The Chinese don't care about "dictatorship". Their lives are largely unaffected. Sure, sometimes a political rant gets deleted from the Internet, but it has little bearing on actual daily life.
They openly mock western liberal values, they have their own slang for it. It seems so natural for the westerners that all countries will naturally drift towards democratic governments and more freedom, but it seems that some regions of the world just don't work that way. Just like Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable) under military dictatorships, China seems to prefer authoritarian rule that at the same time doesn't really get in the way of them living their lives the way they're used to. It's a tough pill to swallow, but some nations just don't like democracy and don't want to implement it in any form.
> Just like Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable) under military dictatorships
This is extremely easy to say after any attempts at democracy in the middle east(Nasser and the Nasserites, Mossadegh, and now Rojava) are crushed by foreign powers and military dictatorships are actively supported since they are easier to control.
I concur - nation states under constant attack from imperial aggressors survive better under military dictatorships, precisely because that is what is required to survive during times of war.
If the West would leave the Middle East alone for a decade, it is highly likely that we'd see a much different picture. Its very difficult to develop free, social, democratic society when the institutions which support that development are perpetually bombed into oblivion: universities, hospitals, infrastructure.
Under times of intense duress, all humans survive better under military dictatorships. Its not just the Middle East. Not having had their infrastructure destroyed by outside forces, there isn't a single modern western democracy that we can use as a model to demonstrate this fact. If we stop bombing the Middle East, they'll have a chance to develop institutions which allow for their progress. Its just we, in the West, don't want to ever allow that to occur; it would interrupt our own development as Military-Industrial oligarchies.
> it is highly likely that we'd see a much different picture
Highly unlikely since the Middle East is composed of hundred of tribes and other populations like the Kurds who want nothing to do with each others and will enter conflict whenever appropriate.
You are implying that their attempts at defense and self-preservation against violent tyranny and genocide is a conscious collective choice of the people for more conflict rather than a reaction to their inhumane circumstances under such conditions. Everyone is capable of resisting arrest if you bend their arm back at a certain angle.
Kurds have been continuously in that existential conflict long before the gulf wars. Their identity has been systemically under attack by brutal military dictatorships and nationalism for over a century now. Self-determination, survival and freedom from tyranny has always been their motivation. One does not have the option to choose when homicide knocks on one's front door.
Kurds, most people of the Middle East and humanity in general want peaceful coexistence, progress, freedom and live productive lives. However, inorganic oscillations due to oppressive force and might wreak havoc in reaching any sustainable equilibrium.
You do realize that Saudi is the biggest ally of the US in the region and it starts all the wars/carries on its domestic affairs however it pleases, with US backing, right?
The same argument could have been made about Europe not so long ago. I think one difference is that back then the playing field was more equal. Military power was roughly equal to the number of people you had fighting on your side.
Fighter Jets, Aircraft Carriers, Tanks, Drones, Nukes changes that to military power being equal to your economic power. Meaning that authoritarian governments are much harder to displace if they have enough economic power.
> Their lives are largely unaffected.
This might be true for a large portion of the population. That does not justify treating the rest as enemies of the state. Not allowing people the freedom to speak their mind is never moral.
How would life improve for "minorities" in a democracy? Imagine China PR became a democracy. Would they keep the promises they made to Hong Kong?
UK is democratic. The current prime minister TM is from the same political party as her predecessor DC but nobody even talks about the promises made at the vote for creating an independent Wales.
Not true. SNP talk about it all the time. "The Vow" is highly contentious. What you believe was promised largely depends on what side of the nationalist divide you sit on.
Sorry, I think I failed to be clear. I meant to signal the lack of the Tories talking about keeping their promise. SNP wants more devolution. It is silly for the English to say why Scotland should have a say in English affairs if the English should not have a say in Scotland.
> "The Vow" is highly contentious.
Well, of course it is.
> What you believe was promised largely depends on what side of the nationalist divide you sit on.
Isn't that very convenient? The way I understand it, Labour expects to win a lot of seats in Scotland so it is against their interest as well for Scotland to be independent?
In any case, the point is not how England screws over Scotland but rather use it as an example that a fully democratic government to replace China PR will still screw over Hong Kong and Tibet.
The argument was not that freedom of speech follows from democracy. You could theoretically have an authoritarian rule that allowed unfiltered criticism against it. The argument was: not allowing freedom of speech is always wrong, independent of the type of governance.
I agree that democracy in itself does not guarantee rights for minorities. It depends on the majority adhering to a moral system that enshrines human equality. We know that this system can break down, a population can agree to subjugate some of its members. I would still rather put my trust in the majority over in one person and especially in a system that allows me to replace the government after some period of time.
Not true for every Chinese person. They can't do anything about it, or in a more accurate account, they FEEL they can't do anything about it, is more universally agreed.
Cynicism is deeply rooted in the young Chinese today, maybe the fear facing a gigantic state machine alone is too real, and the fact their have more options than their parents' generation is also real, thus rather than confronting the problem, they embrace escapism and showing compliance on the surface.
Cynicism is one thing but this ideological matter is another. Many (I'd say even the majority of the youth) do believe that any radical change right now is likely to do more harm than good. Of course they also have a lot of dissatisfaction about the society but that doesn't automatically mean they want western democracy imposed upon the country. i.e. they also don't believe that "western democracy" would be a solution. Those two things have very little to do with each other.
> Just like Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable) under military dictatorships
Such a ridiculous claim which shows your lack of understanding of the Middle East. The Middle East is not composed of countries, all the borders on the map were artificially created by colonial powers and the only political structure that existed before was simply a tribal one. So you don't go from nomad tribes to democratic regimes in one step.
>So you don't go from nomad tribes to democratic regimes in one step.
That doesn't exactly contradict what the parent said. If anything it supports it.
Precisely because "you don't go from nomad tribes to democratic regimes in one step" modern "Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable)" as non-democracies.
>The Middle East is not composed of countries, all the borders on the map were artificially created by colonial powers
That's true, but those artificially created countries are still all we have, and are still countries (states) in all senses of the world, and those are the parent was talking about.
> and are still countries (states) in all senses of the world, and those are the parent was talking about.
What is true? If you ask locals they don't have any feeling of belonging to any larger-than-them nation, they clearly describe themselves by the community/tribe they come from. This is the only reality that matters.
>If you ask locals they don't have any feeling of belonging to any larger-than-them nation, they clearly describe themselves by the community/tribe they come from.
Rural locals? Because city locals, and increasingly rural locals as well, will feel like belonging to a larger-than-them nation.
>This is the only reality that matters.*
Obviously not. This might be the only reality they know, but in the outside world, the state they belong to, their government and the general national identity the have to live under matters as well. When such a state is at war with another state, it's not a tribal matter anymore.
You're not even replying to the OP's arguments. Such a ridiculous reply. If anything, this history precisely says why their former form of governance works somehow while the current form of "democracy" (forced upon them by the west again), doesn't.
Count me among those who consider that to be a stepping stone on the way to liberal democracy.
Authoritarianism is easy to support when the economy is booming and living standards are increasing. When this falters, which it inevitably will, then discontent will spread from a relatively small group of political discontents to the population at large, who will start to demand change. And that demand can be the pressure that tips the balance in favour of democratic rule.
It goes the other way as well. In recent history, right-wing fascist authoritarianism has risen when the economy turns bad. e.g. Nazi Germany, 1930s Italy. The Greek right wing groups are currently a non-negligible presence.
>Authoritarianism is easy to support when the economy is booming and living standards are increasing. When this falters, which it inevitably will, then discontent will spread from a relatively small group of political discontents to the population at large, who will start to demand change. And that demand can be the pressure that tips the balance in favour of democratic rule.
If anything, history has taught us the reverse. Nazi Germany became that way exactly because "living standards" were decreasing in the Weimar republic. And all those Latin American countries with low living standards had (and some have) mostly dictatorships and compromised "democracies".
When China created great and brilliant civ, the west was just at savages age!
Dictator? how to define? who define? Even an emperor, one must obey the HuaXia tradition. If modeling by math, China has no dictatorship. Deny as you can, no matter, because China has the one and only consecutive history!
No matter, Chinan is creating and making there glories.
The ones that don't can't very well speak up, so people will keep claiming this.
Anyways, the amount of people who accept something doesn't change my judgement of the thing they accept, the quality of the thing they accept changes my judgement of those who accept it.
With 1.5 billion people you could find some who disagree with literally anything you could say about the situation in their country or about the world in general, I'm talking about the general sentiment.
I would argue that China is just becoming like another US, which is depressing. The US is just a plutocracy and is hardly much more democratic than China. Some European countries do have better democracies. I can only hope that they are able to last for a while still.
"I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values?
I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
What I'm afraid of is with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over." - Slavoj Zizek
> one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
Nope, capitalism is an economic system, not to be confounded with other types of Freedom. Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things. In the West we tend to think it goes hand in hand with Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Press and other liberties, but it does not have to. However, if Individual Freedom is the goal of your political system, then you will have Capitalism as well (the US is a good case since the constitution is clearly about the ultimate protection of individual liberties, even before the State).
>Nope, capitalism is an economic system, not to be confounded with other types of Freedom. Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things. In the West we tend to think it goes hand in hand with Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Press and other liberties, but it does not have to.
Exactly -- and all this obscures how those things came to be: with fierce struggle from the lower classes (workers, women, blacks, etc.) in most cases, handed over to the patricians of the state in others (e.g. US Declaration of Independence and so on) and spread more widely later. Not from the system for running the economy.
Heck, Hayek, for one, a champion of capitalism, was in bed with Pinochet.
And one of the things western countries did when they entered capitalism, was to conquer and enslave 2/3rds of the world in their colonies. So much for democracy.
Hayek was practically senile by 1973. It does not make sense to critique the legacy of someone who is mostly known for his work in the 1920s-40s with some of his more outlandish ideas many decades later.
That sounds dubious that he was senile in 1973 when he wrote this in 1980:
> Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.
It seems to me, that what happens (and not only in Chile) is this:
A few political parties alternate in government without big changes. More or less, they have the same program, with minor differences. They, both, are part of the Establishment and the owners of everything, normally a few families, can live with them. Democracy it's good. Nevermind the conditions of the rest of society.
For some reason, despise the media being owned by "reasonable" hands, somebody outside of the establishment it's elected. Then, democracy it's not so good, and a dictatorship is needed to restore the power to the correct people, sorry, to "protect the freedom".
When the situation it's stabilized we can go back to the democracy simulacrum.
I would like to see how long would take for a new dictatorship appear if the people in power since always feel their position threaded.
>- Slavery was the norm before western countries got involved with it as well.
Not in the scale of enslaving 2/3rd of the world. In fact many nations had put an end to the practice way before colonialism.
And of course those countries didn't pride themselves on their christian or englitenment values, or beings democratic, and having some "white man's burden" of civilizing the world.
>- Democracy didn't exist when the west was also active in the slavery market.
Colonization was how slavery was justified, commercialized and gone global, and colonial subjects were treated as an abundant work force for their colonial masters (when they were not hunted for fun, treated as animals, or displayed on "human zoos").
But even if I was "conflating" the too, that would at best a mistake in the use of words, not a "horribly" (sic) thing to do. Slavery and/or colonization themselves would be actual examples of horrible things to do.
> Heck, Hayek, for one, a champion of capitalism, was in bed with Pinochet.
Where? Hayek said basically that there was more freedom under Pinochet than under Allende, which is not the same thing as being a supporter of Pinochet.
> Hayek: More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.
>Where? Hayek said basically that there was more freedom under Pinochet than under Allende, which is not the same thing as being a supporter of Pinochet.
Even if he had just said that, it would have been enough to make him a supporter -- considering that he said that for a fascist junta leader that overthrew a democratically elected leader, and is responsible for thousands of executions, and tons of torture and violence. There was just no redeeming quality.
> In 1970, Allende won 36.2 percent of the popular vote, less than the 38.6 percent he had taken in 1964 and only 1.3 percent more than the runner-up. According to the constitution, the legislature could have given the presidency to either of the top two candidates. It chose Allende only after he pledged explicitly to abide by the constitution. “A few months later,” Whelan reports, “Allende told fellow leftist Regis Debray that he never actually intended to abide by those commitments but signed just to finally become president.” In legislative and other elections over the next three years, Allende and his Popular Unity (UP) coalition, dominated by the Communist and Socialist parties, never won a majority, much less a mandate, in any election. Still Allende tried to “transition” (his term) Chile into a Marxist-Leninist economic, social, and political system.
and
> Many on the left had long believed that capitalism and democracy were incompatible. In a brazen demonstration of its contempt for majority wishes, and for the institutions of what it called “bourgeois democracy,” the pro-Allende newspaper Puro Chile reported the results of the March 1973 legislative elections with this headline: “The People, 43%. The Mummies, 55%.” This attitude and the actions that followed from it galvanized the center-left and right, whose candidates had received almost two-thirds of the votes in the 1970 election, against Allende. On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies, whose members had been elected just five months earlier, voted 81–47 that Allende’s regime had systematically “destroyed essential elements of institutionality and of the state of law.” (The Supreme Court had earlier condemned the Allende government’s repeated violations of court orders and judicial procedures.) Less than three weeks later, the military, led by newly appointed army commander in chief Pinochet, overthrew the government. The coup was supported by Allende’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva; by Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president after democracy was restored in 1990; and by an overwhelming majority of the Chilean people. Cuba and the United States were actively involved on opposite sides, but the main players were always Chilean.
So what? Winning with just a plurality is not uncommon in democracies all over, since when does that make him not democratically elected? Hell, even the US - whose system is designed to only have two candidates - managed to have two Presidents elected without an absolute majority in the the past twenty years.
> On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies, whose members had been elected just five months earlier, voted 81–47 that Allende’s regime had systematically “destroyed essential elements of institutionality and of the state of law.”
The actual democratic representation was against him by 1973, That's what's important.
So was Congress against Obama (they even sued him!), does that make him not democratically elected? Democratic bodies in conflict are common, and mean nothing.
It's telling that the text you quoted has zero actual facts against him, only reports of vague accusations. The name for that is "character assassination".
The point is that at the time of the coup d'etat most of his former allies were against him. That's far from the picture usually painted in books and the mass media of a popular leader loved by his people suddenly betrayed by an evil military force.
> only reports of vague accusations.
Where vague accusations? The economic situation of Chile during his regime went from bad to worse and his directives were directly responsible for it (as proven countless times in countries where the same policies were adopted). Check out the wikipedia page on the economy of Chile during his years.
The point is that at the time of the coup d'etat most of his former allies were against him.
You contested the claim that he was democratically elected. I don't see how this is relevant to that claim.
In any case, I don't see evidence that his former allies were against him. Congress wasn't his ally, and besides - as the text you quoted says - there was an election in between, so they weren't all the same people. His allies were the UP, and as far as I can tell, they still supported him.
Finally, losing support from your allies means nothing. That happen just five years ago in my Western European country, and it might happen again soon. It's an expected development in a country with a diverse polity.
Where vague accusations?
"destroyed essential elements of institutionality" and such.
The economic situation of Chile
Which might make him a bad President, but still a democratically-elected one, which was the point being argued.
He wasn't, still, he got a 64,1% approval rate in 1972, which is much more than the actual president (Michelle Bachelet) on her whole second government.
> Main players were always Chilean
Not true, there is evidence that proves US intervention in both elections and government.
>Even if he had just said that, it would have been enough to make him a supporter
That is absurd. He supports who he supports. He never claimed to support Pinochet, so he didn't. If I say that Krushchev was better than Stalin, does that make me a Krushchev supporter? Of course not!
>There was just no redeeming quality
Pinochet's reign, brutal though it was, led Chile to become the most prosperous country in South America. If that is not a redeeming quality, I really don't know what is. Hayek also correctly predicted Chile's transition to democracy ten years before it happened. I think most of Hayek's work post-1950 is nonsense, but a correct prediction is the highest standard of scientific demonstration, and this was a big one.
Allende was a socialist, who believed in nationalization of means of production and central planning. We know very well where that leads in other countries. When you stand for central planning, you do not stand only against economic freedom but against Freedom at large, because central planning does not limit itself to the economy.
Allende was choose in democratic election in a sovereign country.
If you believe in democratic freedom, you believe in the right of the people of a country to choose whatever they want even if, in your opinion, it's a mistake or too radical for your taste.
Compare that to Pinochet who was choose by the CIA and the Chile oligarchy. Defense of freedom certainly.
> Allende was a socialist, who believed in nationalization of means of production and central planning. We know very well where that leads in other countries.
Well, that's how Stalin's Soviet became an industrial power that could fend off Germany, and basically how South Korea rose economically under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (except that "nationalization of means of production" was changed to "give means of production to subservient businessmen who are rolling in the same bed as the government").
You can't predict a country's future by a few soundbites like "Is it central planning?": you immediately run into problems, like how do you even define central planning?
Hayek is not a capitalist, he's a Social Darwinist who also believes - without a shred of evidence, given the shortness of the time spans under consideration - that free market capitalism gives groups an evolutionary advantage. That's a huge difference.
> Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things.
Wrong. Capitalism is about maximizing profits and accumulation of wealth. Free markets are essentially a very hostile environment to that. As soon as big players emerge in a field they will root for protectionism. Less competition leads to more profit. Free markets are something completely different.
"Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things."
Is it? IDK. There are different definitions.
Part of the problems is that opponents and proponents use different definitions. Opponents describe characteristics, or consequences. On the radical end, they use marxist definitions (really, the original) which are mostly about an urban, company-centric (wage labour) economy. Less radical ones use it to describe the power/wealth inequalities we have.
Proponents generally focus on "free markets," free trade, private property^ and such. IE, you could have bronze-age capitalism if people were free in certain ways. IE, the ideologies of anglo-american liberals (libertarians, neoliberals...and other derivatives).
> Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things.
Within limits. For example, we can't freely trade slaves, sex with minors, powerful weapons, etc, and I'm sure most of us are pretty thankful for that. Most western nations also have limits on trading private property, inasmuch as such trade is taxed. See Ha Joon Chang's books for a reminder that "free" markets aren't really as free as the ideology would have you believe.
I think the thinking is that capitalism creates wealth, creates a middle class, i.e. a large population of wealthy educated people (in other times we would call it the bourgeoisie). This middle class would be large enough, organised enough to threaten a corrupt/unpopular dictatorship and would ultimately result in its downfall, either violently or gradually.
I think it is misguided in the short term. Dictatorships are very good at protecting themselves from the hostility of its population. However I think it does work in the long run, that is 30-50 years.
So we just need to be either patient or ruthless with China.
What about a multicultural, pluralistic, democratic, socialist society like India or South Africa which is slow and lumbering, but in the right direction? (A recent talk of land appropriation in S.A. makes me apprehensive about it.)
These countries still have a version of capitalism that is not as aggressive as the Anglo-Saxon model, and a democracy that is far more permissive than the East Asian (barring Japan) model.
Indian or South African growth may not be glamorous, but it might be sustainable. (And the population growth in both places is far less alarming than generally thought.)
I hope it does not end up like Zimbabwe. From what I understand, some demagogues are demanding that white farmers' land must be taken over by the state and redistributed to blacks. This is exactly where things started going wrong with Mugabe.
yep that would be disastrous, but then I do hope they find a way to mediate the two extreme factions, one that wants the white to pay for some past sin, and one that does not believe they did any thing wrong to the blacks, as S.A future depends on this.
Namibia has a "if you sell land, the government has the option of being the first buyer [to redistribute it afterward]". Not ideal, but way better than Zimbabwe. They probably looked at Mugabe's results and thought "thanks but no thanks".
Not sure this would work for ZA though. Namibia is only 2M people, it's not the same scale.
Not OP, but in general: Empirically, in historical context, land reform done right creates wealth throughout economy.
Do it wrong, however, and you can end up like Zimbabwe.
The track record of the South African state in the past decade has been depressive. After they booted Zuma there is probably a chance to do better, but it's not obvious everything will go well from now on.
I'd be interested in some examples of land reform done right. Most examples I'm aware of were disasters (Venezuela, for example.)
One thing to keep in consideration about the South African situation is that land reform in South Africa is not new; it's written into the constitution. What's new is that South Africa is dropping the requirement to recompense the owners. This could be a problem, not just for the white South Africans but for black South Africans as well as it could drive the middle and upper class out of the country.
Generally speaking real estate law probably is not constant anywhere over any significant period of time. Even without a revolution, looking just at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England[1], it is possible to see how small details were nation-altering in terms of both economic and political[2] power.
England is an easy place to start because the common language leads to an extensive Wikipedia article, but you'd find similar ones for any European country in their own language, especially since most experienced the upheaval of revolutions, conquests or occupations. The US had common trends but different details for each state.
I don't think that changes it real estate law are same thing as 'land reform'. The latter usually refers to some sort of overt redistribution, which is what I was talking about. I'd agree that events like the enclosure of common land had profound impact, but that's generally over time.
Isn't "land reform" just a euphemism though? Whereas there is an intrinsic value to stable property laws, there is always a competing trend toward changing the rules of ownership after the fact, in order to optimize for a specific outcome.
For example, abolishing serfdom made your land less valuable if there were no longer people that belonged to it. Or, confiscating monasteries and abbeys, then gifting them to favored nobles is a form of land reform. Similarly creating the conditions that the large manors dissolved later is another form of land reform.
In California, you can look at the title histories that trace back to large ranchos from the Mexican period and before, and look at how ownership changed hands. Most owners were legally entitled to retain ownership, but any number of tricks were used to get them to lose their claims.
The same goes for changes in ownership of water rights, mineral rights, air rights, or new limitations on what types of commercial activity are permitted.
The measures can be beneficial or not, but it seems extremely common for changes in public policy to alter property rights.
The dearest to me, however, is what was done in my native country, Finland, in the 17th and at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries which created the basis for our current national wealth.
To simplify a bit too much: a succesfull land reform looks like splitting the ownership of land which produces agricultural output or timber from few large owners to many dedicated ones. This distributes the revenue from capital among the population using a " market healthy" method. Rather than spread the revenue from the capital, spread the capital itself. This is a solid foundatuon for creating a wealthy middle class - which has been identified as one of the key parts of a healthy modern economy.
Zimbabwe just took the land from it current owners - which were already spread among a fairly large population - to complete people who could not tend it as well, and not utilize the capital as effectively.
Leader of the opposition literally saying "I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people.....yet" to the thunderous applause from his audience is most definitely a reason to be worried about the future.
Some people say this kind of populist stuff (and worse) on campus here too. I feel like some of the polarising optimisations in social media that have happened in the US etc spill over to here - but the stakes are much higher here.
Malema is not the leader of the opposition, his party has won less than 10% typically. The official opposition is the DA, which governs Cape Town and the Western Cape Province.
Do it right and it works well, do it wrong and you get Zimbabwe.
Everyone is worried land appropriation in South Africa is going to kill agricultural productivity like it did in Zimbabwe, where the farms were seized and given to individuals that had no business being farmers.
>Indian or South African growth may not be glamorous, but it might be sustainable. (And the population growth in both places is far less alarming than generally thought.)
While I doubt that's the case for either (them being sustainable), you raise an important point.
What we call "success" (economic, and so on), might be in fact a liability (environmental, societal and democratic debt), and countries doing worse than US, Germany, China, Japan, and so on, might be much better in actual sustainability and future-proofness.
The problem is we talk about "progress" without ever mentioning progress towards what. More GDP, more consumer gizmos, more productivity, etc -- but rarely we talk about preferred ways of life, maximizing happiness, inequality, democracy, and so on.
I don't think they offer hope beyond their own borders. India may rise to be a liberal world power with a free people and parliamentary government, but that doesn't really give me hope that the many other nations in the region will follow in their footsteps. For leaders to give up power requires clear and powerful incentives.
Both India and South Africa were British colonies who had some elements of British politics & liberty passed onto them. The freedom of these peoples, if they maintain it, will be down to their history.
Other nations, particularly in Africa, are looking keenly on at China's economic miracle, and realising for the first time in history that liberalism is not a requirement for a thriving market economy. For decades, if not centuries, this has been the established rule. What's so dangerous about China apparently breaking the rule is that every leader, autocrat and downright despot with a population hungry for a better life will now realise that there is a path where they can give their people a better life but they can keep their own power. Before, it was clear that liberty, at least to some extent, went along with prosperity. If and when when African nations get their feet out of the mud it will shake the foundations of the global order. I desperately want to see their power and authority granted and restrained by free and equal peoples. If they follow in China's footsteps that certainly won't be the case.
It will be interesting to see what happens when there is a strong downturn in the economy, it's easy to cary people along when the economy is growing, not so much when they are hungry.
That's what policy makers need repressive surveillance tech for (not just in China). You can maintain this level of control only via an Orwellien thought police & intrusive surveillance and SmartCities¹ tech.
I have a feeling you have China and its citizens in mind when making this comment, but an equally plausible scenario is when Western economies begin to fail due to China's dominance of every industry and it is the West who's citizens are hungry. I wonder if maybe the prospect of joining the Chinese family might look very attractive at that point....sure, you'd have to give up just a few minor freedoms, but in exchange for peace and prosperity as citizens of China enjoy.
And that is how China can take over the world without firing a single shot.
Laugh now, but let's revisit this idea ten years from now and see if you're still laughing.
I think you misunderstood him: HE well be right in 2020, not his liberal friends, because there will be no democratization. That's his entire point: Capitalism has gotten a divorce from Democracy.
That being said, and not being troll-y, the has already happened - in a different way - in the USA. The democracy part is mostly myth at this point. The capitalism part, the same. Both are facades that are propped up with propaganda and ignorance.
I’m pretty darn leftist, but splitting hairs over the US being a republic which routinely follows the will of the electorate using consistent rules, just not some people’s preferred system, vs Chinese communist party rule where the dictator just removed term limits from himself is pretty absurd.
So a ruse is ok? Given the blah blah blah about freedom, liberty, democracy, etc. I don't think so. At least the communists are honest.
Regardless, the point isn't what some other gov does or doesn't do. The point is the US is being sold snake oil. That doesn't need any comparison. BS is alway BS. Lip stick doesn't make it any less so.
There are all sorts of things worth complaining about in the world, but the fact that the US federal government is a republic and lots of people wish it had more direct democracy is an argument that’s been around since the founding of the republic.
Doesn’t seem like much of a ruse to me.
And regarding “doesn’t matter what other countries do”, come on! This is a thread about the west’s relationship to China in the context of Xi consolidating lifetime rule.
It’s explicitly a thread about our relationship to other governing systems. So your attempt to say people in the US have no standing to criticize China based on some individuals in the US feeling disenfranchised seems like the non-sequitur to me.
When was the last time any politician said, "well actually, we're a republic. This is how it works. It was designed that way. You proles need to sit down and get in line."
Yes. It's a republic.
No. There's no effort to communicate that to those most effected. At some point the friction from the disconnect will manifest itself in "weird" ways. Trump being a prime example.
On one hand, we have Marx' definition, characteristics of an economy and polity: urbanism, bourgeois elites, private property, wage labour. It was good foresight. The world he described di more or less come about. More than at any other time we work in companies, for wages, in cities. Most of the important property is privately owned.
On the other hand, we have anglo-american ideological "capitalism." It's a variant of liberalism. The emphasis is on free markets, and a confidence that these produce an efficient self organizing market. But, the ideals (at least of the philosophers they refer to) are a little bit of awkward fit in 20th & 21st century settings, where the economy is made up of massive companies.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
Anyway, I think the ideological lens (neoliberalism, asian-capitalism) might be more obscuring than clarifying. In practice, the economic systems are the same. The ideological differences between the US & China do not impact the stucture of the economies more than (for example) geography or local cultural norms do. The Soviet centralised economies were different, but I'm not really sure how related that is to ideological communism. It's just what they did when all those commune projects failed.
..The actual differences are more in the legal systems and the political norms (which in China are still extremely strict). Here I think we agree.
The definition of capitalism that makes the most sense to me is that capitalism is the separation of ownership of businesses from employment in the business, i.e. The joint stock corporation. As opposed to all businesses being run directly by their owner, or being family businesses, etc. The big idea behind the joint stock corporation is that the son of the previous owner might not be the best person to run the business when the previous owner passes on, and if you want to unlock the wealth and resources of the aristocracy you need a way for them to invest in a business and have a permanent stake rather than just give a loan. But then to make that work you need to take the legal and ideological stance that businesses should be optimized to benefit the owners of them - the owners of the capital. From that point of view, markets and a currency and banking system- the "free market"- can exist without capitalism. For instance, if all companies were employee owned, there would be no stock market, and no class of people whose role was to own stock and collect the profits. Capitalism was a great idea, and produced a huge surge in investment, but freedom for the people who don't own capital is neither necessary or helpful to make it work.
I think history shows that capitalism and democracy can coexist, but I think it's a mistake to assume that they are the same thing, or that they can only exist together. I suppose that's what the parent article is arguing too.
That works, but I think to get at what people mean (pro or against) when they say capitalism, you have to define it in a way that speaks to the economic "system" in practice, not just the rules governing it.
Joint-stock and separation of capital & ownership. These need to be the dominant structure in an economy, for the economy to "count" as capitalism. IMO, this is a lot closer to Marx' "mode of production" definition (he also saw it as a progressive step up from feudalism) that the "capitalism as an ideology" definition of Neo/Classical/Anglo-liberalism. So... your defining mechanism may have existed at point A but I don't count that as capitalism until that mechanism runs a significant portion of industrial output. ...Also you need to consider all the clearly non-capitalist mechanisms that separate "ownership" from management, like the Byzantine/Ossoman system for example.
The "ideological" definition just makes a lot more sense in a small firms world, where you really are talking about freely transacting individuals.
The private property point is also worth delving into. No one is a feudalist anymore, so no one defends it. But, I think it's worth comparing and contrasting to this (much more long lived) ideological and practical mode of society. It's the one part of the definition both that marxists and capitalists emphasize is a defining feature of "Capitalism." The private property point made by marx is a pretty obscure 175 years later as we lost context. He considered feudal rights and borouise property to be very distinct from each other.
Under most well functioning feudal systems in their prime, there were "welfare-ish" obligations (and obligations generally) of lords to serfs. Emergency grain stores, for example. A lord was expected to house and feed his subjects. These obligations don't come with modern property rights. In fact, there is barely a concept of obligations that come with property or rights anymore.
These are great points. On the obligations point: If you look at the whole uber/Lyft/gig economy dynamic and contrast that with salaried employment, I think you'll see that to the extent that a company owns the time of their employees, they are more likely to give them health benefits, paid vacation time, and so on analogous to how a lord treated his subjects. I think Nassim Taleb has made that point. Whereas a Lyft driver doesn't get taken care of in the same way.
I liked Taleb's point too, especially as it ties in to completely disparate situations like ancient greek urbanism. I think it's early to hang to much theory on these gig-companies though. It's still not clear they'll stick around for the long term. Hardly an economic "mode" yet.
It's a great place to explore the divide though. To the capitalism point though... I think Uber/Lyft dynamics are perfectly capitalistic in a marxist sense. I think that from a ideological-capitalist perspective, a system where drivers transact more directly with passengers would be more capitalist.
> These obligations don't come with modern property rights. In fact, there is barely a concept of obligations that come with property or rights anymore.
In some places, these obligations do exist, at least in theory. The German Grundgesetz Article 14, for example, states: "(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good." [0]
Which is often quoted but these days rarely actually enforced/acted upon, the opposite is becoming far more common (privatization of common goods/services or straight up bailing out private companies with public money) like recent pushes to privatize German Autobahn [1] or when the public is bailing out massive private companies, like it happened with the banking crisis of 2008 [2], nuclear waste deals [3] or most recently bailing out German car manufacturers for Dieselgate [4].
How can all companies be employee owned if you need to invest a lot of capital to start a car factory. Half of the fortune 500 companies are younger then 10 years - starting a company has a high risk on the invested capital.
A company is owned by whomever is risking their money to finance it.
How is capitalism different from early human tribes? They also needed to work and trade. Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain. People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
> How can all companies be employee owned if you need to invest a lot of capital to start a car factory.
Equity isn't the only form of capital investment.
> How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
> They also needed to work and trade.
Which is broadly true of every human society, regardless of politico-economic system; such systems differ in the (for instance) distribution of the accumulated benefits of trade, not in it's practical necessity.
> Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain.
The basic principles that remain the same are not the features that distinguish politico-economic systems from each other.
> People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
Yes, technology has improved since ancient times, and, in the domain of politico-economic systems even most critics of capitalism would agree that it represents positive progress from feudalism and other earlier politico-economic sysyems.
An interesting (probably leads nowhere) way of defining this question is in reverse, how would a company that is to be owned by employees going to get started?
It's an easier question to answer these days, when many companies are like Google or Facebook. They don't really have "capital assets." No stock to buy or factories to build. Just people that need to pay rent.
> Equity isn't the only form of capital investment.
Someone has to pay for the fixed costs. And its most common that an investor does that. Never said it has to be that way, just that it is common and offers many advantages.
> Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics I wrote about. If you are a tribe you might life in balance with other tribes and you have control over a river (or whatever) and you might even give something comparable to property right to a member of your tribe. But this is all enforced by society. Property rights are the same thing, just more formalized and generalized. Ofc. there is more insecurity in a autocracy, but that because an autocracy is about exploiting others.
> Someone has to pay for the fixed costs. And its most common that an investor does that.
Yes, and, again, equity isn't the only form of investment even within the capitalist system (though, obviously, it's often structurally preferred by investors within that system.) So, even granting, for the sake of argument, the need for capital investment to start firms, that does not imply a need for capital, as opposed to labor, ownership of firms. (See, for a large example even embedded within a capitalist economy, the Mondragon Corporation.)
> Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics
That's certainly one of the reasons for formalizing such rights, but “property rights” aren't a special feature of capitalism, what defines capitalism—and this is generally true of each other politico-economic system—is a particular model of property rights. And, yes, in each case they are viewed by defenders of the system to “help” the immutable basic needs of human society.
Is this rhetorical? I didn't say they could (or couldn't be). If you mean it in a curious way than let's start with 'how can a company...'
How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
It depends on which capitalism you mean, Marx's or Milton Friedman's. Also which tribe. If early human tribes were like modern ones, they had a lot of different ways of doing things.:)
For marx, you could probably stop at "they don't live in cities or work for wages" like they do in capitalist systems.
For Friedman's capitalism, they tribesmens affairs are probably dictated by customs and communal nterests, not private interests.
Idk, though. It's theoretically possible for ancient human culture to be capitalist under Friedman's definition, if their rules are compatible. Under Marx's it doesn't matter what they do, capitalism is an urban-industrial society.
My point was more that the basic characteristics of our modern economy (our modern economy = capitalism) also apply to early human societies. Working a profession, cooperating with colleagues and trading goods are inherent human nature. Even if you are a hunter-gather.
I wasn't referring to specific theories. My point was more about observing how the world is.
Sure. What's universal is universal. But what's the point of defining something as capitalist (or anything) if it applies to every case.
Characteristics of capitalism (let's go with the Marxist definition) certainly aren't universal. Not every human economy includes private property, for example. Not every system include a bourgiouse elite, a customary, religious or military elite is more common historicaly.
>>How can all companies be employee owned if you need to invest a lot of capital to start a car factory.
You go to a bank (or credit union in this instance) with a compelling business plan and a history of success and get a loan. If the company at some point can't make the payments they declare bankruptcy, the company dissolves and the credit union takes ownership of the company's assets (or what ever was used as collateral) which it then sells off.
Same as real estate deals the people who take the loan legally own the property unless they fail to pay off the loan, then and only then does the property change hands to the loaner.
Interesting point, considering a lot of modern finance, where there is often very little investor "risk capital" in the sense implied by the OP.
A lot of large infrastructure projects, for example, are funded by loans with very little (or none) equity capital. Risk is borne by the firm, its lenders, or the state. The "owners" are basically they guys who get the deals made.
I have no idea if employee-owned companies will be any good. There were examples (eg Egged) in the past that didn't work well. But it's curious to see them taken as an impossibility for reasons like this, that they don't fit inside of a textbook free market example, with all incentives perfectly aligned. Half the companies in the world weren't started this way. How did Russian oligarchs buy all those state companies? Leveraged buyouts. IE, the banks (does this count as the state?) gave them money to buy (or start) them.
The more interesting questions are around management. How does an employee owned company work well? Answer that with confidence, and I think everything else is solvable.
I don't actually think "how" is even a question at this point. If you poke around wikipedia's (clearly incomplete) list of cooperatives and employee-owned* companies the answer is/has-always-been pretty clearly: just like any other form of company works.
*coops however aren't necessarily employee owned-- there's a several models-- and ESOP style employee ownership can be pretty weak from an ownership perspective so in addition to being woefully incomplete the lists should also not be taken at face value.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
Then you need to read the french free marketers like Frederic Bastiat or Gustave de Molinari :p
True, these guys (having come later, and often writing in direct response to Marx, a contemporary) are easier to think of in the context of post industrial economies. IDK, Molinari. I do know Bastiat, but I can't recall anything that speaks directly to the reality of an economy made up of mostly large firms. He's pretty early though, and the world wasn't like that yet (even though Marx saw it coming, I think).
The "Austrians" (particularly Hayek, IMO) do address this world of megafirms a lot more than earlier writers (again, makes sense considering the times). This is getting a lot closer to modern theories, with Hayek directly defending "capitalism" (free market systems, and here we really have the modern ideological framework in a similar form to today's). They (Hayek & Mises anyway) had much more modern, abstract theories.
Hayek described the economy as an information system, with price signals as its source of information flow. This certainly is a defense (one the the most interesting and convincing, IMO) of free markets, but we're back to the modern definition. ..It's fairly tangential to Marx' definition, and harder to argue for from a traditionally ideological/liberal perspective. IE, it's fairly tangential to and disconnected from the "liberals" of the british enlightenment or the american revolution.
Interesting, I always thought bastiat was writing in response to marx...
You're right about the colonial megafirms, they were really the forerunners of today's corporate world...quarterly stock price pressure and all. But, they're pretty absent from most examples of that time. Maybe it's because they didn't operate in Europe much.
Modern free marketers can easily disown them on crown issued monopoly grounds. Smith considered them the same as guilds... Even Marxists didn't really pay as much attention to them as they should have, considering hindsight.
> "Adam Smith...idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories"
Actually, Adam Smith constantly used independent farmers as examples of inefficiency, and the second paragraph the first chapter of "Wealth of Nations" mentions huge companies "destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people".
Cheers Daniel. I suppose we could argue this point. But... my reading of Smith is that he is describing the world as it is at his time. A lot of mid-sized agricultural enterprises, in a world transitioning from feudal privilege to private ownership. A smaller (but very interesting) industry, also transitioning from the guild system to a more modern system.
Here's a semi-random example from a chapter on wager labour:
"When an independent workman, such as a weaver or shoemaker, has got more stock than what is sufficient to purchase the materials of his own work, and to maintain himself till he can dispose of it, he naturally employs one or more journeymen with the surplus, in order to make a profit by their work. Increase this surplus, and he will naturally increase the number of his journeymen."
or the famous one:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
It seems to me that he is talking about a world that is not really capitalist, in a marxian sense.
Smith does spend a lot of time on wager labour, he does talk about freedom (nonexistent under feudalism) to pursue their own interests and the market forces which create opportunities. But... the economy he is describing is of small scale industry, landlord-tenant dynamics... I don't think Marx would have called this capitalism.
Also, what he regards as "monopoly" (bad) is a much lower bar than we use today. Where he describes larger scale structures like corporations (I think he means guilds and regulators), joint-stock companies (rare then), and such it is usually in a negative light, associated with monopoly or what we'd call "regulatory capture" today.
All of this is arguable. Smith was a long time ago, the world was different, and we can't really know if he'd consider modern capitalism good. But, I do think that what marx was describing and SMith was advocating are two completely different things. We happen to call both capitalism (depending on whether we're for or against it). I think they're tangental or even somewhat contradictory.
I agree with your more important point. Read Smith. It's a great opportunity to read accessible and interesting texts that are important to modern thought, and still easily relevant. Don't try read Marx, only heartbreak will follow. Read Darwin too, for the same reason.
> China is a very capitalist country compared with, say, EU.
That is patently false. In China it is impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field. There is a huge amount of protectionism and anti-competitive practices, the currency is manipulated to favor exports, and it's basically impossible to make it big without ties to the CCP.
It’s kind of similar though in Europe. France, Italy, Germany and other European nations are very protectionist. Hell, entire EU is basically a protectionist conglomerate of nations so they can protect their economy against competition from emerging markets, Asia, South America etc. Chinese companies trying to have any meaningful presence in Europe also have to be in bed with local politicians and ruling class.
You are missing the point. Yes there is protectionism in the EU, but the claim was: China is very capitalistic compared to the EU. That is just false.
In the EU you can start your business wherever you are a legal resident, the regulations are a known quantity and essentially you just have to mind your own business. This is not so in mainland China, your applications can be arbitrarily denied, and if your business does too well, you will get a knock on the door asking if you are a "good comrade". All big businesses there are tied to the CCP one way or another.
Yes, like the 74% Steel tariff the EU imposes on China
Or how about solar panels from China which are hit with 65% tariffs unless they are sold at a minimum price (which is higher than average EU equivalents)?
The EU not being protectionist is a widely believed meme.
Correct, but the points in my second comment below also apply if you are Chinese. If you do business in China, even if you're a local, you're on a leash.
And, more importantly, minimal (environmental) regulations. Cheap labour is great. But not having to worry about the disposal of waste, or the air pollution you generate is even better.
When China has smog issue many in the West point and wave fingers. The truth is, that pollution is The West's. We're just too naive to admit it.
If we cut off China from world trade in order to reduce Chinese smog, we'd be condemning factory workers to go back to subsistence farming and a worse life overall.
I'm not even close to suggesting that. I'm only pointing out that the conventional wisdom is biz goes to China for cheap labor. That's barely half of it. It's the lack of reg - esp environmental - that's the draw.
The "bonus" is, politicians in the West can claim they cleaned things up at home. Lol. Oh hell no. When the jobs left, so did the (direct) pollution.
By that logic, pollution in the US is also the property of all the countries that the US sells to. That pollution in Flint Michigan is the rest of the world's fault because they buy US cars.
Regardless, the point is, China's env regs are MUCH more lax. So chances are good Product X made in the USA was made with less pollution than the same product made in China.
Yes, pollution is a shared "resources." But some countries are less concerned than others. China is one of those coutries.
Plenty of places offer cheaper labor than China. It's more about the quality of their work, although relatively cheap labor is obviously part of the equation.
Cheap workforce with little consideration of the freedoms of the workers making the products. Like with C02, we've never wanted to confront the reality that we have negative externalities that aren't being priced into the product.
> Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
A lot of the rhetoric in the past went the other way: freedom is good because capitalism requires it.
As a former and still sometimes libertarian who once read a lot of Ayn Rand and still thinks she made some good points, I personally get a big case of the "flying saucers didn't come blues" from this.
Freedom and free enterprise were supposed to go together. Then Singapore and China proved that you don't need freedom for capitalism and that it might even be a liability.
Markets love a kind of pragmatic totalitarianism that acts proactively to restrain any genuine "disruption" and much more importantly to prevent panic selling and crashes. Investors can feel confident in the market if there's a totalitarian backstop in place that will spring into action to prevent a market panic. Markets work great if they're just not allowed to go down.
Controlled societies are great for capitalism. Real freedom means the freedom to do things that do not increase GDP and behave in ways that disrupt or distract from corporate culture. Turn the world into an office park. We can see this mentality spreading to the West.
The lower classes can safely be ignored, drugged/entertained, or distracted by pitting different races and cultural identities against each other.
If the upper classes (upper middle class, technicians, academics, the "lower rich") get politically uppity or have moral reservations you can just flatter their sense of superiority and entitlement. Make them think they've been brought into the fold. Invite them to rub shoulders with the real elite. Give them a false sense of freedom through consumer choice and BoBo pop libertine indulgence. Take the hedonism pioneered by the counterculture and strip it of its rebellious and spiritual undercurrents. Tinder is a great example: a meat market night club without the music, dancing, or art. Create pseudo-free gated enclaves where the upper middle classes and the rich can enjoy custom tailored lifestyles optimized for the consumption of high-end goods and the production of intellectual capital that ultimately benefits the real aristocracy.
Edit:
To all the leftists and anarchists right now who are wagging their fingers at us libertarians saying "we told you so," please hold back a little on the schadenfreude. This future is absolutely not what we had in mind.
Edit #2:
In all seriousness though... independent of whether or not capitalism or markets are good things I think it's important to advocate freedom in and of itself as an independent moral, ethical, and political goal. Freedom is not good because it makes this or that work better. Freedom is good because human beings must be treated with dignity and deserve personal autonomy.
Way back in 1957, the National Review took on Ayn Rand's book. The main gist of their overall critical review (https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-y...) is that a "dictatorship of the technocrats" that they saw the book advocating in the end probably does not look that much different than a dictatorship from the left side of the political spectrum or other similar ilk. From my viewpoint, in the end, some Large Figure ends up ruling, power corrupts, and the result is largely the same -- if any philosophy is so absolutist that disagreement is more than just disagreement, it is a Sin, this tends to be the net result.
There are positive points to be taken from many political philosophies (including libertarians and communists alike), my personal outlook is to never attach too dogmatically to one side though. :)
Capitalism and basic freedoms are indeed separate entities, but I do think it remains an open question whether China can become a knowledge / innovation powerhouse, while at the same time heading backwards on basic freedoms as they seem to be now. This is more the key that I see has been historically linked together. Controlled societies may be just fine for the nuts and bolts portion of capitalism, but one can point to countless examples in history where suppressed / tightly controlled knowledge ended up holding societies back, severely suppressing innovation.
I never read Rand as advocating a dictatorship of anyone. Of course you could argue that this is naive and that power vacuums invite someone to seize power.
I sometimes compare Rand to Marx. Both were very astute critics -- Marx of capitalism and Rand of socialism/communism. Unfortunately neither had practical ideas of what to do about it. Both advocated some version of "put certain ideas into practice and then (magic happens here) and then the evil state withers away." The magic is what doesn't happen. We're now able to see that the real world endpoint of communism is mafia rule and that the real world endpoint of capitalism is techno-feudalism.
Yeah, to clarify, the review is more implying naivety than straightforward advocacy. As in, the review believes Rand is "calling for an aristocracy of talents". But in the real modern world, this is a naive viewpoint, and "the impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship."
The naivete ultimately comes from the failure to define "talent." The talent that yields advancement (in nearly any large scale society, not just capitalism) is often deception and primate dominance gestures. An aristocracy of talents becomes an aristocracy of narcissists and sociopaths.
Rand's heroes all look like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. People like that are notable because they are rare. Most of the ultra-wealthy more closely resemble Rand's villains.
Real creators are too busy creating to play the kind of dominance games that most often lead to political and business success. You can succeed by creating, but doing so is many orders of magnitude harder than succeeding through manipulation and so you get a smaller pool of people who can pull it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_values - what's usually meant is filial piety or loyalty towards the family, corporation, and nation; the forgoing of personal freedom for the sake of society's stability and prosperity; the pursuit of academic and technological excellence; and, a strong work ethic together with thrift
Filial piety followed through to its logical conclusion as the leader being the father of the nation, risking dictatorship, while forgoing personal freedom for the sake of society leads to censorship.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
"I’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :("
Few years ago I talked on people on omegle. Chinese girl pops up. We talk, like many many Chinese, she asks quickly what I think about China.
I grew up fond of Asia: Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, asian food, spiritual ideas, that simplicity in art, architecture, clothing; Japanese culture too.. anyway I was very very positive about her culture.
She responded right away: cool but well you know.. it's not all rose here; with a few mild comments about economy and politics. Then a long silence, followed by panick-ish excuses around the fact that she shouldn't have said this and she disconnected.
Note that this was about the big firewall thing. Surely it didn't help for paranoia. Still it was the first time I ever talked to someone scared about her country as a whole.
----
Recently with the growth of international chinese tech brands, some news about raising wages, using robots instead of armies of exploited people .. I thought China would get a stable and peaceful rise. I did not envision this.
If someone posted that on reddit, especially /r/China, there's practically no chance he/she is actually Chinese. /r/China is full of English-speaking immigrants who hate China.
Yep. I was born in SE Asia and came to the US for high ed (and have since been living here). Most of the people who I met on the internet and in the US, who are interested in the political situation of my home country, posses a view from a bubble that is very different than the perspective from people there. Overall, people just want to have food, shelter and a good living. They could care less about who is ruling them. It's like some people from Europe think Americans are idiots because of our current leader's doings. Not a lot of people in the US, who reads NYT, Economists and such, do not understand that their glimpse into other countries is very much biased and limited.
> posses a view from a bubble that is very different than the perspective from people there. Overall, people just want to have food, shelter and a good living. They could care less about who is ruling them.
Seems like just different bubbles, actually. I'm somewhat skeptical of taking at face value the opinions of a population subject to authoritarian information controls. Even in such a case, you're likely to get very different opinions of a government like China's in Xinjiang or Tibet than you will in Beijing. Both groups are only able to form their opinions of the whole from the very limited pieces available to them.
I think the most interesting perspectives come from people with a foot in both worlds. I have friends who don't want China to become a democracy, at least not right away, because they're afraid of what it would do. The CCP has kept the necessary civil society weak, and encouraged popular nationalist sentiments that could be very dangerous if put into action.
Do you mean not a lot of people understand or "do not understand"? Your wording is a bit confusing. Apparently more self-awareness is good but indeed I'm afraid if they keep being imbued in the mainstream media who keep feeding them ideological nonsense and agendas from their own elite politicians they'll know very little about the reality. Talking about China, Tibet, Xinjiang all the time without even actually having been there at least once and talked to actual people living there. That's laughable.
What sensationalist and exaggerated rhetoric. People who claim imminent collapse and chaos in China have been doing so for decades. They can keep on trying. Nobody is listening to them.
The Chinese leadership knows too well what a complete trainwreck Mao and the Cultural Revolution have brought on the country. Their priority is always on developing the country further. They are way smarter and more pragmatic than some western media/elites want to imagine them to be (e.g. imagine them to be some Kim-esque figure who only cares about personal enjoyment and leaves the population dying. That's absolutely not the mentality of the current Chinese leadership.)
What if that guy was told that in Germany, UK etc. there are practically no limits on how long a head of state can serve, as long as they are re-elected? Substitute the name for China. Would they change their rhetoric 180 degrees around? All just ideological nonsense with no substance. Yes, Xi's reforms could fail. The power struggle could become so intense that it spirals out of control and harms the populace somehow. But it could also be the case that Xi truly realizes his vision and became the leader to make China the most powerful country for a long time to come, a la Lee Kuan Yew, Ataturk etc. It's all hugely uncertain at the moment. Talking as if China is doomed from now on exactly shows how ignorant and far from reality this person is.
Personally I hate the fact that China is becoming like another US on so many aspects of the society. But really, that is a totally separate matter.
Well at this point, the world's main alternative's are those. We live in a world with a handful of superpowers that are able to demonstrably project power and influence, arguably mainly China, Russia, and the USA. We already don't have too many choices.
Also the article, while well written, takes a very naive view of China's use of hard and soft power, which was very irritating. The USA constantly uses it's economic and military power in countries to ensure an 'America First' direction. On the front page of HN today, America accused a Latvian bank of money laundering and bypassing American sanctions so it shut it out of the FedWire service which eventually killed the bank within a matter of weeks [1]. Also see America's economic embargo of Cuba, invasion and occupation of Iraq, NATO's no fly zone over Libya in 2011, etc. All countries with enough power use it for their own benefit. This is neither a China-only nor a USA-only issue.
> What I'm afraid of is with this capitalism with Asian values
What's "asian values".
> But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration
It's been 30 years since tiannamen square demonstrations. There won't be another tiannamen square unless there is economic issues within china. And the same applies not just to china or "asia", but everywhere. Economic stress is what drives protests and societal chaos.
> no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.
When was there ever any marriage between capitalism and democracy? One isn't linked with the other. Democracy precedes capitalism by millenia. You can have democracy and no capitalism. You can have capitalism and no democracy. You can have both or neither.
The quote appears to say a lot but says nothing. It makes a host of false assumptions and runs with it.
Truth is, China/Singapore/South Korea/Japan will all run into severe population problem. And those societies all have homogeneous ethnical profile, that it is impossible to use immigration to solve this problem.
What is so good about those Asian capitalism that those countries, after adopting this model, are all on course of their national suicide? It is clearly this model cannot even sustain itself, the prosperity it demonstrates is probably just a intermediate state before impending, pro-longed decline.
Capitalist liberal societies will always peg communist countries wrong, because in liberal societies there is a fundamental lack of understanding about Communism. Which is quite obviously the guiding force of Communist countries.
Understand Communism (and I mean genuinely understand it, not this Red Scare, Fox news ignorance you've been force fed your whole life) and you will understand Communist countries. It's really not a tough concept.
You talk about Cambodia and Pol Pot. Do you want to talk about Guantanamo too? Or the secret CIA prisons in Poland, Romania and the Czech republic?
Come on, the USA is the least liberal and democratic ( in the true sense of the word ) country in the world. It is a plutocracy dressed as a democracy, where he people vote for the puppet du jour and the deep state runs the show under each and every administration.
> You talk about Cambodia and Pol Pot. Do you want to talk about Guantanamo too? Or the secret CIA prisons in Poland, Romania and the Czech republic?
This is literally nothing compared to what Pol Pot did. Pol pot killed millions on Cambodians (look https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge#Crimes_against_hum...) just on ridiculous basis like "having a minimum education", and being of another ethnicity. The country is now in ruin after decades of his regime. A poor example to argue about.
Ever read the 13th amendment of the US constitution? Guess what, slavery is still legal and practiced in the US. Using the so called "war on drugs" i.e. poor black people, so that you can imprison them and use them as slaves.
Not that I agree with that, but drugs are illegal everywhere in the world and prisoners can be forced to work in many countries. In your opinion, that makes the US the least liberal and democratic country in the world?
How do you define liberal and democratic? Personally, I would include things like freedom of speech, the right to love who you will, and universal sufferage.
There are many countries that don't respect these freedoms.
And I'm asking if they believe that one criteria weighs more heavily than all the others.
That's putting aside the question of whether the US is really the worst prison system in the world, ie, granting that point for the sake of argument, though I strongly disagree with it. If I had to go to prison somewhere, the US would rank below a few but above most countries.
Whataboutism is the mightiest endorsement of a justice system.
Again, they are clearly talking about forced labor in the prison system, you can't meaningfully analyze the other parts of their comment separately from that.
It's interesting that you feel the need to shift away the attention form socialist dictators with a switch to the US (where btw you can even elect a judge or Sheriff). I've seen you doing that on the hacks by Russia before. So what is the world you thing you are accomplishing by drawing this?
Would you prefer living in a quasi dictatorship that watches over what you write on the internet because you have nothing to fear since you are so "compatible" with their views?
How do a world in a tight ideological bondage, aiming for ideals from the last century prosper in your eyes? Or is this bound to this "I don't care what happens when I die" view that comes with climate change denial for example? Do you believe in climate change (the religious tone here is intentional)?
Do you feel that the world became "complicated" and you having a hard time to follow certain topics?
Why even mention Guantanamo. Pol Pot's popularity and rise was enabled by the USA's absolutely monstrous and indefensible atrocities committed against Cambodia (and Laos) during the "Vietnam" War.
After Pol Pot's genocide was stopped (by the Bad Guys, Soviet-backed Vietnam), the US (and China - its commie BFF since throwing Taiwan under the bus) supported the Khmer Rouge as the Cambodian representative in the UN until the 1990s.
You know, like having the Nazi Party represent Israel or Poland until the 1960s.
The US armed, funded and kept alive the Khmer Rouge in the 1980s, and Reagan's British poodle Margaret Thatcher even sent the SAS to train them.
"ASEAN wanted elections [in Cambodia] but the U.S. supported the return of [Pol Pot's] genocidal regime." - Singapore diplomat Bilahari Kausikan
And those observers conclude things like: the elections "failed to meet many of the commitments and standards that we have. It was not a fair election." and there were "flaws in the secrecy of the vote." "Effectively, we can't say these were fair elections,"
But China is not a communist country.
Actually, most of the country who claim to be communist are just autocracy.
The only state that have been communist or anarcho-communist /anarchist for at least a while, was Ukraine (during the Makhnovchtchina), Catalonia (during the Spanish revolution of 1936) and, if I remember, Mexico during one of the revolution.
I might be missing some example, but China, USSR, Cuba and North Korea were always just communist in names. The reality was that they were/are all different form of dictatorship / autocracy.
The USSR was definitely more communist in the early days when they had workers councils' and stuff. Most of that was disbanded under Stalin though.
Most nominally communist countries have elements of communism even if they are autocratic at heart, and that often forms part of their "Lockean" social contract - e.g. in North Korea, schools, hospitals, universities and apartments are all provided free by the government.
In North Korea, protection from invasion forms the larger part of the social contract (they officially renounced communism a few years ago I think) and in China, cradle-to-grave protection (the iron rice bowl) has been supplanted by the promise of always increasing standards of living.
Thomas Hobbes would have approved. Famously in the Leviathan he argued for a sovereign commonwealth, a sort of autocratic monarchical rule with no separation of powers. In order that the system be stable freedom of expression is subordinated to the sovereign as is the system of law an the free press.
Hobbes's Leviathan is China. Because Hobbes lived through a very tumultuous period of strife and conflict what he optimised for is stability and peace and prosperity at the expense of individual freedoms like the ability to choose one's destiny through either representative democracy or direct democracy.
If the lives of the vast majority of Chinese are improving, who is to say their system is morally wrong?
In fairness, the West only has itself to blame. Nobody with an honest heart can look at the post-colonial period and say that the West has not meddled in the affairs of other sovereign states. Also, many of the West's so-called republics and democracies are very hollow and corrupt often veering towards plutocracy, the system of law and political legislation is controlled by money and so corporate lobbying and eventually even political capture by corporations is rife. Workers rights are trampled at home and abroad though international agreements. Corporations evade paying taxes, they pollute the environment, collective bargaining is seen as a communist horror rather a democratic good.
The West is in no position to point fingers. That's what gets my goat up. Who the fuck do we think we are that we can tell others how to run their lives. What fucking gall. After all we've done? And we wonder why others respond indignantly and with contempt. I don't blame them. Get your own house in order first as Peterson says.
No, the correct response the Xi's power grab is not a suicidal arms race or political pressure. The correct response is to make the West an example others want to follow. We could start by taking back democracy by making citizen rule more direct so that people feel empowered. Let's move to the Swiss model. Let's reform the courts so that everybody has a fair chance, not the just the wealthy–it does not matter a whit if everybody is equal before the eyes of the law in theory if in practice they are not. We need to counter the evil of nationalism. We need to be sympathetic towards migrants. We need better separation of powers and we need to reject all forms of fundamentalism. Identity politics is a side-show, the arc of history is clear. Most importantly I think is that we need to place real limits on social media companies and we have to dismantle global surveillance, this is an evil so large it boggles the mind. We have to figure out how to combat rising economic inequality! We really do.
They built Leviathan, we built the Panopticon.
I recognise the freedoms we do have, such as my ability to criticise the system without repercussion, though if you agitate too much various agencies may open up a file on you.
You could argue the Chinese system hasn't been properly tested in modern times. In other words, there's been no recession, no meaningful economic downturn which really forces leaders to make very hard decisions and causes the population to become restive.
The West on the otherhand had that in 2008, it survived although the repurcussions are still being felt (Trump).
Can the Chinese avoid a serious recession forever? You would have to assume not, that will ultimately be the test of how well their system holds up.
>The West on the otherhand had that in 2008, it survived although the repurcussions are still being felt (Trump).
Trump is hardly the repercussions though, and the West has hardly survived in the sense of "overcoming" the recession.
Trump is a result of (and a reaction of the people to) the recession, and the recession (jobs lost, dwindling middle class, etc) still holds, even though figures paint a rosy pictures and those outside the affected masses hardly know better.
> Can the Chinese avoid a serious recession forever? You would have to assume not, that will ultimately be the test of how well their system holds up.
China is sitting on a knife edge, I suspect. There are all manner of things than can bring it crashing down. Automation--demographic imbalance(too many men)--nuke from North Korea.
(As much as the West frets about North Korean nukes--practically all the major Chinese cities are closer. Can you imagine if North Korea nuked a Chinese city?)
The problem is what will happen as the dinosaur falls. Dinosaurs can take a long time to die and cause a lot of damage while doing so.
Hobbes, like Milton, was dramatically effected by the English civil war; Milton's "On the tenure of kings and magistrates" was very clearly a "Please don't kill me" and it's generally not read for this reason. I only recommend it if you are a huge Milton fan (which is something I strongly recommend becoming)
Hobbes didn't write anything quite so... obvious, and I think we read 'leviathan' today because he makes such a clear and compelling argument against anarchy; I'm not saying it was his intent, but the leviathan can be read as tirade against Anarchy rather than a paean to tyranny. anarchy is so bad that if the only alternative is some ridiculously absolutist ruler, well, that's still better than the state of nature.
My own feeling is that his support of absolutism was mostly about how people were asked to choose sides. I think you can't understand Hobbes and his weird authoritarianism without the context of the English civil war
I don't like "after all we've done" arguments. Why should I not be allowed to criticize something that I don't like because of things that people from my general geographic area have done in the past?
> Why should I not be allowed to criticize something that I don't like because of things that (...)
There is a very simple answer to that: because you won't sound convincing to the other side.
I agree with you from a moral point of view: just because your side did something wrong doesn't mean you can't criticize the wrongs of the other side. But from a practical point of view, your side probably already agrees with you, and the other side will just ignore you.
Do you care whether what you say actually has a positive effect, or do you just say things just to have an opinion? If it's the latter, no arguing with you. But if it's the former, then you need to consider how the receiver is going to interpret it given their background and point of view. Many Chinese view the US call for democracy as hypocritical and ignorant. If you care about them truly listening to you then yes, it is a very good idea to consider what people from your general geographic area have done in the past. They are no fault of your own, but it's still your problem.
Let me put it this way. If Microsoft wants you to believe that they are no longer evil, they have to do more than simply having the latest CEO proclaim "I am not Bill Gates and what he did was not what I did".
This is a complicated matter. I guess one important fact to remember is that the western mainstream media is never fair. They ignore horrible countries backed by CIA etc., as long as they are strategic allies of the west, and many articles that criticize China reek of hypocrisy and double standards. Therefore such media can hardly appear convincing. Shortly put, their "criticisms" always have some hidden agenda behind it, and are not really objective pieces. The western government and media couldn't care less about how the normal Chinese actually live. They only care about their own interests. That's the problem.
On the other hand, if you're somebody like Chomsky, i.e. also see your own government for what it is and criticize its problems, then your arguments can be as fair and unbiased as possible. That is to say, they do not inherently have double standards or want to actually advance the interests of western countries, while trying to restrict the rise of China. You actually think in terms of the Chinese populace.
Unfortunately, it has become very hard to tell these things apart, i.e. a normal American probably gets a lot of their information from the mainstream media that they read every day, after all. Therefore it's very hard for their criticism to not be tainted by the hidden agenda propagated by the media. That is a big problem.
What's evil about me wanting to live with people with whom I share cultural heritage, language, ethics and peculiarities of perception of life? What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government, with having laws and rules tailored specifically to this large tribe I belong to?
I have no desire for my nation to invade other countries or to impose our rules and ways of life on other people. That said, I also will not tolerate foreign interference in my nation's affairs, come it from a single country or international gang, such as UN.
Nations and nationalism are not evil, they are manifestations of different, unique ways of human development, manifestations of the very diversity Western leftists crave for.
> State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "I, the state, am the people."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course, Nietzsche wrote this before companies with "no I in team" and whatnot :P
> What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government
Nothing, but "nationalism" to me implies some sort identification with a symbol, rather than interacting with reality. Sufficiently developed individuals don't "belong to" groups, it's the other way around. Tribalism is a great method to stop that development dead in its tracks.
> The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.
In so far that is the case for what you would consider nationalism, carry on. To me, a sense of responsibility towards the place where you live and towards the people that live there is just that,
while nationalism adds more and only bad things to it. I generally see it used as crutch or excuse.
The main issues with strong nationalism is: i) it encourages rhetoric blaming the other, which encourages escalating conflict and, historically war, and ii) it does not map to realities on the ground. Europe has been a continuosly shifting map of principalities, empires, kingdoms, nations, cultures, languages and ethnicities for thousands of years, and trying to draw a hard border to create an indivisible homogenous ethnic state does not end well, for the latest from a long list of examples, see Yugoslavia. Similarly in reality Russia is not this kind of nation, but the core of an empire, with many ethnic and cultural groups within its borders, and substantial minorities in neighbouring states. America is a country of immigration which has never had a homogenous ethnicity or culture. In none of these places can this kind of ethnic-cultural-nationalist state be created.
Sorry about your downvotes. People will see you're right eventually, but by then it will be too late.
EDIT: Oh my that was a fast downvote, < 10 seconds. I wonder if a clever HN member has set a "thought police" style bot upon me. Sorry, I shall try harder to stick to the narrative.
> If the lives of the vast majority of Chinese are improving, who is to say their system is morally wrong?
If the people of the PRC are not permitted to speak freely, then it is all the more important that the rest of us do. You are as entitled to criticize the government of the PRC as you are of any Western government. Therefore let us speak plainly to the matter at hand; let us not evade the issue by pretending we, as human beings, have neither the wit nor the right to look and judge; let us not be so naive as to think that an increasingly authoritarian and chauvinistic China does not affect the rest of the world.
Perhaps the people of the PRC value the stability that creates the conditions for their improving lives more than free speech and other individual rights. We, in the 'West', are in no moral position to say that their system is somehow wrong. Sure, we absolutely can and do judge; but we have lost the moral authority to say to the rest of the world that they ought to live by those judgments.
Also, some European countries do have better democracies than the US. It horrifies me that the China is now basically becoming another US in so many aspects of the society. But it seems to be very hard to stop now. I can only hope that the European countries can preserve their democracy longer. I dunno.
I think a common flaw in these kinds of bold statements is the use of the phrase “The West”. There exists a multitude of different nations, each with different political structures and vastly different social opinions but, most importantly, different national objectives vested in China.
The idea that business from the USA, UK, and, other nations in the West all “wanted democracy” is blatantly not true. They wanted profit and success via the penetration of a huge potential market. Democracy? No, fair treatment.
The idea that the general public wanted a democracy in China is silly also. Most people are exposed to a very warped viewpoint of China, and I would argue, all people want is that their nation remains great, their jobs remain stable and their economic future is secure. Most average people I speak to (UK) still ask if if people eat dog meat and proclaim China is communist.
The strongest case for “wanting democracy” is most likely in the political sphere for western nations. The strength of cooperative democratic governments is weakened when an outside nation is playing by its own rules, gaining advantages that members could be envious of.
Having lived in China and having Chinese as my second language, I find recent events deeply troubling. The recent US-Taiwan travel agreement and new campaign for a referendum vote for independence on the 6th April is just adding to the anxiety. It’s an uncertain time, but I certainly agree that clear and hard rulings need to be made to ensure fairness between trading nations.
> Most average people I speak to (UK) still ask if if people eat dog meat and proclaim China is communist.
What do you answer? We have a saying in Austria that Chinese eat everything that throws a shadow (I don’t approve of this, just recount), and I as an uninformed person don’t know what to call it instead of communism (sure, not the traditional kind).
I would describe China's economy system as capitalism. There is however the caveat that the government has a history with interfering with private ownership to pursue its interests, and their law has a history of approving that. This is different from e.g. the USA where the law is very propetive of private ownership and the law usually sides with it against the government.
I would say that with respect to this metric Russia and the EU are somewhere in between.
That's pretty funny. I think its ok to let yourself approve - just make sure you have banter about every nationality's cuisine.
I was eating with a Chinese client who at various times had served dishes like donkey and tree frog, and I really couldn't tell what I was eating but it sure was unusual. I asked what it was and the client chewed his food, paused thoughtfully for a minute and then reported "I think it is some type of meat". If I have ever eaten something furry that we keep as pets, that might have been the time.
FWIW, the Cantonese themselves say they eat anything with four legs except tables, anything that flies except planes, and anything that swims except submarines.
I reply with what I saw and discussed with natives: Typically dog meat consumption is isolated to smaller cities or rural areas. Older generations are more comfortable eating dog meat and younger generations (especially educated individuals) dislike it. Consumption is mostly a factor of social economic status. Anecdotally, while admittedly I most worked in a single city, I did take time to travel to a number of different cities/provinces and not once did I ever see a ???? (Dog meat restaurant).
Actually, if you permit me to give a personal opinion: I find it quite strange that we bias one animal over another for consumption (cow vs dog). I understand the moral connection to pets, but it seems slightly illogical to have one be taboo other the other for consumption. After all they are both animals. Also, it’s interesting that in the UK people turn their nose up at offal, when it seems like a more total and efficient usage of an animals meat.
I’m vegetarian though (which was a complete nightmare in China).
Have you ever been to the Miao areas of china before? Dog meat is pretty ubiquitous in those places. Like, many westerners visit Guilin, and it’s very easy to run into dog meat there.
Authoritarian is the most valid label. It has a mixed market economy, which the government claim is the necessary first stage in their long term goal of socialism.
If southern China is anything like northern Vietnam, which I have been led to believe it is, then dog meat consumption is widespread - I have seen it with my own eyes. According to Wikipedia, 20 million dogs are killed in China for consumption per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat#Mainland_China Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent, and yet it is a cultural norm in China.
10,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many of them were deliberately squished into mush by tanks. The thought of that happening in the West is beyond the scope of my imagination. Chinese people live in a world of brutal, ruthless dictatorship that will literally grind them to mush under tank treads by the thousands if they protest. To act as if finding that supremely unappealing and objectionable is "warped" is delusional.
10000 casualities is the worst estimation around. Not saying it's false, it's just an estimation. Red Cross estimated ~2500 deceased while Chinese government numbers were below 1000.
The number of injuried people was very high also. And the arrests afterwards were numerous, too.
> 10,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many of them were deliberately squished into mush by tanks
Be aware that that is the highest end of a very contested range of estimates. While I by no means believe the governmental estimate of "0-300", 10,000 is so huge I personally find it hard to believe.
As always the truth is probably somewhere in between. I personally believe the number was probably between 500 and 1,000 dead. It was a brutal repression of a student protest, not an extermination.
It could be in between, it could be much worse. There was no way in estimating very accurately, so we shouldn’t just take the middle as the truth. Besides, most of the casualties occurred outside of the square when the city basically rioted, and it was in the government’s interest not to count bodies.
Yes, but the government could have answered the question with a real investigation at the time, while the other parties could not. At any rate, whenever you use the military to do what riot police should be doing instead (China lacked non-lethal riot suppression capabilities at the time), it is going to be very messy.
> Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent, and yet it is a cultural norm in China.
Have you ever asked yourself why? Pigs are roughly comprable to dogs in intelligence[1], yet we eat them by the millions. There is little ethical distinction here - instead purely a cultural one.
I got curious to try horse meat in the US recently, only to find that it's essentially banned from consumption throughout the entire country, through a combination of local laws and congress defunding horsemeat inspection (making it impossible for horse meat to satisfy USDA requirements). I understand banning dog meat, to an extent, considering I would never eat it - although I agree that others should be allowed to. But horses?
To my surprise it seems that horses in the US still become food at some point. They first have to be shipped to Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter and butcher them for meat, but not to consume them. The meat is shipped to Asia and Europe where the consumption is acceptable and legal.
The commonly cited reason behind horse meat being illegal is that horses are given drugs throughout their lives that may make their meat unfit for consumption. Yet there are no provisions for consuming horse meat that is raised like normal livestock. Indeed, whenever horse meat becomes an issue in the US, activists take action, which lends credence to the idea that the ban is more moralistic than a regular safety precaution.
The idiotic part is that this doesn't prevent horses from being slaughtered and eaten. Instead, horses are shipped thousands of miles to Mexico, where many die due to the heat on the journey, before being slaughtered anyway. All I wanted was to try what I've read described as "like very lean beef"
In Europe you find cheap American horse meat on the counter sometimes. It's far cheaper than local alternatives and i honestly never tried it to compare. Horse meat generally isn't bad. Not my favorite but a steak done by a pro is definitly a new taste experience that's worth it.
I totally think that this 'eat animal' 'pet animal' thinking is beyond stupid and only shows how limited we humans think.
The simple answer is that dogs are carnivores so they can't be bred and raised economically for slaughter. Therefore any dog meat you eat is from wild dogs. Wild dogs are also tame enough to stay close to humans, which means they are likely to be feeding off a lot of human waste. Any dog meat you eat is likely to be gamey and full of parasites. It's not just a cultural distinction.
That's not really an answer at all. Eating dog isn't seen as abhorrent because of the possibility of consuming parasites or the quality of the meat. It's seen as abhorrent because we view dogs as trusted companions capable of basic emotion. GP was merely stating that this quality, which is the one that actually causes people to scoff at dog-eaters, is also present in pigs.
Dogs and humans have co-evolved[0] for approximately 30,000 years[1] (for reference, agriculture is only 10-15k years old[2]). Human-dog gaze can cause the same effect as parent-child gaze.
Dogs have evolved/been bred for tens of thousands of years to instinctively bond with, trust, and genuinely love humans. Their biological purpose is to be our companions and helpers. Eating them is a primal act of betrayal and pure cruelty. It is an active rejection of some of the most beautiful facets of humanity and of life in general for the sole purpose of eating something that tastes like chicken.
As someone else have pointed out there is no legitimate economic reason to raise dogs for food due to their being carnivores. If people are starving to death then sure, eat dogs to survive. Otherwise my point above stands.
Pigs may be smart, but they have no such special relationship with humanity beyond being domesticated for food. Killing a pig is not killing an animal whose brain is physiologically structured to love you. And while I personally eat pork & beef, I don't necessarily think that people who view it as abhorrent are wrong. 95% of animal consumption in today's world is abhorrently wasteful and destructive. I will gladly eat lab grown meat when it's widely available and of acceptable quality, which can't come soon enough.
2 days late. But in case you are really curious this is only in more rural areas like Schwyz. Some people in the cities don't even know. So it's not actually normal
Dog meat consumption is indeed widespread in parts of Hunan, guizhou, guangxi, Yunnan, places that are near to northern Vietnam. Not all chinese eat dog, most don’t, but some do (the same is true about Korea and correspondingly parts of northern China). It isn’t a cultural norm in all of china, China is just very diverse.
> Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent
A Muslim person might find someone eating pig morally abhorrent and a Hindu may find someone eating beef reprehensible.
Grow up — people can eat what they like and what’s food is going to differ between places. If you prioritize your own personal food preferences over the right of others to eat a perfectly ethical food, you’re just spreading xenophobia.
I have never understood why people are so upset that other humans eat animals.
Which 'average' people in the UK are you talking about?
The vast majority of the people I know don't think of China in those terms. And they may call China communist but what they really mean is non-democratic rather than a comment on the market. (The term 'communist' is somewhat overloaded in everyday talk.)
And I don't meet many people at all in the UK who want their nation to remain 'great'. That's a very foreign sentiment to us - patriotism doesn't sit that comfortably. They probably do want a good life for themselves and others though.
Lastly, I think you're a bit too cynical on people actually wanting democracy for China. I think a lot of people do genuinely want this for altruistic, but also selfish reasons.
The great mistake was in thinking "liberal western-style democracies" were the natural end-state of human societies, and that all states are historically determined to reach this point sooner or later. That the West was both Exceptional and Normal at the same time. This was pride.
Then there were those who didn't care about the human rights issue and just wanted to make money, who thought they could use China as a massive cheap factory forever. Never thinking (or caring) that China could one day surpass us and turn the tables. This was greed.
A sort of naive liberal narcissism. Or happy go lucky. If I'm nice then everyone else will be nice. And I'll take that smile at face value. Alas, the world's a big place.
On the bright side, it seems like some people here are finally waking up to the fact that China may soon be imposing it's will on the world. The Economist must be very influential.
Behind western capitalism is a long tapestry of human exploitation punctuated by periods of total war. Pre 18th Century there was slavery. Then when that became unpalatable we moved to colonialism. Finally we have used modern globalism and information technology to abstract the exploitation out of sight.
The tone of article also implies (and I think is true) that the west views/viewed China from a position of moral authority. Like a parent being disappointed in a kid because it should know better. Culturally this leads to to the idea of "punishment" or reinforcing the parents idea of quality.
The issue is that countries see each other as equals and the punishment trick can't be easily used when nuclear weapons are involved.
Should we dehumanize those who dehumanize others? I don't think so. The US for a very long time has grown in a moral authority that is overreaching and over simplistic in it's definition of humanity. The only way to break cycles of hate is to show that there is a better way, not through the domination/punishment lens.
We're all products of rape and murder. To see rape and murder and not remember our past is to bask in cultural wealth wondering why everyone else is so poor.
Plus of course that the West in general and the US in particular are standing on shaky ground when making any moral argument.
I believe that on the balance the systems as currently in place are relatively moral. Especially compared to historic precedent (also compare Russias war in Syria to the US wars, having to convince a domestic audience that you're the good guy puts real constraint on the use of military power). But the level of immoral behavior even just focusing on past WWII/Post-colonial times is still staggering and easy to point towards for others.
I don't think it's accurate to say that "liberal western-style democracies" are the natural end-state. I think it's accurate that history has shown that such democracies work better than authoritarian regimes for various reasons -- largely economic.
I don't think that China's recent success disproves this. China spent decades experimenting with ruthless authoritarianism, and wound up decades behind the world. They relaxed their hold for a time, and experienced massive catch-up growth -- growth they would have experienced much earlier if their government had been properly managed.
The real question is whether they'll be able to continue that growth if they turn to a much more authoritarian model, which seems to be the direction they're going. And I'll be frank that there seems to be very little historical evidence that this approach will lead to continued economic (and thus political) dominance. In fact, all signs point the other way. It's just unfortunate that we keep trying the experiment.
I think what's really been shown is that ruthless centralization clearly doesn't work. China's trying to develop an alternative that includes some economic decentralization but doesn't include liberal values and democracy.
Western capitalism may be like a pack of wolves freely cooperating without leashes, but China's is like a pack of wolves wearing shock collars. Most of the time they're on their own, but they have to be mindful of what their master wants or they'll get zapped. That latter system might be good enough to compete with the West.
I feel this article undermines a stand for ‘democratic freedoms, rights and the rule of law’ as it conflates the former with abiding by ‘Western’ rules in international trade and politics and even respecting US military superiority (!).
I think we’ve been late to re-examine some of the ideological memes from eh 80s-90s, which formed as the Soviet Union failed.
In a nutshell, it was triumphalist. The Soviet Union, was oppressive, had a failed economy, it’s people wanted out.. wanted democracy, rights, capitalism.
All the aspects of soviet failure (and the West’s success) were pinned in the “ideology” or system of government. Free markets, liberal democracy, independent courts, late night talk shows… These were all taken as a single system, which beat out a rival system.
Looking back… Do we think that if the US had a Leninist revolution 100 years ago and Russia had had Tatcher & Churchill, that everything would be reversed. We see countries succeeding and failing regardless of clear ideological links.
Implementation is usually more important than ideas. Stalinism was a very bad implementation. China’s last generation was a good one. The ideological underpinnings… less important.
Anyway… the major & minor powers run almost identical economic systems these days. China, US, Russia, Japan, EU, UK…
“Large Corporations”, almost sums up the system. At the scales modern corporations live on, the concept of free markets is fairly watered down. Banking, real estate (housing), transport, education… there are no free markets here.
Elsewhere in the economy (e.g. consumer tech), oligopolies run the show.
China has inched its way over to an almost identical economic system. I think the west has taken a few steps towards china’s. They’ll “intervene” more (like using the great firewall to keep out foreign competition), but … meh .. China runs a local monopoly rather than adopting the international one. It’s not really a big deal, economically.
Basically, the economic system of china is the same as the west’s. Neither are very similar to the ideological systems they pay lip services to.
Also, free markets don’t exist within companies. Companies are “islands of planning.” Well, the corporations are continents these days. Inside a company, totalitarianism is perfectly acceptable in Ohio, just like it is in Xiamen.
When it comes to linking western rule-of-law, rights-centric constitutions and such to economic success… I’m not sure that link is really there. I think this was triumphalism and wishful thinking.
Anyway, Russia accepted a lot of western systems. They have a free-ish market, a democratic constitutions.
Yet, Putin is running yet again. The betting odds are currently @ 1/500 of him winning.
My TLDR point is that the ideological lens is very, very foggy. It distorts our view of the world with easy-to-digest narratives and categories, but it really doesn’t describe the world.
We need to drop this cold war mentality. I was 7 years old when the Berlin wall came down, why am I still thinking in these terms!!
> the ideological lens is very, very foggy. It distorts our view of the world with easy-to-digest narratives and categories
Right. All of this talk about capitalism, communism, etc is intellectually nonsense.
The whole world is actually moving towards the Chinese model with highly interventionist monetary policy, the majority of GDP allocated by the government, etc. That is the case in every major country now.
No serious policy makers believe in free markets any more. They believe in democracy to the extent that they see it as a mechanism for social control, but that is it.
That might be shocking to some people but the other thing to take into account is that all of these smart people have come to this conclusion so maybe they are right and free markets and real democracy are just dumb ideas.
Well... The Chinese are "moving to the Chinese model" too, so idk if it's right to call it chinese. I think the model is the same, and all major economies are going that way. The cultural & legal differences make for different ways of describing and justifying things but.., they don't seem to amount to a huge difference.
Baidu was essentially picked by the CCP, as the Chinese Google. Google was produced by the "free market." The end result is the same. Similar privacy/surveillance implications, similar business models. Similar market share (monopoly). I bet the offices look pretty similar too.
Generally speaking, I am very skeptical of free market ideas applied at the >$1bn level. Corporations that size have political power, inevitably. They also tend to operate in less dynamic & competitive environments. The power differential between them and the employees they are "freely transacting" with are huge. Mostly though, it's the political thing. A mayor of a city is not going to ignore a $5bn going under, or moving away. They have influence on the rules that get made.
Exactly. Glad to see that many people out there still have their cool heads and see through the ideological nonsense and lens of extreme double standards that the mainstream government/media want to force upon their populace.
After all it's just ideological propaganda. Singapore has been much more "authoritarian" than China in many aspects. Regimes in Central America supported by CIA brutally kill their citizens every day. Saudi backed by the US wrecks havoc in the region. The media doesn't give a damn, or at least has very restricted reportage. They only want to constantly attack China because China is regarded as a competitor/enemy, while Singapore and Saudi allies. As simple as that.
In fact China is just rapidly turning into another US in a lot of aspects of the society. Xi is compared with Reagan for his pro-market stance. (Though he does indeed implement a lot of surveillance etc. as well.)
The west just doesn't want to see their old order challenged. But little can be done to stop the rise of China now. Whether the reforms of Xi totally succeed is still unknown. There are of course a lot of uncertainties. But China as a world power is probably there to stay for a long time. The better thing to do for the western elites/governments is cope with this fact and think of strategies under this premise, instead of trying to deny/sabotage it with wishful thinking.
Personally I'm horrified that China is turning into another US but that apparently doesn't have anything to do with the ideological buzzwords that those media so like to use.
It looks like the "Western" does not like any other sovereignty country. Any of the phrases below from the article can be applied to the USA:
Though people’s personal lives remain relatively free, he is creating a surveillance state to monitor discontent and deviance.
Meanwhile, foreign businesses are profitable but miserable, because commerce always seems to be on ___’s terms.
The initiative asks countries to accept ____-based dispute-resolution. Should today’s ___ norms frustrate ___ ambition, this mechanism could become an alternative.
Putting up with misbehaviour today in the hope that engagement will make ____ better tomorrow does not make sense.
______ societies should seek to shed light on links between independent foundations, even student groups, and the ____ state.
As somebody else said in this thread, equating the USA with 'Western countries' in general is distorting reality. Most 'Western' countries are very different from the US. But I see how the equation 'Western world=USA' serves people well rhetorically if they want to make a case against democracy without clearly saying so.
The point is that there are many different democracies and the USA is not and never was a poster example of it. Some have argued that the US is more of an oligarchic republic based on the example of ancient Rome rather than a modern democracy. However, the fact that people like Noam Chomsky who make this critique can freely live and talk in the US readily tells you how misleading it is to ride on popular anti-American sentiment when it is done on behalf of a country where critics are simply imprisoned.
This is an article in a British magazine. Why blame the US?
> people like Noam Chomsky who make this critique can freely live and talk in the US readily tells you how misleading it is
In the US freedom of speech is part of the system of control. It is a safety valve that releases social pressure to prevent explosive revolutionary outbursts.
The rulers of the US are no less dictatorial, they are just more sophisticated in their understanding of social control.
Got it wrong? That's over-stating it quite a bit. Sure, that was the spin to get a toe hold, but ultimately the West's Capitalists saw massive opportunity, and nothing else.
Long to short, 30 - 40 years ago the media ALWAYS referred to China as Communist China. I can't remember the last time I heard that phrase. That's no accident.
Perhaps the politicians got it wrong. That's no surprise. They're (pardon the editorial) just stupid hand puppets anyway. But the elite capitalist? They were spot on. Just look at how the income inequality gap has widened. Again, no accident.
p.s. If anything, China suckered the West, believing it could influence the West's structure, more than the other way around.
China didn't abandon communism (as in command and control economy, vs market economy) until 1978, so it's hardly a surprise that 40 years ago it was always Communist China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
I understand that. My point is, after years of shoving must-fear-the-Commies down the minds of the American (/West) people, the prefixed was dropped because it didn't fit the narrative; because now there was money to be made. Which goes back to my original point. The only ppl who got it wrong were the politicians, and they're idiots anyway. No surprise.
Yeah, they're still communist. But you'd never know it.
They don't anymore. That's my point. Now that the big money has rolled in, it doesn't want to be perceived as collaborating with the reds. Ao the media drops the prefix and the money keeps piling up.
They still do, and there are many Chinese who criticize the west for using their own language.
Most articles in the western media on China are fairly pro-China, and have been for a very long time. But selection bias means we just focus on the critical ones.
When was the last time anyone _in the media_ said _Communist_ China?
Yes. China knows they're communist. Yes, China says they're communist. But at this point the West's propaganda masks that because...there's massive money to be made.
Great article, makes me glad I now subscribe to the economist. It is interesting how elites in China use a different method of population control than the elites in the USA. Here, a well run propaganda machine comprised of MSNBC and Fox News effectively split the US population into two factions that disrespect each other and thus can’t cooperate while our freedoms, economic and political, are reduced. In China, they use a dictatorship that is effective enough in providing a good lifestyle so mostly young people there don’t complain too much.
Sorry if I am oversimplifying, but at a TLDR, that is how I view things.
The article sounds like if the opening of the China-Western worlds relationship was something thought in these terms. But I have the feeling it was more the result of economical reciprocal interests among many actors.
Xi is actively giving more power to the market. In fact he's been compared to Ronald Reagan. It's just that he indeed implements quite a lot of surveillance measures as well. China is becoming like the US in a lot of aspects. Is the US society a shambles? Of course. But even with the rise of Trump people can hardly see a "disaster" or a major upheaval coming. The established interest is just way too strong.
The Chinese leadership is much smarter and pragmatic than many western media and elites would imagine them to be. Doom-sayers have been there for a few decades, but China is still booming.
This is just such a nonsensical ideological piece without any regard to facts, which are always much more intricate and delicate than what simple lofty words such as "capitalism", "democracy", "dictatorship" etc. can cover.
First, Xi is known precisely for his pro-market reforms and has been compared to Ronald Reagan for this. Under Xi's reign, the benefits for public servants have been drastically cut and many formerly commonplace practices will now be considered as corruption and land you in deep troubles. Therefore, many have been simply abandoning posts in the public sector and have gone into the private sector. If anything, China is accelerating on its path to become another US. Basically everything is modeled after the US society, and Xi wants to put everything into "the hands of the market". Depending on who you ask it's either fantastic (for the conservatives) or disastrous (for the leftists who much favor the European model of governments). But in no way will there be more restrictions on capitalism and stronger "government rule" out there. Xi wanting to stay on to continue his reforms doesn't automatically mean he wants to curb the market and expand the government. Exactly the contrary is happening. Drawing conclusions automatically from ideological grounds is just ridiculous.
Second, many mature so-called western "democracies" perfectly allow one person in power for many years. Merkel is desperately trying to start her fourth term right now, and German economy has been always booming under her reign. Another obvious example (though not really a "western democracy" of course) is Singapore. China is even "more democratic" than Singapore in that the leadership is never passed on to a family member. Yet where are the criticisms against Singapore in the mainstream media during all these years? Zero, simply because Singapore is considered a strategic partner of the US while China a rising competitor, enemy. Could the media and western governments be even more hypocritical than that? Such double standards is quite some feat. Again, Xi's wanting to stay on doesn't automatically mean that China is going to be plunged into a reign of terror and chaos. Nobody can predict how his measures turn out to be, but to say that it's destined for failure and using "dictatorship" which implies something similar to North Korea or some Central American country (its brutal regime supported by the CIA and US politicians all the time, of course), is just laughable.
Xi is indeed coming up with some measures that one may call authoritarian such as video surveillance coupled with facial recognition systems everywhere. But so is the US, especially after 911, with the massive overreach of government into civil lives. I sincerely don't think the US is much more a "democracy" than China is. There are some truer democracies among the European countries, which should indeed be protected. I am quite horrified witnessing the transformation of China into another US right now, but I'm afraid that cannot be stopped and the western political establishments would be better off thinking how to cope under a new world order instead of trying their best to deny or distort such a fact with such double standards thinly coated with ideological nonsense, as always.
They openly mock western liberal values, they have their own slang for it. It seems so natural for the westerners that all countries will naturally drift towards democratic governments and more freedom, but it seems that some regions of the world just don't work that way. Just like Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable) under military dictatorships, China seems to prefer authoritarian rule that at the same time doesn't really get in the way of them living their lives the way they're used to. It's a tough pill to swallow, but some nations just don't like democracy and don't want to implement it in any form.
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