I think this, in combination with the author's previous article about the moves the CCP have made on Ma's business make it pretty clear what is happening. Ma is being held whilst his businesses are dismantled. Ant is being turned into a traditional bank, Alibaba is being attacked from several directions, Ma's university (a clear source of soft power) is being shut down.
When you then ask where Ma is I would say it's pretty clear - Ma is being held out of the way whilst this happens. There's no point in causing drama whist they're doing this, just hold him out of the way and in about 18 months there'll be nothing for him to come back to. At that point they'll no longer need him, all the businesses will be managed by cronies of the state. So what happens when they no longer need him? If he's lucky they'll let him manage some tiny sliver of his former empire, but I can't imagine them taking the risk of him fleeing and becoming a powerful critic, so I guess most likely thing to do is trump up charges of corruption and prosecute him.
What happens if Xi kicks the can tomorrow? How smooth is the transition going to be? China is so massive I cant understand how they dont have multiple power centers bumping into each other all the time.
Well last time there was a "successor problem" China went through a decade-long political and economic turmoil that was the Cultural Revolution.
Having experienced that first hand, Deng implemented the term limit, so that there won't be a position of absolute power for the rest of one's life (it's just too much a temptation and thus recipe for chaos every 20-30 years or so).
Now that the term limit is gone, I don't think the transition would be as smooth as the past two decades.
> Having experienced that first hand, Deng implemented the term limit
No... the man had zero sympathies for the civil state.
He just planned to stay in power way longer, and organised it so that all senior party men coming after him will be in compromised positions.
Similarly, Jiang never left the power on good terms, but with a hefty pack of compromising info on party elites, and arranging for new coming leadership being very weak.
Only Hu possibly left the power unconditionally, and without any power left, but only because he was weak.
This overlooks many changes that have occurred in the recent decades, such as the restructuring of the PLA (including their decoupling from state business), the development of the socialist market economy, and the further development of the rank and file organization of the party. All of these give structure and order where they didn't exist before. The leadership roles in the party have never been less significant within Chinese internal politics, as the collective leadership has been strengthening for the last three decades.
I really don't know where to start with this. The short answer is no.
The long answer is Stalin's supporters said the exact same things. And it's not a surprise -- Xi is borrowing a lot from Stalin's centralization playbook, including "restructuring" the PLA (i.e., purging generals who weren't loyal to him personally and ensuring he has a Party loyalist on every ship) and developing the rank and file (to replace the Party leaders he purged in "corruption scandals"). However, this time around, those of us outside the system smells the b.s. a mile away.
China would be wise to remember that Stalin came thisclose to losing WWII because of these changes. Purging military leaders may make them loyal to you, but it doesn't make them good at their actual jobs.
I think we must have different understandings of what causes power struggles within leadership. The comparison to the 1953-1956 period in the USSR also feels a bit misplaced to me, as although there was a minor power struggle during that period, it didn’t have broad implications the way the death of Mao did. (I also don’t agree that the structure of the CPC is all that similar to the structure of the CPSU during Stalin’s leadership, but that’s not of much relevance in my mind.)
RE: the PLA and the party membership, I was referring to changes that mostly took place during the 1990s, which had much broader implications on the locations of structural power within the PRC than anything that’s been done in the last decade.
Calling what led to tens of executions, had an amnestia releasing 1.2 million criminals amongst the public and had top brass spending days in meetings with emergency support being flown in, minor is an understatement
Talking with a Chinese friend of mine, his take was that Jack Ma's imprisonment/disappearance is less about his comments in the October speech and more about an ongoing power struggle in the CCP between supporters of the former General Secretary Jiang Zemin, who is an ally of Jack Ma, and the Xi Jinping faction. The October speech may have just been the catalyst and pretense. As for how smooth the transition would be, Chinese politics are pretty opaque and I'm far from an expert, but from the outside it appears the Xi faction is fairly strong and only growing in power, so I would guess the transition wouldn't be too turbulent.
I definitely think politics are less unified in China that it may appear, and the whole situation with Jack Ma is an example of "multiple power centers bumping into each other".
Yes, I've heard the same thing. Jiang Zemin, Jack Ma, and others like Deng Xiaoping are/were more interested in making money. Xi Jinping is more ideologically motivated, and wishes he could be Mao Zedong.
The centralized, unitary structure of the Chinese government and the CPC make it unlikely that there will be a power struggle — there aren't many levers that would-be power players have to pull to achieve their goals (unlike after the Death of Mao, by contrast). Xi holds three positions of authority in China, and it's unlikely that anyone would immediately replace him in all three, as it's only happened in his case because of the confidence that the membership of the CPC has in his faction.
The next General Secretary of the party and Chairman of the CMC would both be elected by the party's Central Committee. Whoever is selected as General Secretary will most likely also be chosen as President, since this is mostly a ceremonial role. The majority of the Central Committee are in the same faction as Xi is currently, so it seems more likely than not that they'll find people from within their ranks to fill these positions and attempt to strengthen the collective leadership.
They do, if you remember a while back the head of Shanghai area was prosecuted and brought down on corruption charges, that consolidated power in current leadership because he was an alternate center.
Xi wants no waves for the CCP 100th Anniversary celebrations and a few other key milestones this year. That’s why even the wolf warriors are being muzzled at the moment.
So Medieval. The Crown accuses you of corruption/sedition/treachery, prosecutes you then confiscates your property as a fine. A bit like Henry 7th in England during his reign. Also a bit like Putin against any oligarchs who dared to oppose him. But then I suppose its a standard pattern of behaviour to give their actions the sheen of lawfulness.
Authoritarianism is possible with most types of government, but is necessary for communism. Most communists are well aware of the fact that an economic system with strict objectives requires a very powerful mechanism in order to accomplish this, and most of those understand that this mechanism is an authoritarian state, but there are obviously the delusional few that refer to the state by any other name (syndicates, guilds).
China, however, is not communist. China is fascist.
> Fascism: authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy
I agree with everything you said, except for China not being communist.
The CCP's take is "Mao was 70% right" and officially identifies as communist. Its stated end goal is a communist society. It is in service of this goal that they are taking a capitalistic / globalization route to expanding their Lebensraum. Whether CCP = China I guess is another discussion, but I don't have a strong view there.
Many communists assert that "state capitalism" is a step on the pathway to communism. From an outsider's perspective, we watched a failing communist state open up markets under Deng Xiaoping, and become the fastest rising capitalist power in the world. First, the thing that took the country from being a failed state to the fastest elimination of poverty the world has ever seen was specifically its rejection of communism, which is primarily an economic model. Secondly, there still remains no evidence that the country could ever go back in a communist direction and not lose all of the benefits incurred by a market economy.
They can call themselves communist all they want, but all they have in common with it is the authoritarianism.
A market economy has nothing to do with capitalism. Market economies existed long before capitalism was in practice. Capitalism is an employment model.
As far as crediting their rise due to their economic opening, I’d say that is not reproducible. Not without the agreement of the wealthiest nation in the world to begin massive investment into it. If it were that easy every nation would do it for the same result.
Definitely agree on everything else, and I addressed this more completely elsewhere in this thread but it’s impossible to have a communist country. Communism is anarchy. Leninism is a vanguard state.
>Authoritarianism is possible with most types of government, but is necessary for communism.
Only if the people aren't onboard. The whole idea of communism is with people being onboard (and running soviets, worker councils, etc).
Some not being onboard is OK - communism is about majority rule, not what some person likes or dislikes. In that, it's like any other system. A modern democracy also doesn't care if somebody likes to sell heroin freely, or whether they'd rather have a King.
Even if the majority was initially on board, one could argue that communism inevitably leads to authoritarianism and is necessary for its continuation.
I strongly doubt that a communist system would be ok with everyone not being onboard. It is highly likely that any disagreeing individuals would be classified as bourgeoisie or enemy of the revolution.
If you're gay and can't marry who you want because the majority says so, it doesn't matter if the dictator or your peers told you so.
What makes communism necessarily authoritarian, as compared to capitalism (which can be, but is not necessarily authoritarian), is that communism is a prescriptive ideology. It stipulates outcomes regarding distribution of resources, how hierarchies are manifested or not manifested, economic relationships, etc. Capitalism is an ideology of systems, unconcerned with outcomes. This is why communes can exist in capitalist countries, but private enterprises cannot exist in communist countries.
There's always pragmatism though - it's possible to say that your end state involves no workers being alienated from their labour, but to allow it for some large number of years on the basis that it will help you get to a good version of the endstate quicker.
A state that governs with a communist endstate in mind might still be regarded as communist, even if they use capitalist policies to get there.
That's because people don't understand the words that they use. Even people that label their countries communist.
'Communist' and 'nation' are mutually exclusive terms. There's no such thing as a communist nation, it's not possible. Communism as originally defined by Marx is lack of a state.
You can start another 100 countries and call them communist but they're really only Leninist (or derivative ideological strains). Guys starting with Lenin took the rather popular idea of statelessness, which is required to completely eliminate the master-slave / lord-serf / employer-employee relationship of capitalist employment, and used that popular economic ideology to create a vanguard state to work towards communism. It was always an attempt, either sincere or not, as a jumpstart towards communism.
I'm not a communist, nor am I a sympathizer. I'm a wholehearted statist in favor of democracy. I do think there are lessons to be learned from Marx's examination of the capitalist economic model, and believe we could have a better hybrid system with workers' cooperatives to compete with capitalist enterprise. I'm just telling the truth on this one, there cannot be a communist nation. It's a complete contradiction. Lenin completely understood the USSR couldn't possibly be both a state and communist, but admitted this, and called it communist anyway. And all of this is why if you read about 1800s communists, they're all referred to as anarchists. Still are, if you're talking to someone that understands communism.
Authoritarianism comes in every flavor of Kool-Aid.
I don’t really see the inequality of representation and taxation in capitalism as any less authoritarian.
If everything I do is being validated for value by management and bosses, and my buying power is managed by bankers who have inflationary powers to dilute my earnings, we’ve just made managed economy ephemeral. We’ve socially normalized grift and protection rackets.
Some estimates suggest up to 30% of inmates are innocent. And when plenty are in there for marijuana, that’s a bit more petty than a billionaire disrupting an entire society.
Rather than real prisons we let people die on the streets from preventable disease so we can say we didn’t force anyone into anything as if letting them rot is glass half full.
It’s a shame the “I am educated and worldly” community hasn’t put much though into the depth to which relativity applies to human existence.
If we’re going to intentionally avoid lifting people up at the cost of putting agency into propping up the already rich, well, the poor can never experience the alternative to form meta opinions.
This bantering in traditional political memes is patronizing and ignorant af given our scientific understanding of reality.
If you don’t see a difference, but millions of others do, it might be worth steel manning the opposite of your conclusions. It’s a useful rhetorical exercise at least.
I get the difference. It doesn’t absolve our culture of ignoring it’s deficiencies. But look what happens at a university in 2008 when students simply sit on the ground.
Is there a difference? Or have we just accepted our fate?
I don’t think I’m the one that needs to take tour advice.
I was not speaking to taxation. I’m speaking to private influence on wages, regressive taxation, privilege for the financial elite, the real health issues and costs of extreme inequality as being authoritarian.
Relativity; being poor isn’t a character flaw. Lack of experience means not knowing what one should be fighting for.
Relativity is a scientific fact yet in the free world we enable class-based suffering. Do we throw them in a gulag?
No, we let them rot in the open in tents under bridges, and complain about it. We’re far more civilized.
Even for engineers buying power is incredibly diminished by inflation to prop up Bloomberg’s and grandpa’s property portfolio he was able to afford starting in 1970.
Normalized agency in deference to political nostalgia not what communities need isn’t constrained to China and has real consequences on lives. Is it jackboots with machine guns? No. But the effects are just as measurable.
how would this impact the stock? it didn't seem to have responded yet to those news. shouldn't that be the case if those theories were true? lots of large investors should have info on Ma's and Alibaba's fate.
that's not much, though. alledgedly, a socialist party is taking control of a highly valued capitalist company - shouldn't that provoke a stronger response?
I don't think CCP would throw away billions of worth just because they dislike the man. Unlike the west, China is allowed to meddle into the affairs of any company, so it's not hard to imagine they are just profiting from him, like a shadow takeover. This explains why he is shown around from time to time: to calm down the investors. At some point this circus would be over, and the companies will collapse by themselves.
The market cap chart in the article suggests otherwise; since this started hundreds of billions have been wiped off the value of his business empire and its still declining. The trigger was simply a speech where he didn't even criticize the government directly, just the financial infrastructure (which is itself very interesting - why is the CCP so sensitive to criticism of its banks?).
And the iron grip they need to maintain control on the trillions inbound means they regularly need to stomp on the source of a few 10’s of billions here and there. This is just a slightly larger, and significantly more externally visible version of what they do on the regular - and must - to keep control.
One thing that you learn quickly when traveling the world is how easily one can go from having a good time with your friends, to being in a shitty prison without food, running water or a phone to let your family know if you are dead or alive.
I have friends travel to interesting places during times of (relative) stability. To paraphrase one of the guys that I know: "When you travel in some of these places, you exist at that time and place, not because you belong there or have a right to be there, but because nobody has decided you shouldn't."
I have always kept that in the back of my mind when traveling, even in places that I would consider first-world. It is certainly something that I would keep in the forefront of my mind if I lived or worked in a place like CN. It is always interesting to watch people who push the boundary, become emboldened and forget that they aren't the ones making the decision for their fates.
I have always thought of CN as one of those countries that wants all the benefits of a western society, with expectations that people will conform, with an implicit "or else".
Similar thing happened with ADVChina. He had spent years trying to portray the positive aspects of Chinese society but was increasingly targeted by police. He ended up leaving after the harassment became too much.
It's kind of intriguing to me because, as a member of a western society, I think we place largely the same expectations on people to conform, the only difference is in how the enforcement is applied.
In many countries, cities, and neighbourhoods in "the west" if you aren't white you experience exactly the kind of insecurity you describe elsewhere. There are plenty of incidents where non-white residents are arrested while working on their own car, or entering their own home because a neighbour saw them and decided they did not or could not belong. There was a rather notable protest movement just last year that had it's roots in a group of people not being allowed to freely exist in the same way as the rest of society.
I find this to be completely untrue. Anecdotally, my friends from South Sudan, who aren't white, tell me that the unsafest neighborhoods in my country are better than the safest in theirs.
This is the same sentiment that I get from most non-white foreigners.
Generally things are "better" here but that doesn't mean the problems don't exist. They might just be less severe or be expressed in a different manner. "Exactly" was probably the wrong word to use. The sentiment I'm arguing against is the idea that "these things don't happen here", which I find is typically an excuse to ignore or downplay the cases where it does happen.
>In many countries, cities, and neighbourhoods in "the west" if you aren't white you experience exactly the kind of insecurity you describe elsewhere. There are plenty of incidents where non-white residents are arrested while working on their own car, or entering their own home because a neighbour saw them and decided they did not or could not belong.
Does this go beyond anecdotes and are that quantifiable occurrences that are disproportionally happening in the west vs. other countries? Because I know of many contrary anecdotes of Non-European people, living very safely and without such concerns in western countries.
In my opinion I'd tend say that modern western societies are the most safe and welcoming societies for foreigners, were you face the least amount of discrimination as an outsider.
My point wasn't that these things happen disproportionately in the west. It was that to imply, as the GP did, that these issues do not exist or are not problems in the west is both incorrect and damaging.
Corruption is a pretty good example. When it occurs non-western country it's called out and criticised but when speaking about western countries we dress it up in fancy clothes. In the U.S. it's "Lobbying", in the UK it's "Cronyism" or "Chumocracy". By redefining the terms, corruption becomes something that only happens elsewhere, in less "civilised" places, and not something that has to be dealt with at home.
Labour could be another, there's a huge lack of perspective in discussions around foreign labour standards where we will condemn the working conditions in China or India while ignoring the fact that these people are experiencing those conditions working in the factories of some of the wealthiest companies in the west.
> In my opinion I'd tend say that modern western societies are the most safe and welcoming societies for foreigners, were you face the least amount of discrimination as an outsider.
I think it depends on so many factors that you shouldn't make a blanket statement in any direction. You can say both things on different areas of the same city.
Of this were a big problem in the west, we’d see a pause in immigration to the west.
People learn fast if things are not good. If you’re targeted, if you’re harassed.
I don’t mean people who have very little choice (their home countries are so bad they have to leave), but I mean middle class families who have alternatives. They still choose the west as a destination by choice.
I think this is a reasonable proxy indicating life isn’t bad for foreigners immigrating to the west. If it were bad, they’d choose to stay home or a neighboring country that has similar culture.
Also, regarding travel. Most people experience their travel to other countries as middle class visitors, not as lower class visitors. Take someone from a first world country who didn't go beyond high school who earns <$25,000 and put them in one of these places and see how far their skills take them.
I didn't intend to speak to the relative scale of the problems, merely that we shouldn't ignore that it's still a problem and we should still be trying to improve. My original wording wasn't great at conveying that.
North Korean defectors are really fascinating. I just can't wrap my head around her claim that what I perceive as a kind of over the top righteousness on the campus of elite American universities is comparable to--let alone worse than--North Korea.
Her father was literally sentenced to a labor camp. How can that possibly compare to anything you'd run into at Columbia. Yeah, it's annoying that people wouldn't cut her a break with the pronoun stuff as she was learning english. But again, that's worse than North Korea?
One adjacent example of this is the case of Sirous Asgari, the Iranian scientist who refused to spy on Iran for America. What happened to him is really a disgrace and something one would think could not happen in America.
What about all the neighborhoods that are dangerous to white people? I white person has a higher chance of getting in serious danger in a majority black ghetto than a black person would in virtually any majority white neighborhood.
The difference is that a white person in a black neighbourhood will be put in danger by the criminal activity of private citizens. A black person in a white neighbourhood will be put in danger by an agent of the state who is purportedly responsible for dealing with criminality. The white person will have the backing of the state when seeking justice while the black person will be fighting the state.
In terms of the typical outcomes, in the first case those people are rightly considered criminals and will be held accountable if caught. In the second there is usually no accountability even though we know who carried out the action.
To make my claim more specific (not all black neighborhoods are dangerous, just ghettos) and because a far larger proportion of primarily-black neighborhoods are ghettos than primarily-white neighborhoods (since there are far fewer black people and they're a disadvantaged demographic)
In many cases things are worse locally and they move because of it. The targetting in America is generally with black people. You rarely hear about the east Indian family being pulled. You often hear about people going out of their way to support immigrants (at least in Canada).
Reminds me of Danny Fenster who is a US journalist being held in Myanmar. His family went many weeks without any sign that he was even alive an the US government seems utterly powerless, or disinterested in flexing their power. He is totally at the mercy of a rogue newly installed government.
It's incredible how fast people on HN jump to false equivalencies when comparing US and China. The mere fact you can criticize the government in this forum without the fear of being brought in for questioning should give you some hints on how both systems compare.
Criticize the US as much as you want (after all, you can do it), and the US government DOES deserve a good deal of criticism, but saying that the countries are somehow equivalent in the consequences for anti-state speech is laughable.
But not because some government official suddenly decided they should.
In the USA, the rules are known well in advance. There might be questionable rules, but POTUS cannot decree a rule into existence and put a bag over your head an hour later.
On an individual basis the rules are often vague and selectively enforced.
As a collective institution there was the whole Edward Snowden thing where he pointed out that the NSA had definitely not been following those rules and no one who knew what they were doing seemed particularly keen on stopping them.
That is a big problem but kindof a separate issue. He may have been targeted because he was critical of the government but it's really hard to argue that he didn't do anything against the law. Maybe he should have whistleblower protection but his case isn't as simple as persecution solely for being critical of the government which is what this thread seems to be about.
My point wasn't the treatment of Snowden but rather that the claim that:
> Inside the USA? The rules are far more clear.
Is false. The NSA was/is carrying out a mass spying operation over a number of years and involving hundreds of people that directly contravenes those rules.
Can you clarify this? As far as I'm aware, the US govt can dispute anyone's citizenship without recourse, even if you're holding e.g., a valid passport.
>Can you clarify this? As far as I'm aware, the US govt can dispute anyone's citizenship without recourse, even if you're holding e.g., a valid passport.
Your cite does not support your claim. If Palma had ever had a US passport (expired or not), his situation would never have occurred in the first place.
Or the (by now, likely in the thousands) people killed by US drone attacks?
I don't want to play the whataboutism card, but let's not pretend that the US is somehow exceptional here. In fact, I'd consider it one of the more troubling countries, with the kindappings, Guantanamo, and the "grey area" on the borders, where your constitutional rights do not apply.
The world is not a nice place, and the US is no exception, unfortunately.
"Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police."
According to this ^, the police in the US is 3.5x more likely to kill civilians compared to other developed nations. (It would be interesting to find a world-wide comparison here.)
>"Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police."
These soundbytes usually (intentionally) omit half of the story. For example, how many police officers are being killed in encounters with black men?
And how many less lethal (for black men) encounters would there be with black men not attacking officers or third persons but actually complying with police orders?
The greatest danger to a black person's life only second to coronary diseases is another black person.
It's these kind of questions which grievance studies activists and journalists never (dare to) ask.
You are being downvoted because you failed to do bring any evidence to support your assertions and instead resorted to conspiratorial thinking.
Unlike your claim that "journalist never (dare to) ask", the numbers of violence against police are well studied, published and easily available with a search. Had you done that, you'd have realized that your basic premise is wrong: violence _by_ police is significantly higher than violence _against_ police.
Indeed, police work is _less_ dangerous than e.g. farming, construction, trucking and sales.
Logging, fishing, aircraft, roofing, recycling, even landscaping is more dangerous than police work in terms of fatalities. Yet you don't hear politicians complain about the dangers of landscaping work, do you? Why do you think is that?
From China's point of view, the creation (and concentration) of (large amounts) of wealth in the hands of individuals, leads to the concentration of power. That power in turn, becomes a threat to the current approach of the CCP, and the messages being shared with society.
In 2019, China began working with PWC in an effort to repatriate, or at least dual-list IPOs, in either Shanghai (Star) or Hong Kong. DIDI publicly want against that goal - by single-listing on the Nasdaq.
By accruing a massive amount of wealth, and freedoms, Ma began to become a thorn in the side of the CCP. It's one thing to have (direct) access to finances, it's another to disparage the state-run financial system. But it's still another to control purchase platforms, chat platforms, and the next-generation of educated, technology executives. This is where he was.
Ma has been silenced, the threat has been eliminated. The CCP has proven, once again that they are adept at addressing both the internal and external threat to their perceived stability.
Can you elaborate? How are LGBTQ chatrooms a threat to the power and stability of the CCP leadership in a way comparable to Jack Ma?
EDIT: I don't mean this critically, I'm actually quite interested. There seems to be a correlation between how repressive a government is and how nasty they are towards LGBTQetc people. I never considered this to be a causal relationship until your comment. Maybe somehow Putin and Orban and Xi think that that this helps them stay in power? How? Why?
LGBTQ as a movement is seen as a western influence. It’s funny that I saw your comment, earlier today I read a machine-translated version of this article(1) that was shared by a Wechat contact. I would say this attitude is fairly common among people 40+ in China.
Warning if you don’t want to get angry: it is full of repulsive views.
I don't understand your argument. Are the screenshots in that post faked? Because if they are not, they prove that those movements are Western influence...
Because they're both threats to their power. If Ma had gone public, he could have used the foreign money in the way that Whitey Bulger used the FBI to eliminate his rivals within his own organization and then in other gangs. It's the double agent game most spooks excel at, so the CCP saw it coming nipped it in the bud. (It's also why I think Ma's been dead for quite some time. A country with billion smartphones and not one picture from some random waitress? C'mon.)
The CCP are is obsessed with the relationship between demographics and war because it always thought that their extraordinary numbers would be their saving grace in WWIII. Now, for a lot of reasons, they're really not so certain.
If you're a CCP leader, gay men aren't the problem so much as it is lesbians. (I've never seen trans people enter into the debate at the policy level, even though all three are existential threats to Confucianism.) The gender imbalance caused by the one son policy really is a problem because it means you have tens of millions of unmarriageable single young men. Historically, the more unmarriageable single young men you have as a percentage of your total population, the more violent crime your society has. If you hit a certain point, revolutions become far more likely. Lesbians -- as well as Chinese women who prefer Western men, their careers, or anything else -- have to be stomped out by any means necessary because because they feel that they are uncomfortably close to that tipping point. It's why a lot of people think the campaign to denigrate leftover women ultimately came from the CCP.
Interestingly, its this demographic imbalance that is the reason for gay porn to still be somewhat tolerated, even if forums aren't. (Lesbian porn still isn't.) Chatrooms and forums are bad because they encourage solidarity and planning; porn is okay because you're just sitting in a room staring at a screen.
Edit: Am I the only one who's a little disturbed at how closely the English language media has followed the Chinese language media on this? And people wonder why I stopped using FB/Twitter/smartphones.
LGBTQ by itself is not a threat to either Putin or Xi but what LGBTQ represents is a threat to traditional society and gender roles. The judgement is still out if new type of society developed in the west with modern gender norms, women’s rights and sexual freedoms is viable long term and from demographic perspective it’s frankly probably not.
Authoritarians instinctively cling to the old roles/family and even if are not able to fully stop changes (US is amazing at exporting ideology) they try to and battle against LGBT is part of that fight.
I do not think you can directly connect authoritarian and being anti LGBQ outside of modern context - Xi, Putin or Orban views on lgbt were mainstream in US only 20-30 years ago.
What's your point? Countries with LGBT and woman's rights aren't sustainable demographically?
I think you're severely overstating the effect of LGBT people on this matter - western countries struggle with demographics, but it's not because more gay people are able to live their lives without being forced into straight relationships.
No. I'm saying this is how elite Russian and Chinese party policy makers view their own demographic situation. Although they don't really talk about modern Russia or China, Helene Carre and Walter Scheidel probably have the most readable books about how demographic imbalances relate to empire collapses. And if you read them, it's very easy to see why China and Russia are far more reason to be concerned than the West does. Russia already fell off one in 1991, and both nations really are close to another.
(Also, American elites don't really see themselves as struggling demographically.)
Personally, I think they also like being able to blackmail powerful LGBT within their countries/satellites. Historically, when their targets realized that America's fairly tolerant towards foreigners, leftover women, <i>and</i> LGBT people, their targets tended to defect.
I'd say it's because LGBT rights are seen by conservatives as generally coming with more freedom in society and that correlates with higher child-bearing age, fewer children being born in general, higher abortion rates, and more promiscuous society.
Not my views, what I see as the reasons traditional conservatives want to keep LGBT acceptance to a minimum.
> The judgement is still out if new type of society developed in the west with modern gender norms, women’s rights and sexual freedoms is viable long term and from demographic perspective it’s frankly probably not.
LGBTQ rights are a sub-set of human rights, in which individuals have self-autonomy/integrity. This may be antithetical to more traditionally collectivist cultures.
An independent judiciary and due process also has a noted history in the West as compared to how things were run in (say) Imperial China:
LGBTQ folks probably have fewer children than the average. The demographic challenges we face are in scaling services to support the global population. So wouldn't freedom of gender expression, if anything, make things easier?
Assuming that queer people will somehow take over the world and cause an unsustainable birth rate sounds a bit like the right-wing "gay agenda" conspiracy theory. Not to mention that people born with a vagina can have a male gender identity and still get pregnant, and some trans women can get others pregnant. Sex != gender. Also because gender identity isn't just a lifestyle choice, it's not like all the straight people will somehow get converted.
That's not what they're worried about. At all. Forget PR talking points for a minute and think about the very real relationship between macroeconomics and empires. THAT is party elite care about here.
The Party forced the population to HAVE fewer children in 1980. They did this primarily to jump start their economic modernization plans. Moreover, they figured everyone would start having kids at replacement rates second they lifted the rules. If that happened, they'd be able to consolidate their economic gains.
Economic modernization worked. The kids part...not so much. In fact, there's reason to believe (e.g., maternity store receipts) that their birth rates will look like Japan's or Korea's.
To put it another way, not only are people having fewer kids, they're having far fewer kids than Westerners with equivalent per capital wealth/income are. If that happens, China may not be able to consolidate their economic or international political gains. THAT is what Chinese elites are really worried about.
I, personally, am interested in the elephants in the room. For starters, my lesbian friends and I really wonder if the Chinese censorship machine are responsible for erasing lesbians from Western media spaces -- and especially LGBT spaces. Everyone hears plenty about bi and trans women, but lesbians? Nope. But we're still here.
While I'm not the only one who's noticed this erasure, I think I may be the only one who's also noticed how China's quietly been rolling out aspects of its online censorship system in the West over the past ten years -- and how it's REALLY intensified over the past five (i.e., doxxing, career ruining for anyone with political opinions threatening to the current leaders, sex pic leaks against political opponents, etc.). Guess too many of the Chinese kids studying abroad decided to stay abroad, so it's time to make the English internet feel exactly the Chinese one. Sadly, now the air sucks just as much here. Thanks guys.
More substantively, I find it interesting that absolutely no one will discuss how women in fully economically developed Confucian societies have FAR fewer children than equally economically developed non-Confucian societies (e.g., South Korea and Japan vs. Italy and France).
I'm indifferent. Honestly I think I'd rather see elites fighting among themselves than select a particular brand of unchecked unaccountable power to be lorded over me.
Would you prefer to live under Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un?
It's not about the elites. If China's not afraid to disappear their richest, most internationally well-known celebrities what does that mean for the average citizen?
The Kim family don't draw any of their power from being billionaires. If there was a choice between someone like Jack Ma running the show or the North Korean Kim family ... Jack Ma is a much better bet.
If you think this side of the worlds' Marxists don't get fully erect when reading about what happened to Jack Ma, then you don't realize how bad it really is.
And to your second point, are you saying that it is good to threaten, silence or disappear wealthy people in case they might become a threat to your authoritarian regime? I suppose from a purely practical point of view yes that might be the best move. We seem to disagree on the ethics of authoritarianism though.
Nice endorsement of kidnapping and violence against people who have "too much". Fits every criteria of fascism and yet I bet you don't wear that label outwardly.
Fascism is a tool of the rich to use those fallen from (some amount of) grace against organised labour that might otherwise mount a successful revolution. There’s a reason the first targets have always been communists and labour organisers, not industry owners.
I have no evidence either way of what this person does and they verbally advocate for violence against people they don't like to achieve political ends.
So I'm going to stick with them seeming pretty facistic.
Capitalism uses violence against the working class to maintain profits for the owning class.
Revolutions of the working class are violent, yet they end the former violence and exploitation.
Fascism is violence to protect the owning class from a revolution by the working class.
Suppression of capitalists after a working class revolution is also violence to prevent them from regaining power to yet again use violence to exploit the working class.
The meanings of words matter if we are to understand each other. Fascism has a very specific historical meaning. Violence is a far more general concept.
Then in May, it was reported that Jack Ma had actually visited Alibaba headquarters for an employee social event.
I took this at face value and asked my wife (Chinese) what her opinions were on Ma having not been seen in public for so long. Within a couple of minutes she brought up some Chinese social media posts:
The project screen behind him in the video looks like it says Aliday 2021 at the top, and the 20 second video clip has subtitles that seem to match what he's saying. The content of what he's saying seems generic, something like "Ali needs to have a singular vision."
I _guess_ it could be real. I wouldn't be surprised if it were a deepfake.
Thanks. I can't read Chinese, is it the 5<something>10<something> at the start? That would make sense.
I very much doubt it's DeepFaked. Why bother? If the CCP were holding Ma and wanted him to make a generic video like that for putting up appearances I'm sure they have ways to make him do that. I suspect the OP is correct and it's simply that the author of the article doesn't know how to search Chinese social media.
I do think the author's argument "There are one billion smartphones in China today" pretty weak. How many smartphone users publish their photos on open social media? Most people probably took pictures and shared them on WeChat with their friends and relatives.
This is an interesting read - I didn’t know how unsubstantiated a lot of the “sightings” of Jack were… was dumb of him to say what he did, but doesn’t warrant the apparent mistreatment
I fault the press for letting this slide. Most people just read headlines and figured he was alright and their theories were proven false. The press should have for skepticism because they act as the middle layer between the public and the reality of what is going on. They have a responsibility to get us the relevant facts.
These days seems like the press has sold out and seems like they are in someone’s pocket…
> They have a responsibility to get us the relevant facts.
>These days seems like the press has sold out and seems like they are in someone’s pocket…
We do not want to compensate journalists, and there seems to be quite some risk in doing investigative journalism in China, so I would not expect someone to donate their life as the risk reward ratio is out of whack.
We barely have the choice to compensate journalists. For them to do their jobs effectively, they need to group together. But the people who control the groupings of journalists take active steps to cultivate a feeling of distrust and hostility between the would-be compensators and the controllers of the groups. Are there any news websites that make you feel better and more informed after you've visited them? It always seems like you should feel grateful they haven't started tracking you, got you an expensive and hard to cancel subscription and like your life will be desperately uncertain if you decide to go make a cup of coffee.
It's almost impossible to spend nothing but a couple of dollars and some attention in exchange for quality journalism like it was just a few years ago.
There is one party who controls the interaction between journalists and the public, and prior to casting aspersions on the general public you need to consider their actions.
Interesting that this bubbled up this week--China is cracking down on Didi over "security concerns" within a week of it IPOing on a US exchange.
This should be pretty embarrassing, so if Didi had legitimate security issues, the CCP would have kept it quiet and gotten it fixed quietly. I think this is to send a message, but I'm not sure to whom.
> There are one billion smartphones in China today. Everyone knows what Jack Ma looks like. Given his notoriety, and the intense vested interest of the financial world in his status and well-being, if he is at liberty today, how could it be that there are no pictures of him in circulation?
This point would be better if it could be demonstrated by showing that there were a lot of ordinary people taking pictures of Ma in public all the way through October 2020 and then that suddenly stopped.
So I decided to check for myself and searched for 马云 偶遇 on DDG. First result was this article about a woman's selfie with him going viral, published on June 2, 2021: https://new.qq.com/omn/20210602/20210602A02NNM00.html
If he'd known about this, there are many ways the author could've attacked its credibility (e.g. maybe it's a deepfake or an old picture) but given that he doesn't mention it, I conclude that he didn't do enough research and his list of sightings is incomplete.
> given that he doesn't mention it, I conclude that he didn't do enough research
> I'm too lazy to check how many of them are reposts of old pictures
You just proved his point - plenty of images available from 2019 and earlier. Plus he used to have flashy appearances that would be reported on international media every once in a while - the lack of those alone tells us something has changed drastically.
Another (more) interesting question would be: What is Jack Ma actually doing with all the money from private loans against his shares? Buying European real estate?
We probably will know eventually if $BABA keeps its downward trend and margin calls cannot be fulfilled.
AFAIK it’s usual practice for billionaire founders to fund their lifestyles with loans taken against their stock. If they sold stock, they’d incur large taxes. A loan avoids that.
Wouldn’t they just end up selling the stock to pay the loans, and pay taxes then? It seems more reasonable that they’re betting on the stock values increasing more than the loan interest rate
The difference is "end up". They can (if appropriate, and if they can't cover it elsewhere) sell small amounts to cover the interest on the loan, rather than the large amount of the principal. At the end of the loan term the usual thing would be to roll it into another loan. The lender wants that stream of interest payments. The only time they care about the full amount is if they want (or need) to call in the loan, which, in the ideal situation from their perspective, never happens.
So the borrower should never need to sell enough of the stock to seriously affect the price, and the tax is only payable on a small number, not a big one.
If you can keep this up until you die, your heirs may benefit from what's called "step up in basis" on the shares. Thus a lot of capital gains tax is avoided.
Who says they ever have to pay the loan? Most banks are tripping over themselves to manage the banking needs of billionaires, an interest free loan, especially in this environment would be completely unsurprsing and they could roll that loan over forever.
It is also considered a sign that the founder doesn't believe in the company if they sell stock. That's the main reason loans are used, so you can enjoy the wealth without cashing out and tanking the share price.
"If Jeff Bezos disappeared, and there was a question that he was in trouble with the US government, I think the press would be all over this. In this case, nobody seems to be too curious about it," via [an interview](https://racket.com/stu/rt6Yh) with the George Calhoun, the author of this piece.
That really may be what's most noteworthy about this case—it feels like it should be a bigger deal, and so it's hard not to speculate about it.
I wish we still had real investigative journalists. If you're bored sometime, go through the Deng/Murdoch divorce papers and look at how the Murdochs claim Deng altered Lachlan, Rupert and James' business practices to benefit the Chinese government.
From the outside, it sounds like certain SV companies are behaving in the exact same way. But I guess we won't know until someone leaks, huh?
If a rumor of you playing golf causes you to lose billions in net worth, would you appear in public? Probably not unless a major world leader asked you to do some reason.
It's very likely he can be detained, and let go out with some minders.
Just sending him to Gulag would be too much of a bombshell even today, so they perpetuate his "semi-imprisonment" just to not let out people thoughts that capitalism is done for in China.
> It's very likely he can be detained, and let go out with some minders.
Yes but there is the (pretty high, tbh) risk that he would like to leave china as soon as possible and if it happens, he would be able to talk, and be listened.
- note that the official investigation meeting (before he disappeared for 3 months) had state officials from 4 different state departments in one meeting, meaning it was highly choreographed by the CCP
- Xi announced more hands-on CCP oversight for all companies in 2020 after a few decades of Wild West-style capitalism. The point of temporary capitalism was to grow the Chinese economy to a Western standard and avoid Soviet-style economic stagnation, which ultimately made the USSR non-viable. Then control and suppress the economoy going forward.
- Xi had himself declared dictator for life, well, to be exactly that. He doesn't need industry titans distracting the population, or leaving him in the shade. There can be only one.
> Xi announced more hands-on CCP oversight for all companies in 2020 after a few decades of Wild West-style capitalism.
I don't understand why this considered by some communists as "impure". The communist manifesto does talk about capitalism first and then use the generated wealth for communism.
Assuming that failed communist states "are not communist" is is a dangerous fallacy which keeps alive the idea that "Communism works but has never been tried in real life". The CCP is a communist party in one of the end stages of the ideology just like the Soviet communist party was a communist party in one of its end stages, just like all the other failed communist states were led by communist parties in their end stages. The problem lies with the ideology, not with the implementation thereof.
You're putting words in my mouth to provoke an argument, don't do that. There are plenty of very enthusiastic supporters of communism elsewhere who will be happy to have that discussion with you, I specifically said I didn't want to encourage it here.
There are plenty of very enthusiastic supporters of national socialism who will be happy to have a discussion on that subject yet we do not avoid pointing out the failure of the doctrine and teach our children about the resulting carnage. The same standard should be used when discussing communism no matter how many very enthusiastic supporters it has.
What I’m saying is - you’re clearly desperate for a fight with someone. You can definitely find one somewhere, but not here no matter how edgy or provocative you are.
That will very much depend on how the societies handle the loss of employment opportunities caused by increased automation. People need to have a purpose in life, a goal to work towards to. Just giving them a basic income and entertainment will not work, in such a 'Utopia' the populace will eventually break the machines just so that something interesting happens. Maybe a new frontier will be opened, e.g. artificial islands in the oceans which can be built and populated or a space colony, something to give those who seek a challenge a way to fulfil their wanderlust. Maybe war will intervene and make the question moot by giving those in search of purpose or adventure a ready-made answer. A quick perusal of history shows that new frontiers and wars seem to be the most common providers of purpose to those in search for it.
In other words we better hope that someone like Musk will make good on the promise of a new frontier - we need one to have something to aim at other than at our neighbour.
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological or nationalistic flamewar. No, we don't care about Xi [1]. We just care about not having tedious and nasty HN threads, which is what comments like this point to. Plesae don't do that here.
Well Xi is responsible for a lot of bad things, so someone wishing him a trip to the Hague is far from "generic ideological and nationalistic flamewar" but a fair response to what is happening to people that Xi doesn't like.
The only one that is starting the flamewar is you.
It was cheap internet flamebait that guaranteed a degraded discussion. If people have substantive comments to make about such things, they need to clear a much higher bar.
Moreover they need to do it in a way that avoids generic tangents, and the GP was a classic generic tangent, sucking the thread into the nearest black hole:
Eventually sticking your head in the sand is condoning behaviour. I understand your perspective however given YC's conflict of interest due to investing in Chinese companies I think it would be prudent to stick YC's flag in the ground. Inaction and fence-sitting is radically political too.
That's quite a stretch for justifying garden-variety flamebait.
As it turns out, you're wrong on the facts as well. YC got out of China years ago. But none of that ever had anything whatsoever to do with how we moderate HN. It's much more straightforward: we don't want predictable, tedious, nasty flamewars on HN, we want the opposite.
That's literally all there is to this, even though I routinely get accused of being a secret agent, stealth activist, or some other sinister entity just for doing this silly job. The only non-obvious mechanism at work here, indeed the sole aspect that isn't brain-dead in its obviousness, is continually trying to figure out new ways to explain this to the community.
I have no idea. I'm pretty sure YC funded companies all have to be incorporated in the US. But just to repeat the important point, that has literally zero to do with how we moderate these threads. How am I able to say that? Because I'm the one doing the moderation, and I can tell you that "gosh I'd better tell HN commenters not to post flamebait about the great Xi because it might affect some investments I don't know about" is not going through my head.
OK. For the record I believe you however I would like to clarify I'm not wrong on the facts but I was wrong on the motivations. I hope you understand that the questions aren't personal but a reaction to what is happening in the broader world. What grated me was you calling it nationalism. Calling out that Xi is committing crimes against humanity has nothing to do with nationalism unless you conflate the CCP with China which is a standard tactic of authoritarian regimes. It is quite literally a core tactic in their playbook. Every day we hear new stories about how the propaganda arm of the CCP is subjugating western institutions to do their bidding, using the weakness of the capitalist system and ideology (prioritising financial gain above all else) against us.
All in all I really meant that I appreciate the work that you do. You do an excellent job in maintaining HN as my favourite forum on the internet. I understand this is probably wearing you thin so I'm going to leave it now but I hope you can understand why I felt it necessary to clarify the above.
Better than welcoming them in through the front door like we have been doing until now.
It’s come to the point where we need to have a constant and sustain vocalisation against the CCP and the dystopian future they are building. They represent an existential threat to anything that isn’t the CCP and they’ve been very successful in getting their hooks into western society and the world at large. You see it on Reddit all the time. Moderators remove comments because it doesn’t follow some sort of vague guideline, about facts for example, when really it is removed because it is critical of the CCP. The cleverness of this is that it’s hard to prove. While I don’t believe there is direct censorship here on hackernews the above comment and reasoning by dang can be interpreted in the same way. None of the reasons dang gave were present in the comment that was replied to. CCP censorship is here now in western society directly and indirectly through self censorship to protect investments. Our short termism makes us very vulnerable to their bs.
There are plenty of comments critical of the CCP like half the comments here. The difference is that they are actually relevant to the article, which has very little to do with Xi and has even less to do international law. This is probably why dang interpreted as flamebait.
First let me say I think dang does an exceptional job (far better than I could) in moderating this site and I am very grateful for it. Anytime I have fallen on the wrong side of the rules dang has been very fair and patient.
I don't disagree with your comment however none of the rules dang mentioned were actually broken. I read through the link and it only raised more questions. As I see it either the rules need to be updated or an official announcement from YC stating their position on this ever returning topic will put this to bed.
I'm torn about this comment. On the one hand it's inflammatory, like dang pointed out; on the other, we're frustrated about the perceived injustice and our seeming powerlessness at the face of it, and this comment vents that in a relatively calm way. I guess dang is right. I'd prefer not to have venting on HN, even if I sometimes sympathize.
>>>“I am puzzled. I don’t know why the press is not more curious about these very curious little stray sightings and a short video clip and nobody speaking for attribution.”
Come one, are you really puzzled..... Follow the Money...
US Media (and they are Media not journalists) is a for-profit business tied to entertainment, we have seen all manner of entertainment from movies to sports bow to the directives of China. Why does anyone believe the "news" media would be any different than these other entertainment outlets?
I imagine that this is because those non-Chinese outlets that vilify China bundle the CCP, Chinese businesses and Chinese powerful individuals into the same entity, all with Xi on top.
Presenting this as anything but an "internal conflict" doesn't fit their narrative and agenda and therefore it isn't interesting.
When you then ask where Ma is I would say it's pretty clear - Ma is being held out of the way whilst this happens. There's no point in causing drama whist they're doing this, just hold him out of the way and in about 18 months there'll be nothing for him to come back to. At that point they'll no longer need him, all the businesses will be managed by cronies of the state. So what happens when they no longer need him? If he's lucky they'll let him manage some tiny sliver of his former empire, but I can't imagine them taking the risk of him fleeing and becoming a powerful critic, so I guess most likely thing to do is trump up charges of corruption and prosecute him.