I have a fairly dim view of China's ethics and respect for human rights, and so tend to suspect the worst; however, the hyper-competition in China's production industries has led to product ecosystems rife with unsafe materials (e.g. lead), and other cut corners. Now that many Chinese are able to purchase the things they produce, I can imagine that safety regulations are starting to be demanded by the public, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, I am sure this push will also be used to further crackdown on political dissent and to consolidate power, I can well imagine.
> I can imagine that safety regulations are starting to be demanded by the public, and that is a good thing
I remember seeing a sign at the Hong Kong border when going to the mainland warning that there was a maximum amount of infant formula that could be taken across. Hopefully this is that crackdown.
USSR followed the same path when their citizens grumbled about liberalization. State owned enterprises are now seizing power from private companies and foreign entities. Pretty soon you are going to see replays of USSR SoE dominance such as lack of innovation, bread lines, inefficient operation, and corruption. It seems xi jing ping did not fully study the downfall of USSR after all.
This analogy works on a few levels, but not in others. One key differences between the USSR and China is that the USSR did not have a close economic relationship with the U.S., nor an economy near parity to the U.S.'s. There might be a decline of Chinese power, but it will not take a similar path, imo.
Agreed that it’s not exactly the same scenarios. However US is actively disengaging from China. And as far as economy parity I think that may never be as China is on a downward trajectory while US is going up. And lots of china’s numbers are fabricated.
I've been hearing from pundits that the collapse of China is around the corner for the past 25 years, and I have yet to see why I won't be hearing about it for the next 25.
They've been saying it since 1949. Now China is the world's second (first on some measures) largest economy, and they sent a rover to Mars and are building a space station.
I had occasion to read some New York Times newspapers from 1917 and 1918, and they were filled with stories about how Mr. Lenine's (sic) government was about to fall if not already in flight. Off the mark by 70 years or so, and Russia is still run by former CP nomenklatura.
Not to be too tinfoil-hatty, but why wouldn't we at least consider the possibility of this kind of "warfare"? We accept the possibility of physical, nuclear, cyber, cultural, chemical and "deadly" bio warfare. But not soft, malicious and below the radar bio warfare that this could be? Is it because they "released" it in their own country supposedly?
Anywho, I've long since realized that it's all too-easy to do both sabotage, terrorism and other evil things very easily without being caught. The fact that it doesn't happen fairly regularly on a grand scale that brings society to a halt though makes we wonder if there are an appreciable amount of such evil people that are willing or incentivized to do those evil acts. A sort of "Drake equation" look at it, I guess.
At some point in the future it might become possible to design viruses that target human genotypes with great selectivity, and at that point this will become a risk. But we are a long, long way from that future, and even then most people's circle of concern includes significant genetic variation, so very few people could release a virus designed to kill, say, all Slavic people, without killing at least a few of their own close friends and family members.
Historically, biological warfare research has focused on pathogens like anthrax that have very low human-to-human transmission risk, for two reasons. One is that, if your germ-warfare bomb starts an epidemic, it barely matters which sides of the battle lines it falls on; if it thins your own ranks less than those of the enemy, it's only because your troops (and their families dying back home) are in better condition or have better sanitary measures in place. The other is that, if you can't stop the deaths when the enemy surrenders, the germ-warfare bomb doesn't give the enemy any incentive to surrender.
Evil things do happen fairly regularly on a grand scale. But doing things on a grand scale has historically required a centralized government to organize them. That's still true for a little while longer.
Actually, it did: it was called "NEP"[1] and was used to reboot the economics after the revolution and civil war. Afterwards the control of all economic matters was ceased again by the goverment.
Do you really think that the Chinese government have not studied the causes and effects of the ussr collapse enough? The other large communist nation who was also their neighbour? Or is this just some weird rhetoric you're using
The causes of the downfall of the USSR seems to always line up with whatever political angle the writer has. Leftwing can point to a lack of (political) liberalization or poor planning, rightwing can point to not going further on (economic) liberalization. It's a topic that is really valuable to think tanks based on their politics and their donor's politics.
And very few people look at what topped it off: the cold war. The insane pressure from the US caused USSR to overspend on military when then barely fed their population. I think people should say "US won the cold war" rather than "the cold war ended" or "the USSR collapsed". It didn't collapse on it's own...as bad as communism was for the population, they could have potentially carry it on forever, like North Korea, if it wasn't for the US pressure.
It's interesting that likely the biggest beneficiaries of Cold War ending were Russians, not Americans. So maybe US won the cold war - even though they were really worried about collapse of USSR and creation of multiple states instead the former one - but Russians certainly got something out of that collapse.
EDIT: and by "Russians" here I rather mean "former Soviet citizens".
It's not like the US kept it a secret that they wanted to either gain enough of a military advantage over the USSR to remove them as a viable threat or force them to keep spending ever more amounts of resources on military boondoggles.
The USSR economy did pretty well under Stalin, especially during the Depression that affected the west. Khrushchev deprioritized capital expenditures and that was the beginning of the end. Similar story in the DDR around the time of Stalin's death.
The economic landscape of the US at the time was the Depression, whereas the USSR economy was chugging along, other than the poor harvest in the Ukraine that year. Walter Duranty of the New York Times visited Ukraine at the time, and said the harvest was not a good one but a lot of reports coming out of the Ukraine were overblown.
Both Victor's, and your point is completely incorrect.
The point is, whatever survivor's of thirties tell, thirties were a terrible time, even if they were living in a relatively well off Moscow.
That's the only truth, not that of lunatical historians which have nothing, but digits to look on, and imagining things well knowing that pretty much nothing in official economics documents from USSR' reflected reality.
Stalin, and his industrial proves is another busted for 100th time trope, straight out of original propaganda. A thing glaringly obvious to any Russian citizen who had at some time a surviving relative who went through that time, but not to people who purposefully keep returning to it for search of their worldview validation "alternative facts"
Well if the USSR economy was in shambles in 1941, that makes the Red Army's pushback of Barbarossa, and the reversal of initiative at Stalingrad all the more impressive.
Most people in the West (both left and right-wing) thought the USSR was much more economically productive than it actually was, and that the populace was more supportive of the regime than was the case. The Chinese learned very valuable lessons from the USSR, namely that liberalization is very dangerous for a regime; North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.
I am not sure how earlier political liberalization could have saved the USSR, which was essentially a (communist) imperialist dictatorship.
> North Korea has done much worse (economically) than the USSR, but is very politically stable.
NK doesn't go to wars outside it. And they have support of China. This surely supports a long term stability... but how much of a long term, remains to be seen.
> they really are keen on annoying investors aren't they. i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders
They will obey as long as the state has power, which will be for the far foreseeable future.
The Chinese government has been smart enhance its power by keeping its domestic businesses in a strictly subordinate position and creating an environment were foreign businesses cooperate because dependence is the best business decision (e.g. Apple has no "plan B," it's China all the way for them).
And it might work out for them, especially if foreign nations continue to complacently indulge in free market Kool-Aid.
> Apple has no "plan B," it's China all the way for them
I know many people who work, or worked for Apple on the hardware side.
I assure you, Apple has "plan B," and it been trying executing on it relentlessly for the last 2 years — just without any success.
Vietnam's total electronics industry output is like a single district in Dongguan. The supply chain is very, very immature there, despite it already towering above any other place in developing Asia, but China.
If what my buddies tell me of Apple's internal assesment of countries is correct, no other countries are even close to a 2nd place alternative on that, except for Taiwan, which is their "plan C" — a sure to work, but expensive option if everything else fails.
> I assure you, Apple has "plan B," and it been trying executing on it relentlessly for the last 2 years — just without any success.
Can you share any details about that?
> If what my buddies tell me of Apple's internal assesment of countries is correct, no other countries are even close to a 2nd place alternative on that, except for Taiwan, which is their "plan C" — a sure to work, but expensive option if everything else fails.
That's actually kind of what I meant by "there's no plan B." They may be able to formulate other plans (B, C, D, etc.) and even spend a little money on them, but Western business-thinking won't let them actually deviate from plan A.
One of China's advantages is that the West puts business in the driver's seat in a lot of situations, but business is short-sighted, selfish, and geopolitically naive, so it is exploitable and controllable with the right methods.
i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders
Strange question with what I would consider to be an obvious answer. They will obey for as long as they want the profits they get from China's market of video game players for instance. Which strikes me as pretty much "forever".
What company is gonna leave and give that kind of gift wrapped profit center to someone else voluntarily?
Any company, when the realize that it's no longer a profit center, and isn't likely to return to being a profit center any time soon.
The trick for China is to get the regulations in place that are necessary, without putting so many in place that it strangles profitability (and therefore destroys business). But come to think of it, that's the trick for any country when regulating.
"What company is gonna leave and give that kind of gift wrapped profit center to someone else voluntarily? "
When it's no longer a gift.
These companies are sometimes high flying startups along the lines of US firms and they require access to capital.
If their valuations are clipped by an order of magnitude because of regulatory apparatus (i.e. can't list in the US and American investors have no appetite for Chinese exchanges), then this will be a problem for a lot of businesses.
TikTok is getting big in the US and the West where margins are a lot fatter, it could feasibly make more sense for Bytedance to jump ship and become an American-based company with a Chinese workforce. Obviously that's hugely speculative but just an example.
It's like any bit of regulation it has a bunch of externalities. Some may be pretty bad for the company. Maybe, maybe not.
> i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders
Probably as long as the regulation exists. It is amazing, but once there is the real threat of personal, physical imprisonment, most CEOs are pretty good about making sure regulations get followed despite any impact on the stock price.
If they can make Jack Ma disappear for months over some casual comments - I think executives at these conglomerates understand the message pretty clearly.
My tinfoil hats say that they realize that we are in the age of ultra loose monetary policy, so abundance of capital. Therefore it's time to clean the house. Gonna spook investors of course, but hey all other places offer zero or minus yield rate, China still has positive yield anyway.
If you are still manufacturing in China, you are a fool. Get ready for your factory to be seized/shut down in the next couple of years, or be taxed/fines so much that you have no choice but to leave. Or get ransomed by the local factory that you are working with (like extreme delay of products or shoddy products delivery).
1. Why would there be a mass exodus, any shareholder board will fire a C-suite that gives up selling to the world's fastest growing market / building in the world's most capable manufacturing market. Expecting one is just wishful thinking. Boards and executives tend to care about the bottom line, and very rarely about political grandstanding.
2. Even if there were a mass exodus (Which won't happen, because #1), the factories, the expertise, the knowledge base and the human capital those investments paid for aren't going to disappear. All that will happen is that they will become China-owned, as opposed to partially China-owned.
1. Investors selling stock has zero bearing on the operation of a factory, barring certain edge cases. Companies extract money from the stock market by issuing IPOs, after that happens, it doesn't matter to them very much at what price their shares are traded. See my previous post - just because the stock value drops, doesn't mean that actual assets, know-how, expertise, or training disappears into thin air. [1]
2. Foreigners selling will lead to locals buying. Those firms will simply go from majority-Chinese-owned, to Chinese-owned.
3. Stock markets don't just go up all the time, sometimes they correct.
[1] It does in the United States, but that's because during slumps, the government is very skittish when it comes to creating demand, outside of the MIC. The CCP takes a longer view, and actively prioritizes building up China's industrial base, as opposed to dismantling and offshoring it.
citation needed for your first point: "Companies extract money from the stock market by issuing IPOs, after that happens, it doesn't matter to them very much at what price their shares are traded"
It matters to the people running those companies (Because they own a lot of stock, or work for people who own a lot of stock). It matters less for the firms, themselves.
A high stock price prevents a corporate takeover (which is not a real-world-value-destroying activity - factories operated by a company don't burn up when it happens), and it makes it possible for the firm to raise money by selling stock. In a world of low interest rates, and easy credit, this is not very important.
Capable manufacturing doesn’t matter when automation can be reshored, when there are shipping delays and pricing spike, when labor costs are rising fast.
Not sure why we are discussing validity of exodus when public companies have already reported mass exodus of manufacturing from China.
There was only a year that India has higher GDP growth compared to China, real GDP growth of course is still way behind. Yet after that year it went downhill, before COVID their growth was only around 4%.
China's GDP per capita has grown by 120% in the past 11 years. India's grew by 54%. China also started the decade at a much higher baseline than India.
India is not the fastest growing market, either in relative, or absolute terms. The number of globally-middle class people in China far eclipses the number of their counterparts in India. The rate at which people enter the global-middle class is much faster in China. It's possible that one day, India will become the fastest growing market, but that day isn't today, or tomorrow, or next year.
> Capable manufacturing doesn’t matter when automation can be reshored, when there are shipping delays and pricing spike, when labor costs are rising fast.
You simply can't re-shore the ecosystem that arose in Shenzhen. Not without two decades of hemorrhaging money, depending on government handouts, and having a much slower time to market. The labour cost isn't even the problem, there's just no supporting industry in the US that can match the turnaround times/SLAs that vendors in China offer.
It's possible for say, the US to close down its economy, build a wall of tariffs, and only buy local (And thus, eventually, at great cost, rebuild its industry. It's not a bad idea, but the electorate won't stand for it), but those factories in Shenzhen will keep operating, and will pivot towards selling to the middle class of the domestic market, and of the developing world, instead.
> “Strengthen the construction of the national ‘Internet + supervision’ system, and realize the integration and aggregation of data from supervision platforms by the end of 2022.”
I'll bet they're pleased with you-know-who's you-know-what.
"Internet+ supervision" doesn't refer to supervision of the internet, but using the internet to make supervisory agencies in general more efficient. E.g. this post by the Zhejiang Archives from 2019 http://www.zjda.gov.cn/art/2019/6/10/art_1378485_34553497.ht... mentions that employees no longer have to carry around documents and manually fill them in to do their work, but can use an app for that.
The part you quoted probably means they want to get to the point where if someone in Jiangsu needs documents archived in Zhejiang, they can just access them through a unified platform instead of having to ask their colleagues there to send them over.
Surely supervision/surveillance of a person covers all their Internet usage too, right? Google Translate makes it sound like this will just bring massive scale and automation to the types of surveillance and re-education that are already in place:
“In accordance with the requirements of the State Council’s ‘Internet + Supervision’, Zhejiang has vigorously promoted the pilot work of a unified administrative law enforcement and supervision platform across the province. The platform includes dual-random administrative law enforcement, a list of law enforcement matters, supervisory account management, schedule supervision and inspection, special law enforcement inspection, grassroots four-platform linkage management, departmental collaborative management and other module functions. Through this system, it is possible to enter law enforcement information online, transfer law enforcement procedures online, supervise law enforcement activities online, push law enforcement decisions in real time, and publicize law enforcement information in a unified manner, so as to realize the entire process of administrative law enforcement. At the end of May this year, the platform launched a handheld law enforcement app on Zhezheng Ding. Law enforcement officers can log in to the handheld law enforcement system using Dingding accounts. The handheld law enforcement APP system has four functional modules: supervision and inspection, supervision object management, classified supervision, inquiry and work assistance, which can meet the requirements of various inspection methods such as incident verification, daily inspection, and random inspection in administrative law enforcement inspection. Summarize law enforcement data with complete functions.”
You need to see their original Chinese documents and compared with documents that are talking about what @yorwba said and documents specific about surveillance.
Chinese watching is hard.
You may read "law enforcement" and think "police", but it refers to all kinds of government actions intended to ensure that the law is being followed, e.g. requiring building permits or food safety inspections or whatever.
But yes, if someone is under surveillance, reducing paperwork will probably make that more efficient, too. It's just not the exclusive focus of this reform.
explicit goal is actually the opposite and it's likely not just empty words. If you've done business in China as a foreigner over the last few years the court system in particular has actually become more reliable and noticeably quicker. It used to be way more arbitrary and chaotic about ten-ish years ago.
China has a court system? I always thought Chinese law enforcement is basically, "Do something the government doesn't like and you will disappear. Try to run away overseas, and we'll make you an offer you can't refuse: Commit suicide or your family will suffer in your place [1]."
I want to say something glib here but straightfaced I will ask if you are referring to reliably improving the speed and efficiency of the courts' 99.965% [1] conviction rate because that's a number that makes some of my softwares vendors' SLAs look rickety in comparison to.
I'm referring to my personal experience of working in China over the last decade and having come in contact with IP law related issues frequently.
I'm also not at all sure what some statistic about conviction rates in criminal cases has to do with the quality of litigation, arbitration, IP law and the commercial court system. This is a real "I just pulled a random number from Google" take
> This is a real "I just pulled a random number from Google" take
You didn't specify so I gave you the number I am familiar with on the subject of my own interest, that is the surrender of power into the hands of the arbitrary.
Had you been more specific, I wouldn't have asked.
No guilty plea (More than 97 percent of federal criminal convictions, 95 for state) and prosecutor being selective (only prosecutes case that open-and-shut) means very high conviction rate.
> Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case
> Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused
> Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video
> And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence"
> The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel
(Although they wish they have, and they have watered it down, by creating crimes that everyone automatically commits in recent years + selective enforcement laws)
But yeah, the west needs to get better. It always does. And so does china.
But lets take something objective- the "were does money flee towards and were from" as a measurement of law and lawlessness and watch the crypto bleed out of china were it can. I rest my case on the scale of law and lawlessness.
> Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case
Julian Assange.
Allegedly, Lauri Love.
Jake Appelbaum hasn't been arrested, but he's not doing that well either. He was harassed by law enforcement for years after his reporting on the Iraq war.
After Gary Webb's reporting revealed that the CIA had been trafficking cocaine to Los Angeles, using the money to support a terrorist campaign in Nicaragua, he wasn't arrested, but he was forced to resign, and no newspaper would hire him thereafter; he was found dead in his home with two gunshot wounds to the head. The death was ruled a suicide.
Edward Snowden fled to Russia to escape arrest.
Reality Winner has been incarcerated for five years because she revealed the Russian interference in the US election in 02016; she's still imprisoned.
Chelsea Manning was imprisoned from 02010 until 02017, and has been barred from entering Canada or Australia (which, if not in the West, is at least a close ally of the West).
John Kiriakou, who revealed the US torture of prisoners, was imprisoned for two years in 02013 to 02015.
NPR reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal covered the abuses of the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia police force and was kept under illegal surveillance by the FBI; in 01981 the police accused him of murdering a cop who had shot him after beating up his brother. At the trial, he was not allowed to represent himself, instead being represented by a court-appointed attorney he described as a "baboon". He was convicted and has been in prison for 39 years. Four years later, the Philadelphia police dropped two firebombs from a helicopter onto a townhouse owned by a group of his friends, killing eleven of them (five of them children) and burning down 65 houses.
"The west" absolutely does arrest people for reporting freely on cases of injustice. Sometimes they do more than arrest them.
Reporters Without Borders has the US at #44 in their press freedom ranking index: https://rsf.org/en/ranking
That's worse than Botswana, Taiwan, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Lithuania, Namibia, Latvia, Samoa, and New Zealand. Other countries in the west, like Belize, Chile, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and Greece, are even further down the list. (PRC is of course near the bottom at #177.)
> Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused
True, no cases of this in EU, UK, and USA come to mind at the moment. I've known a lot of lawyers here in Argentina who have been threatened with this, but none that it has happened to since the end of the US-supported dictatorship 37 years ago.
> Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video
I think you would be surprised at what goes on in grand jury cases. It's not quite the same: by threatening the family of the accused, the government "forces" them to testify against the accused in secret, and not tell the accused what they testified, or even that there was an investigation. Prosecutors and the police can do much the same, whenever they please, except that they can't prohibit the family members in question from telling the accused about it.
> And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence"
It's true that confessions are rarely broadcast live in "the west", but I'm not clear on how that is relevant to questions of justice.
> The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel
Prosecutorial discretion is very wide in the US. 98% of defendants in federal cases plead guilty without a trial. In US criminal cases that make it to trial, in felony cases, 68% are convicted. (That statistic includes non-federal cases.) Basically if a prosecutor decides to go after you, you are fucked. My friend Aaron committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors for several years and facing decades in prison. His alleged crime was downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.
There are cases, were even i doubt the "lawless china narrative".
Lets take something recent from china for comparisson, the local ccp-officials who in the middle of the night send digging crews to endangered dams to open them and flood the areas downstream - without a warning to the population.
Cause if they warn them - they would be liable for damage compensation. So there seems to be somewhat justice giving system, if cases make it to national awareness. But in this cases, the population of villages and the digging crews brawled on the damn, resulting in incarceration of people who defended there reasonable interests. Its complicated, and i do not think the empire has not eroded away some parts of the justice system of the west.
My question is neutral wrt whether the West is authoritarian. The West supposed to progress in terms of, as the saying goes, 'the rule of law', whereas it is in regression in the Orient.
Im by now convinced that xi jinping, in the back of his mind, hates the communist party and its apparatus, and wants to destroy it by going back to a north-korea style totalitarianism, against which the citizens will rebel en mass.
I take a much dimmer view of this. Xi knows that climate change is coming and its going to be really bad. One of the issues coming from climate change is food shortage.
Food shortage is going to cause riots in US, Canada, and EU for sure. Just based on the vaccine protests/riots, imagine what will happen when rationing is introduced.
He's going to crack down hard and control the population, so when the inevitable comes there is acceptence.
Xi is just trying to centralize party control over the country, and solidify his grip on it. This is very common in dictatorships, take North Korea for example.
Right now that's true. Look at food production this year across the globe, we're seeing dramatic output drops due to climate change (fire, floods, etc). Imagine 20 years of this.
What exactly are you saying that it's going worse this year? There might be regions where production dropped (e.g. Canada plains), but overall we are higher than last year and higher than the average.
e.g.
> USDA forecasts marketing year 2021/22 European Union (EU) corn production at 65.5 million
metric tons (mmt), down 1.2 mmt or 2 percent from last month, but 2 percent above last year’s
crop and 3 percent above the 5-year average.
Your thinking total lack of food as a famine. I'm thinking huge drop in food supply, but you still have food. Some will have more (party members, people in the cities, rich people, etc) and other less. There will be protests.
>Food shortage is going to cause riots in US, Canada, and EU for sure
The US (along with France) can easily supply all the food they need to its citizens. Along with the alliances with Mexico and Canada, the US is not going to have food shortages, much less riots.
China, on the other hand, is definitely screwed on this front. All of its neighbors are either outright enemies or begrudging allies. As the global order continues to collapse, China will see constraints on its shipping routes that will lead to shortages of key goods.
The food shortages won't hit as bad, though, since the population is declining. Just not fast enough, unfortunately.
Now, that's now. So in 10-20 years, there's going to be impact due to climate change. Other countries are going to cut back on feed/food exports.
China is self sufficient except meat, which is fine now.
So in 20 years, your going to tell the people in the cities who are used to eating meat daily that they are going down to meat only 2 days a week. Is your rich fuerdai going to be totally content with that?
and here are some scientific studies projecting future crop failures:
Schlenker and Roberts, 2009. Nonlinear temperature effects indicate severe damages to US crop yields under climate change. PNAS, 106(37), pp.15594-15598
https://www.pnas.org/content/106/37/15594.full
Schauberger et al, 2017. Consistent negative response of US crops to high temperatures in observations and crop models. Nature Comms, 8, p.13931.
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13931
If you take it as a simple additive 2°C increase in temperature sure, if you instead trust the models predicting significantly more unstable weather on both ends of the temperature spectrum then not so much.
fires - the wildfires are mostly a measure of human mismanagement of land than anything else. Normally, the fires happen pretty regularly in nature. Humans wanted to stop all fires, and so you end up with huge amount of fuel for huge fires.
That is how you got in the US West from huge fires in the 1930s to a low average mid century to 2000, to huge fires now.
