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Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

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Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has any journalist tried to clarify the matter? NO So, do you think no journalist in the world has tried to clarify the matter; or no journalist in the world is able to clarify the matter? > jack ma has only disappeared in this magical world created by western media ok, so what does the world of Eastern/Chinese media say?

Journalists could certainly do a much better job with the data already available. For example, there's the actual underlying financial issue: the way Ant Group handled money is very risky, but they want to be regulated as a tech company instead of as a financial institution. This has the potential to cause a huge financial bubble. Even if there's some merit to the accusation that Jack Ma got into trouble for criticiz…

If we are talking about the disappearance, I think the issues you describe are separate from the issue of whether Ma was being involuntarily detained. And that is the question - "Ma got into trouble" could mean a lot of things.

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up. Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue. The very fact that people keep bringing this up should clue you in. Once or twice, okay maybe it's the complainer's perception that's wrong, but again and again, for over a year? Then your damn system has a problem. The least you could do to address it is not let downvotes instantly…

This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum. Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way. The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a hig…

I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way.

Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#253

Does anyone have any book recommendations for non-chinese people to understand CCP power structures? I'm completely lost in all of this Jack Ma stuff.

The Chinese government is highly structured and in general features most of the things one might expect in a modern nation-state (an executive, a legislature, a court system, etc.)

The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.

Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history.

This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point.

However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#254

If I was holding Jack Ma in captivity, I would definitely ask him to do this just for the benefits of doing insider trading on his appearances

If you had the power to hold Jack Ma in captivity, you'd have 1000 other ways to do insider trading, or even bigger access to the market...

Anyone with a gun can hold anyone else, you don't need to be "powerful".

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum. Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way. The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a hig…

I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way. Yes, if I were in…

[deleted]

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's ridiculous if you only know China through the media. But have you considered that maybe the media representation is inaccurate? I've actually lived there, my wife comes from there, and my family is still there. This is combined with new information about China coming from the west, and having no restrictions here. I've studied some of China's recent history, a subject which is rarely taught in the west…

I found the greatest offenders of media that portrays China in a poor light are CCTV, xinhua, people’s daily, etc... if you consume those media, you get the impression that China is a backwards authoritarian state with lots of flaws, but of course the truth is more nuanced. I first visited China in 1999, did a 6 month Chinese course at PKU in 2002, and lived/worked in Beijing from 2007-2016. Frankly, the political si…

> I found the greatest offenders of media that portrays China in a poor light are CCTV, xinhua, people’s daily, etc... if you consume those media, you get the impression that China is a backwards authoritarian state with lots of flaws, but of course the truth is more nuanced.

You're not their target audience, period.

Also you're molded by Western culture, of course you interpret things differently with your own bias (in a neutral sense).

On the flip side, a lot of Chinese find Western media chaotic, unruly and full of lies, which portray Western society in a poor light. And of course, the truth is more nuanced like you said.

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had the power to hold Jack Ma in captivity, you'd have 1000 other ways to do insider trading, or even bigger access to the market...

Anyone with a gun can hold anyone else, you don't need to be "powerful".

If the "anyone else" is a billionaire, then, yes, you do, even to get access to them to point the gun, bypass the guards, abduct them, and keep them.

And we're talking about state-level actors here doing the holding, not some random nobody with a gun. Those don't have any need for "insider trading".

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, I don't even consider myself particularly pro-CCP. But CCP is the only party that actually advances the interests of Chinese civilization. All the other parties only care about destroying CCP, no matter the negative consequences to Chinese society. Also, half of the reasons people use to oppose the CCP, are either false, or based on twisted half-truths. When I see such unwarranted attacks, how can I not…

That's an interesting insight — that the CCP is perhaps the best choice of many bad choices (the "lesser evil" as we say in the US). I do understand your perspective, but I respectfully disagree (though I do admit I don't know that much about how China really works). Of course, China is a developed economy, and there is a lot of really impressive and legitimate industry in China. The hardware markets of Shenzen, the…

> I think these "attacks" of China aren't that unwarranted.

The problem with "attacks" against China is not so much that they are unwarranted, but that, by the time they reach the Western public, they've gone through multiple layers of filtering, stripping them of relevant context. That can cause problems to appear either more widespread or more localized than they actually are.

Case in point:

> invasion of Tibet

Missing context: the invasion of the whole rest of China, partially by means of brutal military campaigns (e.g. Changchun, Taiyuan), partially by local KMT-affiliated warlords realizing that the CCP had the upper hand and switching allegiance. Tibet was an example of the latter, with the lamas remaining in power until the Panchen Lama allied with the central government in a power struggle against the Dalai Lama, causing him to flee into exile.

> Uighur Genocide

Missing context: all non-Uighur people in China who are nonetheless subjected to "reeducation through labor", political indoctrination, birth control (more than 60% (!) of all Chinese women were sterilized to enforce the One Child Policy) and so on.

> organ harvesting of political dissident groups like Falun Gong

Missing context: organ harvesting from non-Falun Gong, non-dissident executed prisoners.

> social-credit system

Missing context: the implementation pretty much failed. The nationwide rollout was originally scheduled for 2020, but the current state is far from the original vision. Both in terms of social scores (only pilot projects in a few cities) and in terms of credit scoring (Private companies like Ant Financial preferring to use their data for their own internal credit scores instead of sharing with the central Baihang Credit). Ironically, Jack Ma claimed in his speech that his company's credit scoring was so good that they shouldn't be required to back their loans with as much capital, but the regulators didn't buy it.

> Great Firewall

Missing context: the large amount of cross-border communication that happens despite of it, both due to not-uncommom use of technical circumvention tools and due to some sites (e.g. https://edition.cnn.com/china ) not being blocked when you'd expect them to be.

> the "Belt and Road" initiative

Missing context: the large amount of "Belt and Road" projects which are not part of any coordinated initiative, but rather an uncoordinated outpouring of Chinese capital in search of higher profits.

Of course the above is not a defense of China, but definitely a criticism of mainstream Western media discourse on China.

And concerning

> the West doesn't have problems like this.

The West did have problems like this, but a) waited them out (territories annexed a hundred years ago, minorities mostly assimilated, natural drop in birth rates) or b) adopted a different solution (organ harvesting from traffic deaths instead of prisoners, established credit scoring agencies, a political system that doesn't totally collapse if information flows freely, impact assessments for infrastructure projects). Most likely, China will solve their problems in a similar way.

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#259
I agree with dang's comment re nationalistic flamewar comments, but then I wonder why is this news article even allowed to appear on HN front page for so long and not being flagged by the admins? There is no substance in this news report which is interesting beyond the usual nationalistic flame wars and conspiracy theories or have I missed something?

Re: Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet

#260
> In the 50-second video, Ma, wearing a navy pullover, spoke from a room with grey walls, a large painting and floral arrangements. It was not clear where the room was. [...] Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped to finish 8.5% higher on the news...

I am pretty sure all sane people knowing that this video is going online had hold a huge long position on Alibaba shares.

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