131–140 of 203 posts
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread that there can be chinese companies that are somehow separate from the government. All chinese companies are defacto part of the government. The CEO of all chinese enterprises is Xi Jinping.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread that there can be chinese companies that are somehow separate from the government. All chinese companies are defacto part of the government. The CEO of all chinese enterprises is Xi Jinping.
No idea why you’re being downvoted. This is 100% correct, China requires party members to be on the boards of companies and Xi is the head of the party.
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50 thousand people are born in China every day. It's not like the world is static.
Well, luckily babies are are too young to use WeChat and won’t be old enough by early August for this to impact them.
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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 Ch…
Under the CCP, the "rights" pendulum swings wildly for society and the economy. Some policies and edicts seem well thought out, others seem impulsive and extreme with little regard to long-term consequences or the impact on China's people. 100 flowers/Great Leap Forward. Cultural Revolution/Deng reforms. Tiananmen/hypernationalism. Tech has enjoyed a relatively open hand for two decades. Now the fist is closed and co…
So by comparison we are taking the highly successful policies of Reagan and Nixon… perhaps with the Japanese internment camps and dropping nuclear weapons thrown in? (For a similar time period in the US)
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>> 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 event…
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
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Does it make sense to have strong principles and not be guided by financial incentives alone? Sure. But would it make more sense to have a solid regulatory framework to start with, as opposed to being loosey goosey for a very long time and then course correcting in a way that evaporates billions in value overnight from domestic and foreign investors? Countries and companies have a lot in common. Consider this analogy…
> I, for one, am happy that China is tripping over itself and will give us a bit more room to breathe and figure out our own mess, so that when the inevitable takeover of Taiwan and all the other shit storms happen in the future, we'll be at least a tiny bit more prepared. A China with a stable regulatory regime is probably preferable over a China that is prepared to do short-term self-harm in return for its long-ter…
That's assuming domestic investors were paying attention to public policy goals (probably not true for many small-time speculators) and able to predict which companies would run afoul of regulations (hard even for well-informed institutional investors). The second draft of the new personal information protection law has penalties up to 5% of revenue in severe cases https://www.cods.org.cn/c/2021-06-24/14270.html (Article 65) but once such a fine is issued for the first time (assuming this part makes it into the final law) I bet the company in question will have its stock price tank, even though the possibility of regulatory action is public knowledge. The hard part is knowing if and when it'll happen.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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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 t…
> 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 th…
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.
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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 politicall…