with the liberals on the 20% side. Yet in a authoritorian state like China, I don't think I've heard anything amount to hate crimes like that in the US, A lot of them would be scared to come out, but no one would be murdering them just for their identity. I think the issue with electoral democracy is that every issue is public, in constant debate, and people's political identity became so important to some that they are willing to kill.

People, expats especially, who live in affluent areas of China often lack the knowledge necessary to understand the less-developed areas of China. Like how people in California lack understandings of Alabama.

> When educated Chinese people were better exposed to ideas about liberal democracy, they were very clear that they wanted it

This falls flat for me. So the implication is that there are no educated Chinese today with exposure to liberal democracy? I think we take for granted the supposed superiority of a system that empirically has delivered many recent failures.

> This falls flat for me. So the implication is that there are no educated Chinese today with exposure to liberal democracy? I think we take for granted the supposed superiority of a system that empirically has delivered many recent failures.

I'm not saying "no exposure," I'm saying they were "better exposed" in the past. You can even see changes like that happening in Hong Kong now, under the new crackdown on civil liberties. For instance, the government is now tinkering with the curriculum of a "Liberal Studies" course in Hong Kong to make it more "patriotic."

> I think we take for granted the supposed superiority of a system that empirically has delivered many recent failures.

Would you trade Donald Trump, Joe Biden, the Democrats, and Repubicans for Xi Jinping and the CCP (and everything that entails)?

Educated Chinese generally speak some English, they are way more exposed to our system/culture than we are to theirs.

my experience is obviously anecdotal but interactions with Western-educated Chinese immigrants, many of whom left in the 80s and 90s, suggest that "democracy is the best" is not some universal wisdom that people will naturally converge to

If it were solely between these two choices? I'm not exactly ecstatic about these options, but I would. The fact that someone like Trump could come to power here - a fact that we, amazingly, seem to be trying to sweep under the rug - says this system is a complete failure and is just waiting to be exploited further.

> The fact that someone like Trump could come to power here - a fact that we, amazingly, seem to be trying to sweep under the rug - says this system is a complete failure....

That's unhelpful hyperbole. Trump was an idiot with charisma, but by way of comparison, he caused nowhere near the damage to the US that Mao did to China.

the fact that a conman with ties to organized crime and indebted to foreign governments could ever assume the highest political office in this country is a complete disgrace. he was _voted_ in!

it scares me to think about what a more devious version of him could have accomplished. i think he would have caused untold amounts more damage if he were empowered to do so - credit to the US system neutering him then, I suppose I must concede that

i think it is disingenuous to bring up mao in comparison anyway, china today is vastly different politically

Sure, liberal democracies have had many recent failures, but they're still the most prosperous societies on a per-capita basis by a gigantic margin. If an authoritarian or non-democratic country can achieve over $40,000 GDP per capita, then we can revisit.

If you go by PPP, top 5 per capita territories are Luxembourg, Singapore, Ireland, Qatar, Macau. That's 3/5 non democracies. Rank 6-10 is Switzerland, Norawy, US, Brunei, HK. 5/10 non democracies.

Many systems can become prosperous if relatively small and sufficiently aligned to US foreign policy to preserve the hegemony. Democracies that don't will get crushed / contained inspite of "democratic peace". The real disruption of PRC's rise is an alternate system that could create a prosperous or even moderately wealthy society, despite US supremency.

that's true. but none of this is happening in a vacuum. liberal democracies are also the ones trying to change or destroy non-democratic regimes by force. imo you can sum up everything evil China is accused of, and it would not come close to what we pulled in South America, the Middle East, and Asia

I'm all for a fair comparison. And as someone who currently benefits from Western ideals of personal liberties, I'd be happy to see it proven that they are superior. But let's make it fair

> imo you can sum up everything evil China is accused of, and it would not come close to what we pulled in South America, the Middle East, and Asia

I know you said Asia and that includes China, but Western countries (and Japan) did similar things to China in the 19th and 20th centuries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

There's an interesting phenomenon, specific to US tech, where there are a ton of Chinese who quietly have a problem with the recent anti-china rhetoric, but they're not going to put a target on their back over it, they stay quiet. How do you even engage with someone who doesn't speak a word of Chinese and is so confident that they know all about China?

Meanwhile, the anti-china folks blithely go on about how much better freedom of expression is in America, and assume that silence means they are right.

I feel like a lot of frustration in the west are due to a lack of voice from within China, who can explain the context and give their point of view. Instead all you get are these disjointed news and headlines without any depth to it. People then make assumptions based on it.

Well, yes and no. Go to reddit for example, you can find endless amounts of people explaining the Chinese perspective and getting voted down and accused of being wumaos, and you'll get banned for it in many places too. At some point I imagine it gets tiring.

Isn't that the problem though? How do you know you're getting a genuine opinion when there's a public, broad, and well funded astroturf campaign? What even is a genuine opinion or free thought when the government employs such ruthless censorship?

If you're not open to other opinions, you will hear none, and that's entirely on you.

In extremely broad strokes, China has gone from colonized and poor to powerful and rich. Is it so hard to believe that the average Zhao is pretty OK with things?

It's not a question of belief, it's more a question of who is speaking - him or the state propaganda? We had the same in communist Eastern Europe - you publicly said things that you thought were ok and assumed anyone with ears can be an agent of the regime. Privately you might have thought something very different, but why end up in prison and cause problems for your family?

China is not an Eastern European "old country" that got broken and remains broken because communism. IMO I find an interesting divergance in opinions immigrants of ex-soviet bloc countries and China, the former mostly has experience of decline and bad times to draw from, the latter largely supports and are of proud of modern PRC, many have aspirations to return / sea tutural back to live and work. You'll find many Chinese people genuininely defend PRC (and CCP) precisely because China isn't a failed communist Eastern European country.

The point is we have no way to distinguish what is "genuine" in this case. Compounding that problem is the current massive Chinese propaganda offensive, which makes it even harder to believe any positive opinions. Especially when at the same time we can see what is happening in HK, for example.

I've wrote elsewhere in this thread that this alleged "Chinese propaganda offensive" especially on western social media is massively overblown. In terms of data, we have decades of western analysis of polling and sentiments in PRC suggesting people are genuinely supportive of central government, reflected in opinions of millions of Chinese diasphora populations who post on western media and/or interact regularly with people in the west. Even substantial percentage of HK itself is supportive of PRC, hence yellow/blue camps. So at minimum the issue is divisive with proponents and opponents, including in HK itself. Except the opponents are trying to create this narrative that proponent opinions can't be genuine because propaganda when that narrative itself is propaganda. All I can say is in my experience, folks in modern PRC voice dissent all the time, this isn't the 70s under Mao where one can be literally dispeared for private conversation. The stazis/red guards days are over. These days negative messages get deleted, positive messages get amplified. It's filtered. In the west the filtering goes the other way. Positive messages of get suppressed, negative ones get attention.

I did not mention social media, but I know things about Chinese influence in e.g. academia. It's not overblown at all; we are not talking nearly enough about it.

See, I already mentioned polling in totalitarian society does not make sense - it's quite simple really - and you are still using it as an argument. That's not a good way to have a discussion.

>polling in totalitarian society does not make sense

Why? There's tons rigorous analysis by western institutions with decades history polling in PRC [1]. The allegations that you can't get useful polling because communism is facile. There's no basis to it other than projection and feels. It's common among East Europeans who abscribe their experiences on PRCs, which is very different. Unlike Soviet Block countries during cold war, PRC prior to mid 2010s was saturated by western NGOs who were given broad access because it was seen as helpful to modernization. Also the topic covered HK polling, if you think that's biased even pre NSL, then there's no reason to believe pro-HKers either.

[0] >The “Surprise” of Authoritarian Resilience in China https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/surprise-authorit...

>I did not mention social media, but I know things about Chinese influence

The original topic was about astroturfing, so assumption was when you talk about massive propaganda ops it would be related.

>academia

Where is the massive propaganda campaign? Thousand Talent particapants being poorly prosecuted by DoJ's China Initiative covered ~80 cases where only %50 had anything to do with espionage/theft. Even then high profile cases had to be dropped because FBI basically admitted they lied and were just targetting / profiling Chinese academics. Of course there's PRC influence in academia, but it's not as substantial as all the engineered headlines suggests.

> There's no basis to it other than projection and feels.

The basis is that the authorities can lock you up if you dissent. You have no right to free expression and no chance for a fair trial. You know this and will deny it happens.

I am not saying that for example HK polls are biased pre-NSL (they are because smart people knew what is coming 2047 or sooner), I am fully aware that half the people will support any government, no matter how bad. That also happened in Eastern Europe, so China is not as unique as you seem to think. It simply does not matter. Once dissent is not allowed - or you know you might be prosecuted for dissent in the future, or your family in China might be in danger - you will start self-censoring.

> Where is the massive propaganda campaign?

all over the world. See for example the Confucius Institute network associated with various universities, its overt task is to teach language and culture, but covertly to manipulate and to pressure lecturers and students and basically anyone around to toe the party line (happened to a friend very recently). Many similar stories all over academia, pressuring companies etc.

Your assertion was that:

> makes it even harder to believe any positive opinions.

Despite acknowledging that conventionally ~50% of the population are pro government. Ergo statistically there are genuine positive opinions, many in fact. On the mainland or in the west, this is magnified by the PRC population / diaspora scale. So why calibrate your belief meter so unevenly as to reject any positive opinions except dogma / feelings when statistically they are bound to exist in massive numbers.

> The basis is that the authorities can lock you up if you dissent. You have no right to free expression and no chance for a fair trial. You know this and will deny it happens. ... >It simply does not matter.

None of that matters to genuineness of positive opinions. Self-censorship doesn't translate negative opinions into positive ones, it turns them into silence or contrition. Dissidents who get swept up don't do a 180 and enthusiastically praise CCP, they stay quiet or do boiler apologies and acknowledge being "wrong". In PRC: many people voice their negative opinions in a variety of forums because the chances of being locked up with "picking quarrels and provoking trouble" is stupendously small. Creative critiques that circumvent censorship are everywhere, posts get deleted, particularly troublesome agitators get invited for tea, repeat multiple times before state security commits resources. No one denies self-censorship or persecution happens, it just doesn't happen on a pervasive enough scale to meaningfully collapse public opinion where the default assumption should be positive opinions are not believable. You can argue negative opinions are suppressed, and positive amplified, but that doesn't make positive any less likely to be genuine. Indeed one would expect more genuine opinions by virtue of pervasive propaganda. In the west you have manufactured consent forming genuine anti-China opinions, and Chinese diaspora who self-censor due to stigma and social pressure, but self-censoring of pro-China opinions doesn't make pervasive anti-China opinions less genuine.

>That also happened in Eastern Europe

The comment was addressing the history/state of mainland polling, Eastern Europe during the cold war was absolutely not home to a plethora of western NGOs that operated with relatively loose oversight. PRC was, hence decade+ of western institutions surveying PRC before internal security modernized to the point of having tenable grasp on public opinion. Reason why this was even allowed in the first place is CCP wasn't in position to trust its own data and relied on western data / expertise for development.

>covertly to manipulate

US allocating 300s million to anti-China influence operations doesn't mean we discount genuineness of anti-China opinions formulated by western propaganda. One can suggest brainwashed useful idiots are being misinformed, but doesn't mean they don't genuinely believe the propaganda. This applies to Chinese propaganda as well. Lots of useful idiots genuinely support the PRC narrative, but on balance one can argue the Chinese exposed to both east + west are in a better position to make a more informed decision. PRC diasphora who understands state propaganda is witnessing how manufactured consent can porduce equally brainwashed populous via cover manipulation is something I'd hope someone who escaped east europe can identify.

> So why calibrate your belief meter so unevenly as to reject any positive opinions

Because negative opinions can get you locked up or worse.

> Self-censorship doesn't translate negative opinions into positive ones

In this case you are again simply wrong. It was again quite common in EE from my experience to say something quite positive if one was invited to opine, even if it was a complete lie and fabrication, just to be saved from trouble. And why not? For some people it is easier to say something than to say nothing. Or even staying quiet or not being enthusiastic enough can be understood as dissent. And all that is before we even start to talk about so-called internal enemies, witchhunts so popular in "communist" parties and organizations.

> No one denies self-censorship or persecution happens, it just doesn't happen on a pervasive enough scale to meaningfully collapse public opinion

There is no public opinion. There is only the opinion of the CCP. To have a public opinion would first need to have a public discussion in which various opinions are freely floated, which is not possible.

We've banned this account. It's a pity, because you've posted good HN comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26978491 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176286, but vandalizing the site like this after we specifically asked you not to is seriously not ok.

Maybe you could try to do something with the Chinese trolls too? It's becoming a serious problem.

I'm always happy to look at specific links. But from my perspective the serious problem is users' tendency to project such categories as "paid shill", "bot", "troll", and so on, onto other users who simply have different backgrounds than they do and different views than they do. There is years' worth of explanation here:

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

and lots of specific explanations here:

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

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

You've already been told by site admins to stop with this. If you have evidence someone is a shill for anything contact dang, otherwise it hurts everyone when you do this.

There is a 90% chance there are ruthless, public, broad and well funded astroturf campaign for and against most of your impactful opinions.

You have to take it with détachement. I have enough Chinese friends living away to know that opinions often aren't that different living here vs in China. Censorship isn't that effective in the era of anyone easily getting a VPN.

>a public, broad, and well funded astroturf campaign?

Abroad where 50c doesn't operate? Reality is there aren't any substantial large scale astroturf campaigns from PRC according to recent foreign influence reports from western social media companies (see Twitter, Facebook). There's hand full of practice bit increasingly competent script kiddie tier campaigns with limited exposure on subject matters most westerners don't care about but CCP does (i.e. GuoWenGui). Even less so per studies before 2020 that only found anti-China social media manipulation that targeted PRC netizens who jumped the firewall. The real brainwashing is thinking Chinese opinion can't be "genuine opinion or free thought" because ruthless western manufactured consent created a misinformation enviroment that insinuates PRC opinions are totally controlled even abroad. There's plenty of genuine PRC supporters in the diasphora, and plenty of opponents as well. The former are usually the educated folks who immigrated in the last 10-30 years with duo perspective on Chinese/western models, largely normal people. The latter are dissidents, groups marginalized by CCP, who only has snapshot / out of date / time bubble memory of PRC. Incidentally they're the ones creating epochetimes, hanging with insurrectionist, and trying to convince western audiences that being pro PRC can't be a genuine opinion.

Here's the 2021 RAND report on PRC disinformation from a week ago:

* China has not carried out substantial disinformation attacks on other U.S. allies or partners (such as Singapore, the Philippines, or Japan).

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR4373z3.html

PRC information campaigns are being tested, they may target west one day. But the idea that PRC is astroturfing the west is the product of western astroturfing itself.

I strongly hold this skepticism of there being targeted CCP shills, including on HN. If true, that goes beyond censorship of their own citizens. How do you prove though. There has been some reporting about it, I remember one about their distributed mechanical turk-ified gamification of astro turfing basically.

And I think that not knowing is part of the value for them. The Putin way of power through questioning reality, just throw out lots of lies, deflect, scapegoat, whataboutism. Class troll behavior has invaded the real world.

I also see parallels in the US, at first from the extreme right 'media' just taking this bold faced bs approach and sadly it works.

Go one level deeper and ask why you're never exposed to that viewpoint.

Washington Post and NYT will happily run Adrian Zenz all day long, even though he's a right wing religious nut and they're secular liberals, but you never see them print the majority viewpoint of actual Chinese people.

>My experience of people in China-- admittedly a long time ago-- was they are generally very patriotic or nationalistic, like Americans. They appreciate the CCP and what it has accomplished. They have a strong domestic arts industry making movies, books, games. Sure lots of people disagree with the party, but that doesn't that they want a western liberal democracy.

Having been on the inside, it's not that they don't want a different system, it's that they see the real or perceived problems of our system as highlighted by their domestic media and generally from their point of view. This makes them substantially less enthusiastic than we think they would be.

The only way to convince them is to show them that liberal democracy does indeed yield better results, with people feeling more secure and leading happier lives. In order to do that we need to ensure that our democratic processes lead to solidarity and not division. That's why the last 4 years have been so damaging to our system, the fabric of the system has been damaged by extreme partisanship, without considering that standing together with our neighbours is in many cases more important than being 'right'.

Anecdotally, western democracy was seen as a means to an end for many “common folk Chinese”. The end is prosperity. Now that the prosperity gap has drastically closed (also there are more clear paths to prosperity), the desire has also dissipated. China has also seen a China-like society in Singapore achieve a very strong economic and social outcome with authoritarian government, so western style democracies aren’t the only “role model” so to speak anymore

I don't think Singaporean politics is particularly well regarded within China. In fact, it reflects the same issues as with the CCP and its authoritarian system. The Singapore system is seen as a necessary evil given the geopolitics of the region and the racial makeup of the city-state. The CCP is seen as a necessary evil to propel China into advanced economy status. This is just how things are.

Singaporean political academies trained 50K CCP cadres until recently. Their system is/was highly well regarded and emulated, but within the last decade CCP has evolved/developed beyond the Singaporean methods designed for small fish geopolitics. LKI was the preeminant statesmen that every CCP leader visited/consulted with personally, outside of state-to-state dialogue. I think Trumps America, drama HK in has turned more and more away from representative democracy. Western system in general started losing luster post 2007 GFC. Whatever model PRC will pursue in future, it's not going to look towards "declining west" until west sorts out it's issues.

The political element is hugely overblown as the training is mostly limited to mid-level cadres and in the areas of Managerial Economics and Public Administration. There's a reason why they are called the "Mayors' Class". It's also a top down policy, not the popular view.

I misread the original subject is on politics vs bureaucracy, in which case I agree.

I think this position is very valuable. By far the best way for us to effect change in China politically, and every other major ideologically opposed nation, is to effect change at home, and be so sucessful that the superiority of our approach cannot be refuted.

Bonus point that there is a lot less chance of war this way.

> I think this position is very valuable. By far the best way for us to effect change in China politically, and every other major ideologically opposed nation, is to effect change at home, and be so sucessful that the superiority of our approach cannot be refuted.

I don't think so. Fixing domestic problems is a worthy goal, but it's wishful thinking to believe it will do anything to "effect change in China politically."

Perhaps it won't, if things don't stop improving in China and we don't improve enough. But if that happens I don't see any way at all of changing things in China from our position.

For US it will. People in the US seldom think about just how powerful their media environment and general influence is. Like women have been sexually harassed since forever in China, and it's the #MeToo movement that led to a lot of the victim to stand up and people to support them.

Yup. People who get their news mostly from Western media might believe Chinese live in a repressive Orwellian hellscape, and conclude that if there is not widespread resentment against the CCP it must be because it's all suppressed. The truth is probably a lot more pedastrian: life in modern China is not bad at all, both in comparison to their own history and compared to other large countries in the world (NOT compared to exlusively rich countries). So a large part of the population is probably at least somewhat content with the current government.

Life is probably far from pleasant if you're an Uyghur or a Falung Gong, but the overwhelming majority of the population is not too concerned with their lot. The CCP clearly does suppress dissent, but it can be targetted to minority opinions.

The median Chinese citizen doesn't just see Western Europe and the USA and concludes that democracy leads to great results. (S)he can also see that it did not appear to bring great prosperity to India, Brazil or Russia.

I'm troubled that your comment was downvoted. It seems very reasonable. Thank you for posting.

I don't understand the premise that the Chinese need to be convinced that the system we live in is the better one. Can we not accept that they are happy with the choices they made, and that not everyone needs to live under a repressive capitalist system?

>repressive capitalist system

Are you implying that the current Chinese system is not repressive, nor capitalist?

No

One your comment on a "strong domestic arts industry", I would recommend this video.

"The Curious Story of China's Indie Gaming Scene"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VrTZ_UeUxM

Thanks, that was interesting.

Re-frame the question: if they could have western style liberal democracy without any bloodshed, would they? The answers you're seeing might be tainted with knowing the path to democracy would be painful, and all else equal, that pain is worse than the current power structure.

There is without any bloodshed and without any bloodshed. The Soviet Union fell down with very little bloodshed, but around 7 million people died from the economic disruption, and the democracy that came from it was rapidly compromised both by local oligarchs and foreign powers in most of it.

I don't think the Chinese would want a fall of the USSR scenario, however little the bloodshed is. Economic disruption can kill a lot of people and there is not even any guarantee the next system would stand on it's own.

> There is without any bloodshed and without any bloodshed. The Soviet Union fell down with very little bloodshed, but around 7 million people died from the economic disruption, and the democracy that came from it was rapidly compromised both by local oligarchs and foreign powers in most of it.

But you're comparing apples and oranges.

Russia was still a command economy when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and went straight to democracy and capitalism at the same time with very little transition (IIRC, mainly because of the bad advice of Westerners who were too ideological and infatuated with markets).

China has already made the transition to capitalism, so I don't think a political transition to liberal democracy there would entail the kind of economic disruption Russia experienced.

China has never made a transition to capitalism. Roughly half of the workforce is employed by the State, it's at best state capitalism.

A transition to hard capitalism and a collapse of the government would absolutely bring economic disruption. And China right now is much less self sufficient than Russia was in 1991, and gets its foreign exchange from complex and vulnerable supply chains.

China is also much less educated than Russia was at the time, and would be even more vulnerable to corruption.

> A transition to hard capitalism and a collapse of the government would absolutely bring economic disruption.

I mean, one of the takeaways from the experience of Russia is to not repeat the same mistakes. If China makes a transition to liberal democracy, it should continue to protect its state sector for a long time, and draw out any reform of it to minimize economic disruption.

It absolutely should not let a bunch of crazed free marketers come in and "creatively" fuck everything up with a blind application of their ideology.

Don't forget that western liberal democracies look pretty un-attractive at the moment. When the choice is between a raving loony geriatric dementia patient and Trump a lot of people think they'd be better off without.

This is still a similar viewpoint held by the young to adult generations of China although the idea of China as a democracy is definitely warming up but its more of at a certain date, China will transition to democracy instead of the current system being replaced now.

> exclusively consume the cultural products of the West

There's more penetration of western media and products in PRC, but vast majority of consumption is still domestic even among educated. And trends show the young are more nationalistic than ever, especially among those with more exposure to the west.

>North Korean style propaganda embarrassing. The disconnect really cannot be understated.

Yeah, folks are embarassed at the style of propaganda, ran by old cadres from for a bygone era. Not the idea of propaganda itself. They want better, modernized propaganda that effectively reinforces nationalism, especially abroad.

On the one hand, they're right to cringe at the tone-deaf socialist era government communist propaganda. "How do you do fellow kids" with a communist flare. Clearly produced by cadres in their 60s in a communist bubble.

On the other hand, the current nationalist Chinese bubble is not that much better. Listening practice on Bilibili would be a lot better without the equally tone deaf comments about how all their neighbors are puppets of the US without any personal agency and owe their culture and history to 5000 years of glorious Chinese civilization. The current anti-Chinese sentiments in the west would be far worse if your average American spent even 30 minutes on Chinese websites. They can complain all day about how biased BBC is towards China (arguably true), but I don't see CGTV overtaking BBC globally in popularity anytime soon. One whiff of that smug self-superiority is enough to make anyone regret learning Chinese.

Nationalists everywhere are insufferable. The aspiration for "lovable" PRC propanda is just aspirational. IMO very little chance PRC will be able to out-propagandize west/US especially among west/US aligned partners. Language/cultural divide too big. I think domestically people will just settle for less cringy interntionational rhetoric, which itself is a losing game since western media will interpret translations with liberty regardless. It doesn't matter that PRC citizens are relatively apolitical on the whole, with 1.4B population statistics there's will always be too many absurd nationals to paint narrative. Really PRC strategy of maintaining different internet/cultural bubbles and targetting msgs at more receptive Chinese diasphora audiences is on point. Once attempt at "lovable" propaganda fails, PRC will pursue Russia style disinformation because ultimately that's whats most pragmatic given the divide and realities of competition. Also more of those PRC cartoons that called out western hypocrisy that was well recieved domestically and made western media look ridiculous by coordinated labelling them photographs. Or calling out Canadian indigenous drama, Australia enviromentalism etc, stuff that has had more ramifcations on the domestic politics of Canada and Australia leaders than west pressing on XJ/HK/Tibet, which Xi doesn't lose sleep over.

> Meanwhile, young, educated people almost exclusively consume the cultural products of the West, Korea, and Japan.

What now? China has a pretty extensive film and television industry, and as far as I know it's very popular.

> And they find the North Korean style propaganda embarrassing. The disconnect really cannot be understated.

And in that case, the most logical reaction is political disengagement, which is completely A-OK in the CCP's book.

You might think so, but slacking now seems to be considered to be dangerously rebellious[1] by the CCP.

1: https://qz.com/2019322/why-lying-flat-a-niche-chinese-millen...

That's different, the "slacking" of which you speak is a kind of dissent.

What I mean by "political disengagement" keeping a distance from political issues and otherwise "saying withing the lines," so to speak.

I see what you mean, it's "going through the motions" without trying too hard, compliance but not enthusiasm.

I'm sure this is one aspect of it. They surely don't want "foreign decadence" to influence their youth --which is part of losing control over narrative.

It's kind of typical socialist thinking that you can have forever revolutionary songs and chants, forever reconstruction and forever community activism (for the party of course). Obviously, that can work in tightly controlled environments such as North Korea, and it looks like they are taking some of that social control back so they can better dictate what they population should do (for its own good as they see it, obviously).

I don't think this is so naive. Jack Ma, for example, disappeared last year shortly after a speech where he called the finance regulators incompetent and tried to use his fortune to bypass them. What probably scared the Chinese government is that he got close to getting away with it. If I recall correctly, that was the flash point for the Chinese Big Tech crackdown.

Worth noting that ANT financial had major risk and accounting shenanigans and regulators were probably in the right to block the IPO until they were sorted out better.

umm. It seems like so many people internationally sympathizes with Jack Ma and Ant, and accuses the Chinese government as oppressing. Lets look at the reality.

Ant has China's most dominate online and mobile payment system, alipay. It has consumer lending products like huabei. Ant ties its payment product with lending product, say if you a colleague student buying a $500 shoes on Taobao, you get to the checkout screen, you are like hey $500 is too much for my monthly budget, can't afford this, Alipay then says oh check this out, through Huabei you can get your shoes now only have to pay back a small portion each months. Ant loan money to consumers, then take a bunch of loans lump them together and divide into securities and sell them to other investors, i.e. classic ABS scheme. Ant even says "since we know the consumer spending and payment habits, we have big data algorithm to calculate the rating of the securities and credit score of the consumer". Consumer credit score is supposed to be a check and balance to prevent lending to high risk individuals, security rating allow investors to be confident about the security they are buying. Now Ant financial is the check and balance to itself in both cases.

Through ABS, Ant externalizes all the risk of lending to outside investors. Financial institutions might include Ant's ABS in other securities. A middle class person might buy retirement investments, which have exposure to Ant's ABS. If you own shares of financial institutions that owns Ant's ABS or securities exposed to Ant's ABS, you are also exposed to Ant's ABS. The exposure is everywhere, can't be isolated. From Ant's perspective, they earn a profit from each dollar they lend, so they got all the positives and none the downsides. This could be a reason why Ant lends to consumer who are much riskier than traditional banks in China lends to, and through my experience, riskier than US credit companies lend to. US credit card companies require a stable job, a home or rent, or a dependent with good credit score. Ant lends to colleague students in China that have non of that. Nor do they check the credit rating of the dependent(parent). If the lending goes bust, for example, triggered by an economic down turn, these ABS will drag down everyone exposed to them. Basically how US financial crisis happened, causing suffering 10s of millions of people. The government's action didn't ban Huabei, and Ant. They are just treating Ant as a financial institution, subjecting it the same rules and standards another financial institution (e.g. a bank). The goal is to reduce financial risks. Why is this a bad thing?

The regulators wanted to use existing financial regulation standards, based on Basel Accords, on Ant. But they were on the fence about it because they didn't want to limit a new form of business emerging, or want to limit what a "private" business want to do. But Jack Ma's statement basically called existing financial regulation, and the Basel Accord itself "stupid, out dated, incompetent". In my opinion, that is unacceptable because while Basel accords has its downsides, it's learnings from many financial disasters that caused suffering to millions of people. Its like airplane safety regulations, are they a hassle? yes. But they are there for a reason. And of course a business person will advocate for reducing the rules that limit their ability to earn money, but reducing the rules will increase the risk the entire society will be harmed, especially the under-privileged. A financial crisis triggered by Ant's reckless lending might leave Jack Ma and Ant's executives slightly less wealth, but they sill got all the other cash in the bank. But for a middle class person, the financial crisis will cost them their jobs, their mortgaged home and their retirement savings. And that middle class person didn't do the things that caused the financial disaster in the first place.

Business people will brand their advocacy as something for good, brand things they are against as something old, outdated, cumbersome, use marketing or media power to sway public opinion. Unless you are well versed in financial theory, how can you tell the truth? Most likely that was the final straw. Regulators finally had to gut to required Ant to be regulated as a financial institution similar to a bank. In my opinion, Ant should be regulated like so from the beginning. They lend money, they issue ABS, of course they are a financial institution, subjected to the same rules, same capital requirements like everyone else. Why should they get preferential treatments, not obey by the same rules. The regulators aren't hard liners, they are too weak. They were probably held back by the public opinion about Chinese government is against private industries, so they are afraid to do things that other might say "limit their freedom, hinder private business development, ccp controls private sector etc", including holding business accountable for legitimate reasons. Now these regulators finally have the gut to do the right thing.

You have it backwards. Jack Ma was scared and emerged in a video tape out of nowhere. Why would CCP be scared? That doesn’t make any sense.

He didn't seem scared to me, and the "video tape out of nowhere" was a speech at the Bund Financial Summit in Shanghai : https://interconnected.blog/jack-ma-bund-finance-summit-spee...

Why would one of the richest men in China openly defying the most basic financial regulations, and then trying to strong-arm the regulators by IPOing as fast as possible before regulations could be finalized, thus making them hurt a lot more people, and almost getting away with it, scare the CCP? I don't know, you ask me. I have no idea how an authoritarian government could be threatened by one of the most powerful people in their society openly calling them incompetent, defying them, and trying to make laws ineffective. None at all.

One scenario would have been Jack Ma (along with family, of course) being outside China wile making the statement. Given his reach and popularity, that would have been a serious blow to CCP PR. He'd lose most of his billions, but this risk existed.

Most regimes and communist systems are paranoid. They'll make sure there wouldn't be another Jack Ma.

> Jack Ma, for example, disappeared last year shortly after a speech where he called the finance regulators incompetent and tried to use his fortune to bypass them.

MSM tried to paint such picture.

Mr. Ma put that show, because of he knows that the regulators are coming to ANT IPO. And he disappeared because a lot of people are going to be very angry after Mr. Ma failed to push the IPO through. Think a bit, who are those angry men. I guarantee you'll never find the names of these people, thinking them like political power that collectively can rival the infamous Mr. Xi.

CCP is bully.

But when it's bullying the one who romanticize 996 [1], hell, yeah, I enjoy that Mr. Ma gets bullied...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

It is simple rule of authority system, not rule of law system. The only way to win is to give the party members enough shares or bribes so that they like you and see you as the member of the club. Chinese authorities are especially thin skinned and will see moves like this also as the win against any criticism.

lol, you are so wrong here. If the way to win to give party members enough shares or bribes then any of the regulatory actions the past year wont happen.

Ant's case: treating Ant like an financial institution. Setting standards on capital requirements, lending standards etc. Perform financial pressure tests similar to banks. Ant lends money, issues ABS, of course they are a financial institution, should subject to the same rules as anyone else. Upside: reduce financial risks, especially if there is economic downturn. If a financial crisis like the 07 crisis happens, the wealthy might be fine, but the middle class people might lose their jobs, their mortgaged house, their retirement investments into companies that are bankrupt. So preventing a financial crisis is protecting people's livelihoods. The government action shows its not afraid to halt a multi-billion dollar IPO to do this.

Alibaba: establishing Alibaba had "dominate position" in E-commerce industry based on market data between 2015 and 2019 and as such, require seller exclusivity is against anti-monopoly law. Upsides: Make this scenario as a precedent, deter future cases from happening. Reduce the dominate player's ability to bend the rules to hinder competition. Allow more choices for sellers, the majority of which are small businesses. Alibaba's seller exclusivity harmed both competition and the sellers.

Tencent: Establishing Tencent's taking majority of controlling stake in 中国音乐集团, resulted in Tencent being dominate position in online music service. It is illegal under anti-monopoly law for not reporting such transaction for review. And by anti-monopoly law, state council can order the entity to take action to reduce its market consolidation. The action ordered is Tencent cannot sign exclusive music licensing with upper stream suppliers. After Tencent's transaction, it signed exclusive music licensing with Warner, Sony and Universal. This has been devastating to competing music services, Netease cloud music, Xiami music, etc. Upside: Establish precedent. Ensure there is room for competition. Good for competitors.

The advisory on Meituan and food delivery platforms: Attempt to address some key public concerns about food delivery platforms. Food delivery workers extremely overworked by delivery platforms, low pay, lack of safety, insurance protection, and practices such as penalizing delivery workers for late deliveries while over stuff them with orders. Upside: good for delivery workers or other gig workers. Also good for companies because the government is not making drastic changes that destroy the fundamentals of their business. Instead, it is issuing a sensible plan of action that are not too costly for the companies. Also calls for them to investigate different approaches to solve delivery workers pain points.

The advisory on K12 education outside of school: This is a lot more controversial. The background is that most Chinese students spent their time outside of school, during weekends and summer break, in some kind of prep classes, it could be English, math, etc. Chinese parents sent their kids to these prep classes hoping their kids can get ahead of others. When I was growing up, as a primary schooler, my Saturday is Violin class, a English class, my Sunday was a math class and a English class. My summer weekday is all English and Math classes. I heard parents would sent their kindergarten kids to prep class teach grade 2 material. The thing is the prep classes is now a huge industry. Prep class companies market to parents and kids, telling them things like you can get ahead others, you need come to us to learn to get good grades to go to university. Parents spent huge amount of money on "out of school" classes. Another issue is, as these "out of school" classes and companies earn a lot of money, they can pay their teachers much more than public school. So good teachers are leaving public schools, resulting in decreasing quality, more kids have to take "outside" classes, creating a vicious cycle, adding to kids time burden and parents financial burden. The most dangerous thing this creates is segregation of education quality based on economic class. Parents with money can send their kids to place with best education resources, while parents without money send their kids to public school with lower education quality. The new k12 education advisory is about trying to return education to its public, universally benefiting nature, reducing the profit seeking tendency. It is also trying to reduce parents and kids access to "out of school" education and strengthen public school education in order to give kids more non-study time. But time will tell the impact of these policies, what are the positives, are the negatives too harmful, and unintended side effects. "advisory" in China are different than laws. They are kind of best effort, are negotiated and discussed about during actual implementation. And these advisories are updated frequently when they need changing. This is a big reform of education scene, if it is successful it will create a more healthy atmosphere for Chinese kids to grow up in and less burden on families.

This doesn't make sense to me.

Centralized power is good (if that's what you want, and it seems like that's the MO of the CCP).

They just need to control it.

They should want Tencent to take over the world - with them in complete control of Tencent (which they basically already are).

Why should the CCP afraid of Tencent getting big instead of trying everything they can to make Tencent and ByteDance etc bigger?

If they get too big and powerful they can theoretically pose a threat to Xi Jinping's hold on power. These crackdowns and the actions against Jack Ma are designed to show that the state will always be in control.

Two flaws would be to assume A) the ccp is a monolithic entity And B) they have complete control over tencent et al. Some control isn’t complete control.

Factions exist in the ccp and having outside concentrations of power can lead to dangerous fragmentation that can also affect the internal politics of the ccp

Right now, Tencent makes a lot of money selling data on Chinese citizens to the highest bidder for the purpose of ad targeting. The government isn't going to do "everything they can" to make Tencent bigger if "everything" includes allowing anyone with deep enough pockets to put their population under surveillance. Hence the network security review.

The bigger threat is apps with massive vertical integration that are popular in Asia. The West hasn't gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Social stability IS econimic power in the long term. Any anti-trust enforcement of that sort is beneficial for the overall market, even if the largest business in that sector will suffer. Short term economical metrics really don't and shouldn't matter that much to a well functioning economy.

By reining in large corporations which may optimize for their own profits over social good and even economic competition may result in stronger long term economic might.