One thing CCP did masterfully is sending very young grads, who are newly admitted to the party, to go to different local communities and evaluate the outcome government project like poverty reduction there (because obviously Xi don’t trust local officials and party members). These young people have a lot of energy to make some impact, also too young to lie or corrupt. The result turned out to be actually effective.
There are quite some admiration for CCP from the american new right like moldbug and musk, It seems either they took a page from CCP, or happen to think alike.
Young people often are hopelessly ideological, in the same way a dogmatic religious person would be. Both are less corruptible than your average person.
As fresh graduate at your first job, I suppose you follow the instructions from your boss a bit more and still have faith in your boss and upper management, a bit more than a senior, more experienced employee. Just look at the military, it's quite easy to scream at 18 year old recruits and have them crawl in mud and being screamed insults at. Try the same with a 45 year old.
Enron was staff by young people hired fresh of school. It is easy to manipulate young people into a new set of values. Army knows that, monks know that etc. These likely believe Musk is second coming of god.
Exactly; it's not that the young ideological think-they-are-doing-the-right-thing are not serving a corrupt system (perhaps unwittingly). They are effective because the corruption they serve diligently comes from the central party and not from local considerations?
Corruptible is relative to the goal you're trying to achieve.
If you're the king of a nation, anyone trying to convince your knights to overthrow you is a corrupting force. But at the same time you could be a brutal ruler corrupted by power, and it is the knights that are trying to upturn the corrupt system.
Oh definitely. They often don't have the experience to question what they're told or see the holes and deceptions in it. For instance: they'd be more easily fooled by a fake deadline. Or in this case, they may trust and follow their leader like a little zealot, even when he's wrong and doing bad things.
>>Both are less corruptible than your average person.
I honestly believe, cheating is a primal trait. Age has little to do with it. In fact young cheats are likely to cheat with more enthusiasm and energy than elder cheats.
Safe enough to say, age has nothing to do with this.
It seems that when push comes to shove right now its the young people who are simply removing people who don't kowtow.
Of course it is easy to imagine that the people they are removing are those who made principled stands rather than the corrupt who keep their heads down. As in they are removing the people who thought their job was to serve the public rather than line their own pockets?
It is not clear if that is the effect the chiefs want or not.
Makes sense, I also imagine the incentives were different. These young grads had no incentive to lie while local gov officials had plenty.
The only one would be for the grads to take bribes from the local gov officials, but if the central government sent enough grads it would be too many to bribe.
Too young to have the experience to know what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Too young to question what they're doing. Too young to push back when things are going wrong. Too young to have life experience and so are far easier to shape and indoctrinate.
Many high-ranking Chinese officials, including Xi Jinping (Chemical Engineering) and his predecessors like Hu Jintao (Hydraulic Engineering) and Jiang Zemin (Electrical Engineering), are trained engineers.
They also like economics and finance people. Premier Li Keqiang has a PhD in Economics from Peking University. Zhu Rongji, a former premier, had a strong economics and mathematics background.
I am not a fan of American techno-libertarianism nor the Chinese CCP but Europe needs more engineers and economists (from math heavy programs) in politics.
The idea that Xi is functionally illiterate beggars belief and is clearly false. It's not impossible his actual Chemical Engineering education was of low quality, but to say he is close to illiterate is actually silly.
Also have you seen the people coming out of majors these days (and by that I mean my own graduation class of ~2010)? Uni access expanded so much that just graduating doesn't mean that much anymore. Especially for career government officials who probably went straight into government from uni with no work experience.
Xi got into Tsinghua not due to intellectual ability, but due to his political connections with the CCP. This isn't the meritocratic or technocratic story one might have assumed to be the case reading the above comment. China is ultimately a poor country on a per-capita basis and essentially a failure when compared to countries with a similar culture and historical circumstance like Taiwan. It's only their massive size that leads people to the faulty conclusion that they have anything worth emulating.
I'm fully willing to accept that he got into Tsinghua from connections, and at the time I'm sure there was mass instability and on top of it I'm sure he would have been able to avoid coursework if he wanted to, leading to the real possibility of low quality education. That's still far away from being almost illiterate.
Not a comment on your overall statement but I want to point out the irony of mentioning Trump and Musk in a positive light and nepotism in a negative one.
Remember Trump giving positions to all of his own family? That is textbook nepotism. It is hard to find that level of nepotism in any other western country.
I am European and American and have lived on both continents. They’re both nice places but in different ways. We shouldn’t be speaking so coarsely to each other, if for nothing else than it’s simply bad rhetoric if you care to make a point. On the other hand at best we should choose kindness because civilization depends on it. Nations are just useful fictions but the facts that can never go away are the people that inhabit them. So I strongly urge anyone reading this to reconsider what kind of person they want to be before responding to rudeness with rudeness.
If it's any consolation I'm just American and I believe Trump is an incontinent rubber stamp for any brown-noser that orbits him and Elon deserves to be unceremoniously gored with a brick.
There are quite some admiration for CCP from the american new right like moldbug and musk, It seems either they took a page from CCP, or happen to think alike.