Is it me or there's some cognitive dissonance going on with the whole article discussing the ramifications of a nationalization without describing at all what sourced this "news" in the first place?
I think we need to wait until there's something more substantial to go on. The headline makes it sound like this is a thing, when in fact (as far as we know so far?) it's a rumor.
There's a long tradition of "$Person hasn't been seen in public -> gigantic dramatic narrative" in media stories about authoritarian countries. No doubt it's great for clicks, but these things mostly turn out not to be true. If this one turns out to be true, we'll certainly find out and discuss it then.
"Deep ties to US agencies" is sensationalizing the facts. It's part of the United States government, and nobody has ever tried to keep that secret. Not RFA, not the U.S. Government. Nobody. "Deep ties" makes it seem like it's trying to be covert. It's not.
It isn’t really a credible source.
It's one of the more credible sources of news in Asia. Especially for more authoritarian countries. I used to know a number of its journalists, and they strive for neutrality and factual reporting in places where that is not allowed.
It's the Asian version of Radio Marti, or Radio Free Europe. Funded by the U.S. taxpayers, run by the U.S. government, to bring information to the world. There's nothing new here. This has been going on longer than most of us have been alive.
It's like BBC News, but without all of the sensationalism that has crept into the Beeb over the last couple of decades.
Trying to paint it as some kind of covert propaganda machine illustrates a lack of knowledge, or a personal political agenda.
> "Deep ties to US agencies" is sensationalizing the facts.
It's not sensationalizing the facts, it's minimizing the facts. It's a pure propaganda project meant to manipulate public opinion outside of the US. It's the Asian version of Radio Marti, or Radio Free Europe. Funded by the U.S. taxpayers, run by the U.S. government, to improve the image of the U.S. in the world, to strengthen friendly governments and to weaken government enemies.
It is an overt propaganda machine, but fully available for covert agencies to use as part of any project they wish. A great way to use it is to float a story, then get more legitimate outlets to report on the story using it as the source.
It's like BBC News, if the BBC didn't broadcast to British people and was explicitly conceived as a propaganda arm of the government. So not really much like BBC news.
You're right. I commented here a few times about how I grew up with my parents who are avid listeners to RFA, VOA, DVB, and BBC (channel specific to my country). Since we have military dictatorship back then, we trusted RFA, VOA more than our government's TV channels. I left for college in the US and learned who are feeding the news for VOA, RFA, DVB and where they are getting funding from, then I realized they are not that reliable news sources (and can be regarded as propaganda machines for people with vested interests).
If one listens to VOA/RFA in my country, one would think that the US is a shining utopia and did nothing wrong in Iraq/Afghan invasions (9/11 just happened a few years before I left the country).
The truth is that there is no objective news outlet in the world (even 'facts' fed to the unsuspecting reporters/journalists are dubitable).
RFA isn't part of the CIA. It's part of U.S. Agency for Global Media. From Wikipedia:
an independent agency of the United States government which operates various state-run media outlets.[2] It describes its mission, "vital to US national interests", to "inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy"[3] and in accordance with the "broad foreign policy objectives of the United States".[4] USAGM supervises Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio y Televisión Martí, Radio Free Asia, and Alhurra TV and Radio Sawa.
I think the disconnect here is that at least for a large part of RFA/RFE's history, simply broadcasting fair and accurate news was effective "propaganda".
Whether that's still true today or not is not something that anyone here is going to agree on.
The "Truth" (or facts presented in a very specific way) is a incredibly effective form of propaganda. You think foreign governments like Chin haven't been using the storming of the United States Capitol as a means to demonstrate the US's weakness or incompetence?
So in your view as one of 350 million, RFA is only(or mainly) set up for providing news to brainwashed Chinese people but not promoting democracy and universal human rights value?
That article, which is from 1977, is about an earlier incarnation of Radio Free Asia that was originally run by the CIA, but ceased operation in 1955 (the article even mentions this). The current RFA started broadcasting in 1996 and is under direction of the US Agency for Global Media.
RFA is still run by the US Government, which is worth considering when talking about the possible biases of RFA... but the NYT article you linked has nothing to do with the current RFA.
It's not covert, but it's quite literally a propaganda machine.
The reason Radio Free Europe/Asia were founded was to broadcast the benefits of 'freedom' into communist-governed areas. You might think that we're qualitatively the good guys, and I'm all for freedom, but that's definitionally 'propaganda'.
The question at issue here is whether RFE/RFA's reporting is known to be reputable. As far as I can tell, it is. (Funding a reputable journalistic organization is entirely consistent with "broadcasting the benefits of freedom", and doing the opposite would probably undermine those goals.)
The person who started this thread is trying to discount an RFA report solely because of the source. That seems unwarranted.
Is the allegation in this case that RFA is misreporting this story in order to avoid undercutting US geopolitical interests? It seems like the goalposts are moving in a way that still doesn't support the implied accusation.
* The linked story is way out over it's skis, pulling together partial opinions from a bunch of sources to make a definitive claim that is not really supported. I doubt the Party themselves have even reached a firm decision on the matter yet.
* The (minor!) Radio Free Asia link is a random person they were interviewing, who gave an opinion. It's not RFA's official opinion on the matter, but I'll opine that they pick and choose who they have on based on US interests, that's their charter and raison d'etre.
Unfortunately, this particular report does not seem to be reputable, based on the way unsubstantiated rumour and uncredible source were solely used to draw an eye-catching title.
I don't disagree that it was founded to try to convince the world that America is awesome. But "propaganda" is an overused term, and in this case, far too broad a brush.
People who listen to RFA know this. People who don't only see that it's run by a U.S. government agency and think it's the equivalent of Soviet shortwave days.
Not everything the government does is evil. Not everything the government publishes is propaganda.
Everything's propaganda. Even "objective" facts presented with the omission of other "objective" facts is propaganda. Look at something you think isn't propaganda. That's propaganda for your particular brand of sensibility about what is or isn't propaganda.
Propaganda is inescapable, like politics. It's all about whose you like the most at the present moment or which kind you're epistemically indoctrinated into. :3 (For me, I like scientific empiricism, but that position, too, is just a philosophical/political/propagandist leaning, frontloaded with all the assumptions and priors that go along with it. And I also think it's the best one, and I think it's dumb to disagree.)
"Propaganda" is an underused term. The propaganda industry renamed itself as the "public relations" industry (Bernays quite literally coined the term.) After that "propaganda" meant "public relations that I disapprove of i.e. communists."
The overused term is "unbiased" which doesn't mean anything. The closest meaningful word to it is "disinterested" which means that the person conveying the information doesn't particularly care about it.
As a former Soviet Union citizen I could say putting any organization on the same level as Radio Free Europe, or Voice of America, is the greatest shame for any news source. Those government funded mouthpieces serve one function, and one function only - to discredit ruling party, and sow dissent and discord. Gloves are off.
The same as VOA, Epoch time(This one is not directly sponsored by government fund). Their main audience are not English speakers.
Some of Chinese audience see the news in somehow opposite direction: True is likely(but not certainly) False. It's a little more than "not credible".
There is another group always fighting against non-believers and saying they are "wumao"
To some point VOA (A lot of Chinese think they are the same but actually not.Just content similar) was criticized by US government that they are helping CCP. What they really did was put some objective/neutral news. It's likely that the management tried to improve their impression and make them more conceptional because Chinese editors of VOA seem quite delusional to fabricate stories. They are much better now that they misleading with some events really happened but mixed with their interpretations.
The Foreign policy magazine did a nice series around xmass, about how much the US had corrupted the communist part.
The very reason Xi did his purging rounds to cut away the US influence from China.
are there any "credible sources"? nowadays eveything is biased. the trick is being aware of the biases in your sources and reading sources with different biases.
The RFA references Song Qing, "Internet finance industry insider":
"These nationalizations are definitely happening, and [the antitrust investigation] will likely speed up that process," Song said. "It's also, I think, about making an example of [Ant and Alibaba]."
So I would trust the article as much as I would trust Song Qing.
So I would trust the article as much as I would trust Song Qing.
What does that mean in this context? What do you know about Song Qing that the rest of us don't that makes him untrustworthy? A quick search didn't come up with anything. Do you have an informative link?
Because I trust the reporters at RFA and RFA's long-earned reputation not to select Sally the receptionist as a credible source. That's the difference between bloggers and journalists.
That's why I want to know who this person is, and why I asked the critic for more information about him. I trust RFA more than I trust some rando commenter on HN.
I think the CCP is mostly at fault. They wanted to control and limit discussion and even news on alibaba so of course people are going to speculate in the absence of information.
Misunderstanding about the inner workings of China isn't the CCP's fault, at least not at this level.
The discourse about China, misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions, and lack of even a basic interest in getting a realistic view of China are rampant. The average view of China in the US is so cartoonish it's quite ridiculous. If you talk to an educated, middle-class Chinese audience about the US people generally have actually a surprising amount of understanding of the basic structure of government, values and so on. You go to a very educated audience in the US or other Western nations and it's still embarrassing. And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
Would love some pointers to read up on. I am imagining something that talks about how provincial governments work, any factions at play, day-to-day politics of getting things to happen whether by official process or informal etc.
I second scarmig's recommendation of Bill Bishop's blog, it's a great resource and he publishes free pieces regularly so you don't need to subscribe. Another great free resources is the sinica podcast. I also recommend following Dan Wang's blog, he works at Gavekal Dragonomics and generally writes in-depth about manufacturing and the semiconductor industry in China, but also China more broadly. His recent post at the end of the year might be a good start. 'Reading the China Dream' is another good source, mostly commenting on and making accessible Chinese intellectual debates.
Hmmm... I'd agree that many people in the west don't have much of an idea how China or the CCP work. Calling them communist is pretty hilarious even if the word is in their name. The country has grown into it's own new empire much more like those of old, I think shaped by the expectations and education of its people.
I'd also agree that because many of China's educated upper class (political and economic) have been schooled or at least traveled or met foreigners from the US or other democracies, they understand many of the mechanics. However, I would completely disagree that even a bare majority of Chinese have much conception at all how western politics work. Even those who are educated in the US/Europe rarely understand politics except at a single point in time.
I would count myself as one who has a fair knowledge of politics and business in China having spent almost 2 decades traveling and working with businesses there. I have some understanding of their history, socialization and education, as well as, business practices. What I can say is that they are very different depending on where you are (Shenzhen/HK vs Shanghai vs Beijing vs Chongqing). They speak differently, they live differently, and they do business differently. Also, China's politico-economic environment has changed very significantly in the past 20 years often with political leaders. and Xi has been one of the more rapid/dramatic changes.
I've learned that I do not understand the inner workings of China/CCP... even the workings of the US political system over the last 4 years border on incomprehensible. I would say that some of the business people I have seen most taken advantage of are Chinese expatriates who invested back into their homes and had relatively large businesses taken from them, because they thought they understood - align your interests carefully with someone who is on the ground or even family can take everything (this wasn't a single instance).
For the same reason we don't refer to Hitler as a socialist. There are still places with actual communes.
Words have meaning so unless you're using them as a proper noun or acronym (CCP, NAZI) you follow common usage. Just because a word is useful for demagoguery or insult doesn't make it correct.
Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence.
The CCP has been around for about a hundred years, founded in 1921. They haven’t changed their name in almost 100 years.
“Officially, the CCP is committed to communism and continues to participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties each year. According to the party constitution, the CCP adheres to Marxism–Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, socialism with Chinese characteristics, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development, and Xi Jinping Thought. The official explanation for China's economic reforms is that the country is in the primary stage of socialism, a developmental stage similar to the capitalist mode of production. The command economy established under Mao Zedong was replaced by the socialist market economy under Deng Xiaoping, the current economic system, on the basis that "Practice is the Sole Criterion for the Truth".”
Not saying your anecdatum isn’t correct, but it’s a higher hill to climb than that. If someone described a person to me as the description above, I’d say “Gee, that’s most likely a communist.”
The Nazi party was founded in 1919 and ended, rather spectacularly, in 1945. That’s only 25 years.
This is an old, stale debate. The common usage of the word "communist" is defined not by vague Marxist theorising or tiny enclaves nobody has ever heard of, but rather the typical end state of actual communist revolutions. That's how the word is used in practice.
This has the unfortunate property that at least for China the end-state is constantly evolving, but only in relatively unimportant ways. China has a freer market than the USSR did, but even the USSR had to abandon completely planned economics almost immediately after Lenin took power. After that it was mixed, just like China's. And in all other ways they are the same: no democracy, rampant censorship and propaganda by state-allied corporate entities, no real private property rights (if you can lose your IPO by giving a single speech criticising the government, it's fair to say whatever private property rights you thought you had don't really exist).
Serious question: How does one get educated about modern China? (I'm Chinese but mostly Western educated)
Having seen my grandparents/parents/relatives escaping communist China and now my generation escaping HK, it has heavily influenced me on how even people who identified as Chinese and hoping for democracy and freedom for their own cousins in China are being played and lied to for multiple decades.
My people in HK are screaming that the West previous engagement policies have proven again and again to be ineffective. It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades.
I do not claim to know everything about how the Chinese system functions and can only observe how my immediate network is being oppressed but still hope that there's a way to engage the CCP if at all possible.
Western posturing and brinksmanship isn't going to bring about any meaningful change. It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]. All that a foreign enemy (that loudly proclaims their belligerence) does is unite people behind shitty leaders. (As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.)
Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government. At the end of the day, no government can govern without the consent of its people. It's just a much slower feedback loop than what you see in countries that have regular elections [2].
Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China, and its architects know that. China is not the target of their behaviour - looking strong in front of domestic audiences is. In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences. Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
[1] The USSR imploded in a combination of incompetence, complacency, and a desire for its leaders (Gorbachev and his allies, who won a power struggle against Brezhnev's circle) to stop the worst of its repressive practices.
[2] Which in itself operates on a timeline of decades, if you look at how long it takes to go from public sentiment, to the primaries, to actual results in elections.
>It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]
Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell? That's the first time I've heard that take. I mean, obviously what killed the USSR was a failure to dictate an efficient economy (what is likely to kill the CCP as well), but the Cold War defenitely, in my opinion and in the opinion of every piece I've ever read on the subject, sped things up significantly.
>As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.
I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies. The most publicized actions are those taked by leaders in unilateral context, which are most often related to foreign relations and military operations, and thus not related to domestic issues. However, if you look at what the vast majority of these democracies spend their time on, on a man/hr basis, it's solving domestic problems. The US is a prime example. Trump represented <1% of the government's actions, but got 90%+ of the media time. Meanwhile the entirety of congress was working on nothing but domestic issues.
>Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Agree for the most part.
> Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government
The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.
>Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China
Posturing, no, but policies can and do have a large effect.
>In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences.
It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.
> Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
Well yeah. No one wants a war. It would pretty much destroy earth at this point. I think if you want to point to rising risk though, most of the blame needs to go to China itself. It's ever expanding territorial claims are the largest risk factor. We can talk about how the US lays claim to a large part of the Pacific, but then we have to start talking about the validity of most of the world's borders, so that's kind of moot in my opinion.
I am quite surprised at the negative sentiment you're getting for your post. It's well-reasoned.
>
Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell?
That's correct. The cold war wasn't the reason the USSR fell. Neither was 'Ronald Reagan', or Star Wars.
To elaborate on that point - it wasn't outspent by Star Wars - Soviet planners were not seriously proposing that the USSR maintain parity in that arena, just like they weren't proposing that the USSR maintain 11 carrier strike groups. MAD would still work, and with stockpiles of thousands of nuclear weapons, its territorial integrity was assured. "We outspent the reds" was more of a domestic justification for bloated DoD budgets, than it was an actual, credible, Soviet-empire-ending military threat.
The disaster in Afghanistan contributed to Brezhnev's circle losing power, but it was entirely self-inflicted. The USSR over-reached, only to discover, to great embarrassment that it was no longer actually capable of projecting military force outside its borders - half due to its domestic economic problems, and half due to Afghanistan being an empire-killing quagmire. It's not the first waning empire to come to this realization, nor will it be the last.
> I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies.
You're correctly observing that the purpose of foreign-affairs-posturing is media optics. I agree. The thing is that, to take Trump as an example - the observable impact of his domestic politics was... Not dramatically different from the status quo. He branded himself as a fireball reformist - and he did it by loudly complaining about Mexico, China, Iran, etc. Meanwhile, domestically - which is what really matters to his constituents - he has accomplished nothing. (To be precise, he accomplished less than nothing - COVID would have probably been handled better if he went on vacation for all of 2020.)
It's a stretch to say that Congress was working on domestic issues - Congress was spending their past year, keenly focused on doing... Nothing. That's the result of congressional deadlock. (To their credit, that's better than active sabotage.)
> The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.
I believe you are overstating the importance of economic dogma. The people of China, just like the people of the United States, or Myanmar, or Sweden, ultimately don't care about whether or not their economic policies are liberal, conservative, or martian. The political axis on which your economic policies fall on isn't interesting to anyone outside of a tribal political argument.
What they care about is results.
What they care about is answers to questions like:
"Do I have a job? Does my job let me make ends meet? Will my children be better off than I am? Do I feel secure in my economic future? Will I be better off five years from now, then I am now?"
Those questions are how you should be evaluating economic success, or failure - not where the policies fall on an economic compass. The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about the legal structure around a foreign-owned branch office in their country, or how some billionaire is treated. The average person cares about whether or not their government pension will be honored, and whether or not they'll be able to afford to buy an apartment, so that they can marry, etc, etc.
Of course, if you are consuming media that is written from the perspective of an un-average person - say, a foreign business owner, then of course it will make it sound like the most important question in the world is "But how neo-liberal are your economic policies with respect to foreign ownership?"
For the past twenty years, ever since the 'China will liberalize because foreign investment' meme was making the rounds in the newspapers (which sounded quite ridiculous to me at the time, but what did I know, I was 12...), all discussion of the subject was focused on the latter question, as opposed to the former. The only time the former was ever mentioned, was to argue a point about the latter.
To summarize - economic policies surrounding foreign ownership are not a bellwether for feedback loops of political sentiment in China. They are a bellwether for the sentiment of foreign business owners about China. There's an ocean of difference between the two.
> It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.
I am under the understanding that the elimination of leaded gasoline was the only meaningful factor for falling crime rates. Countries that did not undertake tough-on-crime legislature fared just as well as tough-on-crime did, without subjecting themselves to the social disaster that surrounded it.
So, the way I see it, it didn't 'have it's problems'. It was nothing but problems.
> Well yeah. No one wants a war.
I disagree. There are factions in the US that want a limited shooting war, because they think they can win it, without it going nuclear. There's the occasional post on HN calling for this sort of thing. I don't think one's likely to happen, but history tells us that its not outside the realm of possibility.
Your point [1] argues that the USSR collapsed due to internal reasons only. I believe that it is an oversimplification.
Cooperation with totalitarian states often prolong their existence. An example that comes to mind is the US subsidizing grain being sold to the USSR and thus preventing starvation, which would have arguably led to a collapse of the communist regime [a].
However, it is also possible to encourage the "feedback loop" that you mention by merely demonstrating the alternatives that are out there. Radio from the other side of the Iron Curtain [b] gave hope to many people in the USSR.
To sum up, thoughtful action from the outside can help bring down totalitarian regimes faster.
Before covid I would have just said go visit China and travel the country. I don't think westerners really understand China as cliched as that sounds. If you add up all the western countries together + their westernized protecterates/allies, Japan, SK, Taiwan. You would only get half the population of China. Think of the scale of that, your internal market is literally twice the size of the entire western market. That goes for domestic products like soap bars or video sharing but also industrial policy like airplanes, high speed trains, etc.
China is basically another planet that also happens to be located on Earth. That's a good analogy I think. The CCP is the current planetary govt. If you are the government of Mar's you wouldn't really care much about happens on Earth would you? (I.E. the rest of the world).
Relations in China are the ultimate expression of realism. Politics is power politics, authority resides in he who controls the guns. The branches of government that matter are intelligence, military and security. Because at the end of the day, the only force is coercive force. This isn't particularly new or fascinating as it's been true throughout Chinese history. The rules of international politics applies to domestic politics in China. I.E. the law of the jungle. It's a very old political culture so I imagine a lot of methods were tried and ultimately centralized authority backed by a strong army came out as the most efficient way to unify and govern the land. The governing method of China has and always has been for the last 2000 years some variation of Legalism. Dress it up as communism or socialism with Chinese Characteristics or any other neologism but Legalism has always ruled the land in an unified China.
I don't think the west is kowtowing to China, the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground" so to speak, but they have not communicated this in any coherent way to their domestic population which continue to cling onto the pretence of the economic and political superiority of the western bloc, hence the dissonance between what is preached and what is actioned.
As for the article I don't put too much stock (no pun intended) in it, mostly because I follow BABA stock quite closely and while it has lost a lot of value recently, news like this should really cause big moves if it is true. I could be wrong and maybe in a month's time we will all be nursing big losses from the rug being pulled from underneath us. But as it stands this has not been picked up any major newswire as far as I know (FT, WSJ, Bloomberg) so I am holding my positions, not shorting or placing puts. Money talks, bullshit walks.
“the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground””
What’s a “Western Elite”? Russia, India, Japan, Australia? What “power” are we talking about? Military power? Economic power? Intellectual power? Cultural power? What are the “facts of the ground” you are talking about? How have the Western elites accepted “facts”?
These are all open questions to the unbiased reader. Could you elucidate? Otherwise it sounds like you are just juicing Chinese stocks...
It's extremely difficult to get unbiased information on China. However, there are some good sources.
If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers.
If you would like a local insight into more young/liberal perspectives, Sixth Tone[3] is fairly interesting. Be aware that this is a state-owned media source, so it has an interest in presenting China as progressive in ways that outside of middle class communities in top tier cities it usually isn't. Just because it's state-owned doesn't mean it's not informative, though! China Media Project[4] is perhaps a useful accompanying source to try understand exactly how the state media is biased.
Of the western media, New York Times probably does the best reporting on China (they even have a Chinese language version), but like all western media they struggle to get access. Inside China, Caixin is probably the best newspaper, but unfortunately it is pay-walled.
From left wing perspective I can also recommend Made In China Journal[5].
The CCP is walking a fine line between relaxing it’s hold over day to day things enough to make western businesses feel comfortable operating there, and maintaining the CCP as the ultimate source of authority over all aspects of society. Just from my knowledge, courts is an example. They’ve had western legal scholars come in and help reform their legal system. These days, it’s not lawless in the sense that arbitrary whims of party officials will decide court cases. But the courts are there to ultimately implement party will—it’s not like in the US where some federal judge will randomly enjoin something Trump does. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-policy-law/chinas-t...
> It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades
The only way that will work will be dropping few tank divisions on direction to Beijing.
I've dealt a lot with people like Xi, and Putin in my life, during my childhood, and youth in worse parts of Russia. I've tried everything, nothing stops them, they will keep pushing with brazen arrogance.
I had once such guy taken away by police, he came out on bail, and came back to bully me the next day.
They are pretty much like cartoon zombies, keep coming back until they cannot.
In other words, what I want to say is that Puting, or Xi will not go anywhere from seats of power, nor would they back down, unless they are down, like down physically. Not advocating a war, per se.
The US government isn't really THAT much different from Japan and all of Europe, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, etc... Even India and, theoretically, even Russia, too.
So, it's not surprising the average Chinese person has a decent understanding of how a basic democracy works.
In some ways, China is also not THAT much different, either. But it is more different than pretty much every other major economy in the world.
I mean, for one, it does not even put on a charade of being a democracy. It pretends to be communist (economically), but in a lot of ways it is more capitalist than a lot of the West. And the scale of the government is enormous. It's much more different, and there's really not much of a reason for many people in the US to have a decent idea of how it works.
China's government does not affect our daily lives that much - at least not yet. And Americans (like most people) are mostly concerned with themselves.
Public control is a continuum rather than an on/off switch in my view. They are owned by the state which is nominally responsive to the public, albeit very indirectly. But, then again, much of our economy and laws are determined by unelected councils (the Fed, the SCOTUS, etc.).
>> misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions
> It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.
This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that is getting the West into trouble.
There is no dictatorship system. At most, it points to a non-democratic system. But that term covers an incredibly wide variety of regimes, from 1920s Portugal to Latin American Cold War authoritarian regimes to the USSR to Maoist China to contemporary China, and all of them are very different creatures. The differences between these are much wider than the differences between democratic systems (e.g. US vs Israel vs India), which are already very wide.
Reductive thinking of how Chinese politics works gets the US into trouble. Particularly, the idea that the CCP is primarily a sclerotic, nonfunctional tumor on society, operating through sheer force of malign will, and that a democratic transition would be enabled as soon as the US helped cultivate alternative domestic institutions to the CCP.
The reality is that the CCP is a dynamic organization, which has the ability to react to new situations and effect new goals in creative ways, in some ways better than Western liberal democracy. "Dictatorship" rhetoric obscures that reality and encourages lazy thinking about liberalism reigning triumphant at the end of history.
Can you evidence that? I've seen absolutely no evidence of the CCP being dynamic or creative. Chinese history forked the day Taiwan became independent, and Taiwan has been well ahead of China in basically every way for my entire life. The CCP seems to hold China back quite drastically. It gets praised as having brought about some sort of Chinese economic miracle in certain western circles, but the evidence from Taiwan, South Korea etc shows that they'd probably have joined the first world in the 70s already if not for the CCP.
Note that dynamic/creative doesn't mean good, just that it's able to develop novel solutions to problems and implement them in a way that brings it closer to its goals.
In recent times, its response to the COVID outbreak is a good example. It's the only "continental" country which has successfully contained COVID, by leveraging its ability to put the whole of China on a wartime footing. That's despite the disease originating in China; them being the first government to have to figure out an approach, with limited biological knowledge of the disease; and initial missteps that led to a full scale disaster in a major city. Today, amazingly, the CCP has more domestic support than it did a year ago, having received credit for defeating COVID.
Other examples of successes: pioneering a way for a government to harness the Internet to increase its own power; the subjugation of rebellious regions (which, by contrast, many countries including the USSR failed at) while mitigating international fallout; wresting control of the South China Sea from competitor states.
Its richness vs SK's and TW's is an interesting discussion, and Maoism set mainland China back decades. But mainland China was a poorer area in 1920 than either SK or TW, with a more rural and isolated population, and SK and TW avoided the worst of WW2 and the ravages of the Chinese Civil War while reaping the benefits of being maritime states and allied to rich countries. A better comparison would be to India, which is a country with a similarly large landmass, massive rural peasant populations, and isolated inland villages. In 1950, it had a similar GDP per capita as China, but today China's GDP per capita is almost 4x that of India. (SK and TW, by contrast, started at a ~50% higher GDP per capita in 1950 than either, though they're now both ~200% higher per capita). It's actually pretty shocking that India did so badly for half a century, considering how badly China mucked things up for three decades.
How are you sourcing that conclusion? I'm not well versed but I enjoy watching finance related UGC and analyses on Bilibili. There's certainly tons of in-depth content and discussion about Ant's leveraging practices and the involvement of financial regulations.
A cursory search seems to show this is a regurgitation on a sourceless Radio Free Asia article (https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/alibaba-probe-1225202...) from December?