301–310 of 365 posts
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.
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.
„China in ten words“ by Yu Hua, of course banned in China „The awakening of China“ - by Sun Yat Sen. Old but informative least but not last becauseit was the only book heralded by both Chinas (PRC and Taiwan) and even allowed during Mao‘s heydays of Terror (in which the official amount of allowed books was in the single digits, and most of those were authored by Mao).
Also, the west still does this shit but I know HN doesn't care about these types of incidents happening on the right
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/03/02/bill-introduce...
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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.
Even if it's separate, does that warrant a near-complete lack of interest in the other issues, which are at least strongly related , even if it's just to provide context? I think it's quite irresponsible to cover things from a single angle only, which paints a caricature.
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Even if it's separate, does that warrant a near-complete lack of interest in the other issues, which are at least strongly related , even if it's just to provide context? I think it's quite irresponsible to cover things from a single angle only, which paints a caricature.
I'm not sure there is a lack of interest in the financial issue in general; but why do you say it's strongly related, or relevant context? Why would regulatory/financial issues with Ant be related to Mas apparent disappearance?
* Because being involved with a "scandal" in such a way is an embarrassment to Jack Ma. He lost face and is ashamed to see people for a while. This is a much bigger cultural issue in China than in the west. He wants emotions around him to die down a bit.
* The regulators were asleep. Or maybe there was corruption, and an IPO which should have been stopped, almost wasn't, until Jack woke up sleeping dogs. Maybe a few people in the regulatory body have been sacked for not pulling the brakes earlier.
I believe that if Ant didn't actually violated regulatory concerns, that Jack Ma would've been in a lot less trouble.
I honestly can't see how they aren't strongly related, or how such things aren't equally interesting. It's like reporting "Trump got in trouble with the tax authority after having insulted the tax authority boss" (implying that the tax authority is "evil" and merely bullying Trump), without covering whether the tax authority actually found tax crimes that Trump is guilty of.
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Do you have an example of something that you think was a very good prediction that has panned out?
He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant jok…
I scrolled to a random section and I read:
"In fact, [the west] have quite as much to learn from [China] as they from us, but there is far less chance of our learning it."
"[There's] a great eagerness to acquire Western learning, not simply in order to acquire national strength and be able to resist Western aggression, but because a very large number of people consider learning a good thing in itself"
Nothing has changed in 100 years...
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The problem of China - Bertrand Russell. Published in 1922. It's not recent but is an incredible insight for the era and forward thinking piece. It is incredibly relevant today.
How do you know it is relevant? TBH like most westerners, most Chinese don't even understand how CCP works. I surely won't trust a book written in 1922.
It works because a large part of it is based not just on Chinese culture, but on human nature.
Its the reason that the Ten Commandments are still relevant today, because as Paul Mooney said, "It puts its foot in man's ass", or in other words, because many of the stories in the Bible were written by people with an understanding of human nature.
The same reason so much of the Constitution of the United States of America still works. Its written to humanity's nature, not current events of 1776.
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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 bureaucr…
Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship. On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chanse…
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Please don't break the site guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Dang, I honestly think it's a fair question. And it crossed my mind, too, when I read the post it refers to.
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Please don't break the site guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ah sorry dang! Will take heed in future.
"So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
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Do you have an example of something that you think was a very good prediction that has panned out?
He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant jok…