I'm no expert on China, but this fits the pattern of them making extreme laws (ie death penalty for corruption) and then selectively enforcing them. Laws are tools for the party to use when it feels it might benefit, not universal rules.
- Óscar R. Benavides
Things seem ok because everyone ends up walking around pretending things are good even the people enforcing the rules. Untill you get a little spark and suddenly nobody is willing to stop it.
PS: I am not saying it's going to happen, but I expect the odds of complete failure in the next 20 years are well over 5%. And if it does fail things could get insanely ugly.
- banned soft cheese
- banned all korean music and entertainment
- (got rid of) Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Laureate, and prevented his wife from leaving China
- banned ICO
- banned a bitcoin exchange
- prevented its companies from investing overseas (Wanda, etc)
- (rumored) prevented the richest person from leaving China
- banned beards and veils in xinjiang
- banned 'muhammad' and 'jihad' as baby names
- banned entertainment news that promotes western lifestyles
etc
I guess it is a sign of the health of the economy of the EU.
Cheese is a hoax
- VPN Apps on the iOS App Store
And my favourite from last year:
- Erotic banana eating videos[0].
[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-36226141
So does Greece. That doesn't appear to be doing Greece much good in the modern era though.
Also, large swaths of China's institutional memory were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution is the one aspect of Maoism that everyone in China today, including the government, will admit was a terrible idea.
If Stalin had been in power (or even Khrushchev) the USSR would not have collapsed. There may have been another holodomor. There may have been another terror. But the government would have survived.
This is a lesson the CCP learned watching events unfold to the north, and they put it to work in 1989. The question is if they still are willing and able to do it. I suspect the answer is 'yes.'
EX: Cambodian genocide (adjusted for population) was far worse than any similar time period in recorded Chinese or Russian history and it did not help.
It's definitely necessary to have accurate information to keep things running, but there are certain aspects of the notion of 'accurate information' when it serves an ideological purpose that are pretty unexpected.
For instance, Stalin believed his doctors were part of a conspiracy to kill him, so he would have his doctors and those of all top officials arrested and tortured, to the point of forced confession. The crime was not simply planning to murder, but planning to kill sacred revolutionaries [0].
This example is typical of the Stalinist concept of "objective guilt": it does not matter there wasn't a shred of evidence to the conspiracy. The ideals were used falsely to prove lies as true - not because the ideals were meaningless or because they were there to justifying any whim. But because swifter and harsher punishment would go to the one articulating why it was obvious no one really actually believed the stated rules. That instead they all obeyed unspoken, subjective rules - externally praising Soviet ideals only to avoid causing themselves horrible punishment. That the system they called objective was actually extremely repressive because of its sheer intersubjectivity..
Though upon reflection, it provokes two questions: "Why could the same Stalin who either truly believed his subjective will was the actual manifestation of historical necessity, or merely dictated as if he did, hold office - during some of the 20th's century's more turbulent periods - for as long as 30 years? And why is it that the reimagined "visionary-yet-non-pathological" Soviet Party that followed Stalin - despite its repudiation of his cult of personality - was even less capable of 'making the right mistakes' towards securing its existence?"
Although one may be forced to say a lie, one will hold no illusions as hubristic as 'having made the correct mistakes' in brutal dictatorships - things are shitty. But when you become self-congratulatory, you hold more illusions. If I lack awareness of my tendency to underestimate my (recursive) uncertainty of my uncertainty of my self-evaluations, I would frequently wonder: "Gee! As if by chance - and without any understanding or memory of what they had in common - all these remote events - which I have disastrously underprepared for - just seem to keep happening to me! And with remarkable consistency"!
I'm not sure if or how China's approach will succeed or fail. But China doesn't have the same illusions as the USSR did about revisionism (and its antithesis). And, the Chinese government does have an external system it is both invested in and holds itself accountable to; one that is also a far less uncertain measure of success than any sort of internal affairs department - the entire world economy.
Another lesson seems to be, that historys smallest revolutionary cell can be bribed into neutrality by economic success.
The counter for this is people getting used to the good life and wanting more. If a government is able to have sustained economic success even in the face of this irresistible force, maybe it deserves to continue ruling.
We have yet to see if the Chinese government will be able to maintain itself as the average Chinese move higher on Maslow's pyramid.
China knows better than the west what powers can be exercised on the net.
They've been testing it for a long while and all the old assumptions "the net treats censorship as damage and routes around iT" etc. have been found wanting in China.
As the power of the nation state returns to ascendancy, now with IT firmly under its yoke, I suspect that China will do much better and succeed.
Instead - I think the west is going to end up following China in some format or the other.
Edit - as analogy: the market can remain irrational longmer than you can remain liquid.
Govt can suppress and succeed longer than you expect.
No civil war destroyed all records. No civil war spanning more then three generations. No locked in against foreigners syndrom.
If China does undergo civil and political upheaval I don't think it has the social institutions or mechanisms to suddenly switch to enlightened liberal democracy, history matters, but that doesn't mean the Communist Party is guaranteed political control in perpetuity.
It got pretty damned close in the Cultural Revolution.
If you really want to know what happened at Tiananmen in 1989, you can find a way to "jump the wall" and find out. It's just that most users aren't actively looking for alternatives to the propaganda statements, so their opinion on the state will be formed by enthusiastic reporting on the "belt and road" program or some other party-led initiative.
When that statement gained currency it was about being free to finally be outside of the cage that governments and large organizations made.
Today the old guard have built new tools - mass online commenting - to combat the signal itself.
So while the network may well reroute around censorship - the good censors just use the network to change the signal.
I've been on forums long enough now, and helped moderate enough To know the old naive version of free speech doesn't lead to the exchange of ideas.
It leads to the exhchange of whichever mind virus or meme is most capable of building reactions and structures in brains.
So it's definitely the era of subverting people and mass subversive speech/propaganda.
If I can press the right buttons in a person before you reach them with your facts/truth - what will you do?
That's the question I don't have an answer for just yet.
Now you can get any information if you want it and the problem is that propaganda still exists and some people still believe it.
It's not perfect but it's better.
And with the new tools, in particular the ability to sock puppet and impersonate human behavior in a context poor environment (you can't physical see the person, so can't make out if they are real or not, or body language and other factors we normally have during interaction).
So wouldn't it be fairer to say that they now have stronger control?
These totalitarian societies where the law doesn't apply to anyone in power the people pretty much follow the example and ignore the law themselves.
Make everyone a criminal and the law is worthless.