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The Makeup of the CCP Elite

chinadatalab.ucsd.edu

41–50 of 97 posts

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that Indians were magically disappearing on earth... I don't think your statement is baseless. But you are being emotional and completely dodges the OP's intention: I.e. US leadership have not been as competent in most major domestic areas as Chinese counterpart. BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude mo…

> BTW: US leadership probably caused more civilian death international than Chinese government's domestic figure. Probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more. Iraq Syria etc. Going off the conservative estimates, the CCP-led Great Leap Forward killed over 10 million people. 2-3 orders of magnitude more than that is 1-10 billion.

I guess the real question if you want to be scientific-ish about it is, how many more died in the 1959-61 famine than in previous, similar ones? The Chinese region has a rich history of famine going back for thousands of years, so it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of math. What's interesting is that after this period, there are no more famines (though food scarcity I think is still an issue).

So China did something right in its industrialization.

Edit to quote from a slate article that was on top of a search:

> Over the past 2,000 years, China has suffered almost one famine per year. Severe drought killed as many as 13 million Chinese in the two-year famine beginning in 1876. The 1927 famine killed as many as 6 million. There were significant famines in 1929, 1939, and 1942.

from https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/why-does-china-not-have...

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't ignoring climate change in their rhetoric . What they are actually doing is building record amounts of coal power plants, right now, this year. https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan... The US' greenhouse emissions peaked years ago and have been in steady decline. China is the #1 emitter, #1 coal consumer, and building record amounts of new coal domestically. And not just in China, b…

This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to t…

> This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely

Hence the need for more of them at record pace? Ridiculous

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#43

> liberated by CCP forces Ah, is that what they call the invasion and take over of Tibet, East Turkistan, and other areas?

I think they are referring to the other more central, heavily populated yet underrepresented areas of China that were held by the Kuomintang before their flight to Taiwan.

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China isn't ignoring climate change in their rhetoric . What they are actually doing is building record amounts of coal power plants, right now, this year. https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-still-building-an-insan... The US' greenhouse emissions peaked years ago and have been in steady decline. China is the #1 emitter, #1 coal consumer, and building record amounts of new coal domestically. And not just in China, b…

This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to t…

China's carbon emissions are still growing and even by their own forecasts won't stop for at least another ten years. I think it's premature to take them at their word when they've been so publicly dishonest in other arenas.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is a benevolent dictator only lasts part of one lifetime. Then you have to deal with the problem of succession, which in a dictatorship likely means unpredictable chaos

In plato's republic the benevolent dictators choose their successors to also be benevolent dictators, do not know if that could work in real life but the CCP do chose their successors, and not based on blood lines

And Xi has consolidated power and purged all competent up-and-coming potential successors that threaten this power. He shepherded through a modification in Chinese law to allow him to serve for life. Previously, the vaunted governing expertise inside the CCP had an age cap for its leaders. Not inspiring much confidence in their system.

https://in.news.yahoo.com/xi-jinping-undertakes-fresh-round-...

Another thing that doesn't inspire much confidence is looking at Hong Kong. The people there have unambiguously and collectively spoken about their desire to live under this system, often at grave personal risk.

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to t…

China's carbon emissions are still growing and even by their own forecasts won't stop for at least another ten years. I think it's premature to take them at their word when they've been so publicly dishonest in other arenas. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...

This data is obsolete : https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese emissions have taken a dive and will recover over a multi-year period, over which other projects to minimize emissions will come online. As a result, independent projections show that Chinese emissions will probably stay at more or less their current level, maybe a bit more, and start decreasing by 2030.

This data could, of course, be dishonest, but as a result there has been a lot of interest in third party data on Chinese economic activity, which is used to provide high-reliability estimates of CO2, based on which they do seem to be on track for this.

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely and are instead base load. Chinese emissions per capita and per dollar are falling, and total emissions seem to have plateaued, so I'm not sure that really qualifies as ignoring it. Same in the developing world, while some kinds of fossil fuels for baseload generation is necessary so long as nuclear is taboo, they are on track to never even get close to t…

> This is true, however these plants are being used quite rarely Hence the need for more of them at record pace? Ridiculous

Yes, they do to build more plants at a record pace, because they need to increase total generation at a record rate. Since renewables, which are also being built at a record pace, are not very reliable time-wise, it is needed to build reliable capacity.

Now, that capacity might be used 15-20% of the time, but it still needs to be built. For example, the UK went multiple days without ever using its fossil fuel electric plants, but they were still necessary in case of bad weather.

I agree that this is not optimal. In the best of worlds, they should use nuclear energy and hydro for base load generation. However, not everywhere in China is good for either, and their very-high-voltage long-range grid is still being built, so for many regions, which tend to be those that are poor and growing the fastest, they have opted to use fossil fuels. This isn't inconsistent with their goals.

Re: The Makeup of the CCP Elite

#49

The CCP is terrible but there’s no question intellectually they outclass the United States’ geriatric leadership. Much more STEM too. We love our lawyers and business folk, don’t we?

Let's not forget that Wilson was a Princeton Professor and Hoover was an engineer. (Wilson appointed KKK members to his cabinet, screened a white supremacist film in the white house, invaded and occupied the soviet union for two years; hoover treated society as a machine that he would "tweak the knobs to try to optimize" - we all know how that turned out) And Coolidge, a lawyer, was arguably the "least bad" president of the 20th c (didn't invade any countries, re-desegreated the federal workforce).
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