I'd suggest taking a look at the specific clauses under discussion, esp. as the draft laws are still in the public commentary stage. See clauses 2 and 3 of Article 34 in (https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/public-security-adminis...) and consider them in the context of clauses 1, 4, 5, and 6. Note the recurrent mentions of 'heroes and martyrs' and 'wars of aggression' within these clauses, something a casual reader of that BBC article would not have been led to expect, and consider that some European countries directly impacted by WW2 on their own soil have laws at least similar in letter (laws which most Americans would probably find restrictive, but I doubt anyone would regard as them as clearly 'nutty').

Of course, you can still criticize these draft laws for vagueness and unenforceability: these concerns have already been extensively covered in mainstream Chinese media outlets.

Tut tut, I thought you would have learned from the HK protests that no serious current event commentator is ever really interested in what the law actually says. I.E., The Basic Law.

"Causing harm to the names, images, reputations, and honor of heroes and martyrs through insult, defamation, or other such means" pretty clearly means to me something along the lines of "you can't point out that Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people."

There's nothing along those lines in any EU country, let alone the US (where such a concept is in extremely flagrant violation of the First Amendment). The closest you'd come is laws against Holocaust denial--but notice the key difference between a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a "good" person might have done something bad versus a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a bad deed never happened.

"heroes and martyrs" is the English translation of 英雄烈士, which is not a generic term of praise in Chinese but specifically applies to someone who died in battle (or some similar act of bravery) — think acts worthy of Victoria Cross in UK or Purple Heart in US. Even people who worship Mao do not think of him as one of the "heroes and martyrs".

In China you certainly can point out, even criticize, Mao's role in the Great Leap Forward. Even "Official History" criticizes Mao! You can't be too "over the top" about it, such as comparing him to Hitler or accuse him of being a mass murderer, lest you get cancelled. But the reason you can't has nothing to do with the draft laws being proposed here.

The grandparent poster was referring to Peng Dehuai who dared to question the Great Leap Forward and was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peng_Dehuai

> "you can't point out that Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward caused a famine that killed tens of millions of people."

I suspect you never read commentary about the Great Leap Forward from the official gov.cn web sites...

In other news, if we're here to sling dirt: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...

Of course UK isn't in "EU country" any more, but hey, I don't have a habit of collecting human rights violations of other countries as a hobby.

Xi is losing it everywhere;

- internal purging of military senior officials. 5 out of the 7 senior officials are now missing in action. https://www.newsweek.com/china-defence-minister-li-shangfu-m.... Very similar to Mao Zedong's purging of his generals https://www.hoover.org/research/lin-biao-incident-and-people.... China has had to transfer generals from airforce and army to head up missile force, because so many generals in the missile forces were purged.

- china's export drop 4th straight month https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/business/china-exports-au...

- the great flooding of northeast farmland this summer wiped out 1/3 of China's grain production. in order to mitigate the flooding of Beijing, they instead flooded provinces next to Beijing, which incidentally housed many military forces. Those forces were destroyed without warning.

- another big real estate developer, sunac, filed for bankruptcy https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/19/economy/china-sunac-ny-bankru....

- the Hangzhou asian games was a massive failure, attended by no major heads from developed countries. Cost $30 billion, while its local governments are so desperate for money, they are raiding temples

Can you provide some sources about the flood destroying military forces and Hangzhou government raiding temples?

About Huawei stores being empty, some seems pretty crowded at least on the first day. https://youtu.be/YFeE2xHQVRI?si=2-tqnqXj8aF8srN6

I mean it isn't the first time that narratives about China's collapse have surfaced; they've been going on since the 2000s. Take anything you read about China on western boards with a pinch of salt; vice versa for the other side too.

I know. I live in Hong Kong. Some of these are worrying but a few of them seem questionable. From what I can find, the previous asian games opening also wasn't attended by many world leaders. It's not Olympic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Asian_Games_opening_cer...

It's the first time we've had some serious quantitative data behind it, though.

There are good indicators that an economic stagnation or recession are coming, and that could potentially hurt the CCP long term.

What are you talking about? Data has been collected since they opened up, enough for people to be writing books on it like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Collapse_of_China

Now are you going to say the data collected before is unreliable somehow and this time it's reliable?

China had a real estate bubble fueled by overbuilding, and it collapsed. Nobody is quite sure what happens after that. The economic system is so different that the aftereffects aren't clear.

I can't find the paper ATM - but this was discussed by an Australian group (ASPI adjacent) tasked with China watching eight years (? ish ?) ago .. and as I recall it played out more or less as they predicted.

China central planning pushed for and encouraged 'over buiding' for efficiency and surplus, doing bulk deals on concrete, streamlining steel creation from iron ore, etc.

If you put aside the traditional western stock market view of companies trading in the building domain (which grew and collapsed) and look at it as state planning for bulk efficiences of scale it perhaps makes more sense.

Right now it makes sense to look at what the next five to ten year state backed push will be as we might anticipate more "one foot in the free market" bubble like growth there.

I'm sure you're smarter than Cathie Wood, who has completely exited Ark investment out of China. Or smarter than Apple, who is moving 50% production to India by 2027. Or smarter than Carrefour, which closed all of their 150 Chinese stores this year.

Oh wait, probably not.

Imagine having such a superiority complex thinking that China's survival hinges entirely on western investment and graces. That's some jingoism right there.

Yeah, I'm sorry to break a nationalist's heart. China needs foreign investment to survive, otherwise its 22% youth unemployment rate, 3 of its biggest real estate companies being bankrupt, local government's $12 trillion debt, 600M citizens on $140/month income will just get worse.

But those investments are now gone forever.

Nah I'm no nationalist. Just trying to provide balanced views.

> But those investments are now gone forever.

Can bet there will still be investors coming in to fill the void.

I don't know about the others, but I'd contest the claim about Cathie Wood.

We've banned this account because it's consistently been breaking the HN guidelines. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means, among other things, using HN for curious conversation rather than ideological battle.

Marriages being down in 2022 is pretty easily explainable as a result of the strict lockdowns that weren't lifted until late December.

Yeah, I’ve seen these stories before. And all from the usual suspects. Quick, someone find the tweet with the 10 Economist magazine covers about China collapsing. You know, the ones that used to come out every 5 years and now come out every year.

Someone could easily cherry pick stories about the US and make the same argument. Unsustainable debt, rampant homelessness and addiction, lifespan and healthspan plummeting, birth rates dropping, etc.

There's an observation in "How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell that all the successful Asian countries grew at about 10% per year as they industrialized, because you can do that by copying the developed world and exporting while paying low wages. Once they caught up, growth dropped to about 5%, because then you have to do something new and pay people more. Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. all followed that path. Countries can screw up and do much worse - Cambodia, North Korea, etc. China is now about at the point where the growth rate drops to 5%. This is not a disaster.

It is a disaster but not for the Chinese. The capitalists elsewhere won't have such cheap labor that's passably educated and has ready access to infrastructure.

Africa and South America would take major investing to bring up to that point.

Very anecdotal.. But I just spent a couple of weeks in Sichuan for the first time since the pandemic. It felt much more vibrant and wealthy than 5 years ago. People dress better, no more half empty shopping malls, much more vibrant street food scene. I went to some designer fashion mall and they had more trendy brands than I've seen in Seoul or Taipei

Huawei seems to be doing well domestically somehow. Way too many store front that aren't too busy.. But they have their own car brand now that seems to be selling well. I'd say half the cars in the street were some domestic electric car brand. I'd guess gasoline cars will be phased out soon

I kept reading about how devastated the country was by the pandemic - but what I saw was a ton of progress. Talking to locals though, they didn't seem to really percieve the difference :)

Wow, you really should stop using internet. Most of it is absolute bs

Here's a thought, maybe all those news are "fake news"?

The original article talks about China misinformation in Taiwan. Maybe western society is running the same thing to China. Like like they did for North Korea.

Remember the "people can only get certain types of haircuts in North Korea"? Fake news, and I believed it at the time. So now I'm always sceptical on what I read from western news talking about Asian countries.

Here's an interesting satire about this https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E?si=MziI90I7xP5W4g-m

Western "society" can't do anything because it's not a uniform entity. We're a group of individuals who can post ideas and theories in forums like Hacker News or anywhere else. Perhaps you can say that about mainstream media, having in mind that the average person doesn't care too much about what happens inside China or Asia, unless if it's killing jobs in the West.

Although what you said makes since in principle, there's a lot of people who "fell" for the hair cut "news" and many other ones.

What's an alternate hypothesis? I.E., why might they be doing this besides going insane? So, an alt explanation that avoids the China-crash forever story?

Xi feels he is losing power isn't a China-crash necessarily.

The US economy doesn't stop when we switch leaders regularly.

Certainly there would be changes but they aren't predictable. (For instance the new leadership could censor even more due to not having as established based on less as they got into power by promising less invasive actions)

Sure, you raise a good point. It's also useful to consider how the idea that the leader for life of the country is going insane could be felt to be denigrating to the country and could be considered to be part of the general China-crash tropes.

For the sake of good analysis, it's important to focus on real alternatives to that hypothesis, and avoid getting bogged down in semantics.

Twisting yourself in knots to avoid an unpleasent conclusion, serves nothing either.

Liberal democracies arose out of the realisation that autocracies have bad endings like this.

Hahah, are you kiddin me? Are you hearing yourself? You think the logical conclusion is Xi is going insane, and you think I'm trying to avoid that? It's you that's twisting yourself in knots to find the outlandish China-crash copium fit to the unpleasant reality of a rising power that challenges the West.

That's exactly what I'm saying: the West needs to face this unpleasant reality, rather than subsisting on myopic and irrational copes like this.

That the realities of governing systems are different to their public faces should be obvious to you if you want to participate at this level in the conversation. Also, I think you need to check your "political model" privilege there, anon. I think China is something new you don't know how to analyze or predict yet; the fact that you're leaning onto copes makes me doubly sure of that. Man....

It appears we have differing viewpoints. While you suggest that Xi's actions indicate irrational behavior, I would argue that we should take a more nuanced view. In my opinion, the rise of China as a global power is a reality that Western nations need to come to terms with, rather than seeking less plausible explanations to rationalize the situation.

I believe it's essential to acknowledge that the public perception of governing systems can differ significantly from their inner workings. If we are to engage in a meaningful discussion, recognizing these complexities is pretty important.

Finally, I'd urge you to reconsider your existing political frameworks when analyzing China. The nation presents a unique cast that may not fit into conventional molds, and I believe that relying on such older models could potentially lead to misunderstanding the situation at hand.

But you’re doing the thing you’re against.

Pretending Xi is insane is twisting yourself in knots to avoid the unpleasant conclusion that China is a challenge to the West that won’t conveniently fail.

So often people are first to accuse others of what they are themselves…

I don't count that Xi losing, but Xi winning. He's very conservative in China's sense, and he's basically crushed less conservative forces in the Party. A crackdown on clothing "detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people." doesn't serve any real interests of Xi other than enforcing the ideals of China's conservatives.

Similar to how the Republican party always try to inhibit abortion wherever they can. You won't say that Republican party successfully passing an anti-abortion law indicates they are losing, will you?