The discourse about China, misunderstandings about how the Chinese systems functions, and lack of even a basic interest in getting a realistic view of China are rampant. The average view of China in the US is so cartoonish it's quite ridiculous. If you talk to an educated, middle-class Chinese audience about the US people generally have actually a surprising amount of understanding of the basic structure of government, values and so on. You go to a very educated audience in the US or other Western nations and it's still embarrassing. And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
It's crazy how tied to a warped view of China people get.
Like, I have serious issues with China too, but the picture many people seem to have in their mind is just not modern China whatsoever.
https://supchina.com/series/sinica/
I'd also agree that because many of China's educated upper class (political and economic) have been schooled or at least traveled or met foreigners from the US or other democracies, they understand many of the mechanics. However, I would completely disagree that even a bare majority of Chinese have much conception at all how western politics work. Even those who are educated in the US/Europe rarely understand politics except at a single point in time.
I would count myself as one who has a fair knowledge of politics and business in China having spent almost 2 decades traveling and working with businesses there. I have some understanding of their history, socialization and education, as well as, business practices. What I can say is that they are very different depending on where you are (Shenzhen/HK vs Shanghai vs Beijing vs Chongqing). They speak differently, they live differently, and they do business differently. Also, China's politico-economic environment has changed very significantly in the past 20 years often with political leaders. and Xi has been one of the more rapid/dramatic changes.
I've learned that I do not understand the inner workings of China/CCP... even the workings of the US political system over the last 4 years border on incomprehensible. I would say that some of the business people I have seen most taken advantage of are Chinese expatriates who invested back into their homes and had relatively large businesses taken from them, because they thought they understood - align your interests carefully with someone who is on the ground or even family can take everything (this wasn't a single instance).
Why? China was clearly a communist project, and this is what they became. Why is the end result we see in reality less valid than the theory?
Words have meaning so unless you're using them as a proper noun or acronym (CCP, NAZI) you follow common usage. Just because a word is useful for demagoguery or insult doesn't make it correct.
Having seen my grandparents/parents/relatives escaping communist China and now my generation escaping HK, it has heavily influenced me on how even people who identified as Chinese and hoping for democracy and freedom for their own cousins in China are being played and lied to for multiple decades.
My people in HK are screaming that the West previous engagement policies have proven again and again to be ineffective. It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades.
I do not claim to know everything about how the Chinese system functions and can only observe how my immediate network is being oppressed but still hope that there's a way to engage the CCP if at all possible.
Western posturing and brinksmanship isn't going to bring about any meaningful change. It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]. All that a foreign enemy (that loudly proclaims their belligerence) does is unite people behind shitty leaders. (As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.)
Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government. At the end of the day, no government can govern without the consent of its people. It's just a much slower feedback loop than what you see in countries that have regular elections [2].
Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China, and its architects know that. China is not the target of their behaviour - looking strong in front of domestic audiences is. In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences. Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
[1] The USSR imploded in a combination of incompetence, complacency, and a desire for its leaders (Gorbachev and his allies, who won a power struggle against Brezhnev's circle) to stop the worst of its repressive practices.
[2] Which in itself operates on a timeline of decades, if you look at how long it takes to go from public sentiment, to the primaries, to actual results in elections.
Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell? That's the first time I've heard that take. I mean, obviously what killed the USSR was a failure to dictate an efficient economy (what is likely to kill the CCP as well), but the Cold War defenitely, in my opinion and in the opinion of every piece I've ever read on the subject, sped things up significantly.
>As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.
I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies. The most publicized actions are those taked by leaders in unilateral context, which are most often related to foreign relations and military operations, and thus not related to domestic issues. However, if you look at what the vast majority of these democracies spend their time on, on a man/hr basis, it's solving domestic problems. The US is a prime example. Trump represented <1% of the government's actions, but got 90%+ of the media time. Meanwhile the entirety of congress was working on nothing but domestic issues.
>Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.
Agree for the most part.
> Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government
The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.
>Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China
Posturing, no, but policies can and do have a large effect.
>In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences.
It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.
> Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)
Well yeah. No one wants a war. It would pretty much destroy earth at this point. I think if you want to point to rising risk though, most of the blame needs to go to China itself. It's ever expanding territorial claims are the largest risk factor. We can talk about how the US lays claim to a large part of the Pacific, but then we have to start talking about the validity of most of the world's borders, so that's kind of moot in my opinion.
Cooperation with totalitarian states often prolong their existence. An example that comes to mind is the US subsidizing grain being sold to the USSR and thus preventing starvation, which would have arguably led to a collapse of the communist regime [a].
However, it is also possible to encourage the "feedback loop" that you mention by merely demonstrating the alternatives that are out there. Radio from the other side of the Iron Curtain [b] gave hope to many people in the USSR.
To sum up, thoughtful action from the outside can help bring down totalitarian regimes faster.
[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Grain_Robbery [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Cold_War
China is basically another planet that also happens to be located on Earth. That's a good analogy I think. The CCP is the current planetary govt. If you are the government of Mar's you wouldn't really care much about happens on Earth would you? (I.E. the rest of the world).
Relations in China are the ultimate expression of realism. Politics is power politics, authority resides in he who controls the guns. The branches of government that matter are intelligence, military and security. Because at the end of the day, the only force is coercive force. This isn't particularly new or fascinating as it's been true throughout Chinese history. The rules of international politics applies to domestic politics in China. I.E. the law of the jungle. It's a very old political culture so I imagine a lot of methods were tried and ultimately centralized authority backed by a strong army came out as the most efficient way to unify and govern the land. The governing method of China has and always has been for the last 2000 years some variation of Legalism. Dress it up as communism or socialism with Chinese Characteristics or any other neologism but Legalism has always ruled the land in an unified China.
I don't think the west is kowtowing to China, the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground" so to speak, but they have not communicated this in any coherent way to their domestic population which continue to cling onto the pretence of the economic and political superiority of the western bloc, hence the dissonance between what is preached and what is actioned.
As for the article I don't put too much stock (no pun intended) in it, mostly because I follow BABA stock quite closely and while it has lost a lot of value recently, news like this should really cause big moves if it is true. I could be wrong and maybe in a month's time we will all be nursing big losses from the rug being pulled from underneath us. But as it stands this has not been picked up any major newswire as far as I know (FT, WSJ, Bloomberg) so I am holding my positions, not shorting or placing puts. Money talks, bullshit walks.
What’s a “Western Elite”? Russia, India, Japan, Australia? What “power” are we talking about? Military power? Economic power? Intellectual power? Cultural power? What are the “facts of the ground” you are talking about? How have the Western elites accepted “facts”?
These are all open questions to the unbiased reader. Could you elucidate? Otherwise it sounds like you are just juicing Chinese stocks...
The population of the PRC is 1.4 billion people.
The population of NATO countries is 941 million [0]
The population of Japan, South Korean and Australia combined exceeds 200 million.
That's 1.14 billion without including any other "protectorates". Far exceeding half of 1.4
[0] https://www.worlddata.info/alliances/nato-north-atlantic-tre...
If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers.
If you would like a local insight into more young/liberal perspectives, Sixth Tone[3] is fairly interesting. Be aware that this is a state-owned media source, so it has an interest in presenting China as progressive in ways that outside of middle class communities in top tier cities it usually isn't. Just because it's state-owned doesn't mean it's not informative, though! China Media Project[4] is perhaps a useful accompanying source to try understand exactly how the state media is biased.
Of the western media, New York Times probably does the best reporting on China (they even have a Chinese language version), but like all western media they struggle to get access. Inside China, Caixin is probably the best newspaper, but unfortunately it is pay-walled.
From left wing perspective I can also recommend Made In China Journal[5].
[1] https://chinarrative.substack.com/
[2] https://chinesejournalreview.substack.com/
The only way that will work will be dropping few tank divisions on direction to Beijing.
I've dealt a lot with people like Xi, and Putin in my life, during my childhood, and youth in worse parts of Russia. I've tried everything, nothing stops them, they will keep pushing with brazen arrogance.
I had once such guy taken away by police, he came out on bail, and came back to bully me the next day.
They are pretty much like cartoon zombies, keep coming back until they cannot.
So, it's not surprising the average Chinese person has a decent understanding of how a basic democracy works.
In some ways, China is also not THAT much different, either. But it is more different than pretty much every other major economy in the world.
I mean, for one, it does not even put on a charade of being a democracy. It pretends to be communist (economically), but in a lot of ways it is more capitalist than a lot of the West. And the scale of the government is enormous. It's much more different, and there's really not much of a reason for many people in the US to have a decent idea of how it works.
China's government does not affect our daily lives that much - at least not yet. And Americans (like most people) are mostly concerned with themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_politics_is_local
And people are just people, once you scrape off the cultural and political veneer.
China definitely has big market aspects and private ownership, but I also think this can be overstated.
There is still massive public ownership of major companies and banks in China and land in all urban areas is publicly owned as well.
It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.
> And it's actually a huge problem for the West that both government and citizens do not engage China seriously.
The West will mostly separate production within about a decade or two. It‘s not a problem at all.
> It functions like a dictatorship functions. The dictatorship of the party.
This is exactly the kind of reductive thinking that is getting the West into trouble.
There is no dictatorship system. At most, it points to a non-democratic system. But that term covers an incredibly wide variety of regimes, from 1920s Portugal to Latin American Cold War authoritarian regimes to the USSR to Maoist China to contemporary China, and all of them are very different creatures. The differences between these are much wider than the differences between democratic systems (e.g. US vs Israel vs India), which are already very wide.
