131–140 of 230 posts
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Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
Lots of plastic junk comes out of China, but the good stuff does too. I checked where a newly arrived superconducting magnet was made when purchased from a German vendor - China.
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Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
> far richer In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation? How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
It would be nice to see some evidence that actually happened.
I’m not an admirer of the CCP, but it doesn’t seem trial judges are under any pressure to give death sentences simply to supply organs.
China has a very large prison population. Including many “lifers.”
Many of the prisoners have perfectly fine organs.
Yet there doesn’t seem to be pressure to move any of these prisoners to death row to get at their organs.
One good argument against it is that it stigmatizes organ donation. In fact, it really should be called “organ confiscation” or just plain “execution.”
It doesn’t set a standard of organ donation being a good thing.
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Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power. Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously f…
Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
"As of late" we're getting democracy-flavoured populism with the governing party restricting free media and repeating divide and conquer campaigns to create a voting bloc that gives them absolute majority.
Hungary and Serbia are probably a lost cause at this point. Poland is slowly getting there.
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> only the Chinese people have the power to make changes to this regime What makes you think they have any power at all? This is not what history teaches us about totalitarian regimes.
Well basic math, there's more than a billion of them. How do you think the Communist party displaced the old regime? If the people were to march on Beijing the government would cease to exist within one day, which is of course why it actually tries really hard to keep the people happy. This is of course orthogonal to both the topic at hand and reality. The Chinese are quite content with their government and abuse of…
Okay, the government is also "people" in some way. But the "people" who can currently enact change are the ones who benefit from the current government, and it's silly to expect that they have a sudden synchronized change of mind.
For the billions of masses, they don't stand a chance against an organized military response. We've had a taste of that in China itself in 1984, as well as in events leading up to South Korea's Gwangju Massacre.
Parent's "only they can help themselves" quip is just a way of absolving any responsibility: "it's not my problem". I'm not saying whether we can do anything or not, but this kind of statements kill any rational thought towards solving the problem before it's even concieved.
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The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
I don't think it's wrong, but it's worth noting that their dates to when China openly admitted to sourcing organ donations from execution victims. I wouldn't be surprised if China were continuing this practice, but I doubt that America genuinely cares about these execution victims any more than they suddenly started caring that Saddam's genocide in the 1980s before they invaded Iraq, or that Russia genuinely cares about Nazis in Ukraine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.
Would the west be as rich and Democratic without?
We would, on average, be richer and more democratic if we had retained our wealth-generating jobs. Instead, we gave the wealth-generating part of our corporations to Chinese labourers.
As a result, China now has a rapidly-expanding middle-class and America has a rapidly-diminishing middle class.
The only Americans who truly benefited from this move are the billionaires whose corporations profited by exploiting third world slave labour.
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> far richer In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation? How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
They could all be running operations in Mexico. That could have become the North American SZ.
This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.