Does it makes sense to discuss it relative to the ‘political and ruling class’?
Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand.
Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year.
So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit.
But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.
The kind of punishment authoritarian regimes dish out is much more severe in ways that you couldn’t do in the US (imprisonment, seizure of assets, death). In fact I’d argue it’s the only kind that matters. Authoritarian regimes rarely go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government (which China does) and instead focus on controlling and censoring anyone in a position of power and let the implicit censoring of the entire population flow downstream from that.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison...As of August 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 30 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.
In the United States, civil forfeiture (also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture)[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing...To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity.
There should be a word for when someone picks the most extreme situation to prove their point.
Yes, the U.S., Europe, and all well-governed democracies aren't perfect, but they're much better than China in that regard.
A litmus test: U.S. and European citizens are free to challenge their leaders, e.g., the recent glut of anti-establishment parties garnering more votes in the EU. Some of these guys are loons, yet they're free to challenge the status quo because that's part of democracy.
Remind me where Xi Jinping and Putin's political opponents end up again? In jail or dead.
Revoking party membership doesn’t mean much necessarily if you still wield influence and power. Imagine if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton were kicked out by Joe Biden trying to consolidate power. They’d still have a voice and be influential outside of their party membership. That’s why Xi needs to imprison his rivals and root them out beyond just revoking their membership. And again I’ll point you to the example made of Jack Ma who wasn’t in the political party except maybe nominally but had wealth. I think you’ve never lived under an authoritarian regime and never talked with people who lived under it to understand what life is like.
This is getting too into the weeds, of course individual situations can be analyzed, but this doesn’t apply to ‘the political and ruling class’ as a whole.
To be more precise in wording, the net increase, or decrease, in net negative authoritarian decision making is what matters for me and probably most HN readers.
Since this increase, or decrease, may be positive and negative to varying degrees for various people and factions, it’s practically impossible to tell if it’s net negative for the class as a whole.
The difference between oligarchy that deliberately maintains balance of power and interests between, say, dozens or hundreds of prominent players, and a one-man rule where the "courtiers" are just richer than an average citizen, but equally subjugated to the Dear Leader, is enormous.
Both Russia and China developed since 2000 from one to the other, and I wonder what the end game will be. In Russian case, the development led to re-establishment of the imperial idea and an attempt to conquer formerly held lands by force; that is something that the oligarchs wouldn't start, but a neo-Tsar absolutely did.
Communist China used to be way less externally aggressive than Russia / USSR, but I don't like the current military gestures by Xi. Not at all.
In your mind, having an army to defend your country like China does is a crime... Better being like Japan that is defenseless against the very people who invaded them and continue there for 75 years.
You don't read my mind well if you think that I am against China defending itself. Most nations have an army for that purpose.
I am against China performing threatening exercises near Taiwan and against China claiming the majority of the South China Sea for themselves when hundreds of millions of other people live on its shores.
Do you understand that it is called "South China Sea" for a reason right? There is no way China can defend itself without controlling their sea. Also Taiwan, although self-governed is literally not an independent country, so defending Taiwan against other countries is literally China's responsibility. That's all distorted by media but true nonetheless.
Clearly Taiwan does not want to be "defended" by China, but is rather desperately asking for defence against China. Also, the international court ruled against China's claim to control everything behind the 9-dash line. It's not true that China needs that line to defend itself - it has done so perfectly well since 1947 without it.
Does India need to control the Indian Ocean in order to defend itself?
What about Mexico, should it control the Gulf of Mexico? Ireland, the Irish Sea? Etc.
And, by the way, as of 2024, you don't really need to control the entire sea (or even half of it) to prevent the enemy from landing on your shores. Any military worth its cost has a large assortment of missiles for that purpose.
Case in point: Ukraine has unambigously denied the Russians (the Russians!) control of the Black Sea while literally having no navy to speak of. By shooting at them from land. That is how it goes.
Taiwan also doesn't rely on its control of the seas to defend itself. Even the Israeli Navy is comparatively weak. Etc.
Taiwan is literally an independent country, although they promote a policy of strategic vagueness about this in hopes that it will discourage China from launching an invasion. The arguments China makes for its ownership of Taiwan are no more defensible, and arguably less, than Portugal's justifications for maintaining ownership of Goa.
The problem is not the army, but military posturing. It can too easily transition into an actual war.
Case in point: Russia. Putin's ratings were falling, and he decided to commit "a small victorious war", based on faulty assumptions. And his assumptions were faulty because all the secret agencies were filled with yes-men who were just telling Putin what he wanted to hear.
That's the problem with the authoritarian regimes: they don't have people who can stop the Dear Leader if the Dear Leader starts seriously believing in conspiracy theories and/or just goes mad with power.
The US starts a new war for posturing every few years. They have the faulty assumption that they can control the world, even as they keep losing wars. So, not a problem unique to Russia.
> The US is not in a real danger of becoming an authoritarian state
So you're saying democrats are lying? They say that may happen by the next election, so at least 50% of the population believes this is possible.
Moreover, from the point of view of foreign policy the US is already an authoritarian state. People have no say on weather to start or stop a war, anymore than the Russians have.
So the degree of authoritarian decision making felt by ‘courtiers’ within the party can vary from year to year?
I guess that is possible, but if that’s the case, wouldn’t that naturally be their goal? To concentrate power and authority in one place, or person, that they can more readily manipulate.
Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand.
Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year.
So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit.
But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.