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Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

Found this quote from Ai Weiwei in yesterday's Guardian very interesting:

“Can China be a global power? I don’t think so. It can gain an advantage, that’s true. But it doesn’t have soul. It doesn’t have heart. It doesn’t trust its own people. So it has no self-identity in the sense that it has never accepted human rights as common values. No freedom of speech, no independent judicial system. If those don’t exist, how can you have creativity? How can you be a country? So forget about China. China is an illusion. It’s there, it’s large. But nobody can tell you what it is.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/sep/17/ai-weiwei-witho...

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Why having freedom of speech, independent judicial system and accepting human rights as common values has to be the prerequisites of being a global power? Technically if you are rich and powerful then you are a global power.

Edit: sensing lots of incoming downvotes. Point is that democracy may not be the only way to global power.

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted, you are absolutely correct.

I would argue that many of the world's billionaires are not particularly nice people, but that doesn't stop them being immensely rich and powerful.

I see no reason the same can't be true for a country. If it has an immense amount of wealth, it will be powerful, irrelevant of human rights, etc.

Political power is not something you can bank. It cannot be stored. It cannot be measured statically at a particular moment in time. It is rooted in networks of people and in ideas. Very rich people can exercise political power only by proxy in our culture: by effectively buying it from people who have the real thing. This is both expensive and limited. It can evaporate in a moment.

    > It can evaporate in a moment.

I think that's the most interesting weakness about power without democracy. China, obviously, has not collapsed and it is going stronger than ever but there are changes in progress.

Are the motivations that precipitated the Tienanmen Square protests still present in the minds of the people? I think so.

In fact, the only global power meeting those prerequisites has arguably been the US (unless you count the EU, but if the EU is a global power then China is too).

The USSR didn't meet them, and before the 20th century no global power was a democracy.

I think he's making a deeper point. China can be a global power in the sense that you mean: like just wielding influence in the crudest sense - "an advantage" as he puts it.

He's questioning what the meaning of that is without a real Chinese identity expressed via the people. It's more like the power a business exercises which ultimately may be broken up, bought or which is assimilated into the culture it seeks to alter. Chinese power in this concept would be a superstructure over the world, not a force within it.

By contrast, American influence over time (love it or loathe it) has been culturally formidable because it has a very powerful grassroots (for want of a better word) identity. It is something which has taken possession of the world from the ground up.

This is a relatively recent thing, for sure. For most of human history, powerful nations exercised their influence mostly via military power and trade, not through soft power such as promoting a better quality of living (middle class itself is pretty recent, a product of industrial revolutions).

I think its disingenuous to dismiss the very real progress that China has made in industry and military as inessential just because they haven't had the same cultural impact as the US. Prosperity, strong and healthy middle class and political stability are what is necessary for the development of a strong, lasting culture.

There is also the often overlooked fact that the US, being an English speaking country, got to ride the cultural train for free since the British Empire had already established English as the lingua franca of the world. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture which we aren't aware of since its mostly in Chinese.

As a side note, my impression is that cultural exports from Hong Kong have declined a fair bit since China took over the island. (Japan and (especially) South Korea seem to dominate Asian cultural exports at the moment).

I think a big issue regarding China and culture is that, with their need for "great firewalls" and the like, they've effectively removed a huge channel for people to communicate their ideas and culture outside the nation. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff going on in Chinese culture that we don't know about; the problem is, with many Western social media channels blocked inside the country, it is probably much more difficult for Chinese to obtain a non-Chinese audience online even if they wanted to.

Consider the difference between hard and soft power. China can definitely wield a lot of the former with "rich and powerful", but the USA today wields both. Watch Chinese movies...even those...especially those with big budgets...and it becomes very clear that china has a problem.

Hm. Never thought much about that before. China's becoming exceedingly good at building and selling other people's IP. But I haven't looked to see if China is a source for any great novel IP. Are they?

All that didn't stop the soviets from being a global power. Odd sentiment.

As a counter quote. I can't remember who said though. "China has 1.5 billion people, and all them want to be millionaires". So China may lack freedom but it has big ambitions.

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