What's particularly ironic is that Xi's father was purged by Mao, he himself spent years in labor camps and yet it's he who's increasingly bringing back Mao's methods. Maybe if you experience enough horror personally you don't seek to fight it but instead to perpetrate.
>Xi made his own Faustian bargain not merely with the Communist Party but very emphatically with Mao’s party: he has been assiduous in restoring Mao’s authority, which his predecessors had cumulatively reduced – a few months ago, reacting to the intensified confrontation with the US and its allies, Xi enjoined the study of Mao’s clever but prolix lectures from 1938, On Protracted War. He constantly elevates the man who jailed and publicly humiliated his father, terrorised his mother, caused the death of his half-sister and imposed many years of acute misery on his siblings as well as himself...
Luttwak goes on to speculate about what this means (if anything) for interpreting Xi's decisions.
When someone founds a new dynasty, they like to emphasise continuity and legitimacy by appealing to the previous dynasty. Sometimes that is claiming descent by right of blood (even if that is "my grandmother was the sister of the king") and sometimes it is by claiming the spiritual, so to speak, heirship of the mantle.
Mao was a venerated previous emperor, and if Xi wants to establish himself as a new emperor, then showing conspicous respect to the predecessor who founded the entire state is the way to do it. "No, good people of China, this is not regression, this is carrying on the patriotic traditions of the ancestors".
Using the name and reputation of the man who destroyed your family to increase your own power and control could be considered a form of revenge, as well.
China is notoriously difficult to rule because of its horrible geography in which only the coasts are prosperous. Xi really doesn’t have much choice as the global economic dividend from the fall of the Soviet Union and the global economic debt bubble have exhausted the extend-and-pretend, kick-the-can runway. The Certificate Of Vassal IDentity deprivation wailing by the thousands from the condo balconies in Shanghai this week is a harbinger of dark times ahead for the entire world.
Any personal issues seem to have been overshadowed by the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Vietnam, which seems pretty typical in a 'grand scheme of history' sort of way.
To be fair, the Boomers managed to get us involved in two distinct wars that were even more stupid & farcical in Afghanistan & Iraq, which most Americans were basically content to ignore for 20 years as long as there wasn't a draft. In terms of absolute death & suffering all around, Vietnam still probably outpaces Afghanistan & Iraq. However, the moral valence of loading the burden of our post-9/11 foreign policy on contractors, mercenaries and regular-duty & reserve US soldiers representing a tiny fraction of the American populace who were deployed over & over again is probably worse. Democracies should tire easily of war. War is fucking awful.
When volunteers were being deployed three or more times on extended tours of duty, then yes, that suggests to me that a draft in the 2000s would have been appropriate. Perhaps we could have ended that idiocy 15 years sooner if Americans' commitment had genuinely been tested.
I read somewhere that after Stalin's death, his successors wanted to make sure one-man rule would not return. They all had experienced first-hand how not even the highest ranking Polit-buro member had been safe from Stalin's vindictiveness. Therefore Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed, so maybe power was diluted too much. Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule but never killed fellow communists again, and were not nearly as brutal as Stalin's regime.
The story goes that Khrushchev was intensely proud of being shuffled off to his dacha instead of shot in the basement. He supposedly said as he was ushered out something like “See how far we’ve come, that I’m leaving this way instead of that? I did that. I changed the USSR. That was me.”
Inside China the view of Mao is not so simple. He drove out the Japanese invaders and an exploitive government that was doing a poor job of fighting them. He gave hundreds of millions of people hope for a better, more egalitarian life. I left China in the early 90's, but. most of the people I worked with (intellectuals) believed still that Mao's grand vision had been corrupted by those around him and that he was still a great man and the liberator of China.
Not as thoroughly as you might expect. The narrative was that Mao had been lead astray as he aged, not that he failed to take full responsibility for the havoc he had unleashed. I think much of this might have been Deng Xiaoping's doing. As I understand it, Deng realized that Mao's--and the CCP's-- downfall was the cult of personality that formed around him. Deng assiduously avoided any talk that he was Mao's "successor," in an imperial sense. Mao's portraits, which were literally everywhere, came down and were carefully not replaced with portraits of Deng or anyone else.
As miserable as the lives of Chinese intellectuals were during the Cultural Revolution, most of them could see that it was much more complicated than one guy being anti-intellectual. Mao had become a figurehead, and they could see that.
Yes, it does seem that Mao's power later in life wasn't comparable to that of Stalin's, for example. And even Stalin, psychopathic tyrant that he was, is still a pretty divisive figure in Russia.
Not hugely accurate; to the Chinese it's known as the 人民代表大会 or "People's [Representative] Congress".† That would be abbreviated RMDBDH if anyone wanted to. (The name I gave is also an abbreviation of the full formal name, 中华人民共和国全国人民代表大会 "National People's [Representative] Congress of the People's Republic of China".) Modulo the "representative" element, this is an excellent match for the name "National People's Congress", but you'll note that while the "National" element is present in the formal Chinese name, it's been left out of the common name.
The only people calling it "the NPC" would be English speakers studying the formal structure of the Chinese government, which is not a large group of people.
† 大会 is a "great assembly", which makes sense as a gloss of "congress" to me, but 代表大会 "representative great assembly" or perhaps "great assembly of representatives" seems to be a Chinese political term of art intended to serve as a translation of the American term "Congress". So whether to translate 人民代表大会 as "People's Representative Congress" or "People's Congress" depends on your view of what "congress" means.
Yeah...... "The only people calling it "the NPC" would be English speakers studying the formal structure of the Chinese government, which is not a large group of people."
Or you know..... Wikipedia and almost all of English language media too.
I read Elizabeth Economy, and have to say I came away genuinely unimpressed. I feel like I could’ve written the same book just based on summarizing what I had read about China in the last few years in newspapers and magazines. I listed some alternatives in the post below. As a general matter popular works on the topic tend to be bad. But there are some real gems written by academics.
Far out. But I can get a whole Western book about China for the cost of buying one single drink for an Old China Hand, and I know with certainty where to get Western books about China, and I have no idea where to find an Old China Hand. Plus I am suspicious that Old China Hand might be a True Scotsman situation where only some small fraction of the people who would appear to me to be China Hands are sufficiently Old-China-Handed to be able to reimburse me for my time. If that's the case, then this advice becomes even less actionable.
Do you have an opinion on Vogel's biography of Deng? I'm about halfway through it, and it has felt fairly insightful to me, but I don't have any close friends who lived in China in the 1960s-80s to sanity-check it against.
I haven't read book, but the book review sounds like an executive summary of what anyone would know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years (which I have).
Not just if you're young. If a book can replace *four decades* of consistently reading two major newspapers (on a given topic), that's incredible. It might not be well suited for someone who has done so already, but it's certainly still a very positive reflection.
If I'm following the succession correctly, Xi's ten-year term expires this year. Is he planning to leave office, or has he found a way of getting around that rule too?
When is his current term expiring though? Scott said something about the NPC approving him for a new term recently, but he didn't provide a source, and I can't find anything on it.
it expires towards end of the year, but it's 99.9% certain he'll be rubberstamped through for a third term at the next congress sometimes in october or november (could be concurrent with US midterms...)
But then I tell them, if you think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every President for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former "Evil Empire," the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it, literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press -- big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests; and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
...
So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our government.
If you read up on early constitutional history, there are a few more examples of where the supreme court seemed to have basically made a ruling so that they wouldn’t get ignored by the president
He did some things which deservedly look very bad to modern eyes, and some things which look worse to the sort of modern eyes in the academy than to the average person.
But one should also note that he won two terms, was succeeded by someone from his own cabinet, founded one of the two major American political parties, and got his face on the $20.
Controversial, sure, but probably with more admirers than opponents for over a century after his death.
And many people revere Mao to this very day. What's your point? Argumentum ad popularum overrules treating your country's constitution like toilet paper?
treating your country's judiciary like toilet paper is often a popular move and need not come with any real political consequences in the politician's lifetime?
Jackson has been ranked in the upper quartile (top 25%) 11 times, as high as 5th in a 1996 survey, and in the top half the remaining 12 times, with his lowest ranking (22nd) in a survey last year.
You're certainly entitled not to like him -- quite a lot of people don't -- but it's nonsense that he is "widely" considered one of the worst American Presidents.
I think a lot of that has to do with whether "worst" means "does lots of bad stuff" or "fails to accomplish his policy goals". Lots of the surveys on Wikipedia seem to be rehashes of Schlesinger's poll on the topic, which is interested almost entirely in the latter.
So somebody like Jackson, who was very successful at accomplishing evil policy goals like "destroy the nation's economy" and "screw over Native Americans", is certainly one of the best presidents in the Schlesingerian sense, but also certainly one of the worst presidents in a more consequentialist sense.
can you back up the statement that he had as a policy goal to destroy the nation's economy? am not a AJ specialist but that just sounds suspiciously hyperbolic. As for screwing over native americans, it's evil by 21st century standards but was something that probably a large majority of his voting constituents (white dudes, for avoidance of doubt, although his was the first presidential election where non-property holders could vote) supported. I thought democracy was about elected leaders doing the bidding of the people who elect them, but lots of people now seem to disagree and prefer the enlightened despot model.
The "Anglo" there is just wrong. There is no such thing as "constitutionality" in UK law.
The Supreme Court can decide that an executive action is illegal ("ultra vires"), but it can't overrule laws.
France has a priori review of laws to determine whether they are constitutional by the Constitutional Council, which means that the courts don't do case-by-base judicial review. While the American tradition would see the Constitutional Council as a judicial role, in the French tradition it's political - its members are mostly retired politicians (there are a couple of lawyers).
And the UK doesn’t even have a written constitution. They have free speech, a free press, rule of law and due process because they are British, it’s what they do. That sense of - we just don’t - is very powerful.
I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen fire miles In the US most folks would just jaywalk.
If you’re at an intersection in the US as a driver and it’s 2am and there same situation the vast majority of Americans will just wait for a green light. In Brazil or Thailand they will just blow past it like a jaywalking America.
Why do we wait at 2am? It’s just what you do. To say you should just blow through a red light is just ridiculous.
Really, really good point. For someone who hasn't spent time in countries without law-following being something that's just what you do, it's hard to overstate just how fucking terrifying the absence of credible law and order is.
In Brazil we don’t wait for the green light because it’s not safe to be sitting in your car like that at 2am, not because we enjoy breaking the law. (Though there’s probably some underlying reason for this that’s related to rule of law or lack thereof)
I don't really know anything about it, but I've got a friend who is a free speech absolutist and he's constantly sending me links about how bad the UK is on free speech. Apparently, someone recently got jailed for a tweet in very bad taste?
I'd be interested in someone who knew more about the subject expounding upon it.
This is why putting principles in writing, rather than depending on a sense "we just don't", is a good thing - it protects against shifts in culture and the whims of the powerful.
The effective protections of free speech in the UK changed because personnel and the values of those personnel changed.
A written law or constitutional amendment that mandated protections of free speech would go ignored if the people with the power of enforcement decided they didn't value the protections and instead valued the cracking down of hate speech as they define it.
SCOTUS, if it had the gumption, could very well take on a US court case and arrive at an 'interpretation of the constitution' that effectively gave the US government the power to regulate all forms of speech. Of course the president is likewise, theoretically free to disregard the courts and continue to protect free speech. The reverse might also be true, the courts affirm broad free speech protections but the legislature and president crack down regardless.
Yeah, Britain has always been a bit iffy on free speech - the government overreach is relatively new, but English libel law is famously stifling (in part because neither party needs to be British for a suit to occur in English court, as long as some of the *readers* of the supposed libel are brits. )
English libel law got changed quite significantly about 10 years ago; it is much harder to actually win cases for libel now - you have to present evidence that it is untrue (previously, the defence had to produce evidence that it was true), you have to show that you suffered actual losses as a result (previously, it was assumed that the cost to your reputation was sufficient), it creates a distinction between statements of (purported) fact and those of opinion or interpretation (ie if you say "this thing is true about the person, and therefore I conclude this other thing", then as long as the first thing is true, the second thing is opinion and it doesn't matter if it is true or not), and creates a bunch of defences relating to editorial procedure (basically, if you made a reasonable effort to tell the truth, it went wrong, and you withdrew and apologised once it had been confirmed that it wasn't true, then you have a defence, also peer-reviewed academic journals have this as an absolute defence as long as it isn't malicious).
The result is that since 2013, there haven't been big victories in court for massive damages for things that are in fact true or reasonable opinion.
The problem is that all of this only really applies if you go to court, which means you have to pay lawyers a small fortune to get to court. Major media publishing about the rich and powerful are able to publish much more freely than they were (they can afford the lawyers, and they will win back the costs from the other side eventually), but individuals and smaller media still get intimidated by the costs, even when their lawyers advise that they will win.
The criminal law relates to "malicious communications" which means any communication that is "indecent, grossly offensive, a threat, or false" and "causes distress or anxiety to the recipient or to any other person to whom he intends that it or its contents or nature should be communicated".
This was originally written in 1988 to apply only to paper letters, but is now used for social media, and is incredibly broadly drawn, especially the fact that it makes the courts the arbiter of the factual accuracy of every tweet.
The UK urgently needs an anti-SLAPP law, to make it easier to defend a libel case where the case will lose, but it being brought just to intimidate.
And malicious communications was reasonable when it was restricted to paper letters, but needs tightening up to being more "threats" and less "saying things that other people disagree with and claim make them anxious or distressed".
He didn't get jailed, he got sentenced to about a month of community service. (Well, they probably aren't going to make him work it off at 40 hours a week, but if they did it would be about a month.)
The rumors of Europe having free speech are greatly exaggerated. There's free speech unless it's "hate speech" - which is something the government dislikes and you can't be caught in a company that endorses that kind of thing. That's why First Amendment exists in the US - to erect the barrier against such (entirely natural) tendencies. The speech that everybody likes doesn't need protection, the one that a lot of people would hate to hear, especially powerful people that influence making laws - does.
To be fair, I as a German did actually cross a pedestrian red light in Braunschweig at literally 2 AM a couple of years ago, suddenly a police car stopped me a few meters past, and the officers started writing me a ticket for jay-walking. Luckily, they were called away to a real emergency before they could finish.
When I was living in Rome for a few months I accumulated some bad jaywalking habits and I don't think that I've ever been closer to death than on a weekend trip to Cologne--I almost got absolutely smoked by a bus that was roaring around a corner at full speed and had no intention whatsoever of slowing down.
Both the Roman solution (everyone ignores traffic signals and understands that this is what everyone else is doing) and the German solution (everyone obeys traffic signals and understands that this is what everyone else is doing) basically work, it's when you move from one to the other that you get into trouble.
They do have some constitutional laws, not codified in a constitution. It’s a very flexible form of democracy for that reason.
To me - admittedly from a distance - many of the culture wars on the US and the partisan hatreds around election time are amplified by the winning party’s power to choose a Supreme Court justice. If the Supreme Court can find rights to abortion, or not, in a block of text that doesn’t mention abortion they are effectively making law. Why didn’t the Supreme Court just say - this is not a federal jurisdiction? Anyway the U.K. makes parliament sovereign which to me is a good idea. Parliament or the people (if the constitution can be changed by the people directly).
Well they have constiutional laws, but they don't quite have the weight that constitutions in other countries do. Parliamentary sovereignity means absolutely nothing cannot become law if Parliament wants it to - if Boris Johnson wants to become Dictator For Life, all he needs is 50%+1 votes in Parliament.
The problem with the US is not just the Supreme Court, it's the sclerotic nature of federal legislation. If they had said in 1973 that Congress can pass a law on whether abortion was legal or illegal, then it's probably only 50-50 that they would have passed one in the 49 years since.
Having a status quo bias when there is a clearly established status quo is reasonable, but when the status quo is deep uncertainty, then not addressing it is bad - quite often the Supreme Court has stepped in to counter the fact that Congress won't.
Probably the best example of this was King v Burwell; the literal text of Obamacare was that subsidies were only available on state-run exchanges, not on federally run ones. This was because of an obvious copy-paste error in drafting the text. But Congress couldn't go and pass legislation amending it because it would be filibustered (the original law overrode a filibuster, but then Ted Kennedy died and there were no longer enough votes to override a filibuster). The Supreme Court ruled that it was a fuck-up and the mistaken wording could be ignored.
In one sense, the Court literally read words out of legislation and changed the meaning of the law; in another sense, they couldn't send it back to Congress to fix their fuck-up because Congress is incapable of doing that.
Here in the UK, with a legislative process that functions, the court would probably tell Parliament to just fix their own typos, rather than editing the law for them - and Parliament would just do it immediately.
At least in this millennium, this is not an accurate characterisation of Germany at all. If it's clearly safe, many or even most people would cross the street in such a situation, especially younger generations.
This is even the case during the day. Hell, I once crossed a red light as a pedestrian (in a super safe situation) in the middle of the day, while two police officers - whom I hadn't noticed - were walking towards me on the other side (still a bit away from the crossing). They gave me a "stern" talking-to - as in, 20% admonition, 80% not-quite-deadpan humour and good-natured mockery - and, as I told them I was on my way to the doctor, joked about me not needing a doctor anymore once I inevitably get killed by a car.
And that was it.
Although it IS very much frowned upon if you cross a red light when, on either side of the crossing, there are children present, as you're setting a "bad example" for them. Children are generally not sufficiently capable of judging whether it is safe to cross, and as such should obey the traffic light rules (and - directed at American readers - this is important, as we generally let children walk around outside unsupervised starting at quite young ages, ie ainglet digit ones).
And "jaywalking" is not a thing in Germany; generally speaking, unless you're within a certain distance of a pedestrian traffic light (that's turned on - many get turned off at night), you're in principle allowed to cross a street. You do have something of a responsibility to only do so when it's reasonably safe.
Driving norms in general are like this. You could almost rank countries by GDP based on the experience of driving on their roads:
India? Terrible. Every taxi looks like the moon's surface with dents. Unthinkably dangerous driving is standard (ie. speeding around corners completely blind in the wrong lane)
Thailand? Bad but better, less blatant deathwish behaviour. Still a cacophony of horns
Malaysia? Pretty good but still some weird behaviour like ignoring lane lines is common enough
First world generally: Pretty consistently good everywhere I've been, people follow the rules in 99% of cases
There's a big difference though. To jaywalk means to endanger oneself (albeit only theoretically if there's no car in miles). To blow through the red light means endangering others, potentially lethally. So if you violate the rule that protects yourself, because you feel in this particular case you don't need the protection - it is much different from violating the rule that protects others from you, because you're sure others are not in danger. In the former case if you're mistaken, you bear the (most) consequences, in the latter case it's others that do.
Structure is a fig leaf too. You can put whatever title you want on someone's door - they have to actually believe in it to make it work. Cynicism and corruption corrode any system, no matter how high-minded or well-designed.
I think the underlying difference is a cultural one.* People in the west are digusted by patron-client events and institutions, calling them names that evoke disgust such as "corrupt" (=rotten, as in food).**
As a direct consequence we get the cultural habit of impartial treatment and due process, and from those we get our institutions such as politically independent legal systems and militaries.
* Yes, I know "culture" is well out of fashion as an explanation for economic differences. But I have slowly been coming round to the view that this is political-correctness extremism. Different cultural habits produce difference institutions which in turn affect general prosperity in different ways. Patronage, partial treatment as opposed to impartial, in aggregate is negative-sum.
** I _think_ this cultural attitude has its origins in the high Middle Ages in Europe, when there was a surge in religiosity and so in scrutiny of church officials, who were legendarily corrupt at all levels. But I haven't looked into the matter.
Joseph Heinrich talks a lot about the psychological differences of the West vs non-Western cultures, and how that impacts corruption, generalized pro-sociality, and internalized morality, with links to Christendom. I agree with you - it is clear that religion and culture impacted rule of law and prosperity over the long term.
I have trouble believing the argument that our christian background predisposes us towards rule of law and prosperity, although I admit that my atheism may play a part in that.
But I would point to the following counterarguments:
- The church has a very long tradition of corruption, nepotism, selling of offices, the list goes on. There probably isn't a single one of the values of our modern society (rule of law, democracy, separation of powers, checks and balances, equal treatment before the law...) that the churches didn't fight tooth and nail to prevent, before finally having to grudgingly accept.
- In western Europe, Italy is sort of famous as being historically extremely corrupt, and very religious, the Vatican is literally in Rome. On the other hand, Scandinavia was famous for its low crime and so, with little religiousity.
- When we talk of the West as the paragon of rule of law, prosperity and such, the Middle East is usually the implied bad aĺternative. But religion plays a way greater part of life there than here, and laws are almost more important to Islam than to Christianity, it seems to me. Why did that not have the same effect?
- Didn't the West get most of its prosperity and rule-of-law in the times after organized religion lost most of its power over the people? In the US, the latter took longer, but in Europe, it looks to me that way.
It seems to me like a better argument can be made that it helps rule-of-law and prosperity if a country is recovering from an affliction of religion. Not the religion itself.
That's an argument, but a poor one. All you need is exogamous marriages. Many groups have rules that you must marry outside the group, and in many of those there are several neighboring groups that the marriageable partner can be selected from.
I find it more persuasive that if you have and follow laws (that don't change to much and are understandable) it's easier to figure out what investments are good.
Ironically, the best argument I've heard against Henrich is that the Catholic Church's laws couldn't have been the cause of those regional differences because those regional differences predate those laws!
I think that a good check on corruption in society is having multiple centers of power that can serve to check and balance each other. If one center of power gets too corrupt, people can appeal to the other center(s) of power. Christianity seems unique in that it kept separate the power of Caesar and God, thus allowing for separate power centers; even if the kings were Christian, they had no religious authority, while the Pope had religious authority, but no divisions. The other option is that having strong kings served as a check on the Church's power outside of religion.
It can both be true that 'the Catholic church was internally corrupt' and 'the Catholic church served as a check on external corruption'. And this scales, in that what served as a check on the Catholic Church's internal corruption was an alternative center of power within Christianity in the form of the Protestant reformation and schism of Western Christianity into multiple competing denominations.
With regards to Italy, southern Europe overall is more corrupt than northern Europe; Greece, despite being Orthodox, is at least as corrupt as Italy. In the case of Italy (especially southern Italy), it might be that the only real center of power was the Catholic Church. It might be that the religious infighting in northern Europe served as a better check on corruption, both within and outside the church. It might be that the trade leagues of northern Europe served as an additional power center.
Having multiple centers of power necessarily means that the power will be divided between them. The problem is that creating new centers of power is incredibly difficult, because it means reducing the power of existing centers of power, which naturally resist losing power.
I don't know that religion needs to be one of the centers of power, but at least in the West up until perhaps the 18-19th century it's been one, and it's one that has a natural boundary and since the Reformation it's had internal divisions to keep one religion from getting too much power. Trade / commerce is the other obvious center of power, but that's much easier for politics to co-opt (or vice-versa).
This is the fundamental libertarian mistake, which is the belief that this is possible.
The only way to reduce the power of officials is to grant the power to restrain officials to someone else. And that person/group now has all the power that the officials used to have.
That doesn't reduce the power, it distributes it.
In the end, if a sufficient number of people with sufficient influence/authority want something to be done, then no rule saying "this thing may not be done at all" will prevent it. The best you can do is to raise the bar on how many people and how much influence/authority, and also to make the processes and consequences more transparent (eg people have to support raising taxes if they want to raise spending, or they have to acknowledge and explicitly support attacks on other people's rights / equality as such)
It has been tried. Basically half of Europe switched from a single organization having power over essentially all of the economy to no organization controlling more than half of it. China also greatly reduced the power of its rulers by allowing private enterprise.
This seems to be Hitchens level of debate on religion. The problem with saying that the West became rich after it lost religion is that Europe has only fairly recently lost religion, and the US pretty much hasn't even lost its religion. The 19C was both a religious and a scientific era.
As to the supposed religiosity of Italy and catholic Europe, Mediterranean or Latin Catholicism was mostly cultural, and far less austere than northern Protestantism.
The argument about protestantism and capitalism is that the idea that people are judged directly by a God, without the fairly easy forgiveness of confession, made them act more honestly than they might otherwise have had. Protestantism was more comfortable with wealth accumulation than Catholicism and promoted a work ethic. This is all from Weber
Good points. I agree with you that the often corrupt and powerful Church structure doesn’t explain the societal success of Christendom - in fact it probably pulled the other way. Though it’s unpopular to say it, what changed the world was actually the doctrine of Christ, taught both to kings and to the rural peasants for whom the corruption of Rome was a non-factor in daily life. The story of *individual* salvation possible for every man, woman, citizen, or slave directly through Christ crushed the old hierarchical structure of family clans where religion is mediated through the father/patriarch and one’s moral value depended on where you fall in the hierarchy.
The moral ideals of egalitarianism, greater value of the individual over the polis, and a personal and internalized morality / relationship with divinity were revolutionary for the times and changed the world slowly. Over the centuries these values filtered into legal philosophies, law codes, individual psychology, and cultural expectations.
Larry Siedentop’s “Inventing the Individual” describes this process in greater detail and builds a strong case for his argument (IMHO).
There was already a pre-Christian strain of egalitarianism which gave rise to classical democracy, and the Romans insisting they didn't have a king and were ruled by a Senate long after they'd become an empire (which continued after Constantine).
That’s fair. Egalitarianism isn’t unique to Christianity. Maybe Christianity pushed equality a step further, as evidenced by Christianity being mocked as a religion for women and slaves), but I can’t say for sure. Probably the part about individual salvation / individual relationship with divinity was the more critical piece.
I’ll address some of the specific points here too:
Scandinavia - before converting to Christianity they were literally the Vikings, so I’m not sure what you mean. These days crime may be lower, but it’s a society built on the assumptions of a Christian West, even if they now neglect the actual religion part.
Concerning Islam and rule of law. It’s also maybe taboo to say it, but not all religious doctrine is born equal. Many of the benefits of the Christian doctrine of Christ that I mention in the other comment aren’t conveyed through Islamic doctrines or other world religions.
Prosperity increasing after rejecting Christianity - Prosperity in the modern Western sense (ie not derived from looting one’s neighbors) arises from a combination of freedom and trust (or order). I think Christian values helped create the West with its relative freedom and high interpersonal trust, which enabled prosperity. (For example, John Locke, who helped create the modern liberal order, was a strong Christian and also wrote theological treatises.) Prosperity is a lagging indicator of these other cultural factors. The prosperity we enjoy might last for centuries after we drop the actual religion part before we start to see a reversal. Or maybe a collapse could happen more quickly - who knows. That’s my take.
"Scandinavia was famous for its low crime and so, with little religiousity."
Scandinavia *is* famous for its low crime and little religiosity *today*. It wasn't always so.
During centuries following the Reformation Scandinavia was heavy with state-sanctioned Lutheran fundamentalism tied to the state and ruling monarchy.
Speaking of crimes, criminal punishments until 19th century were harsh. During 19th entury Sweden had the 2nd highest rate of capital punishment in Europe. Finnish part of Sweden ceased handing out death penalty in 1820s mostly because it had been conquered by Russia and Alexander I liked the PR of commuting death penalty to exile in Siberia.
I believe a big part of the cultural makeup of Europe is that rather than an individual hegemonic state which is mostly concerned with internal affairs it has for a long time been made up of many competing states with external pressures. States that were too corrupt and leaders who spent too much effort on defeating their political rivals and not enough on defeating neighbouring states' militaries or economies ended up in trouble.
The USA does have significantly freer speech - at least in "freedom to say things without committing a crime" - than the rest of the Western world, and it is specifically because of the First Amendment.
Laws against extreme pornography (even when fictional) and against "hate speech" are popular in the modern West. They get passed everywhere - the USA, Britain, Australia, Europe.
The difference is that in the USA, the Supreme Court immediately says "this law is unconstitutional".
Culture protects only speech within norms; it can never protect people saying something that people actually don't want to hear. Rule of law only protects speech when there is a law protecting speech; it is necessary, but not sufficient.
“ The difference is that in the USA, the Supreme Court immediately says "this law is unconstitutional".”
They could easily say hate speech falls under the fire in a crowded theater/fighting words exception to free speech, if it was generally accepted that this was so.
Maybe in 50 years they will - I think that this is one of the upsides of America being a gerontocracy, the Supreme court is old enough that they aren't subject to the current fad - a societal change has to last multiple generations for both the Justices and the people trying to get a case to court to both disagree with the old precedent.
The American concept of a "fire in a crowded theatre" exception was literally created specifically as a pretext for the Wilson administration to suppress all criticism of government policies. It's a fine example of how the Constitution only protects you as much as people want it to.
I think you're overestimating how popular "hate speech" laws might be in the United States. They're really only popular on college campuses and Silicon Valley high tech campuses, out in the real world I would say most people despise them.
Different bubbles have different taboo speech - you're thinking of the taboos of the Left, but in Right-wing areas the taboo is against eg. talking to kids about the existence of gay people.
While it might not be accurate to the Florida law that Thor seems to be referring to, it is certainly true that there are fairly large groups of conservatives for whom presenting being gay as acceptable to children or pornography would indeed be taboo
Oh of course, pornography is taboo to social conservatives, as are advertisements for tobacco, alcohol, dancing, pool halls... and advertising "gay is great" is too, but that's not "the existence of gay people." How else are preachers going to have sermon fodder?
Thor Odinson didn't say "presenting being gay as acceptable to children". He said "talking to kids about the existence of gay people". These are meaningfully different: saying (to kids) "some people commit buggery and they will go to hell", for instance, would be "talking to kids about the existence of gay people" but not "presenting being gay as acceptable to children".
The Supreme Court has never fully gone "this law is unconstitutional" on obscenity laws; they tend not to uphold them, but they have left a vague (and explicitly culture-based) zone where they're allowed.
America's free speech is because of the Supreme Court, not the First Amendment. For ages the US had blasphemy laws like the rest of the west, then one day they woke up and decided those were kinda bullshit so suddenly the First Amendment meant you couldn't have them.
The whole point of the Soviet example is that having it written down is by default worthless, you need enforcers who care what's written down.
And the whole point of *my* example is that enforcers who care what's written down are *also* worthless *if the principle at issue is not written down*. You need *both*. As I said above:
>>Rule of law only protects speech when there is a law protecting speech; it is necessary, but not sufficient.
I dunno, the Supreme Court seem to have done a pretty good job inventing ideas about privacy and growing your own wheat that weren't written down. Principles can be upheld without supporting text.
That reminds me of how William Stuntz said that the substantive provisions of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were better than the procedural rules of our Bill of Rights.
I would guess that culture played a big part as well. By the time of the American revolution, the English had spent several centuries building up an identity as a free people. Not exactly like us, or how we would conceive that term--think about how each group in Albion's imagined freedom--but more than most places. Those who ended up in the Americas had particularly strong beliefs about not being interfered with by a central authority (well, their local central authority was ok, but a far away central authority was not). Owning guns, distrust of government, the right to worship freely, these were all things that *meant something* to the people who had paid, in blood, for freedoms they had desired for generations.
Even with all that, it almost collapsed upon itself very quickly. See the blatantly unconstitutional Sedition Act and Jackson attempting to ignore any possibility of being checked by the Supreme Court. It did collapse on itself in about 140 years. Turns out freedom is hard to maintain.
Regarding Xi anti-corruption purges that seem puzzlingly non-power-centralizing:
Apparently, some unusually large number government officials in China were actually spying for the CIA, who compensated them in part by paying the bribes that were required for these spies to advance in their government careers. The income was disguised by the ordinary activities of corruption, and having CIA funding meant US spies could pay more bribes and advance faster politically than non-spies. The anti-corruption purge stopped this by making it suddenly very suspicious to receive large sums of money, by reducing the ability of well-funded spies to advance via bribery, and by enabling the government to be purge and punish spies without suffering the loss of face associated with admitting publicly that they were full of spies.
Being cynical, the *threat* of a purge for corruption can be power-centralising as well. If all officials are more or less corrupt, and everyone knows that, then there's a good chance that Chair Warmer No, 6 in the Department of Purple and Green Ribbons is corrupt.
You can directly boot out Chair Warmer and replace him with your own guy. *Or* you can drop hints to Chair Warmer that "Oh look, Nos. 4, 9 and 12 got purged. Such a pity they were on the wrong side. *You're* not on the wrong side, are you?" and then Chair Warmer finds that suddenly his heart has been converted to your faction.
That could be one explanation for the above about Xi not going after the Politburo: 'you leave me alone, I leave you alone' and both sides agree that business as usual continues. Or the threat hanging over them of "I haven't turned the spotlight on you *yet*" is, as Scott says, fear keeping them in line. Or they're too big for him to go after, he can't be sure he'd win in a direct fight, and the damage done to both sides would be too severe, so let things lie.
Of course, Xi could also genuinely be sincere about anti-corruption purges.
I've heard a similar argument from Libertarians about the wide ranging laws in the US. You can get arrested for breaking a thousand different laws that you may or may not know about. The people who tend to get arrested for breaking these laws are most commonly social undesirables, but also sometimes political opponents.
"Upstanding citizens" (cynically; rich people) rarely worry about getting in trouble for breaking certain kinds of laws. I'm thinking specifically about drug possession or similar, but it can even go much further than that.
Arrested? This claim seems to be mostly debunked in a more general sense, but usually proponents of this idea restrict themselves to “illegal” stuff, most of which is a misdemeanor.
My sense is that if you don’t own or operate motor vehicles, and pay your income tax, almost everything people do is in fact quite safe from threat of arrest.
I'm on the fence about the claim myself, but I am aware of lower social class individuals in my area, who seem to have far more frequent run-ins with police. I don't have a great vantage point on why the police get involved so much more often, but it's clearly true that they have multiples of the number of police visits of people from more affluent neighborhoods.
These visits don't always result in arrests, and in fact mostly do not. That said, when they police are there, they can and do find reasons to arrest individuals involved.
I agree, the anti corruption is like a hypothetical lethal electric fence around the prison. Its just there it doesn't really do anything, only like one or two people every year get taken out by it.... but it still has a powerful influence on behaviour.
There are nations where it's difficult (by design?) to figure out the precise chain of leadership. Who ultimately controlled Imperial Japan's foreign policy in WW2? The Emperor? The state? The war council? Extreme elements within the army? An uneasy Schelling balance of all the above? At various times various factions held sway. For Japan's enemies, it was like negotiating with a many-headed hydra.
I'd say there are deep and unspoken national characteristics that continue to express themselves regardless of what the government's nominally doing. China has never in history shown signs of being a bastion of Jeffersonian democracy or cultural liberalism. Whatever steps the CCP claims to be taking in that direction, the reality is probably somewhat different.
and only 1/3 Chinese. "somewhat" is also doing a lot of work, given that Singapore is famously the example of "a rare well-run non-democracy" for many people/.
i don't think the OP meant it chinese are incapable of functioning in a democratic system in some kind of racialized inherent qualities type way (if he did that would be dumb - chinese americans operate just fine within a democracy). But HK/Taiwan/SG or even Korea / Japan being democratic to various degrees doesn't mean China can convert easily to such systems too, because sheer size. Similar flawed metaphors as when people point to sweden and say why can't US healthcare system or what not be like that.
It seems like a really interesting and important question how some countries manage to construct a sensible democratic civil society out of nothing, and others don't.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan -- these countries didn't evolve democracy naturally over centuries, they had none of the cultural DNA required, but they flipped a switch and turned into perfectly reasonable democratic civil societies. A lot of Eastern Europe falls into this category too. Indonesia.
But on the other hand you've got the failures, the countries where there was a serious and concerted attempt to build democratic civil society and it backslid. Russia, Iraq, Pakistan maybe.
With Japan the "flipped switch" would be defeat & occupation from WW2. For Eastern Europe that would be the fall of the Berlin Wall & dissolution of the USSR. But I think the other examples were closer to gradualism.
Japan did get its switch flipped at a particular point, but before that there had been a gradual evolution toward liberal democracy, followed by sudden backsliding in the 1920s. The Taisho government wasn’t as democratic as the Weimar government, but it was headed in that direction.
A lot of Southern Europe too. Greece was only very intermittently democratic before the 1980s and never for very long, and now it's been 40+ years and democracy has survived a massive economic shock.
Spain and Portugal both had occasional elections in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, but in neither country did democracy last very long before the next coup. Then Franco and Salazar died in the 1970s and they've been democracies ever since.
South Korea may be far less of a "perfectly reasonable" democracy than you think. I'm no expert, but the recent news around their elections has evolved extreme nepotism, bribery and even some assassinations. Multiple former presidents are in jail, which is a feature of unstable or corrupt democracies (and one of the reasons people don't want to really go after former US presidents: it makes us look like one, too).
Taiwan is one of my favorite countries, but it was ruled by a brutally repressive authoritarian party until the late 1980s -- look up the White Terror. The party behind it, the Kuomintang, only finally lost their uninterrupted grip on power in the early 2000s, and they're still a force in the country. So yeah, lovely place, feels stable and law-abiding, but personally I was very surprised at how very short a time they've spent as an actual reasonable democracy.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty years (and those who survived that were those that co-operated), and then after a brief interlude has spent seventy years as a client of the United States. It's culturally a lot less Chinese than you might think.
(This isn't necessarily a defence of the original statement, but your criticism missed the mark.)
Taiwan also can be a labyrinth where rules are (seemingly deliberately) vague enough that their interpretation and enforcement will depend on which person you ask on which day, and many, many people quietly do whatever they feel like doing, content that most of the time it will not be punished, and apparently of the belief that what is not caught is not wrong.
There is a theory that China oscillates between Confucian and Legalist poles of philosophical governance and has done so since the Qin dynasty, 2300 years ago. Xi is taking China into the Legalist direction (rigid adherence to the diktats of the leader).
Minor quibble, Vietnam has always been anxious about/wanted an ally against China. At the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh temporarily welcomed the French back in so that the Chinese would leave. After the Vietnam war, Vietnam basically allied with the USSR against China. Deng launched a punitive invasion of Vietnam in 1979. After the Soviets collapsed, the US was the logical next choice for outside protector. I'm sure this nonsense over islands hasn't helped, but they always want someone to protect them from China. It's not all Xi's fault.
Interestingly, there's a similar dynamic where Cambodia constantly wants an outside ally as protection against Vietnam.
In the main art museum of Ho Chi Minh city, there are three levels. Level one starts with antiquity, then make a 1000 years jump over all the period of Chinese domination as if it never happenned. Level 2 and 3, though, are entirely devoted to propaganda paintings from the war against the USA.
I had an interesting, completely random chat with a Vietnamese military officer in Hanoi. At one point I asked him why they don't hate Americans, and he mentioned a Ho Chi Minh quote that has stuck with me. The substance was: if America won against Vietnam, they might rule for 10 years. But if China had its way, it would rule for 1000 years. So basically, the establishment there has decided to forgive and forget what the US did because we're, if not the lesser evil, at least the less relevant evil.
I couldn't find a quote exactly like that online, but this one is attributed to him:
“You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
> Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.
Right. The mechanism here is that they were told that being an engineer was necessary to get to power. So the people who were social climbers got engineering degrees. The flow is not power to engineers. It's the powerful to engineering programs.
> This isn’t a great answer to the question “how autocratic was pre-Xi China”? In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding). I also don’t get what it meant for some Chinese leaders to be better at pursuing their policy agenda than others: what levers did they pull? How did they quash dissent?
What's an autocracy? The CCP has never been, and is not now, a government where the central government is expected to control everything down to the finest details. Instead the cadres are instructed to understand the goal and spirit of the instructions (they have a lot of study sessions) and to implement them as best suits their locality. Mao was very big on this as a criticism of the USSR and its bureaucratic formalism. This kind of looks like federal, local government. But the thing is the idea is not that the local government does things on their own. The idea is that the local government serves as a tool of the central administration. For example, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party of Smalltown is not that they represent Smalltown to the Party. It's that they represent the Party to Smalltown. They are explicitly instruments of Party control.
China has never had separate power bases. The factions were always at least formally obedient to central authority. They certainly didn't act as a check or balance on central authority. They would have been horrified by the idea that the Communist Party could fight itself or have any kind of insubordination like that. The system was, and is, set to prevent that. On the other hand, the ability to gain genuine support from key CCP officials and from the party in general matters for the effectiveness of your policies.
On the other hand, if you're the leader and you say, "let's get steel production higher," then a combination of will and competence and interest by local cadres is going to matter a lot. If you can play the game, get them onboard, etc then you'll do well. If not, well, they won't disobey. But they won't go the extra mile either. When people say Hu was not as strong a leader what they meant was that he was less capable of getting the average cadre on board or playing oligarchal games to win support. So everyone obeyed him but he wasn't able to get as much done as effectively.
Also, keep in mind that patronage networks can shift. My understanding is that if you upset your subordinates too much they can jump ship. Basically, the two way street in China is that patrons compete to attract clients and clients compete to receive rewards from patrons. Someone who doesn't sufficiently reward their clients, especially if it's because of a personal flaw rather than a lost power struggle, will find people bleeding out of his patronage network and into competing patrons'.
> Of these, I find the second hypothesis - good timing - the most plausible. Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power. This can create reform tensions which is part of what Xi, by rolling back reforms, wants to resolve.
> During earlier parts of his reign, Xi deliberately left a small fraction of the public square untouched; he seemed aware of the “dictator’s information problem” where nobody would tell him when things are going wrong, and he valued public protests as a way to find corrupt officials and other problems requiring his attention. He’s since backed off on this and just started censoring everything.
China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group. So, for example, supposedly the entire Congress delegation of Fujian can talk freely with each other without fear. But notably not with other delegations or in public or in private apart from the group.
It's a clear attempt to prevent national level opposition and to particularize it by region and control information flow. But that's their solution as it stands. Xi's actually ramped these periods up. He's also started to distribute powerful people into these dialogue communities so they get more genuine information. For example, Xi now represents Mongolia because he wants more genuine information on the frontier.
> By its own standards, Xi’s centralization campaign has succeeded: other factions have been marginalized, corruption has decreased, and society toes the party line more closely than ever. His other efforts are more dubious.
His other efforts are irrelevant. Xi's first stated goal is to keep the CCP in control of China and loyal to ideological doctrine. I've seen nothing in his actions that imply he's not telling the truth there. His goal, as he's stated, is to build Mao-Xi style Early Socialism in China, effectively a form of controlled and directed capitalism that will lead to a smooth transition to real socialism down the line.
Of course, the issue is that capitalism produces wealthy capitalists, celebrities, and other modes of production that tend (in the Communist mind) to produce bourgeois government. Xi was, I suspect, concerned that Party members were becoming capitalists so he severed that link pretty severely. But there's still the issue that that means CCP members are both more powerful and poorer than China's business elite and that the fusion that was ongoing has been, if anything, reversed. Of course, China has a simple way to keep these people in line: a police state. Actresses and billionaires and the like are imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. Enough that I think, especially for businesspeople, it's starting to produce a downward pressure where incentives are to be successful but not too successful. I don't have any broad evidence for this. But I at least think I'm observing that behavior.
So graduates of Tsinghua University suddenly became better communists than graduates of Peking University? And conveniently right around the same time the former became adept at playing the patron-client game?
As I said, patronage and pragmatic concerns do play a role. But ideology plays an even bigger one. Plenty of red princes are not in power right now.
Also, that is exactly what happened because the definition of "good at Chinese communism" is a moving target. As Xi and his allies' though became accepted as mainstream the definition of ideal changed to increasingly resemble them and what they thought.
I'll never stop being astounded at liberal Westerners who seriously think that they can understand Chinese governance without reference to any sincere belief in communism, Marxism, or the Leninist party-form. As if a people as pragmatically hard-nosed as the Chinese would maintain this enormous system of Marxist ideological production that nobody allegedly believed in for seemingly no purpose at all.
It reminds me of Sam Harris's observation of liberal Westerners' total mental block against comprehending that Muslims actually believe in their religion.
Just hypothetically, let's say that Harvard suddenly gets embroiled in a massive PR fiasco and the national media narrative starts to shift towards "Harvard is notably racist", and Yale for reasons comes out looking good in this narrative.
In a decade or so, the Anderson Coopers and Barack Obamas will come much more from Yale and much less from Harvard.
Side note: my father in law is Xi's age and came from Beida, and he was a serious nuclear physicist who came to the US and stayed for "teh science". I've asked him about this, and he has said that at that time, Peking was the school that took engineering seriously and Tsinghua was the school that took politics seriously.
Nevertheless (on the engineering thing) having a leadership that has to go through these engineering courses will lead to smarter leaders than in the west.
Not necessarily. Scott made it sound like engineering courses in China were much easier than in America, and many can chest their way through. Second, American Leadership has about as many lawyers as China has engineers, and I am not convinced that one requires more intelligence than the other. I could see an argument that China leaders have more quantitative intelligence and less verbal intelligence, based on the degrees, but I would not assume there is significant difference in general IQ.
The average students attending top engineering and law schools have similar IQs if you measure by SAT score. The average SAT score for an MIT undergraduate is 1535 and for a Yale law school student it's 1515. Comparing undergrads to law school students isn't apples-to-apples, but if there was a big difference in IQ then the average SAT scores would be farther apart.
When I became a lawyer I was shocked at how incredibly poor public speakers most lawyers are. Unless you're a public defender or something, even full-time litigators don't spend nearly enough time in the courtroom to actually be very good at it. Your average high school debate team probably has more poise and confidence in front of an audience than your average lawyer.
Right. To the extent that “graduates of top law schools” in the US might not always seem like the sharpest people (and I think that’s easy to overstate), it’s because they operate on the same sort of patronage who-do-you-know and how-much-can-they-donate that Chinese engineering schools apparently do.
That depends on how much added value you think engineering courses provide. Remember, a lot of these people are politically connected and went to universities in the middle of the Cultural Revolution prior to China's big boom in engineering. I have no doubt Xi and the rest have read a lot more science textbooks than Joe Biden. But they've never really practiced engineering and if there was some kind of filter (on entrance exams, on grades in courses) it was probably never applied to them.
For example, Xi got in on the Communist equivalent of class affirmative action and spent a lot of time dealing with politics and learning about Marxism. He's wrote a lot of Marxist theory and not too much about engineering.
I’ve read some of his works and speeches. He’s got a broad educational background, in western and eastern philosophy. In fact he’s read people like Milton Friedman, and in his speech on philosophy
(a chapter in the book i read) he recommends people like Locke, and Hayek along with leftwing philosophy and Chinese thought. He doesn’t read much like a Marxist.
Which book did you read? Because he tones it down for foreign audiences. Though even there it's still there.
But yeah, Communists are obsessed with economics so of course they read opposing arguments. When asked to name his favorite people to read he named two Marxists, a guy from ancient China, and a German jurist. He writes a lot about historical materialism and while he compares it to ideas like Hayek's he always comes out on the Communist side of things. Some people say this is all a cynical lie. I just don't believe them. I think most Communists actually are Communists.
All of which gets away from the point: Locke and Hayek are not engineers or normal parts of engineering programs!
The book is volume 2 of the “xi jinping governance of china”. A real physical book too, since it’s not on kindle. Derived from internal speeches, to my knowledge. Fairly dry stuff, but he’s far from being a doctrinaire communist. Try reading Stalin for that, he was a true believer.
If you mean "The Governance of China Vol. 2" then that's specifically made for foreign audiences and most of the speeches and pieces are to foreign audiences. Xi is a doctrinaire Communist because he literally wrote the doctrine he follows...
Really, all utopias? I don’t think that engineers or scientists dominated the Marxist left, rather engineering courses and students were the more conservative elements in universities in the west. Or at the very least politically agnostic. I believe that still holds, in so much as theres any conservatism left.
Engineering is an applied science, generally about what is practicable. Utopianism is generally impractical.
Yes, all Utopias afaict. Feel free to name one that didn't believe those assumptions.
And the raison d'etre of the command economy is that needs could be determined "scientifically" and resources efficiently distributed by the "scientific economist" technocrat class. Heck, was it Brazil that had that uber-cool Mission Control-esque command center where economists could read reports in real time and issue commands to the factories?
Anything can call itself scientific. Marxism is about as scientific as astrology, and Christian Science isn't science either.
As for technocratic economism, that also exists in the West, and I personally don't find non-marxist economics to be scientific either, it doesn't pass the test of fallibility and is driven by ideology.
"engineers or scientists dominated the Marxist left,"
I got curious: What about the Soviet leadership who tried to implement Marxism in the one country? Summary of Wikipedia bios after Stalin:
Khrushchev: Minimal schooling prior the party career, metal worker. After civil war, a technical college drop out, but in charge of increasingly big engineering-related projects (first mines, later managed building of Moscow Metro).
Brezhnev: Metallurgical engineer. As a rising party official, in charge of agricultural projects, missile and nuclear arms programs.
Andropov: Water Transport Technical College, then politics and KGB.
Chernenko: Only political training (?).
Gorbachev: Law degree. Considered unusual, because law wasn't prestigious. Second degree, agricultural production, and finally a PhD, in sociology.
Fascinatingly, everyone before Gorbachev was born between 1895-1914.
Once a system is in place you would hire engineers. Are engineers in the west pre deposed to Marxism, or radicalism compared to social “scientists”. Obviously not.
Considering all the failed attempts to perfect society by banning demon rum, the devil's lettuce, degenerate art, private property, marriage, etc it seems like people are very poor at identifying solutions to purported problems. And considering that people don't agree on which things are even problems in the first place (see: gun ownership)...
That people are (sometimes) bad at solutions doesn't mean that problems should not be attempted to be solved. Also you cherry picked failures and ideological minefields. We have in fact solved lots of problems, either through the government or the government with private enterprise, or private enterprise.
If intelligence is heritable and low intelligence people aren't good at stuff necessary for the creation and maintenance of safe, prosperous societies, what's the "solution" to low intelligence populations creating poor, unsafe societies?
If we drop Copenhagen ethics, we have the following options to choose from:
A) good culture that lets low intelligence populations build something safe and posperous; this has precedent in every functional traditional society on Earth
B) intelligence augmentation via gene editing (soon to be widely available)
C) classic eugenics, if you like wearing Hugo Boss and goose stepping
D) do nothing and let poor unsafe societies be poor and unsafe
This is just silly. Even assuming engineers are smarter than lawyers, this would be 100% product of selection (into college programs), not a product of engineering instruction.
> Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power.
This claim is surprising to me, what are some examples of Xi favoring Ideological Communist Norms against Power-Consolidation Strategies?
I usually assume that Power-Consolidation models of political agents will hold the greatest explanatory power in the most political systems without strongly decentralized political incentives (democracy with a strong middle class) and norms against consolidation (free voting, organization, and speech norms). China's middle class doesn't have any meaningful political power compared to liberal democracy's middle class. China's 'anti-consolidation norms' don't mean much if you always disperse any other powers that try to consolidate. This is why I think Scott's Power Consolidation model of CCP ruling class is accurate. Would you disagree with these points?
> China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group.
Dang, thank you for the terrifying details of open discussion in China. Anyways, I think by 'genuine' you simply mean getting feedback on "strategically bad business policies". However I think Scott 'dictator's information problem' is talking more about getting feedback on "power-consolidation efforts that threaten your own". For example, I'm sure no one is currently going to the business open forum policy discussions saying things like "Hey, I hear Taiwan is pretty nice. Maybe we should try democracy?"
Vietnam and China had a brief war in 1979, right as Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his power. Vietnam is a strong regional power, so they're a natural proxy/ally for the US against China.
Doesn't seem too surprising there's tension there..
Also, good book on Deng is the one by Ezra Vogel. Gives a good sense of power dynamics in 1970-1990 China.
I refuse to believe that "Economy" is a real surname. Surely this is a case of a nom de plume chosen for the subject matter, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Dancer
Hmm, I was mostly responding to the idea that Economy isn't a real surname and is instead a nom de plume, but I'm sorta coming around to the OP being said somewhat in jest so probably I shouldn't have butted in.
But just to be clear the surname Oikonomou seems to be a fairly popular name in Greece[1] and there's nothing particularly strange about it's English transliteration being found in Greek-Americans.
Their name is oikonomos (steward, manager, head of household) not oikonomia (economics, management).
Oikonomia comes from oikos (household, family, private area as opposed to public) and nomos (literally "distribution/divide/allocate" but also used to mean arrangement or rules). So oikonomia is the practice of arranging private affairs. An oikonomos is someone who does so, usually because they're the head of the family but also on behalf of others.
The name approximates "Steward" or "Freeman" in English.
Greek is a very, very old language. Consider the probability that "economics" comes from a Greek word that was already in use as a family name for generations.
From whence oikos, "household" which encompasses the family itself, the house it dwells in, and the family's property. It is the basic unit of Greek society.
The oikonomos ("house ruler") is the head of the household, who manages the property and all the affairs of the family.
Over time, this term becomes the title for a role in politics, religion and commercial affairs as a manager/treasurer. Or steward, such as Denethor. Down the line, the "economy" is what the "economist" manages, and then we get the commonly understood use of the word.
Related: oikoumene, the "inhabited/known world" which becomes a term meaning "civilisation" and then becomes a worn-down version that also gets Latinised as "oecumene/ecumene" to refer to what is broadly termed "Christendom" and hence "ecumenism" which refers to the relationships between the Christian Churches/denominations.
But then, that would be an ecumenical matter!
EDIT: Look at the family name of the House of Stuart, which came from the same hereditary occupation:
"The House of Stuart, originally Stewart, was a royal house of Scotland, England, Ireland and later Great Britain. The family name comes from the office of High Steward of Scotland, which had been held by the family progenitor Walter fitz Alan (c. 1150). The name Stewart and variations had become established as a family name by the time of his grandson Walter Stewart."
Had Walter FitzAlan been Greek, his family name would likely have been Anglicised as "Economy" in the same way.
I can't resist adding a useless comment here: my own username has an etymology originating in the Greek for "raven" and both the OP, Tossrock's, and my icons are corvids.
Looking it up, if the name were given as an equivalent in English usage, rather than directly anglicised, it would be something along the lines of "Stuart/Stewart":
"Americanized form of Greek Economos ‘steward’, or of the patronymic form Economou."
Would you find "Elizabeth Steward/Stewart/Stuart" a more believable name?
Dr. Economy was married in a Greek Orthodox church according to her NYT wedding announcement:
"Elizabeth Charissa Economy, an associate fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was married yesterday to David Michael Wah, a vice president in the investment banking division of CS First Boston. Both work in New York. The Rev. Demetri Kantzavelos performed the ceremony at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago."
I will note that Venice put a *lot* of effort into preventing capture of its internal elections, primarily by heavy use of sortition (the idea being that bribes were inevitable but with enough randomisation bribing *enough* people would become prohibitively expensive)
Honestly we should bring back sortition. Replace the upper houses. Select 100 people. Make it illegal to bribe ( or fund them). Aware them a pension on completion. They can vote on legislation but maybe not originate legislation.
Was Mao an autocrat throughout his time as Paramount Leader? When I was reading about the history of China since the revolution a few weeks ago, it had seemed like there was a period after the Great Leap Forward when Mao had become mostly a figurehead, but then his cult of personality became useful to the Party, and the Cultural Revolution happened, and he became as powerful as he had ever been in his last few years.
I don't know Chinese Communist history nearly as well as Soviet history, but my impression is that Mao tired of being sidelined by Zhou Enlai and other leaders and initiated the Cultural Revolution to retake power which he held to his death. Mao was like Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution, and if the Gang of Four had defeated Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death, mainland China could well have continued enduring massive purges and other self-inflicted wounds every decade or so to the present day.
I thought that corruption was precisely the point of Belt and Road. You go in, promise to shower the local leadership with cash, infrastructure, and jobs, to be repaid at some later date. They embezzle the money like they're supposed to. Then you come back a few years later and say, "Hey, remember that money we gave you ? Remember how we said it was a loan ? Guess what, first payment's due now, but we'll take your port as collateral if you prefer". So the head honcho gives them the port... and the iron mine... and the plantation... and whatever else they need. China builds some military bases on the property, then moves on to the next target. It's a win-win situation for everyone but the peasants, but who cares about them ?
Yes and no. They did that at the start, but they're at the point now where they're basically just deferring/forgiving loans. The hard truth is that they just don't need that many podunk ports or iron mines in remote parts of the world.
Right, my point is, they don't need podunk ports; they need military bases and puppet regional dictators, and the infrastructure loan scheme is a way to gain both.
>they need military bases and puppet regional dictators
What for? China doesn't strike me as being interested in the sort of global power projection wielded by the US, that seems like a projection of US foreign policy interests onto China.
China is building a base in the Solomon Islands. What possible legitimate (e.g. security) purpose would this serve? The only possible explanation for this is they want a military base in Australia's backyard in case Australia has something to say about China bullying its pacific neighbors.
Of COURSE China are interested in global power projection, it's just that so few countries trust them and would see a Chinese base as nothing more than a way of getting on the bad side of the US. Whereas most foreign US bases are in countries who want them there as a form of security.
This is sort of true but I do think there's a lot of Hanlon's Razor in this. A lot of people, not just in the West but also in China, have a persistent tendency to WANT to believe that economic development of poor countries can be rapidly achieved by combining local labor with outside capital and technical expertise to construct infrastructure and large industrial projects. I.e., that the Marshall Plan as an idea is just as applicable to a place that has been poor since the Stone Age as a rich country that recently had its infrastructure bombed out by B-17s. And that This Time is Different because the corrupt idiots who sabotaged all the past economic development initiatives along these lines are definitely gone this time.
I strongly feel like the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor. I did a book review in the SSC comments a few years back, but I'll do a summary here:
Basically - China pre-Xi wasn't a stable system. The patronage network you outlined in this piece has a serious downside: a newly-appointed paramount leader is necessarily at his absolute weakest in terms of influence at the time he is appointed leader. This is because a large part of being paramount leader is the ability to appoint a bunch of people into important positions who will back your agenda. If you're coming into a position where all the important spots were filled by your (likely ideologically-alienated) predecessor, you come in with not that much ability to accomplish much. Conversely, however, the time when you're most powerful as a leader is when you're right on the cusp of being kicked out of power. You've had time to solidify your reign and appoint a bunch of toadies.
Think of this as an exact inverse of the american system. Instead of a honeymoon "mandate" at the start of a term, the Chinese leader has more of a gradual ramp up. Instead of a lame duck period, they have a year or so of basically uncontested rule.
So... if a leader is most powerful right when they're about to get removed, why didn't someone hang onto power before Xi? Well, it's a mix of honest-to-god admiration of Dengism on the part of the former leaders and a shadowy network of retired party officials who still exerted significant sway and could, conceivably, have made life untenable for a would-be emperor. Unfortunately, that network had mostly disolved by the time Xi was facing the boot, so he didn't have to deal with it.
Mostly though, the previous chinese system didn't work. It really weakened the central government and was quickly losing ground to private industry. It was such a flawed system that reform was basically inevitable - either the party would reassert itself through a strong leader that was able to re-centralize power or it would be glasnosted.
I have a theory that may or may not be true that Jiang essentially expected to have the most personal influence in China even after "giving up" the position of President and that this was true up until sometime into Xi's first term. In essence there was only ever meant to be one true ruler.
I think "admiration of Dengism" and "shadowy network" kind of understates the main force holding Jiang back which is that Deng himself was still alive for a good portion of his rule. Had Jiang tried to seize power, Deng could simply have swept back in. Jiang likely had the same influence on Hu, and indeed reports often pin Jiang as the main opposition to Xi - Scott asked why the Shanghai Gang didn't oppose the Tsinghua Gang, but the answer is that they did, but chances are Jiang's power had just waned sufficiently by then that he couldn't do much. And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have.
A longer form version of this comment sounds very interesting. If you have it handy would you mind linking to your prior comment? Or if you don't have it handy, could you verify whether you had the same username back then so I can search for it myself? Thanks
I know why Scott didn't do it, but I would have found the Chinese names less confusing if the tones were indicated. (He didn't do it because the other readers would have been more confused.)
This is a chronic problem with pinyin. Even in China tones are rarely indicated when pinyin is used. If the Vietnamese can do it there is no reason the Chinese can’t as well.
Another option, equally intelligible to those who can't read tones, is to capitalize the entirety of the Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese/Cambodian/Hungarian surname, either on first reference or (more awkwardly) always.
It's helpful with Japanese politics lately. For many years, it has been conventional to transliterate Japanese names in reverse order. This puts the surname last, as with European names. Lately, the Japanese government has stopped reversing the order, but foreign media largely persists. Thus the Japanese government tends to write 'KISHIDA Fumio' to remind us that this is indeed the prime minister commonly known to us as Fumio Kishida.
Not sure that's a nit - it's faithful to the BBC headline, and the BBC article correctly calls him "Mr Yang", so it seems they intentionally elected to use the Chinese name order.
This. What got me when I first went to China is how familiar and comforting in a way the patron-client and general economic system was to me as someone from the deep rural south.
One thing I think is missing from the GDP discussion is the degree to which demographics is destiny. By this measure, China has done above average in terms of growth, even considering its demographics. It is however, set up for a huge slowdown in growth.
If I were an autocratic leader facing inevitable economic headwinds, I'd be consolidating power and locking down decent too. The prosperity carrot used to bargain for unity is going away. Without a carrot, what is there but a stick?
Check out this animated plot I made of gdp vs demographics for every country with a population >50m.
True, but rapidly accelerating economies tend to have a lot of young people in the wings waiting to be productive. <=15 are an investment in future growth.
Russia and Ukraine (not shown) have the same pattern. There are occasions where non-demographic factors can dominate. Switching from communism to (sort of) capitalism is one. War is another.
Maybe you disagree, but it looks to me like a pretty consistent trend down and to the right. Most countries trace very similar trajectories over different time periods. This is especially true when you get past 10% >= 65 y/o.
A Marxist reading is that the growth slowdown was at least partly deliberate and unforced (leaving aside COVID-19, of course). The Chinese remain as much, if not more, interested in capital accumulation - expanding the mass of assets (even barely profitable) under control of their enormous banks - as in GDP growth. And they're very interested in boosting domestic demand and tech self-reliance in a dirigiste, targeted way.
I don't know whether all this is rubbish according to orthodox macroeconomics, but if the Chinese are deliberately accomplishing other goals at the expense of GDP growth, then it's probably a mistake to judge Xi's performance by that measure.
I am not sure what you mean exactly. Expansion of capital is a part of GDP known as investment. It is usually around 20-25% as it is in the EU and the US, in China it’s over 40%.
Yea and he’s wrong. The recent regulatory frameworks around the Three Bright Lines seeks to limit investment expansion. They’re furiously attempting to evolve past an economy based on real estate speculation.
"""After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top"""
Oversimplifications are usually good, but this one is missing a really critical piece. Everyone also furiously backstabbed each other for several years *before* Mao's death, as they tried to stay a step ahead of the Cultural Revolution he *encouraged* to take them all down.
The Cultural Revolution was zombie movie level scary for people who found themselves up against it. Your doctors and former military officers and powerful people were screamed at and then locked up *and then screamed at while they were locked up* and then taken out to do various important jobs like "take over from the teenagers who have been manning the Russian border because it looks like the Russians may attack". Terrifying doesn't begin to describe it. "Allie Brosh takes a lot of drugs and watches horror movies then intentionally strands herself in the woods at night" is closer.
"""In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding)."""
It's probably the simple answer! It's probably same answer as why they cracked down so hard in Tiananmen Square: abject fear. "In my lifetime, one man has been able to goad the populace into becoming a screaming zombie mob, and they stayed that way for years. Dear Marx, I don't ever EVER want to see that happen again. Deng is right. We have to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again."
Also, Jiang had to be talked out of power to some extent (more than Deng or Hu), but this took place behind closed doors and to my knowledge there has never been any indication that it was a threatening or violent process.
Another interesting tidbit which bears adding, and which I've never been able to square, is this: after being sent down in the Cultural Revolution, Xi ran away and hid, and was arrested and sent back.
Everyone of any standing in his generation was sent down. It's like the fundamental commonality for the entire generation. His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning.
It should be like "Bill Clinton dodged Vietnam" times a hundred. But it never seemed to affect his career.
Is there anyone in the comments who knows more who can explain this?
"His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning."
I doubt he was the only guy who tried it, he's just the biggest name. And local peasants were probably not too happy with having a load of soft-handed city kids who didn't know one end of a cow from the other landed on them and being expected to turn them into useful labour.
Also, if his family were persecuted as described, people may feel he's been punished enough, no need to look for blood from a turnip.
"And local peasants were probably not too happy with having a load of soft-handed city kids who didn't know one end of a cow from the other landed on them and being expected to turn them into useful labour."
Most of the English-language memoirs of the Cultural Revolution are written by the educated youth that went to the countryside, but from what I've gotten from those, this is a reasonable approximation of how the local peasants felt. The educated youth, for their part, were not happy about being taken from their soft city lives and made to live knee-deep in pig shit. Wanting to get the hell out was pretty universal. I can believe that the attitude towards Xi would be more "wish I could've done that" than "screw that guy".
The Soviet Union *never* had decentralized authority after Stalin, except maybe for a few months in 1953 while would-be Stalin successors maneuvered to succeed him. Khrushchev was an absolute ruler, so was Brezhnev, so was Andropov, (Chernenko was a placeholder while maneuvering happened), and then so was Gorbachev. So I'm not sure this comparison makes sense.
It's hard for me to comment about China, just because I'm not a Chinese-speaker, but I kind of suspect that while most of the power is at the very top, which works on patronage, in some of the better-run regions *attempts* are made to run things technocratically. One reason I say this is that, cross-culturally, patronage systems tend to be overwhelmingly male-dominated, but in countries with gender equality women do somewhat better on standardized tests than men. China prides itself on valuing performance on standardized tests highly, particularly post-Deng (and traditionally). And what we see is that...among members of the NPC born before the mid-1980s, men overwhelmingly predominate; among those born after the mid-1980s, a majority are women: https://npcobserver.com/2018/03/10/demographics-of-the-13th-npc/
The easiest explanation for this is that among really young members of the CPC there really is a shift away from patronage towards something like technocracy.
(As an aside, this suggests -- if you extrapolate straight lines out to ridiculousness -- that in two generations or so China might have an overwhelmingly female leadership class, even as its adult population at that point will be very disproportionately male: https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1501955523976974342
A much smaller male majority in South Korea led to a totally serious mainstream political attempt at "Radicalizing The Romanceless", whose candidate actually won the 2022 presidential election. Fascinating to consider China, a few decades from now, having much more public support for a radicalized romanceless movement, but in an authoritarian society where the leaders are all unelected women.)
Also, a good English-language source about the mechanics of the CCP leadership structure and the 2018 NPC here (it's from a random user of this forum, but please trust me that it's illegibly good, like the bloggers from the WebMD post): https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=274337.0
He was able to unilaterally push through reforms in a very short period of time that decentralized the state. He was not able to reverse them.
Nobody knew what the military budget was (I think until academics pieced things together in the 1990s), but that just goes to show that it was mismanaged and disorganized, not that it wasn't deeply centralized.
China was never as centralized as the USSR because Mao thought the bureaucracy and centralization of the USSR was bad. As for the rest of the argument: it relies on the extremely dubious idea that standardized testing leads to membership in the NPC and that you can extrapolate "number of women" to "meritocracy." It doesn't and you can't. The CCP is setting the numbers and one thing they do is try to have a certain number of various ethnic minorities, women, etc.
Also, I think you've misread South Korea. Yes, angry anti-feminist men are a part of the coalition, but it's not because they can't get dates. Or at least that's not the rhetoric. The rhetoric is largely about Communism and the (real) fact that men have to spend two years of their lives in the army and then return to jobs or universities with affirmative action for women. It doesn't help that the last female President of South Korea was corrupt, incompetent, probably made major national decisions due to astrology, and still got a lot of praise from international/feminist groups. (Yes, it's unfair that her failures affect all women. But realistically it was a factor. The astrology thing was especially dwelt on.)
I really think the South Korean feminist movement misstepped by ignoring the effect conscription and the border has on Korean men. But South Korea doesn't have the same issues as China (a lack of women) and China doesn't have the same as South Korea.
The rise in the number of women in the NPC seems to pretty closely track the rise of women in various white-collar professions around the world. Immediately linking that to "meritocracy" is kind of a stretch, sure, but I think it points in that direction. (As a general rule, I think the more the demographics of your elite resemble the demographics of who is successful in white-collar professions, the more meritocratic it probably is, and the less it does so, the less it probably is.)
South Korea has sky-high rates of young men reporting no sex over the last year compared to anywhere else (...though I don't know if this is polled in China). (source: https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/women-dont-want-to-do-it-men-dont-have-anyone-to-do-it-with/). I don't know which direction the causation the widespread anti-feminism goes -- whether no sex leads to anti-feminism, which is what I suspect, or whether anti-feminism leads to no sex (which I think you're saying?), which might also be plausible.
I do think that both are downstream of a ludicrous and unnatural sex ratio, that China's sex ratio is much worse than South Korea's and still getting even worse (though I think the second derivative has turned; the peak of male births relative to female births happened in ~2015, though there are still far more male births than female births), and that if you sort of extrapolate straight lines out a few decades China will have a largely female elite in a country dominated by dissatisfied men. This seems interesting if nothing else.
> (As a general rule, I think the more the demographics of your elite resemble the demographics of who is successful in white-collar professions, the more meritocratic it probably is, and the less it does so, the less it probably is.)
That's an interesting position. It at least makes sense. Though there's an issue with the application: your statistics are wrong. The NPC outperforms most professions like lawyers/judges, military officers, engineering directors, etc. The most prestigious professions with a lot of women like doctors are closer to gender parity.
> I don't know which direction the causation the widespread anti-feminism goes -- whether no sex leads to anti-feminism, which is what I suspect, or whether anti-feminism leads to no sex (which I think you're saying?), which might also be plausible.
Sort of. What I'm saying is that anti-feminism and feminism can be understood as gender dominant sociological coalitions that are making contradictory demands of society. Painful, dangerous conscription creates and strengthens male coalitions and means society requires significantly more extraction from men than women. This gives them a legible common class interest which is inflamed by feminist discourse about their privilege. Meanwhile women lack a similar forced coalition and while they're equally inflamed they have less bargaining power than the men the state needs as soldiers.
This isn't inherent, of course. SK Feminists could have insisted women get conscripted too which would have made any coalitions formed more cross gender. I still think this would have led to anti-establishment youth coalitions but they'd manifest less as anti-feminist because women would be involved too. Or they could have fought conscription. But they were shortsighted in my view and now there's a growing reactionary backlash that they aren't handling very well.
It's that quote about injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere. In this case, uncompensated extraction that feminists didn't care about because it was the "wrong" gender has created an anti-feminist coalition that helped elect a president who posts shitlord memes about women and has abolishing a bunch of women's only programs as a campaign promise. (Though, to be clear, I don't think it's feminists' fault that happened. It's just they played their hand poorly.)
> and that if you sort of extrapolate straight lines out a few decades China will have a largely female elite in a country dominated by dissatisfied men. This seems interesting if nothing else.
I doubt it. The CCP is only about 30% female and has huge structural privileges for the military which is overwhelmingly male. I do think women are on the rise in China. But the idea that women are going to dominate the elite seems a bit far fetched.
CIA dossier on Xi by close friend said he was incorruptible by money. He's a princeling whose sister was prosecuted to death during the cultural revolution and got sent down to the countryside only to come back a believer. LKI, who I'd categorize as preeminent PRC watcher with relations with 5 generations of PRC leaders compared Xi to "Nelson Mandela calibre" of person. These points rarely get mentioned when assessing Xi.
He's enough of a political maverick to consolidate sufficient power for massive corruption crackdown and push through military modernization as well as eliminate thorough US/western influence (see CIA debacle, domestic NGO laws). That's massive. On corruption, CCDI has disciplined 1M+, even Xi didn't start off with that many enemies. But he was competent enough to accumulate enough power to step on that many toes, something Hu/Deng couldn't do.
Incidentally crackdown among military corruption + modernization has actually evolved PLA into fairly competent force, at least enough for US to rank PRC as pacing power. Add in building SCS bases while US distracted in ME and Xi has massively improved PRC strategic posture. Note alternative to Xi was Bo, whose relationship/patronage with brass made such transformation (IMO) not feasible. Again, feat Xi's predecessors and alternatives wasn't capable of.
Dismantling CIA network, neutering foreign NGOs and ramming through NSL in lawless HK is self explanatory. It's ridiculous HK existed so long as spy capital of Asia with NSL state of exception that enables unfettered treason. Securitization in XJ, however you feel about methods, stopped terrorism completely. Repressing less than 1% of minorities for domestic security is no shit correct political decision.
I was initial Xi doubter, he sounds and looks dopey as hell, and frankly seemed too simple/stupid. Yet his achievements have been remarkable for PRC interests. He was the right man at the right time. Keep in mind US pivot to Asia under Hu. Xi inherited a US already orienting towards PRC containment and have played most of the cards right. Staggeringly so. Mao unified country, Deng built it, Xi looks to be securing it against the most powerful hegemony in world history. And he's doing a surprisingly good job, at least more than most who follow PRC geopolitics for the last couple decades would have thought. Seems like the right man to FDR a 3rd term to navigate PRC in a "world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century".
As for development:
>Of those, China is least impressive (so far)
PRC has done best considering scale and external development environment. Other east asian tigers had support/security umbrella of US at peak hyperpower/hegemon. Singapore was city state on relatively easy mode. PRC climbed out of hole while being sanctioned by west, had to build own indigenized nuclear/space/weapons etc industries. At end of day, PRC population means PRC can't get away with specializing in a few industries to uplift population, they have to cultivate every industry and even then there's not enough global demand to uplift everyone. For reference peak PRC manufacturing employed something like 300M... all the Tigers combined and more. There was/is simply too many people. To be blunt, other tigers got A+ playing on "I'm too young to die", PRC got A- playing on "nightmare". They're not even in the same league considering all aspects of nation building and geopolitics. US satraps and countries that align with US interests do well, including authoritarian ones. News at 11. The only country PRC should be measured against is India... which speaks for itself.
China had plenty of support and favorable trade conditions from the US for a long time to play it off against USSR and in hopes that it would eventually liberalize.
Triangular diplomacy maneuvered PRC in position to get _better_ trade conditions vs active sanctions/embargos by western bloc during cold war. Meanwhile, USSR did provide support to PRC, but not on same tier like "satraps" like JP/KR/TW received from US/west, i.e. TW/KR didn't get any severe sanctions post white terror or gwangju massacre, but CCPs shoots some students and no more western weapons/tech while USSR was geopolitically uneasy neighbour/partner. Favourable trade conditions is unconditional support despite atrocities, which PRC was rarely immune from. Even PRC's WTO accession was extra onerous due to additional US lobbying. There was period of favourable looking the other way late 90s early 00s after MFN and good relations while US blind by end of history goggles from USSR collapse as US thoroughly infiltrated PRC and cultivated influence via NGOs. Still didn't take too long relative to US foreign policy speed before recognizing PRC growing too fast, so HClinton queues the pivot. Post war PRC/west relations is roughly ~30 years of severe containment, ~20 years of open door policy with reduced containment, ~10 years of relatively favourable trade conditions, and back to containment for last ~10 years. Favourable periods existed, but not for a long time. IMO a future retrospect will show it was blink in historic terms, but PRC was fortunate to have modernized during peak globalism and connectivity enabled rapid indigenous catchup given typical protectionist policies and PRC scale that briefly caught US off guard. The favourable window was narrow, and Xi arrived / preparing for world where it was already closing.
Long-term resident of China (20 years) here. This was very good, actually descriptive of the China I know, unlike 99% of western media reports.
On the censorship issue, I want to complicate the picture a bit. I think all descriptions of increasing Chinese censorship are deeply flawed, because they fail to account for the massive general increase in information that the internet has brought.
So: "...to people who grew up in Hu’s China, Xi’s regime feels like a clear step backwards."
I don't know about the regime, but I have access to a lot more information now than I did under Hu, because the internet is better.
"The censoring of Southern Weekly, previously a well-regarded Chinese newspaper, is emblematic"
Sure - but the Southern Weekly and others in the Southern stable, while "well-regarded," were never actually good. What has happened is this: factional debate in China used to sometimes happen in the newspapers. It was exciting to read when it happened. Western observers salivated at the access it gave them to current Chinese political thought, which is usually very opaque. But it was always opinion within the current acceptable range of political possibility. No one who thought the CPC should not be in power ever wrote in the Southern Weekly.
About 10 years ago (I think), that kind of newspaper debate stopped. It went online, private, and into other channels. Western commentators sighed, and said, oh dear, the newspapers have been censored. But that's not really what happened: they were always very heavily censored. Now they're just heavily censored media where nothing of import is talked about.
As to total censorship: the internet is routing around. The outbreak of Covid is a classic example. The news got out, really fast. Much faster than the authorities wanted. And they cracked down later, notoriously jailing the doctor who broke the story. But the story still got out. That was basically unthinkable under Hu. (Example: the city where I live, Xiamen, was the site of one of China's few successful environmental protests, back in about 2007. I watched them march in the streets to stop a chemical plant being built near our city center. That news never got out - never reached other people, never got into the media.)
So the real censorship landscape is: increasing censorship, yes; but failing to keep up with the internet, so overall we are getting more information, not less.
The same applies here:
"Universities that previously had a long leash..." universities never had a long leash. This is rose-tinted nonsense. Any prof who had genuinely radical/democratic/non-communist views would have been weeded out at any time during the last 40 years. This is just more people going to university, so censorship has become more visible.
The other thing I would like people to know about China right now is that Xi's anticorruption campaign has been very effective for ordinary day-to-day stuff. When my older son was born 15 years ago, we stuffed cash in an envelope and gave it to the doctor to make sure my wife was treated well in the hospital. We don't do that any more.
(There's still plenty of corruption, running through personal acquaintance networks, but the cash bribery part of ordinary transactions has been effectively stamped out in my middle-class city. Teachers react with horror if you try to buy them a gift; we recently had a house refitted and the man who came to check whether our gas main was properly routed wouldn't accept a bribe, so we had to install an extra door.)
From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better.
Obligatory disclaimer: Anything positive I say about China or its government should not be understood to mean that I support its censorship, oppression, or imprisonment of innocent people.
This fits well with my own impressions. I lived in Beijing in 1998-2001 and gone back often since. I remember Jiang Zemin jokes, and especially those about his wife, who was rather ugly and physically awkward. I wonder if Xi gained an edge by marrying a graceful singer
Westerners have a really tough time modeling the first derivative of improvements in emerging markets. I’m not sure why it’s so hard.
The number of people elevated from abject poverty in China is just staggering. That counts for a lot and certainly more than not being able to visit some websites you even never knew existed.
Sure, it's great, the same could be said for the Soviet Union. But it likely would have happened in a hypothetical Nationalist Mainland China, and even better. See how developed Taiwan became under Nationalist China, much faster and better than Mainland China under Communist China.
Great comment, really useful to hear first hand accounts like this. I do have one question - if you didn’t speak English, would you still have easy access to information outside of China?
Technically, it wouldn't be any different. I bought my VPN from a Chinese person who I talk to on WeChat, and using that VPN I can (usually) access uncensored media in Chinese published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere. And of course, Chinese people can travel and visit other countries fairly freely, and many of them study abroad. Where I live, lots of people have family connections to Taiwan, and you can quite easily find a Taiwanese person to have a conversation with. (However, a lot of Taiwanese people who live and work here may be (a) pretty pro-China anyway, and (b) very careful about what they say, because they don't want to lose their visas.)
Of course, if you don't speak English, there's lots of content that you'll miss out on. There just isn't as much good stuff written in Chinese, but there's still enough for anyone who wants to pursue it.
Could it be that the `outer layers' are not entirely rubber stamps, and that the `standing committee' has total power, but ONLY within some range of options that will broadly be seen as legitimate by the outer circles of the governing apparatus? And within that range, they can pick whatever policy options (or personnel) they like, and the outer circles will dutifully rubber stamp it, but if the standing committee and/or paramount leader try to implement policies that the outer layers of the onion view as fundamentally illegitimate, then there is a constitutional crisis and maybe the entire standing committee gets defenestrated? (In principle - the politburo is smart enough that they never totally exceed their mandate in this way). If this setup is true (and it seems plausible to me), then the standing committee in fact does not have absolute power - it is constrained by a broader consensus on a range of `legitimate policy options,' and this consensus can be shifted, but presumably only slowly, so it is not sufficient to get a clear majority of cronies on the standing committee in order to seize absolute power, you also need to steer the consensus in the outer layers of the onion to a point where `Xi seizes absolute power' is seen as being a legitimate thing to do.
And as a corollary to that: an `anti-corruption' purge that doesn't touch any standing committee members but does (selectively) purge a whole bunch of people in the outer layers of the power structure could be an effective way to shift the consensus in the outer layers to a place where `paramount leader takes absolute power' comes to be seen as a legitimate thing for the paramount leader to do.
and John Schilling's comments on the power of legitimacy to constrain the actions of agents, and thinking that probably a lot of this discussion is also relevant for understanding the power dynamics within the CCP.
Reminds me of a anthropology text I read, where the anthropologist observed that the head man was usually careful to make requests of other tribal members that he knew they would be likely to follow.
No, this definitely isn't right. We know this because the central government has made a number of shocking turns, and they all get rubber-stamped through. The move away from communism to "some people may get rich first" was the biggie; the decision to work with America was another; joining the WTO was another, massively controversial; and Xi's anti-corruption purges is another, hugely disruptive to existing elites and institutions. They all passed because the center wanted them. The outer layers have no power; they are literally chosen from among the people who will assent to whatever the center says.
There must be a bunch of people whose opinion matters, but they are not, to the best of my knowledge, represented by any particular political institution. I guess they are an informal network.
I guess this is still not entirely unrestricted. The supreme leader can't just make 50 controversial executive order and have them all rubber-stamped. It reminds me of some game where you have to pay "legitimacy" or "prestige" points to sign a new rule.
In the faction discussion I was somewhat surprised the military faction was not mentioned. The sabre-rattling against Taiwan helps a lot in keeping them happy and in some ways they are the most important of all factions.
Perhaps Xi's special ability is merely to keep the maximum amount of factions satisfied at once without benefiting China itself in any particular way. And perhaps Xi's goal is little else than personal power, after all he was effectively sent to the gulag as a teenager for the "sins" of his father and may just want to be the one giving orders rather than taking them.
Maybe religion is a tool of dictators to efficiently control their population. Xi never used that, did he?
A friend sent me an interview with an Indian communist. Communists have been decimated in election after election.
This guy was very frustrated. He seemed upset that communism never took off in India like it did in Russia and China. He worshipped Mao, as do all Indian communists. He said rather sadly, that early leaders in independent India, such as Gandhi and Nehru, were a lot trickier than Chiang Kai Shek. He also blamed the " cunning upper castes" in general, for having stopped his utopia from materializing in India.
I'll try to link to this video, if I find it again.
I learned a lot from this post, and loving the dictator book club. May I suggest this charming chap - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sassou_Nguesso - only problem is there are no actual books about him in English.
No discussion of the human rights abuses of China would be complete without a discussion of the horrendous one-child (now two-child) policy. Forced abortion is not a choice. See Women's Right's Without Frontiers (https://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/) for more information.
It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc, America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college' along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines), extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
>The results flatter my biases as a quasi-libertarian: the state-owned companies are much worse than the private ones:
You have a very bourgeois-dominated view of "success", if you measure success by how much the bourgeois gets enriched then sure they are more "successful" but China does not have such an anti-humanist attitude to "success". The purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
"explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college"
If by "anti-democratic," you mean "pro-minority," sure. Otherwise just save money and let all decisions for the US be made by California (then Virginia).
"democracy" as used by the west doesnt mean literal democracy but democratic republics with some absolute restirctions.
I dont have a rose-tinted view of this,and few americans or westerners do. There are all sorts of ways it fails to live up to the ideals.
But... in some sense its surprising that some of th values of liberalism have been conserved, and the US and the "west" really do manage to be "better" in this sense in terms of individual freedoms, diversity of viewpoints, respect for minoroties, etc.
Would you say that since women are the majority of the population, letting only the women vote would be equivalent to the actual system? Or that it was useless to give black people the right to vote since they are a minority in the USA?
Just because you are a minority doesn't mean your vote can't be the tie breaker.
The idea behind those example is to demonstrate that contrary to what Moosetopher says, the vote of almost every american would matter in a normal, direct election, not just those of the dominant category. Trying to convince people has a lot of diminishing return, so the dominant strategy in election is to go campaign everywhere for everyone in the hopes to gain the biggest number of vote possible.
Actually your example goes to my point. Unless you're willing to claim that women and men (as classes) have identical interests and values you're right back to "the majority does what it wants, the minority should shut up and obey."
It sounds like the purpose of SOE's is to provide revenues and jobs to perpetuate the patron/client system. "Enriching the people" sounds like a naive view, frankly.
Trusting the World Bank or the OECD is pretty dangerous when you're interested in the truth, especially when they're talking about SOE in general and not Chinese ones.
Why would they want to be more "competitive" in the bourgeois sense of that term? And why would being "competitive" in the bourgeois sense of that term be something that would happen if you "truly cared" about the fate of the people? Can't governments express their concern in different ways?
Sorry, are you seriously asking why economic efficiency is important for improving the living standards of your populace?
Were Chinese workers better off when Mao was getting them to smelt pig iron in their backyards compared to having private mills pumping out steel on the largest scale in human history?
Yeah that is why Americans were trying to flee to Cuba in self made boats. And why North Korea has to keep people out with land mines and why Venezuela had so many South American refugees fleeing into their country, and that is why East Berlin built that wall.
That is why people from the Soviet Union broke down crying when they saw a fully stocked American grocery store.
To get away from that "bourgeois competitiveness".
>It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc,
Don't say this ideological stuff if you aren't going to substantiate it with concrete examples. Defining capitalism as anti-democratic doesn't help anyone to understand the actual reality.
"America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college'"
Okay, so what? Compared to China, this is still RADICALLY pro-democracy. You're squabbling over decimal places when the difference is orders of magnitude.
>along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines)
How serious? To what extent does this reduce how democratic America is? It's not enough to just repeat talking points, you need concrete metrics. Otherwise, can I say that China is "hypercapitalist" because Chinese billionaires exist? It's not different to what you're doing here.
And gerrymandering along racial lines is perfectly defnisble as a response to political equity dilution through mass immigration facillitation.
>extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
Really? Extreme? By what metric? To what pracitcal extent? Pointing to some well known examples isn't going to cut it, you need to show the actual concrete extent to which this occurs.
Your comment is extrememly low information and extrememly ideological. The fact of the matter is that America is radically democratic compared to China and you've done nothing to prove otherwise.
>We purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
Where is your evidence? Stop just mindlessly asserting things and start providing data to support what you say.
There was a really long yet impressive Chinese article called 客观评价习近平 (Objective evaluation of Xi Jinping) worth reading, it's not as objective as it claims to be, but some of your questions may be answered, you may try the DeepL, the translation is pretty good.
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7822182-the-party is probably the best place to go for an explanation of how the system worked (or didn't) pre Xi. Does a particularly good job exploring the incentives of mid level officials and how that warps the system.
>After trying to atone by self-criticism and the obedient acceptance of ritual humiliation, Xi Zhongxun was demoted to deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang... Having been punished as an individual, with the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 the elder Xi was brought back to Beijing to be punished again as a former member of the party elite: there is a photograph showing him with a placard listing his sins. He was driven and pummelled and kicked down the street with his wife walking alongside to hit and curse him as a revisionist traitor. She must have been convincing: although she was repeatedly beaten during this period, she was not imprisoned, nor did she spend six years digging ditches in Inner Mongolia like her daughter Qi Qiaoqiao, nor was she driven to suicide like Xi Jinping’s half-sister, Xi Heping.
She can claim that all she wants, it doesn't make it remotely true. It's not even really relevant to what Luca said, because 'social media' has little to do with Murdoch media, and American social media is dominated by *anti-white* liberalism today.
But let me guess, you think reasonable opposition to neoliberal mass immigration policies is 'angry white populism', but would be outraged if somebody called Black americans rioting and looting 'angry black nationalism'.
>More people died on that day that on all the BLM protests of the previous year combined
Forbes article on BLM protests: [0]. The title of the article says it all: 14 days, 19 dead.
Bipartisan senate report on Jan 6 riot [2]: claims 7 people died, though I've seen some suggest it should be 9 because of later suicides...
(Side note: I find it amusing that as a left-leaning person I seem to have a far more charitable view of American conservatives than a self-described conservative. Maybe I've gotten into too much of a habit of steelmanning my political enemies that most of these criticisms seem like straw men to me now, lol)
How serious has "white populism" been in Canada and Australia? Perhaps I'm misinformed, but it doesn't look like it has been anywhere near as serious in either of those countries as it has been in the US and UK. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that Ardern's claim is wrong.
Now, this doesn't quite track with "mass immigration" -- Canada and Australia have *higher* levels of immigration than the US today! Instead, it tracks with mass *low-skill* immigration against the will of the people. (Only a powerless fringe opposes immigration of e.g. poor brown IIT graduates.)
In certain circles. theres absolutely conservative social media, which has unfortunately has become obsessed with things that aren't real.
With all the problems with "woke" hyper liberal media, there is at least some factual basis to what they obsess about, even if people largely disagree with the approach, solutions, etc.
Unfortunately popular conservative social media has gone off the rails and is largely dominated by things that have no basis at all in truth, like the idea of an elite conspiracy of pedophiles or vaccines being used to control people.
I mean, objections to wokeness in general is based on real things that are happening, but the modern "conservative" media environment is increasingly dominated by complete fiction that even mainstream conservatives have to play along with.
Opposition to immigration is based on literal nationalism- the ide that people status as citizens or non-citizens of a nation are entitled to different rights.
Protests/riots over racially based injustice are a more diverse coalition of people then "black nationalists."
There are some people who believe in a form of racism that is like nationalism but not exactly the same. A "black nationalist" would believe something like black people in america form a unique group who should have their own nation.
There are definitely groups who see different identity groups as competitors and are against liberal individualism- who claim something that liberal individualism which ideally aims to judge people as individuals is just a mask for "kyriarchy" and that groups will always fight for power and recogniizng that is actually being "woke"- but that isnt the sole or even primary ideology behind BLM protests, and even for groups who believe that, "nationalism" isn't really the right description.
Nationalism has to do with the distinct idea of a nation-state.
Historically it came about from modern states- and the idea that instead of the old way of feudal or imperial governance, groups of people were "nations" who deserve their own state.
The most radically segregationist of "woke ideologies don't seem to focus on the "nation state" concept- they generally are defined by what their against rather then what for for.
I think it needs to be added that China took #1 in external trade (not PPP-adjusted). It's already more influential than USA in trade and USA advantages in influence are non-economic.
An interesting but curious book review in that Marx and "theoreticians" are never mentioned once.
Does Dr. Economy not mention either?
There really wasn't much of anything in the review (and thus I'd gather the book) that is new knowledge that someone wouldn't know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years.
"Universities that previously had a long leash are finding that professors are increasing getting disciplined for teaching non-state-approved courses, and new university hires are now mandated to pass “political correctness interviews” along with having subject-specific qualifications, plus undergo a background check to make sure they never expressed dissenting political opinions.
(I’m not claiming that modern America has any moral standing to object to this, just that it’s bad in an absolute sense)"
I mean...yes, we do? This is operating on an entirely different scale and order than the problems (which I certainly acknowledge exist) with American academia.
Always enjoy these posts. I'm not aware of a good book on MBS but I would recommend The Call by Kritika Varagur (it has a 4.4 on goodreads if you care about that) about the Salafi project from mid-70's-9/11, and the lasting influence since then. It's only like 200 pages and very good.
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the Dictator's Handbook by Mesquita and Smith. It's a good summary of political science research on the dynamics of taking and consolidating power in autocratic regimes (they attempt to expand the scope to democracies too, but I think their analysis is oversimplifying those dynamics a bit).
Some relevant points loosely inspired by the book:
* dictators almost always turn on the people who helped them get into power because those people know how to topple a regime. A dictator wants sycophants whose power flows from the dictator not competent people who have an independent base of power.
* dictators retain power by buying off key powerholders in a country. They can afford to do this better if they personally take a smaller cut of corruption revenue. This means one relatively stable situation is a dictator who personally takes relatively little state revenue but makes the other key players fantastically wealthy. Because any replacement would take a larger cut for themselves, the other players aren't incentivized to change the system.
* always pay attention to who has the loyalty (whether bought or earned) of people with weapons as they're fundamentally the ones who decide who rules
* external competition (either from other factions, social groups, or foreign powers) can reduce internal dissent. If the next leader after Xi would be likely to radically change who has power in China that strengthens Xi in relation to current powerholders.
Doesn't make a difference to the rest of the review, but the first diagram has the Central Committee on the right having authority over the National Party Congress. The second lists the National People's Congress, which in the first diagram is on the left. Are these two different NPCs, and is one of the diagrams mixing them up?
"Partly this is inevitable; economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
China isn't stagnating because of 'the technological frontier.' They're stagnating because of collapsing birthrates and an ageing demography (one of the worst in the world) leading to a shrinking labour force and collapsing domestic demand. (Same thing has happened to Japan and is happening to Korea, the former is just managing the process of decline more gracefully.)
"One alternative to that narrative - I think the gist of the case Noah presents - is that Deng Xiaoping was a genius, Jiang and Hu were pretty impressive too, and Xi hasn’t added anything to their work and may have subtracted from it. I find this pretty plausible."
Deng may or may not have been a genius, but he inaugurated and imposed the one-child policy and his successors failed to notice this was setting up their country for an economic and social suicide for around 40 years. I'm not inclined to judge them very favourably in retrospect. Xi is just inheriting the mess that they bequeathed to him.
Thailand, maybe, but Myanmar and Vietnam are basically at replacement fertility at the moment. (World bank figures for China may also be inflated, since they apparently 'misplaced' a hundred million people from census data- their true birthrate is probably closer to 1.2 children per woman.)
Korea's data is shocking, I'll grant, but they apparently had their own anti-natalist programs back in the 1960s, so it's probably much of a muchness. Same for Thailand, apparently.
To be fair, overpopulation was the existential environmental crisis of its day. Notoriously wrong (but always available for a quote if you need one!) person Paul Erlich Published The Population Bomb in '68. Surely Deng didn't want to be considered a Science Denier.
A 2-3 child policy would have been comprehensible. How senior Chinese policy-makers went four decades without noticing that this was simply going to crush their system is unforgivable.
Banning nuclear and fossil fuels will probably do some serious damage too, but that hasn't stopped various governments from announcing that they'll have it done by next decade. And getting rapturous media praise for doing so.
Oh, I completely agree. But that's its own species of madness and can in principle be corrected in the space of a decade or so once people notice the lights are going out and realise they need to turn old plants back on and/or starting building out nuclear capacity. The greens will have be dragged there kicking and screaming, of course, but dragged they will be.
The damage inflicted by birthrate collapses could take a century to correct, assuming that any given nation survives long enough to correct it.
Nuclear, sure, fossil fuels, not so much. It will cause short term pain for long term gain. It will be cheaper and will stop the flow of money to terrorism funding oil states.
The Chinese population is still increasing. They also still have surplus workers in rural areas who have not yet been allowed into cities (in effect these are effectively the same as a pool of immigrants). The whole “China is doomed because of demographics is wrong headed”. If you replace 800M workers who are not that productive with 700M workers who are much more productive you still grow. As workers transition from fields to factories, and from less productive factories to more productive factories per capita GDP (which is a measure of output not income) will still grow. Anyway the Chinese are actually trying to fix the problem unlike in the west.
Moving workers off of farms and into cities is part of the process that destroyed Chinese birthrates to begin with, since it involved lower-class men and women being (A) physically separated and/or (B) packed into tiny shoebox apartments where there physically isn't room for children while real-estate speculators and the sterile rat-racing consumer class bought second and third apartments to match their lamborghinis. The system is a grotesque hybrid of the worst excesses of both capitalism and socialism. I highly doubt that more of the same will fix the problem at this stage in the game.
I'm aware, but that reversal should have happened the moment fertility dipped below replacement levels, back around 1992, and probably a little before. It's too late now.
To be clear, the fertility situation in many OECD nations is only modestly better, and the western political management class have been sitting on their hands regarding this problem for just as long. They were too busy shuttering nuclear power plants and carving out tax breaks for lesbians.
The situation in many OECD nations, Eastern Europe and much of Asia is far worse. Personally I think that China could turn it around, although nobody has managed that yet. It’s just an increase of 16% or so in births.
China's actual birthrates are considerably lower than the world bank figures if you check out recent news on the topic- in Anhui they've been dropping by 10-20% per year for at least the last 5 years, despite the one-child policy being lifted. The true figure is probably closer to 1.2 children per woman.
Paul Collier is the guy I usually cite on this topic, because I don't want to say that zero migration is always and forever socially optimal, but it's a complex topic and I won't dig into it just now.
I will say that there's no realistic scenario where mass migration can solve the problems of the OECD at this point. The sheer scale of the demographic shortfall is just too large, even from a logistic perspective.
I tend to agree with Noah Smith's assessment that Xi just isn't of the same caliber as Deng was (but not many people are; in terms of scale x competence, Deng was probably the most effective leader of the 20th century). But I do think increasing censorship of Western internet platforms is a good thing, both from a narrow Chinese national interest perspective and from a more universalistic "what-is-good-for-humanity" perspective. From a PRC perspective, China is one of the only countries (possibly the only country) where nationalism and patriotism increase among smarter, younger, and better educated people. Russia, which also has pretensions to independent Great Power status has faced a huge exodus of its smartest young people who are generally more liberal-internationalist. China has avoided that. From a universalist perspective, a separate Chinese internet ecosystem helps insulate China from Western mind-viruses (see my one and only Substack post for a longer elucidation of this), which otherwise tend to quickly spread to the rest of the world via the internet. China is perfectly capable of developing its own mental viruses (see: Taiping Rebellion, and the nuttiest incarnations of Maoism. Both partly derived from Western ideas of Christianity and Communism, but mostly indigenous), but at least they'll be *different* mind viruses. Helps stop one particular set of bad ideas from dominating the entire world through the Anglosphere.
"which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected, never really catch up to developed world standards, and plateau at around the same (absolute) GDP as the USA."
This is something that will be clear in a few years at most. China has to drop to 2-3% growth pretty soon - by or before the decade's end. Are there any prediction markets for this?
It would mean that China would be spectacularly unsuccessful as an Asian nation, as the piece pointed out. The Chinese within China would be the worlds least successful Chinese people. It is true that doctrinaire Marxism might hold them back, its clearly a less efficient economic system, but I can only assume that the communists would reform back to the economics of Deng era if it looked like they couldn't pass the US in GDP. Xi would be gone.
Otherwise I can see why a fairly industrious, smart, and well educated people with a potentially massive internal market would stall in the middle income trap.
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism? Deng Xiaoping was a really smart guy, he put a lot of effort into trying to build a multipolar oligarchy, and . . . it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. Xi just walked in and took over."
I think China may be a particular case. Their history is that it is better to have an Emperor. When you have "multipolar oligarchy", you get the Spring and Autumn Period which leads right into the Warring States period.
You have a choice of being a high-up minister under the Emperor (and running your own agenda to increase your power) or being lord of an independent feudal state, with all the *other* lords of independent feudal states warring with you, plus somebody somewhere is a really *good* lord and general and is getting ambitious about becoming Emperor, starting with taking over your state (and generally chopping your head off in the process).
It's safer and more profitable to be a minister under an emperor. Besides, if the emperor is too incompetent, you can always overthrow him and seize the mandate of heaven for yourself (if you're careful, capable and powerful enough). And Chinese history shows over and over again, separate warring states eventually get conquered and unified under one emperor, like it or lump it. So better not to put up too much of a fight when a new, potential emperor shows up, and that way you can keep your head.
"The Shanghai Gang stuck together and supported its own, and operated kind of as a “political party” “representing” the interests of east coast urban elites."
Take that sentence and tell me it doesn't remind you of at least one Western nation. I certainly find that very applicable to the situation in Ireland, where the complaint generally is that Dublin swallows everything, and if it's not in Dublin then the rest of the country can go hang.
Geographical power bases generally are the way it goes; you can maybe make one, like the university example, that isn't based on geography but it has to be based on *something* everyone has in common, be that the east coast versus hicks from the sticks or membership of Skull and Bones/the Bullingdon Club or whatever.
If you are an east coast elite, it may be valuable to you to have at least one subordinate who is a hick from the sticks, so long as he has influence back in the sticks. Dominic Cummings, for example, was someone without a power base except his own conceit about his own genius, and when it came time to throw him under the (bendy) bus, his bestest pal Boris had no qualms whatsoever. Because Dominic had no power base or no influence to ward off Boris dumping him.
I'm very interested if anyone has some good thoughts or empirical evidence regarding the quote:
>[anit-corruption]...cost China an estimated 1 to 1.5 percent of its annual GDP during 2014 and 2015.
Presumably there are some good effects of lowered corruption as well. That money should not have been purely lost, but held or spent by someone other than party officials. (It's also pretty insane to think that 1%+ of China's GDP was funneling through party official's private hands). Related, and probably harder to measure, I would think that a less corrupt economy would also be more efficient, because contracts would be made for economic instead of corrupt reasons. That may very well have been offset by other choices that made growth worse, as mentioned by Scott.
Is there any reason to think that reduced corruption didn't increase the economy?
I was actually living in Asia during that period. My only comment would be that there was a flurry of capital outflows from the mainland during that time period. It would not at all surprise me if there was a significant GDP hit just from officials offshoring capital.
That would make sense as a one time outflow, thanks. I was looking at it as if 1-1.5% per year was being mishandled, but if that was a reaction using multiple years worth of wealth that happened to show up at a particular time, that is a lot easier to believe.
> When Xi succeeded Hu (2012), he was able to pick up the power-gathering project almost where Jiang left off, with only a little bit of “damage” from Hu’s ruleDuring.
Everyone spends all their time singing the praises of liberal democracy. But have any political scientists (since Machiavelli) spent any time on figuring out the best way to structure and run an oligarchy/autocracy -- assuming you have to have one?
For example, is it structurally better (in terms of producing stability and beneficial policies for the nation) to have ultimate power reside in one Supremo, a small clique, a big committee with subcommittees? Or is it always just luck of the draw as to the personalities and abilities of the people who actually claw their way up the slippery pole of power.
Maybe if you can't have a full-blown democracy a hereditary monarchy is the way to go. Perhaps the Chinese should bring back the Emperor.
Consider India. Political dynasties are popular here.
Three generations of the Nehru family have been PM. The 4th desperately trying to be, but clearly not very good at or even interested in politics. It seems widely understood that this dude is being pushed into politics only because the family has amassed a ton of illicit money over the decades, and if not in power, they risk being sent to jail for corruption.
You see other examples of dynasties in state politics, specially in South India. A state chief minister's wife or son is often the first choice for the party's next leader (after a CM dies). If they have no family, then someone who was like family to them.
You're starting to see that a little in America with the Bushes, Kennedys, Clintons...
An emperor - basically a benevolent dictator?! I guess ppl prefer that to democracy, provided (this is the catch) the dictator is of the same views as they themselves are on govt policy.
Liberal democracy is probably most compatible with Western cultures?
In India, for example, ppl often turn to govt to be the answer, themselves feeling no need to take any initiative. I think that is cultural.
Regular ppl here are always trying to get to know powerful ppl in govt. During the Delta covid surge, for example, you'd hear "You know how well-connected I am in govt. And even I couldn't find a hospital bed."
Knowing someone big in govt is also a status symbol in India.
How can democracy work as well here, as in America? I often wonder about that.
One of the problems with this is that countries with such concentrated power do not have stable political arrangments. You can say there should be this committee and this council, but there's little stopping these systems from reverting to pure autrocracy and even if this is suboptimal for the country as a whole, the supremo has more incentive to gain power than to optimally run the country.
Thanks for the great writeup. I lived and worked in Shanghai for 4.5 years starting in 2015. When I saw the news in early 2018 that term limits for president had been abolished (and by implication Xi was now dictator-for-life), I began planning my exit. My reasoning was simple: if Xi, in a country of 1.3+ billion people, could not find a single person he thought was trustworthy enough to take over his job after his term ended, either China is doomed from widespread incompetence, or heading towards doom because it's now going to be governed for life by a supremely selfish person with no vision of a world beyond himself. (I guess another option, that he's actually an Ozymandias-style genius who sincerely has China's best interests at heart, didn't seem plausible to me.)
I got out in late 2019 and, COVID notwithstanding, feel that I absolutely made the right decision. During my final years there, internet censorship and traditional policing were visibly increasing all the time. The economy was great but I got a sense of widespread paranoia and intellectual stagnation. Smart young Chinese colleagues and friends repeated propaganda with completely straight faces. Many of my clients (well-off but not wealthy educated Chinese people) were looking for the exits, wanting to move their families to Canada/Aus/NZ/USA and start over. Especially to send their children to Western colleges. It didn't seem sustainable then, and it doesn't seem so now.
Bottom line, I just don't think there's any getting around the fact that a one-man dictatorship is an inefficient, outmoded style of government. It's all too easy for states to fall into this situation, but that doesn't mean it's desirable. Ironically, upon moving back to the USA, one of the commonest things I'd hear in political conversations with American peers was how much they admired China and wanted an benevolent dictatorship here—led by their preferred politician of course. Never mind that that's never how dictators get chosen.
It wasn't easy for Xi to take power. Bo Xilai very nearly beat him to it. Bo's murderous corruption was quite normal for Chinese rulers, not an exception. When it was exposed it almost caused a civil war in China. Xi just got very lucky every single thing fell into place for that not to happen.
"(why are all China analysts named things like “Elizabeth Economy” or “David Dollar”? This also sounds like something that would happen in a children’s book.)"
Simulation is running low on resources, obviously.
I've never understood the logic behind dictators giving themselves vote tallies like 2970-0. Surely you would get 10 people to be like "eh, Xi is fine but I like this other guy better," to feign a tad more legitimacy. Are they being hubristic, or is it actually likely better for some reason I don't understand?
It conveys a simple message: "either I am universally beloved, such that any who oppose me are atomic, estranged from everyone else, alone, and impotent; or I am all-powerful, such that any who oppose me are immediately crushed, yoked, and forced to live their every breath how I wish, until even the thought of defiance dies. Either way, your opposition to me, your hatred of me, your desire for my defeat is an impossible dream. I am the state, I am your God, to oppose me is to oppose your lover, your mother and father, your children, and yourself."
You could call this hubristic, or megalomaniacal, or you could call it a method of suppression, or you could call it a way of displaying absolute power over the mechanism of government. It's all of these things, ultimately.
If the quoted statement were true, the above log-log scatterplot of GDP per capita in 1950 vs gdp per capita in 2016 would have a trendline slope less than 1. But in actuality it has a trendline slope far greater than 1. This means that the countries that were already above average in 1950 grew faster in percentage terms than the countries that were below average in 1950. China's fast catch-up growth is the exception, not the rule. It's an anomaly caused by anomalously high IQ in global terms, plus the sudden removal of factors that were holding them back earlier (civil war, communism, lack of free trade). Ordinarily, whatever qualities made a country have good economic growth pre-1950 would have made it more likely to have good economic growth from 1950-2016, and whatever factors made a country have poor economic growth pre-1950 would have also made it more likely to have poor economic growth from 1950-2016. These factors are likely to include IQ, economic policy, rule of law, and proximity/access to wealthy trading partners.
I thought this might be just a one-time anomaly caused by WWII and communism. Europe got carpetbombed back to the stone age, and the rebound from that inflated their growth rate in the mid 20th century. Some of the former soviet republics benefitted similarly from decommunization and were already top-half in 1950. But if I exclude all of Europe I still see a slope much greater than 1.
Countries which make the transition to high income (e.g. Japan), do experience curves like this, which is what produces this false impression. However, as a whole, the high income countries grow faster than the middle/low income countries, getting further apart rather than closer, and the overwhelming majority of low and middle income countries do not experience a transition to becoming high income countries.
Since 1960, there are three main categories of countries that have succeeded at this task: European (e.g. Czechia), East Asian (e.g. Japan), and oil-rich (e.g. Saudi Arabia). The only exceptions are Puerto Rico (if you want to count it), Israel, and Singapore, the latter two of which are basically European and East Asian culturally.
If you a nation does become rich, the log of its GDP follows an S-curve as it does so; but most nations don't become rich.
This is a good point. Given that a country is fully developed, it probably experienced a period of fast growth followed by a period of slower growth. But fast growth is so rare that in the aggregate it looks like rich countries are growing faster than poor countries.
This comment was brought to my attention by the highlights post. This used to be true, but in the past three or so decades, has not been - see for e.g Brookings on convergence 'In the 1990s, developing economies, taken as a whole, began to grow faster than their advanced counterparts (in per capita terms), inspiring optimism that the two groups’ output and income would converge. From 1990 to 2007, the developing economies’ average annual per capita growth was 2.5 percentage points higher than in the advanced economies. In 2000-2007, the gap widened, to 3.5 percentage points.'
I would be interested to see if that trend continued from 2007-2022. Some important things happened in the early 90s: lots of decommunization, lots of international trade deals, lots of liberalization of economic policy.
We shall see in another couple decades. Personally am rather skeptical as I remember too well all the hoopla around BRICS countries circa 20 years ago - today only China has (probably) delivered on that promise - SA is a shitshow, Russia was doing badly even before the war, Brazil has been in a funk for past 7-8 years and India keeps disappointing (even more so if you take into account the enormous demographic dividend they should be reaping in theory at moment). I suspect a lot of the growth spurt observed in that paper linked above was due to 1) knock on effects of China driven commodities boom in late 90s-GFC for commodity rich poor countries and 2) globalization / shift of manufacturing to LCCs for people-rich countries with decent infrastructure. Both of these were sort of one-offs and aren't going to be much of a tailwind going fwd, so we'll see.
I don't know. Sure looks to me like the slope on the left half is much steeper than on the right half -- which is pretty consistent with slowing growth rates.
Eh, Poland probably shouldn't be used as a benchmark, given what a huge outlier it is itself. Most of its peers which "cast off stifling forms of Communism" around that time ended up with recessions lasting at least a decade.
I wonder if Xi has taken a path similar to Stalin's. Stalin built a personal network within the party that linked him to third and fourth level provincial party members. It was like the old Chicago machine with its chain linking ward healers to the mayor and central players. Effectively, there was a party government within the party, and it was this that let Stalin challenge Lenin and then destroy Trotsky. Stalin worked on this behind the scenes, but by 1930, he was completely entrenched.
Also, the engineering thing. Look up Qian Xuesen. He's a bit of a folk hero by now, the man who brought Western systems engineering to China. He had been working with von Karman's group at JPL, but got kicked out as a security risk and went on to found China's nuclear and space programs as well as laying the ground work for its security state. It was quite a career.
I wonder if those "zombie companies" are actually doing something really important (at least as far as government priorities are concerned) that doesn't show up in traditional capitalist metrics like profit or growth.
>Partly this is because the private companies are actually trying to make money, but the public companies are doing some combination of money-making, employing people for the sake of keeping unemployment low, and carrying out (potentially unprofitable) government priorities (eg investing in foreign countries that it furthers China’s geopolitical interests to invest in, whether or not those countries have anything worth buying).
Amusing comment on the state of censorship in China:
I posted the NPC joke in a language-related chat group on WeChat (China's Facebook). There were no consequences for two days, because Chinese censors don't waste their time analyzing jokes in English language chat. But after a couple of days the American moderators of the group (resident in China, like me) decided to eject me from the group and break off all communication.
This is how it works. Occasionally, the state heavies do shut down a newspaper. But 99% of the time, it's self-censorship.
Yep. Sousveillance, not surveillance. Punish enough dissenters for things all over the scale to make people believe that even thinking bad things about the government in the privacy of their own head will lead to punishment. That's the final stage of totalitarianism- even your dreams become the property of the State.
"A few months before his ascendancy to the party leadership, Xi disappeared from official media coverage for several weeks beginning on 1 September 2012."
Huh, I didn't know that so many leaders in the early 2000s had engineering degrees. This explains the Chinese students that end up in Melbourne and why a lot of them seem startled to struggle with the curriculum (many adapt, but I feel like they kinda kill themselves to do so because they were expecting it to be much easier, and the shame of failing an "easy" degree would be unbearable). I always did wonder what kind of jobs awaited them back in China - the few I talked to were predominantly middle class and research focused and wanted to get into local or Chinese academia but they're definitely a minority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some elite children in my graduating class, but I never got to talk to them!
How can you write about a government who has "censors" to let the news slip about the guy who committed murder, and not write that that government was also authoritarian, even if it was an oligarchy rather than a monarchy like what came next?
Overall, it seems like Scott is still looking for a better book on Xi. I look forward to him finding one.
> I dwelt on some of Xi’s failures or questionable decisions in that last section, because I was impressed by Noah Smith’s article What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? With the incredible economic rise of China over the past few decades, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking their leadership must be geniuses, or at least have managed something that merely democratic countries never could.
I still have the same criticism as I did when Noah's article was last mentioned: it is assumed that raw GDP growth is a goal onto itself. From a Dictator's Handbook perspective, we should expect this to be true in democracies but not dictatorships.
Economic growth in China that isn't controlled by Xi (even indirectly) isn't an asset, it is a liability. It means more money rivals can use against you. Looking at some of the points brought up in these two articles, they all seem to fall inline with this view:
> The effort is so effective that there are worries about unintended consequences
>> ...Officials who remain in power are often paralyzed by their concern that green-lighting new projects or undertaking new reforms will draw unwanted attention. Some have reportedly started avoiding entrepreneurs and are refusing to move forward on projects...
I don't think Xi sees this as an unintended consequence. From his view this is a happy little accident. Noah's article also talks about how SOE are less effective than private yet growth is pushed via SOE. Noah also talks about Xi cracking down on industries he doesn't like.
From the perspective of "GDP is a goal for its own sake" then these are all bad moves. From the perspective the Dictator's Handbook these are all the moves you'd expect from a competent dictator who is trying to perpetuate power.
Re Belt and Road:
> The basic procedure is: China goes up to a developing country and asks “would you like giant low-interest loans to create a humongous port?” The developing country says yes without asking any citizens or businesses, faces protests, loses a lot of the money to corruption, mismanages the construction project, and ends up without a humongous port. Then China either has to harass and threaten them to get the money back.
This also seems to be working as intended. Having the money get "lost" to corruption isn't a mistake it is an intended feature. You just can't admit that publicly. Having a bunch of small countries that owe China money (or a port) that they can never pay back is exactly what China wants. If they do what China asks, China can "kindly" delay the missed payments. If they instead act in their own interest China can demand the loans on time, punishing this insolence.
This is something you could see a classic Joe Pesci character do: get a victim to owe you a debt they can't possibly repay; make it clear that severe harm will occur if the debt is not payed on time; when the victim can't pay up, demand they do stuff on your behalf; make it seem like you are being generous to the victim for offering this deal; still demand the money; repeat. China is just doing this at the country scale.
What's particularly ironic is that Xi's father was purged by Mao, he himself spent years in labor camps and yet it's he who's increasingly bringing back Mao's methods. Maybe if you experience enough horror personally you don't seek to fight it but instead to perpetrate.
Edward Luttwak (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china) writes:
>Xi made his own Faustian bargain not merely with the Communist Party but very emphatically with Mao’s party: he has been assiduous in restoring Mao’s authority, which his predecessors had cumulatively reduced – a few months ago, reacting to the intensified confrontation with the US and its allies, Xi enjoined the study of Mao’s clever but prolix lectures from 1938, On Protracted War. He constantly elevates the man who jailed and publicly humiliated his father, terrorised his mother, caused the death of his half-sister and imposed many years of acute misery on his siblings as well as himself...
Luttwak goes on to speculate about what this means (if anything) for interpreting Xi's decisions.
When someone founds a new dynasty, they like to emphasise continuity and legitimacy by appealing to the previous dynasty. Sometimes that is claiming descent by right of blood (even if that is "my grandmother was the sister of the king") and sometimes it is by claiming the spiritual, so to speak, heirship of the mantle.
Mao was a venerated previous emperor, and if Xi wants to establish himself as a new emperor, then showing conspicous respect to the predecessor who founded the entire state is the way to do it. "No, good people of China, this is not regression, this is carrying on the patriotic traditions of the ancestors".
Using the name and reputation of the man who destroyed your family to increase your own power and control could be considered a form of revenge, as well.
China is notoriously difficult to rule because of its horrible geography in which only the coasts are prosperous. Xi really doesn’t have much choice as the global economic dividend from the fall of the Soviet Union and the global economic debt bubble have exhausted the extend-and-pretend, kick-the-can runway. The Certificate Of Vassal IDentity deprivation wailing by the thousands from the condo balconies in Shanghai this week is a harbinger of dark times ahead for the entire world.
LBJ hasn't been dead that long, but everyone seems to have forgotten what an awful person he was.
Any personal issues seem to have been overshadowed by the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and Vietnam, which seems pretty typical in a 'grand scheme of history' sort of way.
The media shift from Vietnam being "the worst atrocity ever" to "actually not that bad" has been kind of dizzying.
To be fair, the Boomers managed to get us involved in two distinct wars that were even more stupid & farcical in Afghanistan & Iraq, which most Americans were basically content to ignore for 20 years as long as there wasn't a draft. In terms of absolute death & suffering all around, Vietnam still probably outpaces Afghanistan & Iraq. However, the moral valence of loading the burden of our post-9/11 foreign policy on contractors, mercenaries and regular-duty & reserve US soldiers representing a tiny fraction of the American populace who were deployed over & over again is probably worse. Democracies should tire easily of war. War is fucking awful.
I can't find the heart icon... so hear hear!
Huh? How is sending volunteers to fight worse than forcing conscripts to do so?
When volunteers were being deployed three or more times on extended tours of duty, then yes, that suggests to me that a draft in the 2000s would have been appropriate. Perhaps we could have ended that idiocy 15 years sooner if Americans' commitment had genuinely been tested.
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/veterans
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2012/0323/Sgt.-Robert-Bales-and-multiple-tours-of-duty-How-many-is-too-many
https://www.stripes.com/branches/army-units-iraq-and-afghanistan-tours-lengthened-to-15-months-1.62771
Where? I've never seen anything of the sort.
I'm fully aware, and I believe some good old-fashioned Jumbo-flaunting could be the ticket to fixing American politics.
Seems plausible.
I read somewhere that after Stalin's death, his successors wanted to make sure one-man rule would not return. They all had experienced first-hand how not even the highest ranking Polit-buro member had been safe from Stalin's vindictiveness. Therefore Khrushchev et al. ruled by committee. Then Khrushchev was deposed, so maybe power was diluted too much. Brezhnev et all reverted to a more authoritarian rule but never killed fellow communists again, and were not nearly as brutal as Stalin's regime.
The story goes that Khrushchev was intensely proud of being shuffled off to his dacha instead of shot in the basement. He supposedly said as he was ushered out something like “See how far we’ve come, that I’m leaving this way instead of that? I did that. I changed the USSR. That was me.”
If that's true, that's actually something to be proud of.
Inside China the view of Mao is not so simple. He drove out the Japanese invaders and an exploitive government that was doing a poor job of fighting them. He gave hundreds of millions of people hope for a better, more egalitarian life. I left China in the early 90's, but. most of the people I worked with (intellectuals) believed still that Mao's grand vision had been corrupted by those around him and that he was still a great man and the liberator of China.
This is surprising. So Chinese intellectuals didn't blame Mao for the Cultural Revolution, which specifically targeted them?
Not as thoroughly as you might expect. The narrative was that Mao had been lead astray as he aged, not that he failed to take full responsibility for the havoc he had unleashed. I think much of this might have been Deng Xiaoping's doing. As I understand it, Deng realized that Mao's--and the CCP's-- downfall was the cult of personality that formed around him. Deng assiduously avoided any talk that he was Mao's "successor," in an imperial sense. Mao's portraits, which were literally everywhere, came down and were carefully not replaced with portraits of Deng or anyone else.
As miserable as the lives of Chinese intellectuals were during the Cultural Revolution, most of them could see that it was much more complicated than one guy being anti-intellectual. Mao had become a figurehead, and they could see that.
Yes, it does seem that Mao's power later in life wasn't comparable to that of Stalin's, for example. And even Stalin, psychopathic tyrant that he was, is still a pretty divisive figure in Russia.
>it’s so irrelevant that it’s literally called “the NPC”.
Oh, that is choice!
Not hugely accurate; to the Chinese it's known as the 人民代表大会 or "People's [Representative] Congress".† That would be abbreviated RMDBDH if anyone wanted to. (The name I gave is also an abbreviation of the full formal name, 中华人民共和国全国人民代表大会 "National People's [Representative] Congress of the People's Republic of China".) Modulo the "representative" element, this is an excellent match for the name "National People's Congress", but you'll note that while the "National" element is present in the formal Chinese name, it's been left out of the common name.
The only people calling it "the NPC" would be English speakers studying the formal structure of the Chinese government, which is not a large group of people.
† 大会 is a "great assembly", which makes sense as a gloss of "congress" to me, but 代表大会 "representative great assembly" or perhaps "great assembly of representatives" seems to be a Chinese political term of art intended to serve as a translation of the American term "Congress". So whether to translate 人民代表大会 as "People's Representative Congress" or "People's Congress" depends on your view of what "congress" means.
It's a joke, buddy.
But conveniently, "nonplayer character" in Chinese is also abbreviated RMDBDH.
Yeah...... "The only people calling it "the NPC" would be English speakers studying the formal structure of the Chinese government, which is not a large group of people."
Or you know..... Wikipedia and almost all of English language media too.
I read Elizabeth Economy, and have to say I came away genuinely unimpressed. I feel like I could’ve written the same book just based on summarizing what I had read about China in the last few years in newspapers and magazines. I listed some alternatives in the post below. As a general matter popular works on the topic tend to be bad. But there are some real gems written by academics.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/reflections-on-2021
A two-hour chat over drinks with an Old China Hand, any Old China Hand really, is more informative and better than 99% of Western books about China
Far out. But I can get a whole Western book about China for the cost of buying one single drink for an Old China Hand, and I know with certainty where to get Western books about China, and I have no idea where to find an Old China Hand. Plus I am suspicious that Old China Hand might be a True Scotsman situation where only some small fraction of the people who would appear to me to be China Hands are sufficiently Old-China-Handed to be able to reimburse me for my time. If that's the case, then this advice becomes even less actionable.
Fair enough! All good objections. Yes, make sure of the Old China Handness of any given person before buying them drinks
Do you have an opinion on Vogel's biography of Deng? I'm about halfway through it, and it has felt fairly insightful to me, but I don't have any close friends who lived in China in the 1960s-80s to sanity-check it against.
Not me, no, sorry.
I read the whole thing, and a few other books about China (and also moved to Asia from Europe).
I liked it quite a lot, for whatever that's worth.
Your assessment seems about right.
I haven't read book, but the book review sounds like an executive summary of what anyone would know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years (which I have).
This seems like a ringing endorsement of the book, no? Given that it's a lot easier to read a book than read archives of newspapers for 30-40 years.
Heh heh, if you're young, sure.
Not just if you're young. If a book can replace *four decades* of consistently reading two major newspapers (on a given topic), that's incredible. It might not be well suited for someone who has done so already, but it's certainly still a very positive reflection.
Just 2? There are also there are also papers from Europe to read also! And WSJ, LATimes, chi trib.
I regret not being able to read Japanese, too
I wasn't saying someone should only read two newspapers (although I think two is likely plenty for most people)
if you want to read a summary of a large volume of surface level, biased information - sure. If you want to have a deeper insight - not really.
Of course there is more to read to be an expert. But the book review didn't mention any really new information or deep insights.
If I'm following the succession correctly, Xi's ten-year term expires this year. Is he planning to leave office, or has he found a way of getting around that rule too?
Term limits were removed back in 2018, I'm surprised you didn't hear about it. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/11/592694991/china-removes-presidential-term-limits-enabling-xi-jinping-to-rule-indefinitely
I don't normally follow Chinese politics. Almost everything in Scott's post was news to me aside from the names of the leaders.
This thread, about the runup to the 2018 NPC and what happened during it, is absolutely fascinating and served as my introduction to Chinese politics: https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=274337.0
great stuff, thanks
When is his current term expiring though? Scott said something about the NPC approving him for a new term recently, but he didn't provide a source, and I can't find anything on it.
it expires towards end of the year, but it's 99.9% certain he'll be rubberstamped through for a third term at the next congress sometimes in october or november (could be concurrent with US midterms...)
Read some legit newspapers.
Why? There's lot of things you can spent your time with.
Reading about politics is about as legitimate as any other form of entertainment.
(And I specifically write entertainment here. Because it's about as inactionable as entertainment for most people.)
MOD DECISION: Major warning (50% of a ban) for this comment.
Is this directed at my comment?
i'd say it's quite obvious that it's directed at your comment, and that it's not unreasonable to say that that comment justified that response
Yeah, he found a way round by going "Oh by the way, term limits not a thing anymore".
Reminds me of a favorite quote:
But then I tell them, if you think that a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you're crazy. Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every President for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former "Evil Empire," the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it, literally. It was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press -- big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests; and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!
...
So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our government.
And not just the structure. When the Supreme Court issues a ruling, people grumble, call them partisan hacks, whatever, but they still follow it.
Tell that to Andrew Jackson!
The fact he's the only exception and is widely considered to be one of the worst American presidents for it reinforces the point.
If you read up on early constitutional history, there are a few more examples of where the supreme court seemed to have basically made a ruling so that they wouldn’t get ignored by the president
He did some things which deservedly look very bad to modern eyes, and some things which look worse to the sort of modern eyes in the academy than to the average person.
But one should also note that he won two terms, was succeeded by someone from his own cabinet, founded one of the two major American political parties, and got his face on the $20.
Controversial, sure, but probably with more admirers than opponents for over a century after his death.
And many people revere Mao to this very day. What's your point? Argumentum ad popularum overrules treating your country's constitution like toilet paper?
treating your country's judiciary like toilet paper is often a popular move and need not come with any real political consequences in the politician's lifetime?
Widely considered by who? Wikipedia has a convenient summary of surveys of historians over the past 75 years or so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States
Jackson has been ranked in the upper quartile (top 25%) 11 times, as high as 5th in a 1996 survey, and in the top half the remaining 12 times, with his lowest ranking (22nd) in a survey last year.
You're certainly entitled not to like him -- quite a lot of people don't -- but it's nonsense that he is "widely" considered one of the worst American Presidents.
I think a lot of that has to do with whether "worst" means "does lots of bad stuff" or "fails to accomplish his policy goals". Lots of the surveys on Wikipedia seem to be rehashes of Schlesinger's poll on the topic, which is interested almost entirely in the latter.
So somebody like Jackson, who was very successful at accomplishing evil policy goals like "destroy the nation's economy" and "screw over Native Americans", is certainly one of the best presidents in the Schlesingerian sense, but also certainly one of the worst presidents in a more consequentialist sense.
can you back up the statement that he had as a policy goal to destroy the nation's economy? am not a AJ specialist but that just sounds suspiciously hyperbolic. As for screwing over native americans, it's evil by 21st century standards but was something that probably a large majority of his voting constituents (white dudes, for avoidance of doubt, although his was the first presidential election where non-property holders could vote) supported. I thought democracy was about elected leaders doing the bidding of the people who elect them, but lots of people now seem to disagree and prefer the enlightened despot model.
Ditto what boylermaker said.
Is there a democracy where the Supreme Court (or equivalent) is ignored?
France. The pre-eminence of statutory law as opposed to Anglo-American traditional of common law/ jurisprudence.
That’s not the same as not being constitutional.
I don't understand what you mean by "being constitutional".
There are non Anglo American traditions, where jurisprudence is not the final arbiter of "constitutionality".
The "Anglo" there is just wrong. There is no such thing as "constitutionality" in UK law.
The Supreme Court can decide that an executive action is illegal ("ultra vires"), but it can't overrule laws.
France has a priori review of laws to determine whether they are constitutional by the Constitutional Council, which means that the courts don't do case-by-base judicial review. While the American tradition would see the Constitutional Council as a judicial role, in the French tradition it's political - its members are mostly retired politicians (there are a couple of lawyers).
And the UK doesn’t even have a written constitution. They have free speech, a free press, rule of law and due process because they are British, it’s what they do. That sense of - we just don’t - is very powerful.
I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen fire miles In the US most folks would just jaywalk.
If you’re at an intersection in the US as a driver and it’s 2am and there same situation the vast majority of Americans will just wait for a green light. In Brazil or Thailand they will just blow past it like a jaywalking America.
Why do we wait at 2am? It’s just what you do. To say you should just blow through a red light is just ridiculous.
Really, really good point. For someone who hasn't spent time in countries without law-following being something that's just what you do, it's hard to overstate just how fucking terrifying the absence of credible law and order is.
In Brazil we don’t wait for the green light because it’s not safe to be sitting in your car like that at 2am, not because we enjoy breaking the law. (Though there’s probably some underlying reason for this that’s related to rule of law or lack thereof)
I don't really know anything about it, but I've got a friend who is a free speech absolutist and he's constantly sending me links about how bad the UK is on free speech. Apparently, someone recently got jailed for a tweet in very bad taste?
I'd be interested in someone who knew more about the subject expounding upon it.
This is why putting principles in writing, rather than depending on a sense "we just don't", is a good thing - it protects against shifts in culture and the whims of the powerful.
If these cases ever became common the laws would change. That said younger generations aren’t really as pro free speech.
The effective protections of free speech in the UK changed because personnel and the values of those personnel changed.
A written law or constitutional amendment that mandated protections of free speech would go ignored if the people with the power of enforcement decided they didn't value the protections and instead valued the cracking down of hate speech as they define it.
SCOTUS, if it had the gumption, could very well take on a US court case and arrive at an 'interpretation of the constitution' that effectively gave the US government the power to regulate all forms of speech. Of course the president is likewise, theoretically free to disregard the courts and continue to protect free speech. The reverse might also be true, the courts affirm broad free speech protections but the legislature and president crack down regardless.
Yeah, Britain has always been a bit iffy on free speech - the government overreach is relatively new, but English libel law is famously stifling (in part because neither party needs to be British for a suit to occur in English court, as long as some of the *readers* of the supposed libel are brits. )
English libel law got changed quite significantly about 10 years ago; it is much harder to actually win cases for libel now - you have to present evidence that it is untrue (previously, the defence had to produce evidence that it was true), you have to show that you suffered actual losses as a result (previously, it was assumed that the cost to your reputation was sufficient), it creates a distinction between statements of (purported) fact and those of opinion or interpretation (ie if you say "this thing is true about the person, and therefore I conclude this other thing", then as long as the first thing is true, the second thing is opinion and it doesn't matter if it is true or not), and creates a bunch of defences relating to editorial procedure (basically, if you made a reasonable effort to tell the truth, it went wrong, and you withdrew and apologised once it had been confirmed that it wasn't true, then you have a defence, also peer-reviewed academic journals have this as an absolute defence as long as it isn't malicious).
The result is that since 2013, there haven't been big victories in court for massive damages for things that are in fact true or reasonable opinion.
The problem is that all of this only really applies if you go to court, which means you have to pay lawyers a small fortune to get to court. Major media publishing about the rich and powerful are able to publish much more freely than they were (they can afford the lawyers, and they will win back the costs from the other side eventually), but individuals and smaller media still get intimidated by the costs, even when their lawyers advise that they will win.
The criminal law relates to "malicious communications" which means any communication that is "indecent, grossly offensive, a threat, or false" and "causes distress or anxiety to the recipient or to any other person to whom he intends that it or its contents or nature should be communicated".
This was originally written in 1988 to apply only to paper letters, but is now used for social media, and is incredibly broadly drawn, especially the fact that it makes the courts the arbiter of the factual accuracy of every tweet.
The UK urgently needs an anti-SLAPP law, to make it easier to defend a libel case where the case will lose, but it being brought just to intimidate.
And malicious communications was reasonable when it was restricted to paper letters, but needs tightening up to being more "threats" and less "saying things that other people disagree with and claim make them anxious or distressed".
He didn't get jailed, he got sentenced to about a month of community service. (Well, they probably aren't going to make him work it off at 40 hours a week, but if they did it would be about a month.)
The rumors of Europe having free speech are greatly exaggerated. There's free speech unless it's "hate speech" - which is something the government dislikes and you can't be caught in a company that endorses that kind of thing. That's why First Amendment exists in the US - to erect the barrier against such (entirely natural) tendencies. The speech that everybody likes doesn't need protection, the one that a lot of people would hate to hear, especially powerful people that influence making laws - does.
To be fair, I as a German did actually cross a pedestrian red light in Braunschweig at literally 2 AM a couple of years ago, suddenly a police car stopped me a few meters past, and the officers started writing me a ticket for jay-walking. Luckily, they were called away to a real emergency before they could finish.
Jaywalking at 2 AM in Germany is DANGEROUS!
When I was living in Rome for a few months I accumulated some bad jaywalking habits and I don't think that I've ever been closer to death than on a weekend trip to Cologne--I almost got absolutely smoked by a bus that was roaring around a corner at full speed and had no intention whatsoever of slowing down.
Both the Roman solution (everyone ignores traffic signals and understands that this is what everyone else is doing) and the German solution (everyone obeys traffic signals and understands that this is what everyone else is doing) basically work, it's when you move from one to the other that you get into trouble.
They do have some constitutional laws, not codified in a constitution. It’s a very flexible form of democracy for that reason.
To me - admittedly from a distance - many of the culture wars on the US and the partisan hatreds around election time are amplified by the winning party’s power to choose a Supreme Court justice. If the Supreme Court can find rights to abortion, or not, in a block of text that doesn’t mention abortion they are effectively making law. Why didn’t the Supreme Court just say - this is not a federal jurisdiction? Anyway the U.K. makes parliament sovereign which to me is a good idea. Parliament or the people (if the constitution can be changed by the people directly).
Well they have constiutional laws, but they don't quite have the weight that constitutions in other countries do. Parliamentary sovereignity means absolutely nothing cannot become law if Parliament wants it to - if Boris Johnson wants to become Dictator For Life, all he needs is 50%+1 votes in Parliament.
And royal assent.
The problem with the US is not just the Supreme Court, it's the sclerotic nature of federal legislation. If they had said in 1973 that Congress can pass a law on whether abortion was legal or illegal, then it's probably only 50-50 that they would have passed one in the 49 years since.
Having a status quo bias when there is a clearly established status quo is reasonable, but when the status quo is deep uncertainty, then not addressing it is bad - quite often the Supreme Court has stepped in to counter the fact that Congress won't.
Probably the best example of this was King v Burwell; the literal text of Obamacare was that subsidies were only available on state-run exchanges, not on federally run ones. This was because of an obvious copy-paste error in drafting the text. But Congress couldn't go and pass legislation amending it because it would be filibustered (the original law overrode a filibuster, but then Ted Kennedy died and there were no longer enough votes to override a filibuster). The Supreme Court ruled that it was a fuck-up and the mistaken wording could be ignored.
In one sense, the Court literally read words out of legislation and changed the meaning of the law; in another sense, they couldn't send it back to Congress to fix their fuck-up because Congress is incapable of doing that.
Here in the UK, with a legislative process that functions, the court would probably tell Parliament to just fix their own typos, rather than editing the law for them - and Parliament would just do it immediately.
interesting. Thanks.
Ralph Nadar never jaywalks, ever.
At least in this millennium, this is not an accurate characterisation of Germany at all. If it's clearly safe, many or even most people would cross the street in such a situation, especially younger generations.
This is even the case during the day. Hell, I once crossed a red light as a pedestrian (in a super safe situation) in the middle of the day, while two police officers - whom I hadn't noticed - were walking towards me on the other side (still a bit away from the crossing). They gave me a "stern" talking-to - as in, 20% admonition, 80% not-quite-deadpan humour and good-natured mockery - and, as I told them I was on my way to the doctor, joked about me not needing a doctor anymore once I inevitably get killed by a car.
And that was it.
Although it IS very much frowned upon if you cross a red light when, on either side of the crossing, there are children present, as you're setting a "bad example" for them. Children are generally not sufficiently capable of judging whether it is safe to cross, and as such should obey the traffic light rules (and - directed at American readers - this is important, as we generally let children walk around outside unsupervised starting at quite young ages, ie ainglet digit ones).
And "jaywalking" is not a thing in Germany; generally speaking, unless you're within a certain distance of a pedestrian traffic light (that's turned on - many get turned off at night), you're in principle allowed to cross a street. You do have something of a responsibility to only do so when it's reasonably safe.
Driving norms in general are like this. You could almost rank countries by GDP based on the experience of driving on their roads:
India? Terrible. Every taxi looks like the moon's surface with dents. Unthinkably dangerous driving is standard (ie. speeding around corners completely blind in the wrong lane)
Thailand? Bad but better, less blatant deathwish behaviour. Still a cacophony of horns
Malaysia? Pretty good but still some weird behaviour like ignoring lane lines is common enough
First world generally: Pretty consistently good everywhere I've been, people follow the rules in 99% of cases
There's a big difference though. To jaywalk means to endanger oneself (albeit only theoretically if there's no car in miles). To blow through the red light means endangering others, potentially lethally. So if you violate the rule that protects yourself, because you feel in this particular case you don't need the protection - it is much different from violating the rule that protects others from you, because you're sure others are not in danger. In the former case if you're mistaken, you bear the (most) consequences, in the latter case it's others that do.
Structure is a fig leaf too. You can put whatever title you want on someone's door - they have to actually believe in it to make it work. Cynicism and corruption corrode any system, no matter how high-minded or well-designed.
I think the underlying difference is a cultural one.* People in the west are digusted by patron-client events and institutions, calling them names that evoke disgust such as "corrupt" (=rotten, as in food).**
As a direct consequence we get the cultural habit of impartial treatment and due process, and from those we get our institutions such as politically independent legal systems and militaries.
* Yes, I know "culture" is well out of fashion as an explanation for economic differences. But I have slowly been coming round to the view that this is political-correctness extremism. Different cultural habits produce difference institutions which in turn affect general prosperity in different ways. Patronage, partial treatment as opposed to impartial, in aggregate is negative-sum.
** I _think_ this cultural attitude has its origins in the high Middle Ages in Europe, when there was a surge in religiosity and so in scrutiny of church officials, who were legendarily corrupt at all levels. But I haven't looked into the matter.
Joseph Heinrich talks a lot about the psychological differences of the West vs non-Western cultures, and how that impacts corruption, generalized pro-sociality, and internalized morality, with links to Christendom. I agree with you - it is clear that religion and culture impacted rule of law and prosperity over the long term.
I have trouble believing the argument that our christian background predisposes us towards rule of law and prosperity, although I admit that my atheism may play a part in that.
But I would point to the following counterarguments:
- The church has a very long tradition of corruption, nepotism, selling of offices, the list goes on. There probably isn't a single one of the values of our modern society (rule of law, democracy, separation of powers, checks and balances, equal treatment before the law...) that the churches didn't fight tooth and nail to prevent, before finally having to grudgingly accept.
- In western Europe, Italy is sort of famous as being historically extremely corrupt, and very religious, the Vatican is literally in Rome. On the other hand, Scandinavia was famous for its low crime and so, with little religiousity.
- When we talk of the West as the paragon of rule of law, prosperity and such, the Middle East is usually the implied bad aĺternative. But religion plays a way greater part of life there than here, and laws are almost more important to Islam than to Christianity, it seems to me. Why did that not have the same effect?
- Didn't the West get most of its prosperity and rule-of-law in the times after organized religion lost most of its power over the people? In the US, the latter took longer, but in Europe, it looks to me that way.
It seems to me like a better argument can be made that it helps rule-of-law and prosperity if a country is recovering from an affliction of religion. Not the religion itself.
One argument is that the Catholic church prohibited marriages between people considered too closely related, and this undermined clans.
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/st-augustine-and-st-thomas-aquinas/
That's an argument, but a poor one. All you need is exogamous marriages. Many groups have rules that you must marry outside the group, and in many of those there are several neighboring groups that the marriageable partner can be selected from.
I find it more persuasive that if you have and follow laws (that don't change to much and are understandable) it's easier to figure out what investments are good.
The Catholic Church went much more extreme than the typical inbreeding-taboo.
I also find this argument (made by Henrich in The WEIRDest people) to be very weak.
I find Larry Siedentop’s argument much more convincing - that it was the Christian doctrine of individual (not clan-based) worth and salvation, spread by Paul and the Church, that changed the West. https://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Individual-Origins-Western-Liberalism/dp/0674417534
Ironically, the best argument I've heard against Henrich is that the Catholic Church's laws couldn't have been the cause of those regional differences because those regional differences predate those laws!
I think that a good check on corruption in society is having multiple centers of power that can serve to check and balance each other. If one center of power gets too corrupt, people can appeal to the other center(s) of power. Christianity seems unique in that it kept separate the power of Caesar and God, thus allowing for separate power centers; even if the kings were Christian, they had no religious authority, while the Pope had religious authority, but no divisions. The other option is that having strong kings served as a check on the Church's power outside of religion.
It can both be true that 'the Catholic church was internally corrupt' and 'the Catholic church served as a check on external corruption'. And this scales, in that what served as a check on the Catholic Church's internal corruption was an alternative center of power within Christianity in the form of the Protestant reformation and schism of Western Christianity into multiple competing denominations.
With regards to Italy, southern Europe overall is more corrupt than northern Europe; Greece, despite being Orthodox, is at least as corrupt as Italy. In the case of Italy (especially southern Italy), it might be that the only real center of power was the Catholic Church. It might be that the religious infighting in northern Europe served as a better check on corruption, both within and outside the church. It might be that the trade leagues of northern Europe served as an additional power center.
Power will always be abused. The only way of reducing corruption long-term is to reduce the power of officials. This of course will never be tried.
Having multiple centers of power necessarily means that the power will be divided between them. The problem is that creating new centers of power is incredibly difficult, because it means reducing the power of existing centers of power, which naturally resist losing power.
I don't know that religion needs to be one of the centers of power, but at least in the West up until perhaps the 18-19th century it's been one, and it's one that has a natural boundary and since the Reformation it's had internal divisions to keep one religion from getting too much power. Trade / commerce is the other obvious center of power, but that's much easier for politics to co-opt (or vice-versa).
This is the fundamental libertarian mistake, which is the belief that this is possible.
The only way to reduce the power of officials is to grant the power to restrain officials to someone else. And that person/group now has all the power that the officials used to have.
That doesn't reduce the power, it distributes it.
In the end, if a sufficient number of people with sufficient influence/authority want something to be done, then no rule saying "this thing may not be done at all" will prevent it. The best you can do is to raise the bar on how many people and how much influence/authority, and also to make the processes and consequences more transparent (eg people have to support raising taxes if they want to raise spending, or they have to acknowledge and explicitly support attacks on other people's rights / equality as such)
It has been tried. Basically half of Europe switched from a single organization having power over essentially all of the economy to no organization controlling more than half of it. China also greatly reduced the power of its rulers by allowing private enterprise.
This seems to be Hitchens level of debate on religion. The problem with saying that the West became rich after it lost religion is that Europe has only fairly recently lost religion, and the US pretty much hasn't even lost its religion. The 19C was both a religious and a scientific era.
As to the supposed religiosity of Italy and catholic Europe, Mediterranean or Latin Catholicism was mostly cultural, and far less austere than northern Protestantism.
The argument about protestantism and capitalism is that the idea that people are judged directly by a God, without the fairly easy forgiveness of confession, made them act more honestly than they might otherwise have had. Protestantism was more comfortable with wealth accumulation than Catholicism and promoted a work ethic. This is all from Weber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism
I am not totally convinced by this myself ( catholic Venice was pretty commercial for instance) but there is some truth to it.
Good points. I agree with you that the often corrupt and powerful Church structure doesn’t explain the societal success of Christendom - in fact it probably pulled the other way. Though it’s unpopular to say it, what changed the world was actually the doctrine of Christ, taught both to kings and to the rural peasants for whom the corruption of Rome was a non-factor in daily life. The story of *individual* salvation possible for every man, woman, citizen, or slave directly through Christ crushed the old hierarchical structure of family clans where religion is mediated through the father/patriarch and one’s moral value depended on where you fall in the hierarchy.
The moral ideals of egalitarianism, greater value of the individual over the polis, and a personal and internalized morality / relationship with divinity were revolutionary for the times and changed the world slowly. Over the centuries these values filtered into legal philosophies, law codes, individual psychology, and cultural expectations.
Larry Siedentop’s “Inventing the Individual” describes this process in greater detail and builds a strong case for his argument (IMHO).
There was already a pre-Christian strain of egalitarianism which gave rise to classical democracy, and the Romans insisting they didn't have a king and were ruled by a Senate long after they'd become an empire (which continued after Constantine).
That’s fair. Egalitarianism isn’t unique to Christianity. Maybe Christianity pushed equality a step further, as evidenced by Christianity being mocked as a religion for women and slaves), but I can’t say for sure. Probably the part about individual salvation / individual relationship with divinity was the more critical piece.
I’ll address some of the specific points here too:
Scandinavia - before converting to Christianity they were literally the Vikings, so I’m not sure what you mean. These days crime may be lower, but it’s a society built on the assumptions of a Christian West, even if they now neglect the actual religion part.
Concerning Islam and rule of law. It’s also maybe taboo to say it, but not all religious doctrine is born equal. Many of the benefits of the Christian doctrine of Christ that I mention in the other comment aren’t conveyed through Islamic doctrines or other world religions.
Prosperity increasing after rejecting Christianity - Prosperity in the modern Western sense (ie not derived from looting one’s neighbors) arises from a combination of freedom and trust (or order). I think Christian values helped create the West with its relative freedom and high interpersonal trust, which enabled prosperity. (For example, John Locke, who helped create the modern liberal order, was a strong Christian and also wrote theological treatises.) Prosperity is a lagging indicator of these other cultural factors. The prosperity we enjoy might last for centuries after we drop the actual religion part before we start to see a reversal. Or maybe a collapse could happen more quickly - who knows. That’s my take.
Since I noted the classical Greek tradition of democracy earlier, it's worth noting the Scandinavians had the "althing".
"Scandinavia was famous for its low crime and so, with little religiousity."
Scandinavia *is* famous for its low crime and little religiosity *today*. It wasn't always so.
During centuries following the Reformation Scandinavia was heavy with state-sanctioned Lutheran fundamentalism tied to the state and ruling monarchy.
Speaking of crimes, criminal punishments until 19th century were harsh. During 19th entury Sweden had the 2nd highest rate of capital punishment in Europe. Finnish part of Sweden ceased handing out death penalty in 1820s mostly because it had been conquered by Russia and Alexander I liked the PR of commuting death penalty to exile in Siberia.
I believe a big part of the cultural makeup of Europe is that rather than an individual hegemonic state which is mostly concerned with internal affairs it has for a long time been made up of many competing states with external pressures. States that were too corrupt and leaders who spent too much effort on defeating their political rivals and not enough on defeating neighbouring states' militaries or economies ended up in trouble.
The USA does have significantly freer speech - at least in "freedom to say things without committing a crime" - than the rest of the Western world, and it is specifically because of the First Amendment.
Laws against extreme pornography (even when fictional) and against "hate speech" are popular in the modern West. They get passed everywhere - the USA, Britain, Australia, Europe.
The difference is that in the USA, the Supreme Court immediately says "this law is unconstitutional".
Culture protects only speech within norms; it can never protect people saying something that people actually don't want to hear. Rule of law only protects speech when there is a law protecting speech; it is necessary, but not sufficient.
“ The difference is that in the USA, the Supreme Court immediately says "this law is unconstitutional".”
They could easily say hate speech falls under the fire in a crowded theater/fighting words exception to free speech, if it was generally accepted that this was so.
Maybe in 50 years they will - I think that this is one of the upsides of America being a gerontocracy, the Supreme court is old enough that they aren't subject to the current fad - a societal change has to last multiple generations for both the Justices and the people trying to get a case to court to both disagree with the old precedent.
"Fighting words" is a dead concept.
Immediately? I'm not sure what the speed record is, but it wouldn't surprise me for it to be decades. I'm rather certain it's more than 7 years.
The American concept of a "fire in a crowded theatre" exception was literally created specifically as a pretext for the Wilson administration to suppress all criticism of government policies. It's a fine example of how the Constitution only protects you as much as people want it to.
I think you're overestimating how popular "hate speech" laws might be in the United States. They're really only popular on college campuses and Silicon Valley high tech campuses, out in the real world I would say most people despise them.
Different bubbles have different taboo speech - you're thinking of the taboos of the Left, but in Right-wing areas the taboo is against eg. talking to kids about the existence of gay people.
Please don't spread lies.
While it might not be accurate to the Florida law that Thor seems to be referring to, it is certainly true that there are fairly large groups of conservatives for whom presenting being gay as acceptable to children or pornography would indeed be taboo
Oh of course, pornography is taboo to social conservatives, as are advertisements for tobacco, alcohol, dancing, pool halls... and advertising "gay is great" is too, but that's not "the existence of gay people." How else are preachers going to have sermon fodder?
Thor Odinson didn't say "presenting being gay as acceptable to children". He said "talking to kids about the existence of gay people". These are meaningfully different: saying (to kids) "some people commit buggery and they will go to hell", for instance, would be "talking to kids about the existence of gay people" but not "presenting being gay as acceptable to children".
The Supreme Court has never fully gone "this law is unconstitutional" on obscenity laws; they tend not to uphold them, but they have left a vague (and explicitly culture-based) zone where they're allowed.
America's free speech is because of the Supreme Court, not the First Amendment. For ages the US had blasphemy laws like the rest of the west, then one day they woke up and decided those were kinda bullshit so suddenly the First Amendment meant you couldn't have them.
The whole point of the Soviet example is that having it written down is by default worthless, you need enforcers who care what's written down.
And the whole point of *my* example is that enforcers who care what's written down are *also* worthless *if the principle at issue is not written down*. You need *both*. As I said above:
>>Rule of law only protects speech when there is a law protecting speech; it is necessary, but not sufficient.
I dunno, the Supreme Court seem to have done a pretty good job inventing ideas about privacy and growing your own wheat that weren't written down. Principles can be upheld without supporting text.
That reminds me of how William Stuntz said that the substantive provisions of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man were better than the procedural rules of our Bill of Rights.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2018/06/23/the-collapse-of-american-criminal-justice/
Didn't prevent the French First Republic into becoming a terror-state and then an empire under Napoleon.T
I would guess that culture played a big part as well. By the time of the American revolution, the English had spent several centuries building up an identity as a free people. Not exactly like us, or how we would conceive that term--think about how each group in Albion's imagined freedom--but more than most places. Those who ended up in the Americas had particularly strong beliefs about not being interfered with by a central authority (well, their local central authority was ok, but a far away central authority was not). Owning guns, distrust of government, the right to worship freely, these were all things that *meant something* to the people who had paid, in blood, for freedoms they had desired for generations.
Even with all that, it almost collapsed upon itself very quickly. See the blatantly unconstitutional Sedition Act and Jackson attempting to ignore any possibility of being checked by the Supreme Court. It did collapse on itself in about 140 years. Turns out freedom is hard to maintain.
The right to own guns was already guaranteed to all Protestant men of England.
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing I was referring to.
The American bill of rights was less anti-Catholic.
Was not expecting a Scalia quote in the comments. Well done.
He’s in a class of his own. I miss him dearly.
Regarding Xi anti-corruption purges that seem puzzlingly non-power-centralizing:
Apparently, some unusually large number government officials in China were actually spying for the CIA, who compensated them in part by paying the bribes that were required for these spies to advance in their government careers. The income was disguised by the ordinary activities of corruption, and having CIA funding meant US spies could pay more bribes and advance faster politically than non-spies. The anti-corruption purge stopped this by making it suddenly very suspicious to receive large sums of money, by reducing the ability of well-funded spies to advance via bribery, and by enabling the government to be purge and punish spies without suffering the loss of face associated with admitting publicly that they were full of spies.
Summary here: https://www.axios.com/xi-jinping-corruption-drive-intelligence-china-b0adc8ff-8f43-4077-81e1-dab0d05d6c7d.html
Details here (I think; it's been a while and I haven't re-read it): https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/
That is super interesting, thanks for sharing!
Being cynical, the *threat* of a purge for corruption can be power-centralising as well. If all officials are more or less corrupt, and everyone knows that, then there's a good chance that Chair Warmer No, 6 in the Department of Purple and Green Ribbons is corrupt.
You can directly boot out Chair Warmer and replace him with your own guy. *Or* you can drop hints to Chair Warmer that "Oh look, Nos. 4, 9 and 12 got purged. Such a pity they were on the wrong side. *You're* not on the wrong side, are you?" and then Chair Warmer finds that suddenly his heart has been converted to your faction.
That could be one explanation for the above about Xi not going after the Politburo: 'you leave me alone, I leave you alone' and both sides agree that business as usual continues. Or the threat hanging over them of "I haven't turned the spotlight on you *yet*" is, as Scott says, fear keeping them in line. Or they're too big for him to go after, he can't be sure he'd win in a direct fight, and the damage done to both sides would be too severe, so let things lie.
Of course, Xi could also genuinely be sincere about anti-corruption purges.
I've heard a similar argument from Libertarians about the wide ranging laws in the US. You can get arrested for breaking a thousand different laws that you may or may not know about. The people who tend to get arrested for breaking these laws are most commonly social undesirables, but also sometimes political opponents.
"Upstanding citizens" (cynically; rich people) rarely worry about getting in trouble for breaking certain kinds of laws. I'm thinking specifically about drug possession or similar, but it can even go much further than that.
Arrested? This claim seems to be mostly debunked in a more general sense, but usually proponents of this idea restrict themselves to “illegal” stuff, most of which is a misdemeanor.
My sense is that if you don’t own or operate motor vehicles, and pay your income tax, almost everything people do is in fact quite safe from threat of arrest.
I'm on the fence about the claim myself, but I am aware of lower social class individuals in my area, who seem to have far more frequent run-ins with police. I don't have a great vantage point on why the police get involved so much more often, but it's clearly true that they have multiples of the number of police visits of people from more affluent neighborhoods.
These visits don't always result in arrests, and in fact mostly do not. That said, when they police are there, they can and do find reasons to arrest individuals involved.
ha. Look at me. Yeah no. some police will find reasons.
I agree, the anti corruption is like a hypothetical lethal electric fence around the prison. Its just there it doesn't really do anything, only like one or two people every year get taken out by it.... but it still has a powerful influence on behaviour.
There are nations where it's difficult (by design?) to figure out the precise chain of leadership. Who ultimately controlled Imperial Japan's foreign policy in WW2? The Emperor? The state? The war council? Extreme elements within the army? An uneasy Schelling balance of all the above? At various times various factions held sway. For Japan's enemies, it was like negotiating with a many-headed hydra.
I'd say there are deep and unspoken national characteristics that continue to express themselves regardless of what the government's nominally doing. China has never in history shown signs of being a bastion of Jeffersonian democracy or cultural liberalism. Whatever steps the CCP claims to be taking in that direction, the reality is probably somewhat different.
Taiwan is a China, and it's a liberal democracy.
Hong Kong, also full of Chinese.
Also notably not a liberal democracy, now or then.
Singapore is somewhat liberal and somewhat democratic.
and only 1/3 Chinese. "somewhat" is also doing a lot of work, given that Singapore is famously the example of "a rare well-run non-democracy" for many people/.
Mencius Moldbug would also point to the UAE.
What? Chinese are a clear majority in Singapore. 75 % according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore#Ethnic_groups
i don't think the OP meant it chinese are incapable of functioning in a democratic system in some kind of racialized inherent qualities type way (if he did that would be dumb - chinese americans operate just fine within a democracy). But HK/Taiwan/SG or even Korea / Japan being democratic to various degrees doesn't mean China can convert easily to such systems too, because sheer size. Similar flawed metaphors as when people point to sweden and say why can't US healthcare system or what not be like that.
It seems like a really interesting and important question how some countries manage to construct a sensible democratic civil society out of nothing, and others don't.
Japan, South Korea, Taiwan -- these countries didn't evolve democracy naturally over centuries, they had none of the cultural DNA required, but they flipped a switch and turned into perfectly reasonable democratic civil societies. A lot of Eastern Europe falls into this category too. Indonesia.
But on the other hand you've got the failures, the countries where there was a serious and concerted attempt to build democratic civil society and it backslid. Russia, Iraq, Pakistan maybe.
With Japan the "flipped switch" would be defeat & occupation from WW2. For Eastern Europe that would be the fall of the Berlin Wall & dissolution of the USSR. But I think the other examples were closer to gradualism.
Japan did get its switch flipped at a particular point, but before that there had been a gradual evolution toward liberal democracy, followed by sudden backsliding in the 1920s. The Taisho government wasn’t as democratic as the Weimar government, but it was headed in that direction.
South Korea has also had a US Army posted for the last 70 years.
A lot of Southern Europe too. Greece was only very intermittently democratic before the 1980s and never for very long, and now it's been 40+ years and democracy has survived a massive economic shock.
Spain and Portugal both had occasional elections in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, but in neither country did democracy last very long before the next coup. Then Franco and Salazar died in the 1970s and they've been democracies ever since.
South Korea may be far less of a "perfectly reasonable" democracy than you think. I'm no expert, but the recent news around their elections has evolved extreme nepotism, bribery and even some assassinations. Multiple former presidents are in jail, which is a feature of unstable or corrupt democracies (and one of the reasons people don't want to really go after former US presidents: it makes us look like one, too).
Taiwan is one of my favorite countries, but it was ruled by a brutally repressive authoritarian party until the late 1980s -- look up the White Terror. The party behind it, the Kuomintang, only finally lost their uninterrupted grip on power in the early 2000s, and they're still a force in the country. So yeah, lovely place, feels stable and law-abiding, but personally I was very surprised at how very short a time they've spent as an actual reasonable democracy.
Taiwan was a Japanese colony for fifty years (and those who survived that were those that co-operated), and then after a brief interlude has spent seventy years as a client of the United States. It's culturally a lot less Chinese than you might think.
(This isn't necessarily a defence of the original statement, but your criticism missed the mark.)
Taiwan also can be a labyrinth where rules are (seemingly deliberately) vague enough that their interpretation and enforcement will depend on which person you ask on which day, and many, many people quietly do whatever they feel like doing, content that most of the time it will not be punished, and apparently of the belief that what is not caught is not wrong.
There is a theory that China oscillates between Confucian and Legalist poles of philosophical governance and has done so since the Qin dynasty, 2300 years ago. Xi is taking China into the Legalist direction (rigid adherence to the diktats of the leader).
Minor quibble, Vietnam has always been anxious about/wanted an ally against China. At the end of WWII, Ho Chi Minh temporarily welcomed the French back in so that the Chinese would leave. After the Vietnam war, Vietnam basically allied with the USSR against China. Deng launched a punitive invasion of Vietnam in 1979. After the Soviets collapsed, the US was the logical next choice for outside protector. I'm sure this nonsense over islands hasn't helped, but they always want someone to protect them from China. It's not all Xi's fault.
Interestingly, there's a similar dynamic where Cambodia constantly wants an outside ally as protection against Vietnam.
Yes, Vietnam has been paving the way for decades by not teaching kids in school to hate America (compare China).
In the main art museum of Ho Chi Minh city, there are three levels. Level one starts with antiquity, then make a 1000 years jump over all the period of Chinese domination as if it never happenned. Level 2 and 3, though, are entirely devoted to propaganda paintings from the war against the USA.
From my experience dating a VN refugee, there is definitely an anti-colonialist resentment against China.
I had an interesting, completely random chat with a Vietnamese military officer in Hanoi. At one point I asked him why they don't hate Americans, and he mentioned a Ho Chi Minh quote that has stuck with me. The substance was: if America won against Vietnam, they might rule for 10 years. But if China had its way, it would rule for 1000 years. So basically, the establishment there has decided to forgive and forget what the US did because we're, if not the lesser evil, at least the less relevant evil.
I couldn't find a quote exactly like that online, but this one is attributed to him:
“You fools! Don’t you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don’t you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”
Pretty similar sentiment.
I read "How China Became Capitalist" and it was pretty ok. I even have a copy that has the pages in the reverse order if you want it.
> Aside from a few of Deng’s personal picks, we should think of this less as “China is a magic place where rational scientists hold power”, and more as “for idiosyncratic reasons, social climbers in China got engineering degrees.” Certainly none of these people were selected for the Politburo on the basis of their engineering acumen. They got their power by bribing, flattering, and backstabbing people, just like everyone else.
Right. The mechanism here is that they were told that being an engineer was necessary to get to power. So the people who were social climbers got engineering degrees. The flow is not power to engineers. It's the powerful to engineering programs.
> This isn’t a great answer to the question “how autocratic was pre-Xi China”? In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding). I also don’t get what it meant for some Chinese leaders to be better at pursuing their policy agenda than others: what levers did they pull? How did they quash dissent?
What's an autocracy? The CCP has never been, and is not now, a government where the central government is expected to control everything down to the finest details. Instead the cadres are instructed to understand the goal and spirit of the instructions (they have a lot of study sessions) and to implement them as best suits their locality. Mao was very big on this as a criticism of the USSR and its bureaucratic formalism. This kind of looks like federal, local government. But the thing is the idea is not that the local government does things on their own. The idea is that the local government serves as a tool of the central administration. For example, the goal of the Chinese Communist Party of Smalltown is not that they represent Smalltown to the Party. It's that they represent the Party to Smalltown. They are explicitly instruments of Party control.
China has never had separate power bases. The factions were always at least formally obedient to central authority. They certainly didn't act as a check or balance on central authority. They would have been horrified by the idea that the Communist Party could fight itself or have any kind of insubordination like that. The system was, and is, set to prevent that. On the other hand, the ability to gain genuine support from key CCP officials and from the party in general matters for the effectiveness of your policies.
On the other hand, if you're the leader and you say, "let's get steel production higher," then a combination of will and competence and interest by local cadres is going to matter a lot. If you can play the game, get them onboard, etc then you'll do well. If not, well, they won't disobey. But they won't go the extra mile either. When people say Hu was not as strong a leader what they meant was that he was less capable of getting the average cadre on board or playing oligarchal games to win support. So everyone obeyed him but he wasn't able to get as much done as effectively.
Also, keep in mind that patronage networks can shift. My understanding is that if you upset your subordinates too much they can jump ship. Basically, the two way street in China is that patrons compete to attract clients and clients compete to receive rewards from patrons. Someone who doesn't sufficiently reward their clients, especially if it's because of a personal flaw rather than a lost power struggle, will find people bleeding out of his patronage network and into competing patrons'.
> Of these, I find the second hypothesis - good timing - the most plausible. Why did Xi succeed at gathering power, where others didn’t?
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power. This can create reform tensions which is part of what Xi, by rolling back reforms, wants to resolve.
> During earlier parts of his reign, Xi deliberately left a small fraction of the public square untouched; he seemed aware of the “dictator’s information problem” where nobody would tell him when things are going wrong, and he valued public protests as a way to find corrupt officials and other problems requiring his attention. He’s since backed off on this and just started censoring everything.
China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group. So, for example, supposedly the entire Congress delegation of Fujian can talk freely with each other without fear. But notably not with other delegations or in public or in private apart from the group.
It's a clear attempt to prevent national level opposition and to particularize it by region and control information flow. But that's their solution as it stands. Xi's actually ramped these periods up. He's also started to distribute powerful people into these dialogue communities so they get more genuine information. For example, Xi now represents Mongolia because he wants more genuine information on the frontier.
> By its own standards, Xi’s centralization campaign has succeeded: other factions have been marginalized, corruption has decreased, and society toes the party line more closely than ever. His other efforts are more dubious.
His other efforts are irrelevant. Xi's first stated goal is to keep the CCP in control of China and loyal to ideological doctrine. I've seen nothing in his actions that imply he's not telling the truth there. His goal, as he's stated, is to build Mao-Xi style Early Socialism in China, effectively a form of controlled and directed capitalism that will lead to a smooth transition to real socialism down the line.
Of course, the issue is that capitalism produces wealthy capitalists, celebrities, and other modes of production that tend (in the Communist mind) to produce bourgeois government. Xi was, I suspect, concerned that Party members were becoming capitalists so he severed that link pretty severely. But there's still the issue that that means CCP members are both more powerful and poorer than China's business elite and that the fusion that was ongoing has been, if anything, reversed. Of course, China has a simple way to keep these people in line: a police state. Actresses and billionaires and the like are imprisoned, re-educated, or executed. Enough that I think, especially for businesspeople, it's starting to produce a downward pressure where incentives are to be successful but not too successful. I don't have any broad evidence for this. But I at least think I'm observing that behavior.
So graduates of Tsinghua University suddenly became better communists than graduates of Peking University? And conveniently right around the same time the former became adept at playing the patron-client game?
As I said, patronage and pragmatic concerns do play a role. But ideology plays an even bigger one. Plenty of red princes are not in power right now.
Also, that is exactly what happened because the definition of "good at Chinese communism" is a moving target. As Xi and his allies' though became accepted as mainstream the definition of ideal changed to increasingly resemble them and what they thought.
I'll never stop being astounded at liberal Westerners who seriously think that they can understand Chinese governance without reference to any sincere belief in communism, Marxism, or the Leninist party-form. As if a people as pragmatically hard-nosed as the Chinese would maintain this enormous system of Marxist ideological production that nobody allegedly believed in for seemingly no purpose at all.
It reminds me of Sam Harris's observation of liberal Westerners' total mental block against comprehending that Muslims actually believe in their religion.
Just hypothetically, let's say that Harvard suddenly gets embroiled in a massive PR fiasco and the national media narrative starts to shift towards "Harvard is notably racist", and Yale for reasons comes out looking good in this narrative.
In a decade or so, the Anderson Coopers and Barack Obamas will come much more from Yale and much less from Harvard.
Side note: my father in law is Xi's age and came from Beida, and he was a serious nuclear physicist who came to the US and stayed for "teh science". I've asked him about this, and he has said that at that time, Peking was the school that took engineering seriously and Tsinghua was the school that took politics seriously.
Nevertheless (on the engineering thing) having a leadership that has to go through these engineering courses will lead to smarter leaders than in the west.
Not necessarily. Scott made it sound like engineering courses in China were much easier than in America, and many can chest their way through. Second, American Leadership has about as many lawyers as China has engineers, and I am not convinced that one requires more intelligence than the other. I could see an argument that China leaders have more quantitative intelligence and less verbal intelligence, based on the degrees, but I would not assume there is significant difference in general IQ.
Oh I don’t think that lawyering needs very much IQ. Verbal ability and confidence sure.
The average students attending top engineering and law schools have similar IQs if you measure by SAT score. The average SAT score for an MIT undergraduate is 1535 and for a Yale law school student it's 1515. Comparing undergrads to law school students isn't apples-to-apples, but if there was a big difference in IQ then the average SAT scores would be farther apart.
Verbal (and writing) ability is very much a high-IQ skill. And confidence has a lot more to do with TV-lawyering than the actual practice of law.
When I became a lawyer I was shocked at how incredibly poor public speakers most lawyers are. Unless you're a public defender or something, even full-time litigators don't spend nearly enough time in the courtroom to actually be very good at it. Your average high school debate team probably has more poise and confidence in front of an audience than your average lawyer.
Getting INTO top law programs absolutely requires high IQ. And your impression of how intelligent lawyers are isn't useful.
Right. To the extent that “graduates of top law schools” in the US might not always seem like the sharpest people (and I think that’s easy to overstate), it’s because they operate on the same sort of patronage who-do-you-know and how-much-can-they-donate that Chinese engineering schools apparently do.
That depends on how much added value you think engineering courses provide. Remember, a lot of these people are politically connected and went to universities in the middle of the Cultural Revolution prior to China's big boom in engineering. I have no doubt Xi and the rest have read a lot more science textbooks than Joe Biden. But they've never really practiced engineering and if there was some kind of filter (on entrance exams, on grades in courses) it was probably never applied to them.
For example, Xi got in on the Communist equivalent of class affirmative action and spent a lot of time dealing with politics and learning about Marxism. He's wrote a lot of Marxist theory and not too much about engineering.
I’ve read some of his works and speeches. He’s got a broad educational background, in western and eastern philosophy. In fact he’s read people like Milton Friedman, and in his speech on philosophy
(a chapter in the book i read) he recommends people like Locke, and Hayek along with leftwing philosophy and Chinese thought. He doesn’t read much like a Marxist.
Which book did you read? Because he tones it down for foreign audiences. Though even there it's still there.
But yeah, Communists are obsessed with economics so of course they read opposing arguments. When asked to name his favorite people to read he named two Marxists, a guy from ancient China, and a German jurist. He writes a lot about historical materialism and while he compares it to ideas like Hayek's he always comes out on the Communist side of things. Some people say this is all a cynical lie. I just don't believe them. I think most Communists actually are Communists.
All of which gets away from the point: Locke and Hayek are not engineers or normal parts of engineering programs!
The book is volume 2 of the “xi jinping governance of china”. A real physical book too, since it’s not on kindle. Derived from internal speeches, to my knowledge. Fairly dry stuff, but he’s far from being a doctrinaire communist. Try reading Stalin for that, he was a true believer.
If you mean "The Governance of China Vol. 2" then that's specifically made for foreign audiences and most of the speeches and pieces are to foreign audiences. Xi is a doctrinaire Communist because he literally wrote the doctrine he follows...
Nonsense. All utopias start with a series of assumptions that useful in creating engineers but terrible for policy, such as:
-Problems have solutions
-Problems and solutions are identifiable
-Experts exist that can create plans to implement solutions
-Plans that can solve problems should be implemented.
Sometimes these are all true, but not always.
Really, all utopias? I don’t think that engineers or scientists dominated the Marxist left, rather engineering courses and students were the more conservative elements in universities in the west. Or at the very least politically agnostic. I believe that still holds, in so much as theres any conservatism left.
Engineering is an applied science, generally about what is practicable. Utopianism is generally impractical.
Yes, all Utopias afaict. Feel free to name one that didn't believe those assumptions.
And the raison d'etre of the command economy is that needs could be determined "scientifically" and resources efficiently distributed by the "scientific economist" technocrat class. Heck, was it Brazil that had that uber-cool Mission Control-esque command center where economists could read reports in real time and issue commands to the factories?
Anything can call itself scientific. Marxism is about as scientific as astrology, and Christian Science isn't science either.
As for technocratic economism, that also exists in the West, and I personally don't find non-marxist economics to be scientific either, it doesn't pass the test of fallibility and is driven by ideology.
So No True Scientist is a Marxist then?
"engineers or scientists dominated the Marxist left,"
I got curious: What about the Soviet leadership who tried to implement Marxism in the one country? Summary of Wikipedia bios after Stalin:
Khrushchev: Minimal schooling prior the party career, metal worker. After civil war, a technical college drop out, but in charge of increasingly big engineering-related projects (first mines, later managed building of Moscow Metro).
Brezhnev: Metallurgical engineer. As a rising party official, in charge of agricultural projects, missile and nuclear arms programs.
Andropov: Water Transport Technical College, then politics and KGB.
Chernenko: Only political training (?).
Gorbachev: Law degree. Considered unusual, because law wasn't prestigious. Second degree, agricultural production, and finally a PhD, in sociology.
Fascinatingly, everyone before Gorbachev was born between 1895-1914.
Once a system is in place you would hire engineers. Are engineers in the west pre deposed to Marxism, or radicalism compared to social “scientists”. Obviously not.
What's controversial about #1 and #2?
Considering all the failed attempts to perfect society by banning demon rum, the devil's lettuce, degenerate art, private property, marriage, etc it seems like people are very poor at identifying solutions to purported problems. And considering that people don't agree on which things are even problems in the first place (see: gun ownership)...
That people are (sometimes) bad at solutions doesn't mean that problems should not be attempted to be solved. Also you cherry picked failures and ideological minefields. We have in fact solved lots of problems, either through the government or the government with private enterprise, or private enterprise.
And yet, the assumptions that "all problems have solutions" and "experts exist that can solve any given problem" remain untrue.
Not all problems are solvable
[citation needed]
Scarcity, FTL travel, death (especially that of the universe), incels, inequality, the conclusion of ASOIAF...
If intelligence is heritable and low intelligence people aren't good at stuff necessary for the creation and maintenance of safe, prosperous societies, what's the "solution" to low intelligence populations creating poor, unsafe societies?
If we drop Copenhagen ethics, we have the following options to choose from:
A) good culture that lets low intelligence populations build something safe and posperous; this has precedent in every functional traditional society on Earth
B) intelligence augmentation via gene editing (soon to be widely available)
C) classic eugenics, if you like wearing Hugo Boss and goose stepping
D) do nothing and let poor unsafe societies be poor and unsafe
This is just silly. Even assuming engineers are smarter than lawyers, this would be 100% product of selection (into college programs), not a product of engineering instruction.
And that's ignoring the monstrous assumption that intelligence is the primary driver of good decision making.
Thanks for this comment - I found it really interesting.
> Your model is just fundamentally broken if you understand all the premiers as cynical power maximizers. They're a bunch of highly ideological Communists and they do all sorts of things that only make sense if they're true believing Communists. In fact, they have a whole bunch of cultural and even systemic thing meant to keep cynical power maximizers out of power.
This claim is surprising to me, what are some examples of Xi favoring Ideological Communist Norms against Power-Consolidation Strategies?
I usually assume that Power-Consolidation models of political agents will hold the greatest explanatory power in the most political systems without strongly decentralized political incentives (democracy with a strong middle class) and norms against consolidation (free voting, organization, and speech norms). China's middle class doesn't have any meaningful political power compared to liberal democracy's middle class. China's 'anti-consolidation norms' don't mean much if you always disperse any other powers that try to consolidate. This is why I think Scott's Power Consolidation model of CCP ruling class is accurate. Would you disagree with these points?
> China has a weird system of open public comments that happen in stages. I've heard these are pretty genuine. That is, the CCP will say, "We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." Then they might have periods for other groups. These are, as far as I can tell, pretty genuine. Unless you go off topic they don't consider critcisim disloyal. Likewise, they have this weird system where Party members have specific people they're allowed to talk with (supposedly) without monitoring so long as its the entire group.
Dang, thank you for the terrifying details of open discussion in China. Anyways, I think by 'genuine' you simply mean getting feedback on "strategically bad business policies". However I think Scott 'dictator's information problem' is talking more about getting feedback on "power-consolidation efforts that threaten your own". For example, I'm sure no one is currently going to the business open forum policy discussions saying things like "Hey, I hear Taiwan is pretty nice. Maybe we should try democracy?"
Vietnam and China had a brief war in 1979, right as Deng Xiaoping was consolidating his power. Vietnam is a strong regional power, so they're a natural proxy/ally for the US against China.
Doesn't seem too surprising there's tension there..
Also, good book on Deng is the one by Ezra Vogel. Gives a good sense of power dynamics in 1970-1990 China.
Typos: “Fang Binxing” (with one more G), and the link to the VPN incident just goes to the Wikipedia page without the relevant section anchor.
Also "to an America"
I refuse to believe that "Economy" is a real surname. Surely this is a case of a nom de plume chosen for the subject matter, ala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_Dancer
From some quick googling it sounds like it's an Americanization of the Greek surname Economou/Oikonomou
Yes, but the english word "economy" is itself a transliteration of "oikonomos", so we're back at square one with the names being suspiciously similar.
Hmm, I was mostly responding to the idea that Economy isn't a real surname and is instead a nom de plume, but I'm sorta coming around to the OP being said somewhat in jest so probably I shouldn't have butted in.
But just to be clear the surname Oikonomou seems to be a fairly popular name in Greece[1] and there's nothing particularly strange about it's English transliteration being found in Greek-Americans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oikonomou
Why do Greek people have that name? Were their ancestors economists? (I know that sounds dumb, but I'm having trouble thinking of non-dumb reasons)
Wiktionary says it comes from a word for managing a household or government. So maybe their ancestors were managers.
Ah, the 'Home economics' connection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_economics
IIUC originally (WAY back, before the war with Persia) it was specifically the management of a household, including the budget.
"This is my manager, Mr. Manager."
Their name is oikonomos (steward, manager, head of household) not oikonomia (economics, management).
Oikonomia comes from oikos (household, family, private area as opposed to public) and nomos (literally "distribution/divide/allocate" but also used to mean arrangement or rules). So oikonomia is the practice of arranging private affairs. An oikonomos is someone who does so, usually because they're the head of the family but also on behalf of others.
The name approximates "Steward" or "Freeman" in English.
Greek is a very, very old language. Consider the probability that "economics" comes from a Greek word that was already in use as a family name for generations.
Derivations:
Greek verb oikéō, "(I) inhabit"
From whence oikos, "household" which encompasses the family itself, the house it dwells in, and the family's property. It is the basic unit of Greek society.
The oikonomos ("house ruler") is the head of the household, who manages the property and all the affairs of the family.
Over time, this term becomes the title for a role in politics, religion and commercial affairs as a manager/treasurer. Or steward, such as Denethor. Down the line, the "economy" is what the "economist" manages, and then we get the commonly understood use of the word.
Related: oikoumene, the "inhabited/known world" which becomes a term meaning "civilisation" and then becomes a worn-down version that also gets Latinised as "oecumene/ecumene" to refer to what is broadly termed "Christendom" and hence "ecumenism" which refers to the relationships between the Christian Churches/denominations.
But then, that would be an ecumenical matter!
EDIT: Look at the family name of the House of Stuart, which came from the same hereditary occupation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Stuart
"The House of Stuart, originally Stewart, was a royal house of Scotland, England, Ireland and later Great Britain. The family name comes from the office of High Steward of Scotland, which had been held by the family progenitor Walter fitz Alan (c. 1150). The name Stewart and variations had become established as a family name by the time of his grandson Walter Stewart."
Had Walter FitzAlan been Greek, his family name would likely have been Anglicised as "Economy" in the same way.
I can't resist adding a useless comment here: my own username has an etymology originating in the Greek for "raven" and both the OP, Tossrock's, and my icons are corvids.
Looking it up, if the name were given as an equivalent in English usage, rather than directly anglicised, it would be something along the lines of "Stuart/Stewart":
"Americanized form of Greek Economos ‘steward’, or of the patronymic form Economou."
Would you find "Elizabeth Steward/Stewart/Stuart" a more believable name?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_(name)
Dr. Economy was married in a Greek Orthodox church according to her NYT wedding announcement:
"Elizabeth Charissa Economy, an associate fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, was married yesterday to David Michael Wah, a vice president in the investment banking division of CS First Boston. Both work in New York. The Rev. Demetri Kantzavelos performed the ceremony at the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago."
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism?"
Venice lasted over a thousand years as an oligarchy and plenty of other medieval/early modern republics weren't much worse.
I will note that Venice put a *lot* of effort into preventing capture of its internal elections, primarily by heavy use of sortition (the idea being that bribes were inevitable but with enough randomisation bribing *enough* people would become prohibitively expensive)
Honestly we should bring back sortition. Replace the upper houses. Select 100 people. Make it illegal to bribe ( or fund them). Aware them a pension on completion. They can vote on legislation but maybe not originate legislation.
Strongly support this. We already have jury duty, why not senate duty?
Was Mao an autocrat throughout his time as Paramount Leader? When I was reading about the history of China since the revolution a few weeks ago, it had seemed like there was a period after the Great Leap Forward when Mao had become mostly a figurehead, but then his cult of personality became useful to the Party, and the Cultural Revolution happened, and he became as powerful as he had ever been in his last few years.
I don't know Chinese Communist history nearly as well as Soviet history, but my impression is that Mao tired of being sidelined by Zhou Enlai and other leaders and initiated the Cultural Revolution to retake power which he held to his death. Mao was like Trotsky, a believer in permanent revolution, and if the Gang of Four had defeated Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death, mainland China could well have continued enduring massive purges and other self-inflicted wounds every decade or so to the present day.
I thought that corruption was precisely the point of Belt and Road. You go in, promise to shower the local leadership with cash, infrastructure, and jobs, to be repaid at some later date. They embezzle the money like they're supposed to. Then you come back a few years later and say, "Hey, remember that money we gave you ? Remember how we said it was a loan ? Guess what, first payment's due now, but we'll take your port as collateral if you prefer". So the head honcho gives them the port... and the iron mine... and the plantation... and whatever else they need. China builds some military bases on the property, then moves on to the next target. It's a win-win situation for everyone but the peasants, but who cares about them ?
Yes and no. They did that at the start, but they're at the point now where they're basically just deferring/forgiving loans. The hard truth is that they just don't need that many podunk ports or iron mines in remote parts of the world.
Right, my point is, they don't need podunk ports; they need military bases and puppet regional dictators, and the infrastructure loan scheme is a way to gain both.
>they need military bases and puppet regional dictators
What for? China doesn't strike me as being interested in the sort of global power projection wielded by the US, that seems like a projection of US foreign policy interests onto China.
China has 4 military bases on foreign soil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases#China) to the US's "around 600" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military_bases); 3 of them are in bordering nations, and Djibouti just seems like a popular spot to build naval bases for a bunch of nations (US, France, Italy, Japan, Saudi Arabia) due to its strategic location.
Not sure which regional dictators China has installed/propped up either, do you have a list?
At least 3 of those have been built in the last 10 years, so this is definitely an attempt at some kind of escalation.
China is building a base in the Solomon Islands. What possible legitimate (e.g. security) purpose would this serve? The only possible explanation for this is they want a military base in Australia's backyard in case Australia has something to say about China bullying its pacific neighbors.
Of COURSE China are interested in global power projection, it's just that so few countries trust them and would see a Chinese base as nothing more than a way of getting on the bad side of the US. Whereas most foreign US bases are in countries who want them there as a form of security.
You had me until that last line.
It saves money on defense spending.
The Rajapaksa brothers in Sri Lanka appear to be discovering the limits of what China is willing to do to help its vassals.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-61005827
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/how-four-powerful-brothers-broke-an-island-nation/2022/03/18/e9e04c5e-a71d-11ec-8628-3da4fa8f8714_story.html
I mean they're literally funding iron ore mines in Africa to avoid having to but Australian Iron ore because Australia keeps hurting China's feelings. And yes, it really is something close to hurt feelings: https://www.9news.com.au/national/china-australia-tensions-beijing-government-grievance-list-with-canberra/adc10554-e4e9-4a19-970e-81949501a1ad
This is sort of true but I do think there's a lot of Hanlon's Razor in this. A lot of people, not just in the West but also in China, have a persistent tendency to WANT to believe that economic development of poor countries can be rapidly achieved by combining local labor with outside capital and technical expertise to construct infrastructure and large industrial projects. I.e., that the Marshall Plan as an idea is just as applicable to a place that has been poor since the Stone Age as a rich country that recently had its infrastructure bombed out by B-17s. And that This Time is Different because the corrupt idiots who sabotaged all the past economic development initiatives along these lines are definitely gone this time.
I strongly feel like the best summary of the conditions that led to Xi's ascension are outlined in the book "The Party" by Richard McGregor. I did a book review in the SSC comments a few years back, but I'll do a summary here:
Basically - China pre-Xi wasn't a stable system. The patronage network you outlined in this piece has a serious downside: a newly-appointed paramount leader is necessarily at his absolute weakest in terms of influence at the time he is appointed leader. This is because a large part of being paramount leader is the ability to appoint a bunch of people into important positions who will back your agenda. If you're coming into a position where all the important spots were filled by your (likely ideologically-alienated) predecessor, you come in with not that much ability to accomplish much. Conversely, however, the time when you're most powerful as a leader is when you're right on the cusp of being kicked out of power. You've had time to solidify your reign and appoint a bunch of toadies.
Think of this as an exact inverse of the american system. Instead of a honeymoon "mandate" at the start of a term, the Chinese leader has more of a gradual ramp up. Instead of a lame duck period, they have a year or so of basically uncontested rule.
So... if a leader is most powerful right when they're about to get removed, why didn't someone hang onto power before Xi? Well, it's a mix of honest-to-god admiration of Dengism on the part of the former leaders and a shadowy network of retired party officials who still exerted significant sway and could, conceivably, have made life untenable for a would-be emperor. Unfortunately, that network had mostly disolved by the time Xi was facing the boot, so he didn't have to deal with it.
Mostly though, the previous chinese system didn't work. It really weakened the central government and was quickly losing ground to private industry. It was such a flawed system that reform was basically inevitable - either the party would reassert itself through a strong leader that was able to re-centralize power or it would be glasnosted.
I have a theory that may or may not be true that Jiang essentially expected to have the most personal influence in China even after "giving up" the position of President and that this was true up until sometime into Xi's first term. In essence there was only ever meant to be one true ruler.
I think "admiration of Dengism" and "shadowy network" kind of understates the main force holding Jiang back which is that Deng himself was still alive for a good portion of his rule. Had Jiang tried to seize power, Deng could simply have swept back in. Jiang likely had the same influence on Hu, and indeed reports often pin Jiang as the main opposition to Xi - Scott asked why the Shanghai Gang didn't oppose the Tsinghua Gang, but the answer is that they did, but chances are Jiang's power had just waned sufficiently by then that he couldn't do much. And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have.
A longer form version of this comment sounds very interesting. If you have it handy would you mind linking to your prior comment? Or if you don't have it handy, could you verify whether you had the same username back then so I can search for it myself? Thanks
Hey look at that, I found it all on my own: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/open-thread-145-75/#comment-844821
Nitpick: Yang Gang's surname is Yang, not Gang. (I googled this to be sure, and discovered that Andrew Yang also has a gang.)
I know why Scott didn't do it, but I would have found the Chinese names less confusing if the tones were indicated. (He didn't do it because the other readers would have been more confused.)
This is a chronic problem with pinyin. Even in China tones are rarely indicated when pinyin is used. If the Vietnamese can do it there is no reason the Chinese can’t as well.
Another option, equally intelligible to those who can't read tones, is to capitalize the entirety of the Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese/Cambodian/Hungarian surname, either on first reference or (more awkwardly) always.
It's helpful with Japanese politics lately. For many years, it has been conventional to transliterate Japanese names in reverse order. This puts the surname last, as with European names. Lately, the Japanese government has stopped reversing the order, but foreign media largely persists. Thus the Japanese government tends to write 'KISHIDA Fumio' to remind us that this is indeed the prime minister commonly known to us as Fumio Kishida.
Not sure that's a nit - it's faithful to the BBC headline, and the BBC article correctly calls him "Mr Yang", so it seems they intentionally elected to use the Chinese name order.
Your next Dictator Book Club should be a biography of Huey Long, Dictator of Louisiana. ;)
This. What got me when I first went to China is how familiar and comforting in a way the patron-client and general economic system was to me as someone from the deep rural south.
One thing I think is missing from the GDP discussion is the degree to which demographics is destiny. By this measure, China has done above average in terms of growth, even considering its demographics. It is however, set up for a huge slowdown in growth.
If I were an autocratic leader facing inevitable economic headwinds, I'd be consolidating power and locking down decent too. The prosperity carrot used to bargain for unity is going away. Without a carrot, what is there but a stick?
Check out this animated plot I made of gdp vs demographics for every country with a population >50m.
https://epiapps.com/files/gdp.gif
People of age>=65 have lower productivity, but then, <=15 people have lower too.
True, but rapidly accelerating economies tend to have a lot of young people in the wings waiting to be productive. <=15 are an investment in future growth.
Not convinced that is showing much at all. Some of the lines are all over the place, Russa is flying up and backwards at one stage.
Russia and Ukraine (not shown) have the same pattern. There are occasions where non-demographic factors can dominate. Switching from communism to (sort of) capitalism is one. War is another.
Maybe you disagree, but it looks to me like a pretty consistent trend down and to the right. Most countries trace very similar trajectories over different time periods. This is especially true when you get past 10% >= 65 y/o.
A Marxist reading is that the growth slowdown was at least partly deliberate and unforced (leaving aside COVID-19, of course). The Chinese remain as much, if not more, interested in capital accumulation - expanding the mass of assets (even barely profitable) under control of their enormous banks - as in GDP growth. And they're very interested in boosting domestic demand and tech self-reliance in a dirigiste, targeted way.
I don't know whether all this is rubbish according to orthodox macroeconomics, but if the Chinese are deliberately accomplishing other goals at the expense of GDP growth, then it's probably a mistake to judge Xi's performance by that measure.
I am not sure what you mean exactly. Expansion of capital is a part of GDP known as investment. It is usually around 20-25% as it is in the EU and the US, in China it’s over 40%.
It looks like the CCP is trying to reduce that, and increase domestic demand.
Boinu literally just said that they're trying to increase it.
Yea and he’s wrong. The recent regulatory frameworks around the Three Bright Lines seeks to limit investment expansion. They’re furiously attempting to evolve past an economy based on real estate speculation.
"""After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top"""
Oversimplifications are usually good, but this one is missing a really critical piece. Everyone also furiously backstabbed each other for several years *before* Mao's death, as they tried to stay a step ahead of the Cultural Revolution he *encouraged* to take them all down.
The Cultural Revolution was zombie movie level scary for people who found themselves up against it. Your doctors and former military officers and powerful people were screamed at and then locked up *and then screamed at while they were locked up* and then taken out to do various important jobs like "take over from the teenagers who have been manning the Russian border because it looks like the Russians may attack". Terrifying doesn't begin to describe it. "Allie Brosh takes a lot of drugs and watches horror movies then intentionally strands herself in the woods at night" is closer.
"""In particular, I don’t get exactly what prevented Jiang or Hu from seizing power, overstaying their term limits, or killing their enemies (I assume it was some mix of not being sure the military would back them and not wanting to destabilize the country, but I don’t feel like I have a gears-level understanding)."""
It's probably the simple answer! It's probably same answer as why they cracked down so hard in Tiananmen Square: abject fear. "In my lifetime, one man has been able to goad the populace into becoming a screaming zombie mob, and they stayed that way for years. Dear Marx, I don't ever EVER want to see that happen again. Deng is right. We have to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again."
Also, Jiang had to be talked out of power to some extent (more than Deng or Hu), but this took place behind closed doors and to my knowledge there has never been any indication that it was a threatening or violent process.
Another interesting tidbit which bears adding, and which I've never been able to square, is this: after being sent down in the Cultural Revolution, Xi ran away and hid, and was arrested and sent back.
Everyone of any standing in his generation was sent down. It's like the fundamental commonality for the entire generation. His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning.
It should be like "Bill Clinton dodged Vietnam" times a hundred. But it never seemed to affect his career.
Is there anyone in the comments who knows more who can explain this?
"His experience is singular and, at least from my Western point of view, seems like it should be very damning."
I doubt he was the only guy who tried it, he's just the biggest name. And local peasants were probably not too happy with having a load of soft-handed city kids who didn't know one end of a cow from the other landed on them and being expected to turn them into useful labour.
Also, if his family were persecuted as described, people may feel he's been punished enough, no need to look for blood from a turnip.
"And local peasants were probably not too happy with having a load of soft-handed city kids who didn't know one end of a cow from the other landed on them and being expected to turn them into useful labour."
Most of the English-language memoirs of the Cultural Revolution are written by the educated youth that went to the countryside, but from what I've gotten from those, this is a reasonable approximation of how the local peasants felt. The educated youth, for their part, were not happy about being taken from their soft city lives and made to live knee-deep in pig shit. Wanting to get the hell out was pretty universal. I can believe that the attitude towards Xi would be more "wish I could've done that" than "screw that guy".
The Soviet Union *never* had decentralized authority after Stalin, except maybe for a few months in 1953 while would-be Stalin successors maneuvered to succeed him. Khrushchev was an absolute ruler, so was Brezhnev, so was Andropov, (Chernenko was a placeholder while maneuvering happened), and then so was Gorbachev. So I'm not sure this comparison makes sense.
It's hard for me to comment about China, just because I'm not a Chinese-speaker, but I kind of suspect that while most of the power is at the very top, which works on patronage, in some of the better-run regions *attempts* are made to run things technocratically. One reason I say this is that, cross-culturally, patronage systems tend to be overwhelmingly male-dominated, but in countries with gender equality women do somewhat better on standardized tests than men. China prides itself on valuing performance on standardized tests highly, particularly post-Deng (and traditionally). And what we see is that...among members of the NPC born before the mid-1980s, men overwhelmingly predominate; among those born after the mid-1980s, a majority are women: https://npcobserver.com/2018/03/10/demographics-of-the-13th-npc/
The easiest explanation for this is that among really young members of the CPC there really is a shift away from patronage towards something like technocracy.
(As an aside, this suggests -- if you extrapolate straight lines out to ridiculousness -- that in two generations or so China might have an overwhelmingly female leadership class, even as its adult population at that point will be very disproportionately male: https://twitter.com/whyvert/status/1501955523976974342
A much smaller male majority in South Korea led to a totally serious mainstream political attempt at "Radicalizing The Romanceless", whose candidate actually won the 2022 presidential election. Fascinating to consider China, a few decades from now, having much more public support for a radicalized romanceless movement, but in an authoritarian society where the leaders are all unelected women.)
Also, a good English-language source about the mechanics of the CCP leadership structure and the 2018 NPC here (it's from a random user of this forum, but please trust me that it's illegibly good, like the bloggers from the WebMD post): https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=274337.0
Wasn't Gorby not even able to figure out what the military budget was? Or was he not unable to push through reforms that he wanted?
He was far from an absolute ruler.
He was able to unilaterally push through reforms in a very short period of time that decentralized the state. He was not able to reverse them.
Nobody knew what the military budget was (I think until academics pieced things together in the 1990s), but that just goes to show that it was mismanaged and disorganized, not that it wasn't deeply centralized.
China was never as centralized as the USSR because Mao thought the bureaucracy and centralization of the USSR was bad. As for the rest of the argument: it relies on the extremely dubious idea that standardized testing leads to membership in the NPC and that you can extrapolate "number of women" to "meritocracy." It doesn't and you can't. The CCP is setting the numbers and one thing they do is try to have a certain number of various ethnic minorities, women, etc.
Also, I think you've misread South Korea. Yes, angry anti-feminist men are a part of the coalition, but it's not because they can't get dates. Or at least that's not the rhetoric. The rhetoric is largely about Communism and the (real) fact that men have to spend two years of their lives in the army and then return to jobs or universities with affirmative action for women. It doesn't help that the last female President of South Korea was corrupt, incompetent, probably made major national decisions due to astrology, and still got a lot of praise from international/feminist groups. (Yes, it's unfair that her failures affect all women. But realistically it was a factor. The astrology thing was especially dwelt on.)
I really think the South Korean feminist movement misstepped by ignoring the effect conscription and the border has on Korean men. But South Korea doesn't have the same issues as China (a lack of women) and China doesn't have the same as South Korea.
The rise in the number of women in the NPC seems to pretty closely track the rise of women in various white-collar professions around the world. Immediately linking that to "meritocracy" is kind of a stretch, sure, but I think it points in that direction. (As a general rule, I think the more the demographics of your elite resemble the demographics of who is successful in white-collar professions, the more meritocratic it probably is, and the less it does so, the less it probably is.)
South Korea has sky-high rates of young men reporting no sex over the last year compared to anywhere else (...though I don't know if this is polled in China). (source: https://www.blueroofpolitics.com/post/women-dont-want-to-do-it-men-dont-have-anyone-to-do-it-with/). I don't know which direction the causation the widespread anti-feminism goes -- whether no sex leads to anti-feminism, which is what I suspect, or whether anti-feminism leads to no sex (which I think you're saying?), which might also be plausible.
I do think that both are downstream of a ludicrous and unnatural sex ratio, that China's sex ratio is much worse than South Korea's and still getting even worse (though I think the second derivative has turned; the peak of male births relative to female births happened in ~2015, though there are still far more male births than female births), and that if you sort of extrapolate straight lines out a few decades China will have a largely female elite in a country dominated by dissatisfied men. This seems interesting if nothing else.
> (As a general rule, I think the more the demographics of your elite resemble the demographics of who is successful in white-collar professions, the more meritocratic it probably is, and the less it does so, the less it probably is.)
That's an interesting position. It at least makes sense. Though there's an issue with the application: your statistics are wrong. The NPC outperforms most professions like lawyers/judges, military officers, engineering directors, etc. The most prestigious professions with a lot of women like doctors are closer to gender parity.
> I don't know which direction the causation the widespread anti-feminism goes -- whether no sex leads to anti-feminism, which is what I suspect, or whether anti-feminism leads to no sex (which I think you're saying?), which might also be plausible.
Sort of. What I'm saying is that anti-feminism and feminism can be understood as gender dominant sociological coalitions that are making contradictory demands of society. Painful, dangerous conscription creates and strengthens male coalitions and means society requires significantly more extraction from men than women. This gives them a legible common class interest which is inflamed by feminist discourse about their privilege. Meanwhile women lack a similar forced coalition and while they're equally inflamed they have less bargaining power than the men the state needs as soldiers.
This isn't inherent, of course. SK Feminists could have insisted women get conscripted too which would have made any coalitions formed more cross gender. I still think this would have led to anti-establishment youth coalitions but they'd manifest less as anti-feminist because women would be involved too. Or they could have fought conscription. But they were shortsighted in my view and now there's a growing reactionary backlash that they aren't handling very well.
It's that quote about injustice anywhere being a threat to justice everywhere. In this case, uncompensated extraction that feminists didn't care about because it was the "wrong" gender has created an anti-feminist coalition that helped elect a president who posts shitlord memes about women and has abolishing a bunch of women's only programs as a campaign promise. (Though, to be clear, I don't think it's feminists' fault that happened. It's just they played their hand poorly.)
> and that if you sort of extrapolate straight lines out a few decades China will have a largely female elite in a country dominated by dissatisfied men. This seems interesting if nothing else.
I doubt it. The CCP is only about 30% female and has huge structural privileges for the military which is overwhelmingly male. I do think women are on the rise in China. But the idea that women are going to dominate the elite seems a bit far fetched.
Some thoughts:
CIA dossier on Xi by close friend said he was incorruptible by money. He's a princeling whose sister was prosecuted to death during the cultural revolution and got sent down to the countryside only to come back a believer. LKI, who I'd categorize as preeminent PRC watcher with relations with 5 generations of PRC leaders compared Xi to "Nelson Mandela calibre" of person. These points rarely get mentioned when assessing Xi.
He's enough of a political maverick to consolidate sufficient power for massive corruption crackdown and push through military modernization as well as eliminate thorough US/western influence (see CIA debacle, domestic NGO laws). That's massive. On corruption, CCDI has disciplined 1M+, even Xi didn't start off with that many enemies. But he was competent enough to accumulate enough power to step on that many toes, something Hu/Deng couldn't do.
Incidentally crackdown among military corruption + modernization has actually evolved PLA into fairly competent force, at least enough for US to rank PRC as pacing power. Add in building SCS bases while US distracted in ME and Xi has massively improved PRC strategic posture. Note alternative to Xi was Bo, whose relationship/patronage with brass made such transformation (IMO) not feasible. Again, feat Xi's predecessors and alternatives wasn't capable of.
Dismantling CIA network, neutering foreign NGOs and ramming through NSL in lawless HK is self explanatory. It's ridiculous HK existed so long as spy capital of Asia with NSL state of exception that enables unfettered treason. Securitization in XJ, however you feel about methods, stopped terrorism completely. Repressing less than 1% of minorities for domestic security is no shit correct political decision.
I was initial Xi doubter, he sounds and looks dopey as hell, and frankly seemed too simple/stupid. Yet his achievements have been remarkable for PRC interests. He was the right man at the right time. Keep in mind US pivot to Asia under Hu. Xi inherited a US already orienting towards PRC containment and have played most of the cards right. Staggeringly so. Mao unified country, Deng built it, Xi looks to be securing it against the most powerful hegemony in world history. And he's doing a surprisingly good job, at least more than most who follow PRC geopolitics for the last couple decades would have thought. Seems like the right man to FDR a 3rd term to navigate PRC in a "world is undergoing profound changes unseen in a century".
As for development:
>Of those, China is least impressive (so far)
PRC has done best considering scale and external development environment. Other east asian tigers had support/security umbrella of US at peak hyperpower/hegemon. Singapore was city state on relatively easy mode. PRC climbed out of hole while being sanctioned by west, had to build own indigenized nuclear/space/weapons etc industries. At end of day, PRC population means PRC can't get away with specializing in a few industries to uplift population, they have to cultivate every industry and even then there's not enough global demand to uplift everyone. For reference peak PRC manufacturing employed something like 300M... all the Tigers combined and more. There was/is simply too many people. To be blunt, other tigers got A+ playing on "I'm too young to die", PRC got A- playing on "nightmare". They're not even in the same league considering all aspects of nation building and geopolitics. US satraps and countries that align with US interests do well, including authoritarian ones. News at 11. The only country PRC should be measured against is India... which speaks for itself.
China had plenty of support and favorable trade conditions from the US for a long time to play it off against USSR and in hopes that it would eventually liberalize.
Triangular diplomacy maneuvered PRC in position to get _better_ trade conditions vs active sanctions/embargos by western bloc during cold war. Meanwhile, USSR did provide support to PRC, but not on same tier like "satraps" like JP/KR/TW received from US/west, i.e. TW/KR didn't get any severe sanctions post white terror or gwangju massacre, but CCPs shoots some students and no more western weapons/tech while USSR was geopolitically uneasy neighbour/partner. Favourable trade conditions is unconditional support despite atrocities, which PRC was rarely immune from. Even PRC's WTO accession was extra onerous due to additional US lobbying. There was period of favourable looking the other way late 90s early 00s after MFN and good relations while US blind by end of history goggles from USSR collapse as US thoroughly infiltrated PRC and cultivated influence via NGOs. Still didn't take too long relative to US foreign policy speed before recognizing PRC growing too fast, so HClinton queues the pivot. Post war PRC/west relations is roughly ~30 years of severe containment, ~20 years of open door policy with reduced containment, ~10 years of relatively favourable trade conditions, and back to containment for last ~10 years. Favourable periods existed, but not for a long time. IMO a future retrospect will show it was blink in historic terms, but PRC was fortunate to have modernized during peak globalism and connectivity enabled rapid indigenous catchup given typical protectionist policies and PRC scale that briefly caught US off guard. The favourable window was narrow, and Xi arrived / preparing for world where it was already closing.
Long-term resident of China (20 years) here. This was very good, actually descriptive of the China I know, unlike 99% of western media reports.
On the censorship issue, I want to complicate the picture a bit. I think all descriptions of increasing Chinese censorship are deeply flawed, because they fail to account for the massive general increase in information that the internet has brought.
So: "...to people who grew up in Hu’s China, Xi’s regime feels like a clear step backwards."
I don't know about the regime, but I have access to a lot more information now than I did under Hu, because the internet is better.
"The censoring of Southern Weekly, previously a well-regarded Chinese newspaper, is emblematic"
Sure - but the Southern Weekly and others in the Southern stable, while "well-regarded," were never actually good. What has happened is this: factional debate in China used to sometimes happen in the newspapers. It was exciting to read when it happened. Western observers salivated at the access it gave them to current Chinese political thought, which is usually very opaque. But it was always opinion within the current acceptable range of political possibility. No one who thought the CPC should not be in power ever wrote in the Southern Weekly.
About 10 years ago (I think), that kind of newspaper debate stopped. It went online, private, and into other channels. Western commentators sighed, and said, oh dear, the newspapers have been censored. But that's not really what happened: they were always very heavily censored. Now they're just heavily censored media where nothing of import is talked about.
As to total censorship: the internet is routing around. The outbreak of Covid is a classic example. The news got out, really fast. Much faster than the authorities wanted. And they cracked down later, notoriously jailing the doctor who broke the story. But the story still got out. That was basically unthinkable under Hu. (Example: the city where I live, Xiamen, was the site of one of China's few successful environmental protests, back in about 2007. I watched them march in the streets to stop a chemical plant being built near our city center. That news never got out - never reached other people, never got into the media.)
So the real censorship landscape is: increasing censorship, yes; but failing to keep up with the internet, so overall we are getting more information, not less.
The same applies here:
"Universities that previously had a long leash..." universities never had a long leash. This is rose-tinted nonsense. Any prof who had genuinely radical/democratic/non-communist views would have been weeded out at any time during the last 40 years. This is just more people going to university, so censorship has become more visible.
The other thing I would like people to know about China right now is that Xi's anticorruption campaign has been very effective for ordinary day-to-day stuff. When my older son was born 15 years ago, we stuffed cash in an envelope and gave it to the doctor to make sure my wife was treated well in the hospital. We don't do that any more.
(There's still plenty of corruption, running through personal acquaintance networks, but the cash bribery part of ordinary transactions has been effectively stamped out in my middle-class city. Teachers react with horror if you try to buy them a gift; we recently had a house refitted and the man who came to check whether our gas main was properly routed wouldn't accept a bribe, so we had to install an extra door.)
From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better.
Obligatory disclaimer: Anything positive I say about China or its government should not be understood to mean that I support its censorship, oppression, or imprisonment of innocent people.
This fits well with my own impressions. I lived in Beijing in 1998-2001 and gone back often since. I remember Jiang Zemin jokes, and especially those about his wife, who was rather ugly and physically awkward. I wonder if Xi gained an edge by marrying a graceful singer
Westerners have a really tough time modeling the first derivative of improvements in emerging markets. I’m not sure why it’s so hard.
The number of people elevated from abject poverty in China is just staggering. That counts for a lot and certainly more than not being able to visit some websites you even never knew existed.
Sure, it's great, the same could be said for the Soviet Union. But it likely would have happened in a hypothetical Nationalist Mainland China, and even better. See how developed Taiwan became under Nationalist China, much faster and better than Mainland China under Communist China.
Great comment, really useful to hear first hand accounts like this. I do have one question - if you didn’t speak English, would you still have easy access to information outside of China?
Technically, it wouldn't be any different. I bought my VPN from a Chinese person who I talk to on WeChat, and using that VPN I can (usually) access uncensored media in Chinese published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere. And of course, Chinese people can travel and visit other countries fairly freely, and many of them study abroad. Where I live, lots of people have family connections to Taiwan, and you can quite easily find a Taiwanese person to have a conversation with. (However, a lot of Taiwanese people who live and work here may be (a) pretty pro-China anyway, and (b) very careful about what they say, because they don't want to lose their visas.)
Of course, if you don't speak English, there's lots of content that you'll miss out on. There just isn't as much good stuff written in Chinese, but there's still enough for anyone who wants to pursue it.
Could it be that the `outer layers' are not entirely rubber stamps, and that the `standing committee' has total power, but ONLY within some range of options that will broadly be seen as legitimate by the outer circles of the governing apparatus? And within that range, they can pick whatever policy options (or personnel) they like, and the outer circles will dutifully rubber stamp it, but if the standing committee and/or paramount leader try to implement policies that the outer layers of the onion view as fundamentally illegitimate, then there is a constitutional crisis and maybe the entire standing committee gets defenestrated? (In principle - the politburo is smart enough that they never totally exceed their mandate in this way). If this setup is true (and it seems plausible to me), then the standing committee in fact does not have absolute power - it is constrained by a broader consensus on a range of `legitimate policy options,' and this consensus can be shifted, but presumably only slowly, so it is not sufficient to get a clear majority of cronies on the standing committee in order to seize absolute power, you also need to steer the consensus in the outer layers of the onion to a point where `Xi seizes absolute power' is seen as being a legitimate thing to do.
And as a corollary to that: an `anti-corruption' purge that doesn't touch any standing committee members but does (selectively) purge a whole bunch of people in the outer layers of the power structure could be an effective way to shift the consensus in the outer layers to a place where `paramount leader takes absolute power' comes to be seen as a legitimate thing for the paramount leader to do.
As context: I am thinking of the discussion on this DSL thread on mission driven organizations (I think the CCP can be characterized as such) https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6154.msg231263.html#msg231263
and John Schilling's comments on the power of legitimacy to constrain the actions of agents, and thinking that probably a lot of this discussion is also relevant for understanding the power dynamics within the CCP.
Reminds me of a anthropology text I read, where the anthropologist observed that the head man was usually careful to make requests of other tribal members that he knew they would be likely to follow.
No, this definitely isn't right. We know this because the central government has made a number of shocking turns, and they all get rubber-stamped through. The move away from communism to "some people may get rich first" was the biggie; the decision to work with America was another; joining the WTO was another, massively controversial; and Xi's anti-corruption purges is another, hugely disruptive to existing elites and institutions. They all passed because the center wanted them. The outer layers have no power; they are literally chosen from among the people who will assent to whatever the center says.
There must be a bunch of people whose opinion matters, but they are not, to the best of my knowledge, represented by any particular political institution. I guess they are an informal network.
I guess this is still not entirely unrestricted. The supreme leader can't just make 50 controversial executive order and have them all rubber-stamped. It reminds me of some game where you have to pay "legitimacy" or "prestige" points to sign a new rule.
In the faction discussion I was somewhat surprised the military faction was not mentioned. The sabre-rattling against Taiwan helps a lot in keeping them happy and in some ways they are the most important of all factions.
Perhaps Xi's special ability is merely to keep the maximum amount of factions satisfied at once without benefiting China itself in any particular way. And perhaps Xi's goal is little else than personal power, after all he was effectively sent to the gulag as a teenager for the "sins" of his father and may just want to be the one giving orders rather than taking them.
I think the GDP graphs are much more informative on the log-scale:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?yScale=log&time=1948..2018&country=CHN~JPN~KOR~TWN
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=chart&yScale=log&country=CHN~POL
Maybe religion is a tool of dictators to efficiently control their population. Xi never used that, did he?
A friend sent me an interview with an Indian communist. Communists have been decimated in election after election.
This guy was very frustrated. He seemed upset that communism never took off in India like it did in Russia and China. He worshipped Mao, as do all Indian communists. He said rather sadly, that early leaders in independent India, such as Gandhi and Nehru, were a lot trickier than Chiang Kai Shek. He also blamed the " cunning upper castes" in general, for having stopped his utopia from materializing in India.
I'll try to link to this video, if I find it again.
Ha ha! I suppose "Castro" is how they say "Khan" in Spanish.
I learned a lot from this post, and loving the dictator book club. May I suggest this charming chap - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Sassou_Nguesso - only problem is there are no actual books about him in English.
No discussion of the human rights abuses of China would be complete without a discussion of the horrendous one-child (now two-child) policy. Forced abortion is not a choice. See Women's Right's Without Frontiers (https://www.womensrightswithoutfrontiers.org/) for more information.
Maybe we *are* in a children's book, and you're the first to tell. Beats the simulation hypothesis...
It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc, America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college' along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines), extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
>The results flatter my biases as a quasi-libertarian: the state-owned companies are much worse than the private ones:
You have a very bourgeois-dominated view of "success", if you measure success by how much the bourgeois gets enriched then sure they are more "successful" but China does not have such an anti-humanist attitude to "success". The purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
> The purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful
What metrics can I look at to check your claim?
Most descriptions of China make it sound pretty hyper-capitalist from the perspective of the average citizen...
"explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college"
If by "anti-democratic," you mean "pro-minority," sure. Otherwise just save money and let all decisions for the US be made by California (then Virginia).
"Pro-minority" can be used to justify anything.
And "true democratic" justice is a lynch mob.
Call it what you want, democracy is democracy whether it be good or bad,
How DARE you suggest Democracy isn't the holiest of holies!
I didn't actually, if you read what I said properly.
"democracy" as used by the west doesnt mean literal democracy but democratic republics with some absolute restirctions.
I dont have a rose-tinted view of this,and few americans or westerners do. There are all sorts of ways it fails to live up to the ideals.
But... in some sense its surprising that some of th values of liberalism have been conserved, and the US and the "west" really do manage to be "better" in this sense in terms of individual freedoms, diversity of viewpoints, respect for minoroties, etc.
Would you say that since women are the majority of the population, letting only the women vote would be equivalent to the actual system? Or that it was useless to give black people the right to vote since they are a minority in the USA?
Just because you are a minority doesn't mean your vote can't be the tie breaker.
It's one person one vote in normal liberal democracies so I have no idea how those are comparable situations.
The idea behind those example is to demonstrate that contrary to what Moosetopher says, the vote of almost every american would matter in a normal, direct election, not just those of the dominant category. Trying to convince people has a lot of diminishing return, so the dominant strategy in election is to go campaign everywhere for everyone in the hopes to gain the biggest number of vote possible.
Actually your example goes to my point. Unless you're willing to claim that women and men (as classes) have identical interests and values you're right back to "the majority does what it wants, the minority should shut up and obey."
It sounds like the purpose of SOE's is to provide revenues and jobs to perpetuate the patron/client system. "Enriching the people" sounds like a naive view, frankly.
What makes you say that?
"SOEs face similar corruption risks as private
companies, but the risks are compounded by the
scale of the assets they control, the considerable
value of public contracts they award, and most
of all their proximity to governments and politics.
Corruption risks arise from various sources. SOEs in
high-value sectors often enjoy monopoly or
quasimonopoly rights that provide an opportunity for
abnormal profit generation, a privileged relationship
with the government, and state financial support.
This creates incentives and opportunities to extract
significant rents. Such mechanisms are often used to
benefit political groups and party finances in order
to sustain the resource diversion over time. Risks also
arise from weak legal and regulatory frameworks;
corporate governance weaknesses at SOE levels: a
lack of transparency and disclosure over SOE finances
compounded by poor financial reporting practices;
and limited effective government and citizen oversight.
...
Preferential treatment by the state gives rise to
abuse. Funds for direct and indirect subsidies, debt
write-offs and tax exemptions, and compensation
for carrying out non-commercial objectives may be
siphoned off for personal or political gain. Reliance on
state support means that SOEs are less likely to suffer
the same consequences of corrupt practices as their
private sector counterparts as governments can provide
resources to mitigate any damages incurred. SOEs also
enjoy easy access to loans from state-owned banks at
preferential rates, even when such loans have no clear
rationale. Subject to political interference, state banks
themselves may suffer from corruption in the lending
process, which can create a possible risk zone for both
entities. A 2015 investigation into corrupt practices in
Chinese state banks, for example, found that abuse of
office and kick-backs played a role in the approval and
distribution of non-profitable loans to SOEs.2
A 2020 study shows that countries with limited transparency
and accountability of their natural resource sectors
used those assets to secure large resource-based loans
(RBLs). The countries with the largest amounts of RBLs
in their respective region—Venezuela in Latin America
($59 billion) and Angola in sub-Saharan Africa ($24
billion)—both have poor resource governance scores.3
Corruption risks are also associated with relaxed anti money laundering procedures and due diligence
practices, where state banks have been used to launder
the proceeds of crimes in exchange for bribes.
Much more here: https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/600161611679881440-0090022021/original/StateOwnedEnterprises.pdf
Trusting the World Bank or the OECD is pretty dangerous when you're interested in the truth, especially when they're talking about SOE in general and not Chinese ones.
If they truly cared about the fate of the people, they would have made more effort to be more competitive while still being caring.
Because right now 2/3 of Chinese economy is made up of private companies, and China is more cuthroat than the US in some ways.
Why would they want to be more "competitive" in the bourgeois sense of that term? And why would being "competitive" in the bourgeois sense of that term be something that would happen if you "truly cared" about the fate of the people? Can't governments express their concern in different ways?
Bourgeois is doing a lot of work there.
Sorry, are you seriously asking why economic efficiency is important for improving the living standards of your populace?
Were Chinese workers better off when Mao was getting them to smelt pig iron in their backyards compared to having private mills pumping out steel on the largest scale in human history?
The problem with bourgeois competitiveness is that it sacrifices the well being of the people for profit.
The problem with putting “bourgeois” into all sentences is that you don’t have to actually argue the point.
Do you deny there's a certain distinct type of competitiveness practiced by the bourgeoisie?
Yeah that is why Americans were trying to flee to Cuba in self made boats. And why North Korea has to keep people out with land mines and why Venezuela had so many South American refugees fleeing into their country, and that is why East Berlin built that wall.
That is why people from the Soviet Union broke down crying when they saw a fully stocked American grocery store.
To get away from that "bourgeois competitiveness".
Well for a start that's a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between the Soviet Union or nihilistic capitalism.
Instead of writing "the people," you could write "God" and have as much reality.
Ok you can stop embarrassing yourself now.
>It looks like you have a pretty idyllic idea of American "democracy". Putting aside the fact that America is hyper-capitalist and therefore intrinsically oligarchic, anti-democratic, aristocratic etc,
Don't say this ideological stuff if you aren't going to substantiate it with concrete examples. Defining capitalism as anti-democratic doesn't help anyone to understand the actual reality.
"America also has the fundamentally and explicitly anti-democratic system of the 'electoral college'"
Okay, so what? Compared to China, this is still RADICALLY pro-democracy. You're squabbling over decimal places when the difference is orders of magnitude.
>along with serious gerrymandering (especially along racial lines)
How serious? To what extent does this reduce how democratic America is? It's not enough to just repeat talking points, you need concrete metrics. Otherwise, can I say that China is "hypercapitalist" because Chinese billionaires exist? It's not different to what you're doing here.
And gerrymandering along racial lines is perfectly defnisble as a response to political equity dilution through mass immigration facillitation.
>extreme corporate control of legislation etc.
Really? Extreme? By what metric? To what pracitcal extent? Pointing to some well known examples isn't going to cut it, you need to show the actual concrete extent to which this occurs.
Your comment is extrememly low information and extrememly ideological. The fact of the matter is that America is radically democratic compared to China and you've done nothing to prove otherwise.
>We purpose of SOE is to enrich the people not the few and in this sense it is far more successful.
Where is your evidence? Stop just mindlessly asserting things and start providing data to support what you say.
There was a really long yet impressive Chinese article called 客观评价习近平 (Objective evaluation of Xi Jinping) worth reading, it's not as objective as it claims to be, but some of your questions may be answered, you may try the DeepL, the translation is pretty good.
https://2047.one/t/17320
https://2047.one/t/17321
For "Toad warship", CUHK Assistant Professor Kecheng Fang wrote a paper about it.
http://www.fangkc.com/works/turning-a-communist-party-leader-into-an-internet-meme-the-political-and-apolitical-aspects-of-chinas-toad-worship-culture/
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers by Richard McGregor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7822182-the-party is probably the best place to go for an explanation of how the system worked (or didn't) pre Xi. Does a particularly good job exploring the incentives of mid level officials and how that warps the system.
+1 I also recommend this book.
More detail on the purge of Xi's father, a former vice premier (https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/edward-luttwak/goethe-in-china):
>After trying to atone by self-criticism and the obedient acceptance of ritual humiliation, Xi Zhongxun was demoted to deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang... Having been punished as an individual, with the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 the elder Xi was brought back to Beijing to be punished again as a former member of the party elite: there is a photograph showing him with a placard listing his sins. He was driven and pummelled and kicked down the street with his wife walking alongside to hit and curse him as a revisionist traitor. She must have been convincing: although she was repeatedly beaten during this period, she was not imprisoned, nor did she spend six years digging ditches in Inner Mongolia like her daughter Qi Qiaoqiao, nor was she driven to suicide like Xi Jinping’s half-sister, Xi Heping.
Of course censoring american social media was smart by the chinese, it is the minimum requirement for sovereign governance today.
She can claim that all she wants, it doesn't make it remotely true. It's not even really relevant to what Luca said, because 'social media' has little to do with Murdoch media, and American social media is dominated by *anti-white* liberalism today.
But let me guess, you think reasonable opposition to neoliberal mass immigration policies is 'angry white populism', but would be outraged if somebody called Black americans rioting and looting 'angry black nationalism'.
I don’t recall Brett saying that speech should be restricted.
If you're pretending the J6 protestors were trying to overthrow the government, it makes everything else you say much less believable.
I'm not the person you responded to, but uh...
>More people died on that day that on all the BLM protests of the previous year combined
Forbes article on BLM protests: [0]. The title of the article says it all: 14 days, 19 dead.
Bipartisan senate report on Jan 6 riot [2]: claims 7 people died, though I've seen some suggest it should be 9 because of later suicides...
(Side note: I find it amusing that as a left-leaning person I seem to have a far more charitable view of American conservatives than a self-described conservative. Maybe I've gotten into too much of a habit of steelmanning my political enemies that most of these criticisms seem like straw men to me now, lol)
[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/08/14-days-of-protests-19-dead/?sh=189ea0b14de4
[1]: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/HSGAC&RulesFullReport_ExaminingU.S.CapitolAttack.pdf
The only people who killed anyone at J6 were capitol policepersons.
But thanks for confirming you're completely uninterested in facts.
How serious has "white populism" been in Canada and Australia? Perhaps I'm misinformed, but it doesn't look like it has been anywhere near as serious in either of those countries as it has been in the US and UK. So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that Ardern's claim is wrong.
Now, this doesn't quite track with "mass immigration" -- Canada and Australia have *higher* levels of immigration than the US today! Instead, it tracks with mass *low-skill* immigration against the will of the people. (Only a powerless fringe opposes immigration of e.g. poor brown IIT graduates.)
It depends on the reason, doesn't it?
If the opposition was about depressing wages, labor oversupply, etc, then sure.
It's not about that though, it it? And if it's not about that, what is it about?
And don't give me the motte, give me the baily.
In certain circles. theres absolutely conservative social media, which has unfortunately has become obsessed with things that aren't real.
With all the problems with "woke" hyper liberal media, there is at least some factual basis to what they obsess about, even if people largely disagree with the approach, solutions, etc.
Unfortunately popular conservative social media has gone off the rails and is largely dominated by things that have no basis at all in truth, like the idea of an elite conspiracy of pedophiles or vaccines being used to control people.
I mean, objections to wokeness in general is based on real things that are happening, but the modern "conservative" media environment is increasingly dominated by complete fiction that even mainstream conservatives have to play along with.
Opposition to immigration is based on literal nationalism- the ide that people status as citizens or non-citizens of a nation are entitled to different rights.
Protests/riots over racially based injustice are a more diverse coalition of people then "black nationalists."
There are some people who believe in a form of racism that is like nationalism but not exactly the same. A "black nationalist" would believe something like black people in america form a unique group who should have their own nation.
There are definitely groups who see different identity groups as competitors and are against liberal individualism- who claim something that liberal individualism which ideally aims to judge people as individuals is just a mask for "kyriarchy" and that groups will always fight for power and recogniizng that is actually being "woke"- but that isnt the sole or even primary ideology behind BLM protests, and even for groups who believe that, "nationalism" isn't really the right description.
Nationalism has to do with the distinct idea of a nation-state.
Historically it came about from modern states- and the idea that instead of the old way of feudal or imperial governance, groups of people were "nations" who deserve their own state.
The most radically segregationist of "woke ideologies don't seem to focus on the "nation state" concept- they generally are defined by what their against rather then what for for.
I think it needs to be added that China took #1 in external trade (not PPP-adjusted). It's already more influential than USA in trade and USA advantages in influence are non-economic.
An interesting but curious book review in that Marx and "theoreticians" are never mentioned once.
Does Dr. Economy not mention either?
There really wasn't much of anything in the review (and thus I'd gather the book) that is new knowledge that someone wouldn't know by reading WAPO and NYTIMES over the last 30-40 years.
Even if that's true, do you seriously not see the value in condensing insights from 30-40 YEARS worth of news into a blogpost?
It's a book review.
The book doesn't seem cover anything new unless you didn't know anything.
"Universities that previously had a long leash are finding that professors are increasing getting disciplined for teaching non-state-approved courses, and new university hires are now mandated to pass “political correctness interviews” along with having subject-specific qualifications, plus undergo a background check to make sure they never expressed dissenting political opinions.
(I’m not claiming that modern America has any moral standing to object to this, just that it’s bad in an absolute sense)"
I mean...yes, we do? This is operating on an entirely different scale and order than the problems (which I certainly acknowledge exist) with American academia.
+10000
Always enjoy these posts. I'm not aware of a good book on MBS but I would recommend The Call by Kritika Varagur (it has a 4.4 on goodreads if you care about that) about the Salafi project from mid-70's-9/11, and the lasting influence since then. It's only like 200 pages and very good.
If you haven't read it already, I highly recommend the Dictator's Handbook by Mesquita and Smith. It's a good summary of political science research on the dynamics of taking and consolidating power in autocratic regimes (they attempt to expand the scope to democracies too, but I think their analysis is oversimplifying those dynamics a bit).
Some relevant points loosely inspired by the book:
* dictators almost always turn on the people who helped them get into power because those people know how to topple a regime. A dictator wants sycophants whose power flows from the dictator not competent people who have an independent base of power.
* dictators retain power by buying off key powerholders in a country. They can afford to do this better if they personally take a smaller cut of corruption revenue. This means one relatively stable situation is a dictator who personally takes relatively little state revenue but makes the other key players fantastically wealthy. Because any replacement would take a larger cut for themselves, the other players aren't incentivized to change the system.
* always pay attention to who has the loyalty (whether bought or earned) of people with weapons as they're fundamentally the ones who decide who rules
* external competition (either from other factions, social groups, or foreign powers) can reduce internal dissent. If the next leader after Xi would be likely to radically change who has power in China that strengthens Xi in relation to current powerholders.
Great review. This stuff is totally outside my ken, so I found this quite informative.
Doesn't make a difference to the rest of the review, but the first diagram has the Central Committee on the right having authority over the National Party Congress. The second lists the National People's Congress, which in the first diagram is on the left. Are these two different NPCs, and is one of the diagrams mixing them up?
"Partly this is inevitable; economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
China isn't stagnating because of 'the technological frontier.' They're stagnating because of collapsing birthrates and an ageing demography (one of the worst in the world) leading to a shrinking labour force and collapsing domestic demand. (Same thing has happened to Japan and is happening to Korea, the former is just managing the process of decline more gracefully.)
"One alternative to that narrative - I think the gist of the case Noah presents - is that Deng Xiaoping was a genius, Jiang and Hu were pretty impressive too, and Xi hasn’t added anything to their work and may have subtracted from it. I find this pretty plausible."
Deng may or may not have been a genius, but he inaugurated and imposed the one-child policy and his successors failed to notice this was setting up their country for an economic and social suicide for around 40 years. I'm not inclined to judge them very favourably in retrospect. Xi is just inheriting the mess that they bequeathed to him.
Thailand, maybe, but Myanmar and Vietnam are basically at replacement fertility at the moment. (World bank figures for China may also be inflated, since they apparently 'misplaced' a hundred million people from census data- their true birthrate is probably closer to 1.2 children per woman.)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=TH-CN-VN-MM-KR
Korea's data is shocking, I'll grant, but they apparently had their own anti-natalist programs back in the 1960s, so it's probably much of a muchness. Same for Thailand, apparently.
To be fair, overpopulation was the existential environmental crisis of its day. Notoriously wrong (but always available for a quote if you need one!) person Paul Erlich Published The Population Bomb in '68. Surely Deng didn't want to be considered a Science Denier.
A 2-3 child policy would have been comprehensible. How senior Chinese policy-makers went four decades without noticing that this was simply going to crush their system is unforgivable.
Banning nuclear and fossil fuels will probably do some serious damage too, but that hasn't stopped various governments from announcing that they'll have it done by next decade. And getting rapturous media praise for doing so.
Oh, I completely agree. But that's its own species of madness and can in principle be corrected in the space of a decade or so once people notice the lights are going out and realise they need to turn old plants back on and/or starting building out nuclear capacity. The greens will have be dragged there kicking and screaming, of course, but dragged they will be.
The damage inflicted by birthrate collapses could take a century to correct, assuming that any given nation survives long enough to correct it.
Nuclear, sure, fossil fuels, not so much. It will cause short term pain for long term gain. It will be cheaper and will stop the flow of money to terrorism funding oil states.
The Chinese population is still increasing. They also still have surplus workers in rural areas who have not yet been allowed into cities (in effect these are effectively the same as a pool of immigrants). The whole “China is doomed because of demographics is wrong headed”. If you replace 800M workers who are not that productive with 700M workers who are much more productive you still grow. As workers transition from fields to factories, and from less productive factories to more productive factories per capita GDP (which is a measure of output not income) will still grow. Anyway the Chinese are actually trying to fix the problem unlike in the west.
Moving workers off of farms and into cities is part of the process that destroyed Chinese birthrates to begin with, since it involved lower-class men and women being (A) physically separated and/or (B) packed into tiny shoebox apartments where there physically isn't room for children while real-estate speculators and the sterile rat-racing consumer class bought second and third apartments to match their lamborghinis. The system is a grotesque hybrid of the worst excesses of both capitalism and socialism. I highly doubt that more of the same will fix the problem at this stage in the game.
well that and the laws are what caused the collapse of th birth rate. The laws have been reversed.
I'm aware, but that reversal should have happened the moment fertility dipped below replacement levels, back around 1992, and probably a little before. It's too late now.
To be clear, the fertility situation in many OECD nations is only modestly better, and the western political management class have been sitting on their hands regarding this problem for just as long. They were too busy shuttering nuclear power plants and carving out tax breaks for lesbians.
The situation in many OECD nations, Eastern Europe and much of Asia is far worse. Personally I think that China could turn it around, although nobody has managed that yet. It’s just an increase of 16% or so in births.
China's actual birthrates are considerably lower than the world bank figures if you check out recent news on the topic- in Anhui they've been dropping by 10-20% per year for at least the last 5 years, despite the one-child policy being lifted. The true figure is probably closer to 1.2 children per woman.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3150590/china-population-plummeting-births-anhui-province-underscore
According to some sources the latest census data also indicates they managed to overcount their population by ~100 million people.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1444292206865657862.html
Their solution is immigration, which is casuing/will cause far more problems than it could ever solve.
Paul Collier is the guy I usually cite on this topic, because I don't want to say that zero migration is always and forever socially optimal, but it's a complex topic and I won't dig into it just now.
I will say that there's no realistic scenario where mass migration can solve the problems of the OECD at this point. The sheer scale of the demographic shortfall is just too large, even from a logistic perspective.
They have a fertility rate below replacement.
Great analysis. Wish we knew more about China, it definitely sounds like a lot of the internal politics are opaque to us.
I tend to agree with Noah Smith's assessment that Xi just isn't of the same caliber as Deng was (but not many people are; in terms of scale x competence, Deng was probably the most effective leader of the 20th century). But I do think increasing censorship of Western internet platforms is a good thing, both from a narrow Chinese national interest perspective and from a more universalistic "what-is-good-for-humanity" perspective. From a PRC perspective, China is one of the only countries (possibly the only country) where nationalism and patriotism increase among smarter, younger, and better educated people. Russia, which also has pretensions to independent Great Power status has faced a huge exodus of its smartest young people who are generally more liberal-internationalist. China has avoided that. From a universalist perspective, a separate Chinese internet ecosystem helps insulate China from Western mind-viruses (see my one and only Substack post for a longer elucidation of this), which otherwise tend to quickly spread to the rest of the world via the internet. China is perfectly capable of developing its own mental viruses (see: Taiping Rebellion, and the nuttiest incarnations of Maoism. Both partly derived from Western ideas of Christianity and Communism, but mostly indigenous), but at least they'll be *different* mind viruses. Helps stop one particular set of bad ideas from dominating the entire world through the Anglosphere.
Soviet Union never stopped being an autocracy. Yes, Khruscev and Gorbachev were removed in a coup. That happens in autocracies.
"which argues that given the current state of the economy China will stagnate sooner than expected, never really catch up to developed world standards, and plateau at around the same (absolute) GDP as the USA."
This is something that will be clear in a few years at most. China has to drop to 2-3% growth pretty soon - by or before the decade's end. Are there any prediction markets for this?
It would mean that China would be spectacularly unsuccessful as an Asian nation, as the piece pointed out. The Chinese within China would be the worlds least successful Chinese people. It is true that doctrinaire Marxism might hold them back, its clearly a less efficient economic system, but I can only assume that the communists would reform back to the economics of Deng era if it looked like they couldn't pass the US in GDP. Xi would be gone.
Otherwise I can see why a fairly industrious, smart, and well educated people with a potentially massive internal market would stall in the middle income trap.
"Should we argue that non-democratic systems are doomed to collapse into authoritarianism? Deng Xiaoping was a really smart guy, he put a lot of effort into trying to build a multipolar oligarchy, and . . . it doesn’t seem to have put up much of a fight. Xi just walked in and took over."
I think China may be a particular case. Their history is that it is better to have an Emperor. When you have "multipolar oligarchy", you get the Spring and Autumn Period which leads right into the Warring States period.
You have a choice of being a high-up minister under the Emperor (and running your own agenda to increase your power) or being lord of an independent feudal state, with all the *other* lords of independent feudal states warring with you, plus somebody somewhere is a really *good* lord and general and is getting ambitious about becoming Emperor, starting with taking over your state (and generally chopping your head off in the process).
It's safer and more profitable to be a minister under an emperor. Besides, if the emperor is too incompetent, you can always overthrow him and seize the mandate of heaven for yourself (if you're careful, capable and powerful enough). And Chinese history shows over and over again, separate warring states eventually get conquered and unified under one emperor, like it or lump it. So better not to put up too much of a fight when a new, potential emperor shows up, and that way you can keep your head.
Is it not possible to just select subordinates with non-geographic power bases?
"The Shanghai Gang stuck together and supported its own, and operated kind of as a “political party” “representing” the interests of east coast urban elites."
Take that sentence and tell me it doesn't remind you of at least one Western nation. I certainly find that very applicable to the situation in Ireland, where the complaint generally is that Dublin swallows everything, and if it's not in Dublin then the rest of the country can go hang.
Geographical power bases generally are the way it goes; you can maybe make one, like the university example, that isn't based on geography but it has to be based on *something* everyone has in common, be that the east coast versus hicks from the sticks or membership of Skull and Bones/the Bullingdon Club or whatever.
If you are an east coast elite, it may be valuable to you to have at least one subordinate who is a hick from the sticks, so long as he has influence back in the sticks. Dominic Cummings, for example, was someone without a power base except his own conceit about his own genius, and when it came time to throw him under the (bendy) bus, his bestest pal Boris had no qualms whatsoever. Because Dominic had no power base or no influence to ward off Boris dumping him.
I'm very interested if anyone has some good thoughts or empirical evidence regarding the quote:
>[anit-corruption]...cost China an estimated 1 to 1.5 percent of its annual GDP during 2014 and 2015.
Presumably there are some good effects of lowered corruption as well. That money should not have been purely lost, but held or spent by someone other than party officials. (It's also pretty insane to think that 1%+ of China's GDP was funneling through party official's private hands). Related, and probably harder to measure, I would think that a less corrupt economy would also be more efficient, because contracts would be made for economic instead of corrupt reasons. That may very well have been offset by other choices that made growth worse, as mentioned by Scott.
Is there any reason to think that reduced corruption didn't increase the economy?
I was actually living in Asia during that period. My only comment would be that there was a flurry of capital outflows from the mainland during that time period. It would not at all surprise me if there was a significant GDP hit just from officials offshoring capital.
That would make sense as a one time outflow, thanks. I was looking at it as if 1-1.5% per year was being mishandled, but if that was a reaction using multiple years worth of wealth that happened to show up at a particular time, that is a lot easier to believe.
> When Xi succeeded Hu (2012), he was able to pick up the power-gathering project almost where Jiang left off, with only a little bit of “damage” from Hu’s ruleDuring.
Is "ruleDuring" a typo?
Everyone spends all their time singing the praises of liberal democracy. But have any political scientists (since Machiavelli) spent any time on figuring out the best way to structure and run an oligarchy/autocracy -- assuming you have to have one?
For example, is it structurally better (in terms of producing stability and beneficial policies for the nation) to have ultimate power reside in one Supremo, a small clique, a big committee with subcommittees? Or is it always just luck of the draw as to the personalities and abilities of the people who actually claw their way up the slippery pole of power.
Maybe if you can't have a full-blown democracy a hereditary monarchy is the way to go. Perhaps the Chinese should bring back the Emperor.
Too risky my man. You're only ever one bad roll of the genetic dice away from an idiot running your country.
Consider India. Political dynasties are popular here.
Three generations of the Nehru family have been PM. The 4th desperately trying to be, but clearly not very good at or even interested in politics. It seems widely understood that this dude is being pushed into politics only because the family has amassed a ton of illicit money over the decades, and if not in power, they risk being sent to jail for corruption.
You see other examples of dynasties in state politics, specially in South India. A state chief minister's wife or son is often the first choice for the party's next leader (after a CM dies). If they have no family, then someone who was like family to them.
You're starting to see that a little in America with the Bushes, Kennedys, Clintons...
An emperor - basically a benevolent dictator?! I guess ppl prefer that to democracy, provided (this is the catch) the dictator is of the same views as they themselves are on govt policy.
Liberal democracy is probably most compatible with Western cultures?
In India, for example, ppl often turn to govt to be the answer, themselves feeling no need to take any initiative. I think that is cultural.
Regular ppl here are always trying to get to know powerful ppl in govt. During the Delta covid surge, for example, you'd hear "You know how well-connected I am in govt. And even I couldn't find a hospital bed."
Knowing someone big in govt is also a status symbol in India.
How can democracy work as well here, as in America? I often wonder about that.
One of the problems with this is that countries with such concentrated power do not have stable political arrangments. You can say there should be this committee and this council, but there's little stopping these systems from reverting to pure autrocracy and even if this is suboptimal for the country as a whole, the supremo has more incentive to gain power than to optimally run the country.
Thanks for the great writeup. I lived and worked in Shanghai for 4.5 years starting in 2015. When I saw the news in early 2018 that term limits for president had been abolished (and by implication Xi was now dictator-for-life), I began planning my exit. My reasoning was simple: if Xi, in a country of 1.3+ billion people, could not find a single person he thought was trustworthy enough to take over his job after his term ended, either China is doomed from widespread incompetence, or heading towards doom because it's now going to be governed for life by a supremely selfish person with no vision of a world beyond himself. (I guess another option, that he's actually an Ozymandias-style genius who sincerely has China's best interests at heart, didn't seem plausible to me.)
I got out in late 2019 and, COVID notwithstanding, feel that I absolutely made the right decision. During my final years there, internet censorship and traditional policing were visibly increasing all the time. The economy was great but I got a sense of widespread paranoia and intellectual stagnation. Smart young Chinese colleagues and friends repeated propaganda with completely straight faces. Many of my clients (well-off but not wealthy educated Chinese people) were looking for the exits, wanting to move their families to Canada/Aus/NZ/USA and start over. Especially to send their children to Western colleges. It didn't seem sustainable then, and it doesn't seem so now.
Bottom line, I just don't think there's any getting around the fact that a one-man dictatorship is an inefficient, outmoded style of government. It's all too easy for states to fall into this situation, but that doesn't mean it's desirable. Ironically, upon moving back to the USA, one of the commonest things I'd hear in political conversations with American peers was how much they admired China and wanted an benevolent dictatorship here—led by their preferred politician of course. Never mind that that's never how dictators get chosen.
Love your handguns. I'm running a Shadow 2 in matches this Saturday and Sunday.
It wasn't easy for Xi to take power. Bo Xilai very nearly beat him to it. Bo's murderous corruption was quite normal for Chinese rulers, not an exception. When it was exposed it almost caused a civil war in China. Xi just got very lucky every single thing fell into place for that not to happen.
"(why are all China analysts named things like “Elizabeth Economy” or “David Dollar”? This also sounds like something that would happen in a children’s book.)"
Simulation is running low on resources, obviously.
I've never understood the logic behind dictators giving themselves vote tallies like 2970-0. Surely you would get 10 people to be like "eh, Xi is fine but I like this other guy better," to feign a tad more legitimacy. Are they being hubristic, or is it actually likely better for some reason I don't understand?
It conveys a simple message: "either I am universally beloved, such that any who oppose me are atomic, estranged from everyone else, alone, and impotent; or I am all-powerful, such that any who oppose me are immediately crushed, yoked, and forced to live their every breath how I wish, until even the thought of defiance dies. Either way, your opposition to me, your hatred of me, your desire for my defeat is an impossible dream. I am the state, I am your God, to oppose me is to oppose your lover, your mother and father, your children, and yourself."
You could call this hubristic, or megalomaniacal, or you could call it a method of suppression, or you could call it a way of displaying absolute power over the mechanism of government. It's all of these things, ultimately.
"Never be the first one to stop clapping."
Perhaps, on the other hand they don't want to send the message its alright to oppose them lest too many people start getting out of line
"economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
FACT CHECK: This is literally the opposite of what's been observed empirically.
https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950
If the quoted statement were true, the above log-log scatterplot of GDP per capita in 1950 vs gdp per capita in 2016 would have a trendline slope less than 1. But in actuality it has a trendline slope far greater than 1. This means that the countries that were already above average in 1950 grew faster in percentage terms than the countries that were below average in 1950. China's fast catch-up growth is the exception, not the rule. It's an anomaly caused by anomalously high IQ in global terms, plus the sudden removal of factors that were holding them back earlier (civil war, communism, lack of free trade). Ordinarily, whatever qualities made a country have good economic growth pre-1950 would have made it more likely to have good economic growth from 1950-2016, and whatever factors made a country have poor economic growth pre-1950 would have also made it more likely to have poor economic growth from 1950-2016. These factors are likely to include IQ, economic policy, rule of law, and proximity/access to wealthy trading partners.
I thought this might be just a one-time anomaly caused by WWII and communism. Europe got carpetbombed back to the stone age, and the rebound from that inflated their growth rate in the mid 20th century. Some of the former soviet republics benefitted similarly from decommunization and were already top-half in 1950. But if I exclude all of Europe I still see a slope much greater than 1.
Countries which make the transition to high income (e.g. Japan), do experience curves like this, which is what produces this false impression. However, as a whole, the high income countries grow faster than the middle/low income countries, getting further apart rather than closer, and the overwhelming majority of low and middle income countries do not experience a transition to becoming high income countries.
Since 1960, there are three main categories of countries that have succeeded at this task: European (e.g. Czechia), East Asian (e.g. Japan), and oil-rich (e.g. Saudi Arabia). The only exceptions are Puerto Rico (if you want to count it), Israel, and Singapore, the latter two of which are basically European and East Asian culturally.
If you a nation does become rich, the log of its GDP follows an S-curve as it does so; but most nations don't become rich.
This is a good point. Given that a country is fully developed, it probably experienced a period of fast growth followed by a period of slower growth. But fast growth is so rare that in the aggregate it looks like rich countries are growing faster than poor countries.
This comment was brought to my attention by the highlights post. This used to be true, but in the past three or so decades, has not been - see for e.g Brookings on convergence 'In the 1990s, developing economies, taken as a whole, began to grow faster than their advanced counterparts (in per capita terms), inspiring optimism that the two groups’ output and income would converge. From 1990 to 2007, the developing economies’ average annual per capita growth was 2.5 percentage points higher than in the advanced economies. In 2000-2007, the gap widened, to 3.5 percentage points.'
I would be interested to see if that trend continued from 2007-2022. Some important things happened in the early 90s: lots of decommunization, lots of international trade deals, lots of liberalization of economic policy.
A fairly thorough discussion - https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
We shall see in another couple decades. Personally am rather skeptical as I remember too well all the hoopla around BRICS countries circa 20 years ago - today only China has (probably) delivered on that promise - SA is a shitshow, Russia was doing badly even before the war, Brazil has been in a funk for past 7-8 years and India keeps disappointing (even more so if you take into account the enormous demographic dividend they should be reaping in theory at moment). I suspect a lot of the growth spurt observed in that paper linked above was due to 1) knock on effects of China driven commodities boom in late 90s-GFC for commodity rich poor countries and 2) globalization / shift of manufacturing to LCCs for people-rich countries with decent infrastructure. Both of these were sort of one-offs and aren't going to be much of a tailwind going fwd, so we'll see.
I don't know. Sure looks to me like the slope on the left half is much steeper than on the right half -- which is pretty consistent with slowing growth rates.
Eh, Poland probably shouldn't be used as a benchmark, given what a huge outlier it is itself. Most of its peers which "cast off stifling forms of Communism" around that time ended up with recessions lasting at least a decade.
Okay, but the point is that nobody points to Poland as some economic miracle, but they do with China.
I wonder if Xi has taken a path similar to Stalin's. Stalin built a personal network within the party that linked him to third and fourth level provincial party members. It was like the old Chicago machine with its chain linking ward healers to the mayor and central players. Effectively, there was a party government within the party, and it was this that let Stalin challenge Lenin and then destroy Trotsky. Stalin worked on this behind the scenes, but by 1930, he was completely entrenched.
Also, the engineering thing. Look up Qian Xuesen. He's a bit of a folk hero by now, the man who brought Western systems engineering to China. He had been working with von Karman's group at JPL, but got kicked out as a security risk and went on to found China's nuclear and space programs as well as laying the ground work for its security state. It was quite a career.
I wonder if those "zombie companies" are actually doing something really important (at least as far as government priorities are concerned) that doesn't show up in traditional capitalist metrics like profit or growth.
Did you not read this paragraph?
>Partly this is because the private companies are actually trying to make money, but the public companies are doing some combination of money-making, employing people for the sake of keeping unemployment low, and carrying out (potentially unprofitable) government priorities (eg investing in foreign countries that it furthers China’s geopolitical interests to invest in, whether or not those countries have anything worth buying).
Amusing comment on the state of censorship in China:
I posted the NPC joke in a language-related chat group on WeChat (China's Facebook). There were no consequences for two days, because Chinese censors don't waste their time analyzing jokes in English language chat. But after a couple of days the American moderators of the group (resident in China, like me) decided to eject me from the group and break off all communication.
This is how it works. Occasionally, the state heavies do shut down a newspaper. But 99% of the time, it's self-censorship.
Yep. Sousveillance, not surveillance. Punish enough dissenters for things all over the scale to make people believe that even thinking bad things about the government in the privacy of their own head will lead to punishment. That's the final stage of totalitarianism- even your dreams become the property of the State.
I recommend these recent articles on factions and political connections:
https://ftrebbi.com/research/ftx.pdf
https://sites.bu.edu/fisman/files/2019/04/politburo-withtables.pdf
Also, be sure to triple-check any empirical papers about China:
https://michaelwiebe.com/blog/2021/02/replications
An interesting fact:
"A few months before his ascendancy to the party leadership, Xi disappeared from official media coverage for several weeks beginning on 1 September 2012."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Jinping#Disappearance
Huh, I didn't know that so many leaders in the early 2000s had engineering degrees. This explains the Chinese students that end up in Melbourne and why a lot of them seem startled to struggle with the curriculum (many adapt, but I feel like they kinda kill themselves to do so because they were expecting it to be much easier, and the shame of failing an "easy" degree would be unbearable). I always did wonder what kind of jobs awaited them back in China - the few I talked to were predominantly middle class and research focused and wanted to get into local or Chinese academia but they're definitely a minority. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some elite children in my graduating class, but I never got to talk to them!
How can you write about a government who has "censors" to let the news slip about the guy who committed murder, and not write that that government was also authoritarian, even if it was an oligarchy rather than a monarchy like what came next?
Overall, it seems like Scott is still looking for a better book on Xi. I look forward to him finding one.
> I dwelt on some of Xi’s failures or questionable decisions in that last section, because I was impressed by Noah Smith’s article What If Xi Jinping Just Isn’t That Competent? With the incredible economic rise of China over the past few decades, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking their leadership must be geniuses, or at least have managed something that merely democratic countries never could.
I still have the same criticism as I did when Noah's article was last mentioned: it is assumed that raw GDP growth is a goal onto itself. From a Dictator's Handbook perspective, we should expect this to be true in democracies but not dictatorships.
Economic growth in China that isn't controlled by Xi (even indirectly) isn't an asset, it is a liability. It means more money rivals can use against you. Looking at some of the points brought up in these two articles, they all seem to fall inline with this view:
> The effort is so effective that there are worries about unintended consequences
>> ...Officials who remain in power are often paralyzed by their concern that green-lighting new projects or undertaking new reforms will draw unwanted attention. Some have reportedly started avoiding entrepreneurs and are refusing to move forward on projects...
I don't think Xi sees this as an unintended consequence. From his view this is a happy little accident. Noah's article also talks about how SOE are less effective than private yet growth is pushed via SOE. Noah also talks about Xi cracking down on industries he doesn't like.
From the perspective of "GDP is a goal for its own sake" then these are all bad moves. From the perspective the Dictator's Handbook these are all the moves you'd expect from a competent dictator who is trying to perpetuate power.
Re Belt and Road:
> The basic procedure is: China goes up to a developing country and asks “would you like giant low-interest loans to create a humongous port?” The developing country says yes without asking any citizens or businesses, faces protests, loses a lot of the money to corruption, mismanages the construction project, and ends up without a humongous port. Then China either has to harass and threaten them to get the money back.
This also seems to be working as intended. Having the money get "lost" to corruption isn't a mistake it is an intended feature. You just can't admit that publicly. Having a bunch of small countries that owe China money (or a port) that they can never pay back is exactly what China wants. If they do what China asks, China can "kindly" delay the missed payments. If they instead act in their own interest China can demand the loans on time, punishing this insolence.
This is something you could see a classic Joe Pesci character do: get a victim to owe you a debt they can't possibly repay; make it clear that severe harm will occur if the debt is not payed on time; when the victim can't pay up, demand they do stuff on your behalf; make it seem like you are being generous to the victim for offering this deal; still demand the money; repeat. China is just doing this at the country scale.
this article explains the Bo thing in more detail which helps to see what happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing_model