You’re giving a lot of benefit of the doubt to the dictatorship. Establishing complete control over emerging power structures (tech industry) is more likely to be their goal.
We don’t actually know why anyone in power does anything. One thing I do know is we as the West need to figure out how to come together and defend democratic and liberal values, as without them we are seriously lost. We should start by not giving any more money and technology to a Chinese state that clearly do not have our best interests at heart. I think the west is in real danger of just falling apart over the next 50 years if we lose our reasons for existing and instead spend our time arguing about cultural issues. We spend so much time right now looking inward at our small differences we can’t see the reason why our nations became worthwhile in the first place.
What I do notice is that the Chinese "rulers" seem to be more concerned about long-term well-being of its people, rather than trolling and performative assholery on Twitter.
You might describe it as a dictatorship, but it's more data-driven than you might suspect. The Chinese keep the pulse on decisions they make, and if it's unpopular - it's gone. Of course there is a line - you can't go head-on against the Party and call them out directly. Compare this situation here, where we are trying to patch up our infrastructure and instead have to deal with a collection of spectacular douches in Congress, propagandizing against science to such an extent that our top epidemiologist has to get a security detail.
Pithy response: Tell that to the Uyghur Muslims? Are they not Chinese people?
More serious response: I don’t want to live under a dictatorship where a generational change could lead to corruption and suffering on a much bigger scale. I think America as a project might also be lost and we should consider if this crazy idea (democracy, freedom of religion, free speech etc.) is worth fighting for. I think it is and I believe in the values that the US has, despite some very obvious mistakes America isn’t ethnic cleansing Muslims or having a press that can’t criticise the government. I will bet on America not because China won’t win but because I still believe the (relative) peace and prosperity of the post war period isn’t worth throwing away as easily as some want. We need someone focused on this in a clear way and to get Americans stop arguing amongst themselves and look at the bigger picture.
I by no means suggest that the Chinese system is superior. It's a sort of system that can descend into runaway corruption pretty easily.
What I am saying is, given the decay of the western society, which is our fault entirely, our chances of staying ahead are slim.
The problem is, the Chinese have a team. They do not easily sell out. We, however, have an entire layer of high-level government that will readily go to the highest bidder. This is not sustainable. The only way to fix this is a crisis that unites us, but if a global pandemic did not do it, what will?
Yeah, I’m sure the Uyghurs would much prefer the US treatment, namely being murdered from safe distance, over the Chinese genocide, which is essentially a youth correction facility, but for adults.
The actual reports discuss a range that’s unbelievably wide in terms of civilian casualties. Somewhere in the region of 100,000 to 1,000,000 which seems incredibly broad. The US did not deliberately engineer the situation in Iraq of course, and the insurgency, Sunni/Shea civil war that happened as well as Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters made the situation unmanageable.
I think the testimony of so many Uyghur people about this and the huge “re-education” holiday camps you mentioned I’m not sure the West is fabricating such things. There’s simply too much evidence the other way.
It doesn’t really matter whether the US planned to kill slightly fewer people. Everything that ensued was their fault; it wouldn’t happen without US invasion.
Also, note that those numbers are only the direct victims. How many people died because of US sanctions?
As for Uyghurs - I’m sure there were a lot of horrible crimes there. It’s unavoidable when doing things at that scale, in a country which still has a long way to go about human rights. The propaganda part is 1. claiming this is a “genocide”, as in something deliberate, rather than crimes committed by individuals, and 2. claiming it’s somehow worse than the US solution to the same problem, which is killing those people on the spot.
What proportion of those actually committing the murders, insurgency, civil war and Islamic jihad should those pointing the gun take? I think it makes all of this far simpler if you just say it’s all America’s fault but it’s clearly more complicated than you’re suggesting.
You must not understand that Iraq was like North Korea before the war, I suggest you read Christopher Hitchens on this as he puts how dark and evil Saddam’s regime was into some light.
You’re arguing both ways in your comments by the way, you say on the one hand America is responsible for all deaths perpetuated even by others because it created the situation for it to happen but when confronted with evil by the Chinese state you make out that individuals did it and it wasn’t intentional by the CCP. I think you have to understand if you lock up 3 million people without trial you’re going to be running a completely unmanageable version of the Stanford prison experiment and cause horrendous unjust suffering. This wasn’t guaranteed in Iraq if we’d have understood the country had such serious internal divisions when we went it.
Iraq was not at all like North Korea, but let’s for a moment assume it was. Let’s say the US attacked NK and it resulted in a million deaths. Would you claim it’s not US fault, because while they started the killing, some of the dead were killed by the defenders?
As for “both ways” - there is a fundamental difference between government sending people with an explicit mission of killing people - which is what US did in Iraq - and the government sending people to doing something else entirely, yet ending with some of the victims dead.
Let’s assume your numbers are right, and the number of incarcerated Uyghurs really is as high as the number of incarcerated Americans: is that genocide, in both cases? Would you say it would be better for those people to get killed instead?
Those speeches usually contain about as much actual information as a corporate PR statement: they, at best, tell you why the dictator wants others to think they are doing something.
The only logical way to interpret the intentions of political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything else, even personal diaries, are likely full of interested reasoning and outright lies.
If we are talking about the stuff here (regulation of internet companies) there plenty of speeches, 5-year plans, writings in party newspapers that explains the thinking behind the actions.
Okay so is the article right? It’s not about smashing innovation but saying popularity is the wrong metric and (CCP) power should be the driving force behind technology development? Do the powerful really always state there objectives obviously like some dastardly Bond villain?
This is a one sided view and also represents classic bias of the western viewpoint.
Sure a "dictator" (more accurately "central power" for China) wants to consolidate power but to think the dictator is a one dimensional being and that all actions a dictator takes only serves that single minded motivation of power solidification is really not reasonable.
Consolidating power is only one aspect of their motivation that much is true. However the article is not about this aspect of the CCP. The actions taken by the regime here represent broad views about what constitutes economic health. The OPs comment is spot on, and captures the main point of the article.
In my eyes China is a technocratic autocracy, not a dictatorship. This would explain the hypothesis why they want their brains to work on rockets rather than ad tech, as OP assumed.
He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered impeachment process. GTF outta here with your completely ignorant takes on Chinese politics, you clearly have never been there nor read much about it.
Term limits are horrible for the working class in the U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC basically run our legislating process. Killing term limits for certain offices means that as someone gains experience and competence, they continue to lead, whereas in the U.S. they'd arbitrarily have to leave office right when they're getting the lay of the land.
It'd be like firing our senior dev and putting in a junior – no wonder shit never gets done in the States.
> He can be voted out at any time. Western democracies don't even have democratic recall outside of the neutered impeachment process.
Seems a very odd thing to complain about 'neutered impeachment processes' in Western democracies whilst claiming he can be 'voted out at any time'. The US President can be impeached at any time too and removed from office. You claim impeachment is neutered presumably because the power has never successfully removed anyone from office. How then do you manage to praise the Chinese system for its ability to remove leaders. They don't have democratic recall either despite the theatre of voting, their President has never been removed and is essentially selected by his predecessor, the worst performing president at election captured more than 90% of the vote and even with the addition of state sanctioned 'independents' the leader still captures 99% of the vote.
Secondly, I'm not sure exactly why you say 'Western democracies' when you really just mean the US. Just because you're unhappy with the most recent impeachment failures doesn't mean other 'Western democracies' lack the ability to remove the ruling party or the leader.
It's an authoritarian oligarchy currently trending towards more autocracy. I think people often have an unfortunate lack of political vocabulary, and therefor loosely use terms like "dictatorship" for any system with a large amount of political repression.
I know this is just semantics but I actually like 'technocratic autocracy' better than any sort of oligopoly to describe China. There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government. And, so far, they've been quite dynamic on the technocratic front, people get fired for incompetence despite having a political base.
> There are no other poles of power, the army even reports directly to the party rather than the government.
I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic," but it is an oligarchy. The party is the olígos. Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the leader, not the party. I think things are trending that way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at least for the last several decades).
You're right, I was thinking of oligopoly more in the terms where it's usually applied to Russia and the ruling 'set' all have different, separate power bases.
