I'm no expert on China, but this fits the pattern of them making extreme laws (ie death penalty for corruption) and then selectively enforcing them. Laws are tools for the party to use when it feels it might benefit, not universal rules.
Yes, exactly. These extreme laws are only possible because china has "rule by law" rather than "rule of law." They are not applied very aggressively, only to take down enemies when needed.
China isn't homogenous, enemy is left up to individuals with power to define such. This leads to interesting battles where different factions are using similar laws to fight each other.
Even in democracies, the law is abused by those in power. I distinctly remember one party here in germany, slowing down criminal processes of member of the oppossing parties, so that there trials could be held during the election campaigns.
What's really interesting about this is how unstable it makes the country. Clamp down and eventually you end up in a USSR situation where the government suddenly disintegrates with little real warning because there is no feedback loop to maintain stability.
Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly nobody is willing to stop it.
PS: I am not saying it's going to happen, but I expect the odds of complete failure in the next 20 years are well over 5%. And if it does fail things could get insanely ugly.
The xinjiang things are fully justified. Serious problems with terrorism, random knifings, random needle injections, etc. Very bad stuff. As long as china doesn't allow the han population to carry defensive weapons they have no choice but to suppress the murderous muslims there. You want to go to a restaurant or a store? Metal detector and xray machine for your bags. (My wife is originally from there and she has relatives who live there now).
Maybe there are legitimate grudges the "murderous muslims there" have which are not addressed by the state? Like the right to political self-determination.
China is an export driven economy. If a crash were to come, it would be because of a sudden lack of trade (e.g. 2008). Chinese companies are already heavily levered.
China knows better than the west what powers can be exercised on the net.
They've been testing it for a long while and all the old assumptions "the net treats censorship as damage and routes around iT" etc. have been found wanting in China.
As the power of the nation state returns to ascendancy, now with IT firmly under its yoke, I suspect that China will do much better and succeed.
Instead - I think the west is going to end up following China in some format or the other.
Edit - as analogy: the market can remain irrational longmer than you can remain liquid.
Govt can suppress and succeed longer than you expect.
The net does route around censorship; why do you think China keeps passing laws to outlaw VPNs that are already illegal? What the net doesn't handle as well are the armies of paid commentators the state uses to inflate it's preferred opinions.
If you really want to know what happened at Tiananmen in 1989, you can find a way to "jump the wall" and find out. It's just that most users aren't actively looking for alternatives to the propaganda statements, so their opinion on the state will be formed by enthusiastic reporting on the "belt and road" program or some other party-led initiative.
Well... the states continue to control the media now don't they?
And with the new tools, in particular the ability to sock puppet and impersonate human behavior in a context poor environment (you can't physical see the person, so can't make out if they are real or not, or body language and other factors we normally have during interaction).
So wouldn't it be fairer to say that they now have stronger control?
Their government's current history is measured in decades. Future historians may yet measure it in decades. Do not be so quick to praise tyranny. It will last until the economy plateaus. Only then will we see if it is resilient.
You could say that about Europe, the Middle East, South Asia.
If China does undergo civil and political upheaval I don't think it has the social institutions or mechanisms to suddenly switch to enlightened liberal democracy, history matters, but that doesn't mean the Communist Party is guaranteed political control in perpetuity.
Thing about it is, the USSR could have stayed in power if they had been willing to get bloody enough.
If Stalin had been in power (or even Khrushchev) the USSR would not have collapsed. There may have been another holodomor. There may have been another terror. But the government would have survived.
This is a lesson the CCP learned watching events unfold to the north, and they put it to work in 1989. The question is if they still are willing and able to do it. I suspect the answer is 'yes.'
Dictators can't wave a wand and cause such things they need people and institutions to enforce their rule. More importantly they need accurate information information about what is and is not working. So, sure in 1960 in theory they could have changed things and kept the system running, but that's not nessisarily true of say 1985. And I my expectation is they did not really grasp how close to failure they where in 1960.
Doing terrible things is not enough to keep governments operating at scale. The general trend is the opposite where the worst atrocities where commuted by governments that failed shortly afterword.
EX: Cambodian genocide (adjusted for population) was far worse than any similar time period in recorded Chinese or Russian history and it did not help.
(forgive me but this short comment gave me quite a bit to think about :P)
It's definitely necessary to have accurate information to keep things running, but there are certain aspects of the notion of 'accurate information' when it serves an ideological purpose that are pretty unexpected.
For instance, Stalin believed his doctors were part of a conspiracy to kill him, so he would have his doctors and those of all top officials arrested and tortured, to the point of forced confession. The crime was not simply planning to murder, but planning to kill sacred revolutionaries [0].
This example is typical of the Stalinist concept of "objective guilt": it does not matter there wasn't a shred of evidence to the conspiracy. The ideals were used falsely to prove lies as true - not because the ideals were meaningless or because they were there to justifying any whim. But because swifter and harsher punishment would go to the one articulating why it was obvious no one really actually believed the stated rules. That instead they all obeyed unspoken, subjective rules - externally praising Soviet ideals only to avoid causing themselves horrible punishment. That the system they called objective was actually extremely repressive because of its sheer intersubjectivity..
Though upon reflection, it provokes two questions: "Why could the same Stalin who either truly believed his subjective will was the actual manifestation of historical necessity, or merely dictated as if he did, hold office - during some of the 20th's century's more turbulent periods - for as long as 30 years? And why is it that the reimagined "visionary-yet-non-pathological" Soviet Party that followed Stalin - despite its repudiation of his cult of personality - was even less capable of 'making the right mistakes' towards securing its existence?"
Although one may be forced to say a lie, one will hold no illusions as hubristic as 'having made the correct mistakes' in brutal dictatorships - things are shitty. But when you become self-congratulatory, you hold more illusions. If I lack awareness of my tendency to underestimate my (recursive) uncertainty of my uncertainty of my self-evaluations, I would frequently wonder: "Gee! As if by chance - and without any understanding or memory of what they had in common - all these remote events - which I have disastrously underprepared for - just seem to keep happening to me! And with remarkable consistency"!
I'm not sure if or how China's approach will succeed or fail. But China doesn't have the same illusions as the USSR did about revisionism (and its antithesis). And, the Chinese government does have an external system it is both invested in and holds itself accountable to; one that is also a far less uncertain measure of success than any sort of internal affairs department - the entire world economy.
One of the reason the sowjet state collapsed is because they lapsed when it came to surveilance, as in they started to built massive public housing projects, allowing for family to move into theire own flats and thus escape surveilance.
Another lesson seems to be, that historys smallest revolutionary cell can be bribed into neutrality by economic success.
> Another lesson seems to be, that historys smallest revolutionary cell can be bribed into neutrality by economic success.
The counter for this is people getting used to the good life and wanting more. If a government is able to have sustained economic success even in the face of this irresistible force, maybe it deserves to continue ruling.
We have yet to see if the Chinese government will be able to maintain itself as the average Chinese move higher on Maslow's pyramid.
I wish I knew more about Chinese history. They have about 4K years of institutional memory to draw on and they likely are more aware of their history than we are of ours in the West.
Don't mistake institutional and cultural memory, which are not the same thing! A memory in the intellectual elite sense, and a political cultural memory, and a widespread low-cultural set of norms and understandings are also different things. All apart from the institutions of state, or religion, or bureaucracy, or commerce, and so on, which may have traditions and functional memory going back decades or millennia, depending.
It it's quick it will recover fast, it's if it's a grinding situation like Venezuela or Ukraine or Syria, where change occurs but there are still large blocs of people fighting for the government then it gets horrible.
During the short window where Cuba opened up we had a cuban pastor visit our church. The biggest thing that impressed him about the US was that everyone seemed to follow the laws.
These totalitarian societies where the law doesn't apply to anyone in power the people pretty much follow the example and ignore the law themselves.
Make everyone a criminal and the law is worthless.
As long as the economy is good, the party will remain in power. If they lose control of that then you're right. The question then is, what's the probabability of a major prolonged financial crisis in China starting over the next two decades. 5% is not an unreasonable probability.
