How the West Got China Wrong
economist.com
economist.com
I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy...
What I'm afraid of is with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration - no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over." - Slavoj Zizek
Nope, capitalism is an economic system, not to be confounded with other types of Freedom. Capitalism is the ability of freely trade private property, among other things. In the West we tend to think it goes hand in hand with Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Press and other liberties, but it does not have to. However, if Individual Freedom is the goal of your political system, then you will have Capitalism as well (the US is a good case since the constitution is clearly about the ultimate protection of individual liberties, even before the State).
Exactly -- and all this obscures how those things came to be: with fierce struggle from the lower classes (workers, women, blacks, etc.) in most cases, handed over to the patricians of the state in others (e.g. US Declaration of Independence and so on) and spread more widely later. Not from the system for running the economy.
Heck, Hayek, for one, a champion of capitalism, was in bed with Pinochet.
And one of the things western countries did when they entered capitalism, was to conquer and enslave 2/3rds of the world in their colonies. So much for democracy.
> Well, I would say that, as long-term institutions, I am totally against dictatorships. But a dictatorship may be a necessary system for a transitional period. At times it is necessary for a country to have, for a time, some form or other of dictatorial power. As you will understand, it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America — is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government. And during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement.
A few political parties alternate in government without big changes. More or less, they have the same program, with minor differences. They, both, are part of the Establishment and the owners of everything, normally a few families, can live with them. Democracy it's good. Nevermind the conditions of the rest of society.
For some reason, despise the media being owned by "reasonable" hands, somebody outside of the establishment it's elected. Then, democracy it's not so good, and a dictatorship is needed to restore the power to the correct people, sorry, to "protect the freedom".
When the situation it's stabilized we can go back to the democracy simulacrum.
I would like to see how long would take for a new dictatorship appear if the people in power since always feel their position threaded.
- Slavery was the norm before western countries got involved with it as well.
- Democracy didn't exist when the west was also active in the slavery market. I do not know too much about the US though.
Not in the scale of enslaving 2/3rd of the world. In fact many nations had put an end to the practice way before colonialism.
And of course those countries didn't pride themselves on their christian or englitenment values, or beings democratic, and having some "white man's burden" of civilizing the world.
>- Democracy didn't exist when the west was also active in the slavery market.
You don't need democracy to abolish slavery.
Not in the scale of enslaving 2/3rd of the world. In fact many nations had put an end to the practice way before colonialism.
Colonization was how slavery was justified, commercialized and gone global, and colonial subjects were treated as an abundant work force for their colonial masters (when they were not hunted for fun, treated as animals, or displayed on "human zoos").
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/europe...
But even if I was "conflating" the too, that would at best a mistake in the use of words, not a "horribly" (sic) thing to do. Slavery and/or colonization themselves would be actual examples of horrible things to do.
Where? Hayek said basically that there was more freedom under Pinochet than under Allende, which is not the same thing as being a supporter of Pinochet.
> Hayek: More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.
Even if he had just said that, it would have been enough to make him a supporter -- considering that he said that for a fascist junta leader that overthrew a democratically elected leader, and is responsible for thousands of executions, and tons of torture and violence. There was just no redeeming quality.
But Hayek went much further: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/06/25/the-hayek-pinochet-conne...
Note that the election was far from being "the majority of electors" and heavily disputed at the time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende#1970_election
Let's not pretend Allende represented the population of Chile at large, please.
Hoover report on before and after Allende: https://www.hoover.org/research/what-pinochet-did-chile
> In 1970, Allende won 36.2 percent of the popular vote, less than the 38.6 percent he had taken in 1964 and only 1.3 percent more than the runner-up. According to the constitution, the legislature could have given the presidency to either of the top two candidates. It chose Allende only after he pledged explicitly to abide by the constitution. “A few months later,” Whelan reports, “Allende told fellow leftist Regis Debray that he never actually intended to abide by those commitments but signed just to finally become president.” In legislative and other elections over the next three years, Allende and his Popular Unity (UP) coalition, dominated by the Communist and Socialist parties, never won a majority, much less a mandate, in any election. Still Allende tried to “transition” (his term) Chile into a Marxist-Leninist economic, social, and political system.
and
> Many on the left had long believed that capitalism and democracy were incompatible. In a brazen demonstration of its contempt for majority wishes, and for the institutions of what it called “bourgeois democracy,” the pro-Allende newspaper Puro Chile reported the results of the March 1973 legislative elections with this headline: “The People, 43%. The Mummies, 55%.” This attitude and the actions that followed from it galvanized the center-left and right, whose candidates had received almost two-thirds of the votes in the 1970 election, against Allende. On August 22, 1973, the Chamber of Deputies, whose members had been elected just five months earlier, voted 81–47 that Allende’s regime had systematically “destroyed essential elements of institutionality and of the state of law.” (The Supreme Court had earlier condemned the Allende government’s repeated violations of court orders and judicial procedures.) Less than three weeks later, the military, led by newly appointed army commander in chief Pinochet, overthrew the government. The coup was supported by Allende’s presidential predecessor, Eduardo Frei Montalva; by Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president after democracy was restored in 1990; and by an overwhelming majority of the Chilean people. Cuba and the United States were actively involved on opposite sides, but the main players were always Chilean.
The actual democratic representation was against him by 1973, That's what's important.
It's telling that the text you quoted has zero actual facts against him, only reports of vague accusations. The name for that is "character assassination".
> only reports of vague accusations.
Where vague accusations? The economic situation of Chile during his regime went from bad to worse and his directives were directly responsible for it (as proven countless times in countries where the same policies were adopted). Check out the wikipedia page on the economy of Chile during his years.
You contested the claim that he was democratically elected. I don't see how this is relevant to that claim.
In any case, I don't see evidence that his former allies were against him. Congress wasn't his ally, and besides - as the text you quoted says - there was an election in between, so they weren't all the same people. His allies were the UP, and as far as I can tell, they still supported him.
Finally, losing support from your allies means nothing. That happen just five years ago in my Western European country, and it might happen again soon. It's an expected development in a country with a diverse polity.
Where vague accusations?
"destroyed essential elements of institutionality" and such.
The economic situation of Chile
Which might make him a bad President, but still a democratically-elected one, which was the point being argued.
He wasn't, still, he got a 64,1% approval rate in 1972, which is much more than the actual president (Michelle Bachelet) on her whole second government.
> Main players were always Chilean
Not true, there is evidence that proves US intervention in both elections and government.
That is absurd. He supports who he supports. He never claimed to support Pinochet, so he didn't. If I say that Krushchev was better than Stalin, does that make me a Krushchev supporter? Of course not!
>There was just no redeeming quality
Pinochet's reign, brutal though it was, led Chile to become the most prosperous country in South America. If that is not a redeeming quality, I really don't know what is. Hayek also correctly predicted Chile's transition to democracy ten years before it happened. I think most of Hayek's work post-1950 is nonsense, but a correct prediction is the highest standard of scientific demonstration, and this was a big one.
The implication there is that economic freedom trumps any other kind of freedom, which is exactly what the GP was trying to say.
If you believe in democratic freedom, you believe in the right of the people of a country to choose whatever they want even if, in your opinion, it's a mistake or too radical for your taste.
Compare that to Pinochet who was choose by the CIA and the Chile oligarchy. Defense of freedom certainly.
Well, that's how Stalin's Soviet became an industrial power that could fend off Germany, and basically how South Korea rose economically under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee (except that "nationalization of means of production" was changed to "give means of production to subservient businessmen who are rolling in the same bed as the government").
You can't predict a country's future by a few soundbites like "Is it central planning?": you immediately run into problems, like how do you even define central planning?
It has nothing at all to do with socialism and the Darwinism rather references Darwin's evolutionary concepts in a "survival of the fittest" way.
Afaik it's nothing anybody would label themselves as.
Wrong. Capitalism is about maximizing profits and accumulation of wealth. Free markets are essentially a very hostile environment to that. As soon as big players emerge in a field they will root for protectionism. Less competition leads to more profit. Free markets are something completely different.
Is it? IDK. There are different definitions.
Part of the problems is that opponents and proponents use different definitions. Opponents describe characteristics, or consequences. On the radical end, they use marxist definitions (really, the original) which are mostly about an urban, company-centric (wage labour) economy. Less radical ones use it to describe the power/wealth inequalities we have.
Proponents generally focus on "free markets," free trade, private property^ and such. IE, you could have bronze-age capitalism if people were free in certain ways. IE, the ideologies of anglo-american liberals (libertarians, neoliberals...and other derivatives).
Within limits. For example, we can't freely trade slaves, sex with minors, powerful weapons, etc, and I'm sure most of us are pretty thankful for that. Most western nations also have limits on trading private property, inasmuch as such trade is taxed. See Ha Joon Chang's books for a reminder that "free" markets aren't really as free as the ideology would have you believe.
I think it is misguided in the short term. Dictatorships are very good at protecting themselves from the hostility of its population. However I think it does work in the long run, that is 30-50 years.
So we just need to be either patient or ruthless with China.
These countries still have a version of capitalism that is not as aggressive as the Anglo-Saxon model, and a democracy that is far more permissive than the East Asian (barring Japan) model.
Indian or South African growth may not be glamorous, but it might be sustainable. (And the population growth in both places is far less alarming than generally thought.)
Not sure this would work for ZA though. Namibia is only 2M people, it's not the same scale.
How convenient, as the end of apartheid was less than a generation ago (1994). What's done is done, right?
Do it wrong, however, and you can end up like Zimbabwe.
The track record of the South African state in the past decade has been depressive. After they booted Zuma there is probably a chance to do better, but it's not obvious everything will go well from now on.
One thing to keep in consideration about the South African situation is that land reform in South Africa is not new; it's written into the constitution. What's new is that South Africa is dropping the requirement to recompense the owners. This could be a problem, not just for the white South Africans but for black South Africans as well as it could drive the middle and upper class out of the country.
England is an easy place to start because the common language leads to an extensive Wikipedia article, but you'd find similar ones for any European country in their own language, especially since most experienced the upheaval of revolutions, conquests or occupations. The US had common trends but different details for each state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English_land_law
[2] Failure to redraw maps had meant that sometimes one landowner was the constituency behind a seat in the commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832
For example, abolishing serfdom made your land less valuable if there were no longer people that belonged to it. Or, confiscating monasteries and abbeys, then gifting them to favored nobles is a form of land reform. Similarly creating the conditions that the large manors dissolved later is another form of land reform.
In California, you can look at the title histories that trace back to large ranchos from the Mexican period and before, and look at how ownership changed hands. Most owners were legally entitled to retain ownership, but any number of tricks were used to get them to lose their claims.
The same goes for changes in ownership of water rights, mineral rights, air rights, or new limitations on what types of commercial activity are permitted.
The measures can be beneficial or not, but it seems extremely common for changes in public policy to alter property rights.
Kerala.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reforms_by_country
The dearest to me, however, is what was done in my native country, Finland, in the 17th and at the turn of 19th and 20th centuries which created the basis for our current national wealth.
To simplify a bit too much: a succesfull land reform looks like splitting the ownership of land which produces agricultural output or timber from few large owners to many dedicated ones. This distributes the revenue from capital among the population using a " market healthy" method. Rather than spread the revenue from the capital, spread the capital itself. This is a solid foundatuon for creating a wealthy middle class - which has been identified as one of the key parts of a healthy modern economy.
Zimbabwe just took the land from it current owners - which were already spread among a fairly large population - to complete people who could not tend it as well, and not utilize the capital as effectively.
Everyone is worried land appropriation in South Africa is going to kill agricultural productivity like it did in Zimbabwe, where the farms were seized and given to individuals that had no business being farmers.
While I doubt that's the case for either (them being sustainable), you raise an important point.
What we call "success" (economic, and so on), might be in fact a liability (environmental, societal and democratic debt), and countries doing worse than US, Germany, China, Japan, and so on, might be much better in actual sustainability and future-proofness.
The problem is we talk about "progress" without ever mentioning progress towards what. More GDP, more consumer gizmos, more productivity, etc -- but rarely we talk about preferred ways of life, maximizing happiness, inequality, democracy, and so on.
Both India and South Africa were British colonies who had some elements of British politics & liberty passed onto them. The freedom of these peoples, if they maintain it, will be down to their history.
Other nations, particularly in Africa, are looking keenly on at China's economic miracle, and realising for the first time in history that liberalism is not a requirement for a thriving market economy. For decades, if not centuries, this has been the established rule. What's so dangerous about China apparently breaking the rule is that every leader, autocrat and downright despot with a population hungry for a better life will now realise that there is a path where they can give their people a better life but they can keep their own power. Before, it was clear that liberty, at least to some extent, went along with prosperity. If and when when African nations get their feet out of the mud it will shake the foundations of the global order. I desperately want to see their power and authority granted and restrained by free and equal peoples. If they follow in China's footsteps that certainly won't be the case.
¹ https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/96949469861953126...
And that is how China can take over the world without firing a single shot.
Laugh now, but let's revisit this idea ten years from now and see if you're still laughing.
Democracies don't have famines.
He may still be right, but time is running out.
The question is, how long can that ruse continue.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america...
Yes. The source is left-leaning. None the less, plenty of smoke to ID a fire.
Regardless, the point isn't what some other gov does or doesn't do. The point is the US is being sold snake oil. That doesn't need any comparison. BS is alway BS. Lip stick doesn't make it any less so.
Doesn’t seem like much of a ruse to me.
And regarding “doesn’t matter what other countries do”, come on! This is a thread about the west’s relationship to China in the context of Xi consolidating lifetime rule.
It’s explicitly a thread about our relationship to other governing systems. So your attempt to say people in the US have no standing to criticize China based on some individuals in the US feeling disenfranchised seems like the non-sequitur to me.
Yes. It's a republic.
No. There's no effort to communicate that to those most effected. At some point the friction from the disconnect will manifest itself in "weird" ways. Trump being a prime example.
Is that best for the republic?
On one hand, we have Marx' definition, characteristics of an economy and polity: urbanism, bourgeois elites, private property, wage labour. It was good foresight. The world he described di more or less come about. More than at any other time we work in companies, for wages, in cities. Most of the important property is privately owned.
On the other hand, we have anglo-american ideological "capitalism." It's a variant of liberalism. The emphasis is on free markets, and a confidence that these produce an efficient self organizing market. But, the ideals (at least of the philosophers they refer to) are a little bit of awkward fit in 20th & 21st century settings, where the economy is made up of massive companies.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
Anyway, I think the ideological lens (neoliberalism, asian-capitalism) might be more obscuring than clarifying. In practice, the economic systems are the same. The ideological differences between the US & China do not impact the stucture of the economies more than (for example) geography or local cultural norms do. The Soviet centralised economies were different, but I'm not really sure how related that is to ideological communism. It's just what they did when all those commune projects failed.
..The actual differences are more in the legal systems and the political norms (which in China are still extremely strict). Here I think we agree.
Joint-stock and separation of capital & ownership. These need to be the dominant structure in an economy, for the economy to "count" as capitalism. IMO, this is a lot closer to Marx' "mode of production" definition (he also saw it as a progressive step up from feudalism) that the "capitalism as an ideology" definition of Neo/Classical/Anglo-liberalism. So... your defining mechanism may have existed at point A but I don't count that as capitalism until that mechanism runs a significant portion of industrial output. ...Also you need to consider all the clearly non-capitalist mechanisms that separate "ownership" from management, like the Byzantine/Ossoman system for example.
The "ideological" definition just makes a lot more sense in a small firms world, where you really are talking about freely transacting individuals.
The private property point is also worth delving into. No one is a feudalist anymore, so no one defends it. But, I think it's worth comparing and contrasting to this (much more long lived) ideological and practical mode of society. It's the one part of the definition both that marxists and capitalists emphasize is a defining feature of "Capitalism." The private property point made by marx is a pretty obscure 175 years later as we lost context. He considered feudal rights and borouise property to be very distinct from each other.
Under most well functioning feudal systems in their prime, there were "welfare-ish" obligations (and obligations generally) of lords to serfs. Emergency grain stores, for example. A lord was expected to house and feed his subjects. These obligations don't come with modern property rights. In fact, there is barely a concept of obligations that come with property or rights anymore.
It's a great place to explore the divide though. To the capitalism point though... I think Uber/Lyft dynamics are perfectly capitalistic in a marxist sense. I think that from a ideological-capitalist perspective, a system where drivers transact more directly with passengers would be more capitalist.
In some places, these obligations do exist, at least in theory. The German Grundgesetz Article 14, for example, states: "(2) Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good." [0]
Which is often quoted but these days rarely actually enforced/acted upon, the opposite is becoming far more common (privatization of common goods/services or straight up bailing out private companies with public money) like recent pushes to privatize German Autobahn [1] or when the public is bailing out massive private companies, like it happened with the banking crisis of 2008 [2], nuclear waste deals [3] or most recently bailing out German car manufacturers for Dieselgate [4].
[0] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
[1] http://www.dw.com/en/german-autobahns-backdoor-privatization...
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/subprime-bailou...
[3] http://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-de...
[4] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/manufacturing/disbelief-...
A company is owned by whomever is risking their money to finance it.
How is capitalism different from early human tribes? They also needed to work and trade. Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain. People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
Equity isn't the only form of capital investment.
> How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
> They also needed to work and trade.
Which is broadly true of every human society, regardless of politico-economic system; such systems differ in the (for instance) distribution of the accumulated benefits of trade, not in it's practical necessity.
> Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain.
The basic principles that remain the same are not the features that distinguish politico-economic systems from each other.
> People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.
Yes, technology has improved since ancient times, and, in the domain of politico-economic systems even most critics of capitalism would agree that it represents positive progress from feudalism and other earlier politico-economic sysyems.
It's an easier question to answer these days, when many companies are like Google or Facebook. They don't really have "capital assets." No stock to buy or factories to build. Just people that need to pay rent.
Someone has to pay for the fixed costs. And its most common that an investor does that. Never said it has to be that way, just that it is common and offers many advantages.
> Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.
Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics I wrote about. If you are a tribe you might life in balance with other tribes and you have control over a river (or whatever) and you might even give something comparable to property right to a member of your tribe. But this is all enforced by society. Property rights are the same thing, just more formalized and generalized. Ofc. there is more insecurity in a autocracy, but that because an autocracy is about exploiting others.
Yes, and, again, equity isn't the only form of investment even within the capitalist system (though, obviously, it's often structurally preferred by investors within that system.) So, even granting, for the sake of argument, the need for capital investment to start firms, that does not imply a need for capital, as opposed to labor, ownership of firms. (See, for a large example even embedded within a capitalist economy, the Mondragon Corporation.)
> Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics
That's certainly one of the reasons for formalizing such rights, but “property rights” aren't a special feature of capitalism, what defines capitalism—and this is generally true of each other politico-economic system—is a particular model of property rights. And, yes, in each case they are viewed by defenders of the system to “help” the immutable basic needs of human society.
Is this rhetorical? I didn't say they could (or couldn't be). If you mean it in a curious way than let's start with 'how can a company...'
How is capitalism different from early human tribes?
It depends on which capitalism you mean, Marx's or Milton Friedman's. Also which tribe. If early human tribes were like modern ones, they had a lot of different ways of doing things.:)
For marx, you could probably stop at "they don't live in cities or work for wages" like they do in capitalist systems.
For Friedman's capitalism, they tribesmens affairs are probably dictated by customs and communal nterests, not private interests.
Idk, though. It's theoretically possible for ancient human culture to be capitalist under Friedman's definition, if their rules are compatible. Under Marx's it doesn't matter what they do, capitalism is an urban-industrial society.
I wasn't referring to specific theories. My point was more about observing how the world is.
Characteristics of capitalism (let's go with the Marxist definition) certainly aren't universal. Not every human economy includes private property, for example. Not every system include a bourgiouse elite, a customary, religious or military elite is more common historicaly.
You go to a bank (or credit union in this instance) with a compelling business plan and a history of success and get a loan. If the company at some point can't make the payments they declare bankruptcy, the company dissolves and the credit union takes ownership of the company's assets (or what ever was used as collateral) which it then sells off.
Same as real estate deals the people who take the loan legally own the property unless they fail to pay off the loan, then and only then does the property change hands to the loaner.
A lot of large infrastructure projects, for example, are funded by loans with very little (or none) equity capital. Risk is borne by the firm, its lenders, or the state. The "owners" are basically they guys who get the deals made.
I have no idea if employee-owned companies will be any good. There were examples (eg Egged) in the past that didn't work well. But it's curious to see them taken as an impossibility for reasons like this, that they don't fit inside of a textbook free market example, with all incentives perfectly aligned. Half the companies in the world weren't started this way. How did Russian oligarchs buy all those state companies? Leveraged buyouts. IE, the banks (does this count as the state?) gave them money to buy (or start) them.
The more interesting questions are around management. How does an employee owned company work well? Answer that with confidence, and I think everything else is solvable.
*coops however aren't necessarily employee owned-- there's a several models-- and ESOP style employee ownership can be pretty weak from an ownership perspective so in addition to being woefully incomplete the lists should also not be taken at face value.
Adam Smith, the American founders, Locke, Hume... and others that form the basis of ideological capitalism... they idealized independent people, usually farmers. Entrepreneurs, maybe 10 person tin factories. Facebook or Unilever... Idk if an economy of mostly these is all that capitalist, by the proponents' definition.
The "Austrians" (particularly Hayek, IMO) do address this world of megafirms a lot more than earlier writers (again, makes sense considering the times). This is getting a lot closer to modern theories, with Hayek directly defending "capitalism" (free market systems, and here we really have the modern ideological framework in a similar form to today's). They (Hayek & Mises anyway) had much more modern, abstract theories.
Hayek described the economy as an information system, with price signals as its source of information flow. This certainly is a defense (one the the most interesting and convincing, IMO) of free markets, but we're back to the modern definition. ..It's fairly tangential to Marx' definition, and harder to argue for from a traditionally ideological/liberal perspective. IE, it's fairly tangential to and disconnected from the "liberals" of the british enlightenment or the american revolution.
There were already mega firms back then (East India Company IIRC ?)
You're right about the colonial megafirms, they were really the forerunners of today's corporate world...quarterly stock price pressure and all. But, they're pretty absent from most examples of that time. Maybe it's because they didn't operate in Europe much.
Modern free marketers can easily disown them on crown issued monopoly grounds. Smith considered them the same as guilds... Even Marxists didn't really pay as much attention to them as they should have, considering hindsight.
Actually, Adam Smith constantly used independent farmers as examples of inefficiency, and the second paragraph the first chapter of "Wealth of Nations" mentions huge companies "destined to supply the great wants of the great body of the people".
Adam Smith is easier to read than are most discussions of his writing. If you want a sample, read the first three chapters of "Wealth of Nations" - only 20 pages. https://www.ibiblio.org/ml/libri/s/SmithA_WealthNations_p.pd...
Here's a semi-random example from a chapter on wager labour:
"When an independent workman, such as a weaver or shoemaker, has got more stock than what is sufficient to purchase the materials of his own work, and to maintain himself till he can dispose of it, he naturally employs one or more journeymen with the surplus, in order to make a profit by their work. Increase this surplus, and he will naturally increase the number of his journeymen."
or the famous one:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages”
It seems to me that he is talking about a world that is not really capitalist, in a marxian sense.
Smith does spend a lot of time on wager labour, he does talk about freedom (nonexistent under feudalism) to pursue their own interests and the market forces which create opportunities. But... the economy he is describing is of small scale industry, landlord-tenant dynamics... I don't think Marx would have called this capitalism.
Also, what he regards as "monopoly" (bad) is a much lower bar than we use today. Where he describes larger scale structures like corporations (I think he means guilds and regulators), joint-stock companies (rare then), and such it is usually in a negative light, associated with monopoly or what we'd call "regulatory capture" today.
All of this is arguable. Smith was a long time ago, the world was different, and we can't really know if he'd consider modern capitalism good. But, I do think that what marx was describing and SMith was advocating are two completely different things. We happen to call both capitalism (depending on whether we're for or against it). I think they're tangental or even somewhat contradictory.
I agree with your more important point. Read Smith. It's a great opportunity to read accessible and interesting texts that are important to modern thought, and still easily relevant. Don't try read Marx, only heartbreak will follow. Read Darwin too, for the same reason.
Edit: Also, China is a very capitalist country compared with, say, EU.
That is patently false. In China it is impossible for foreign companies to compete on a level playing field. There is a huge amount of protectionism and anti-competitive practices, the currency is manipulated to favor exports, and it's basically impossible to make it big without ties to the CCP.
In the EU you can start your business wherever you are a legal resident, the regulations are a known quantity and essentially you just have to mind your own business. This is not so in mainland China, your applications can be arbitrarily denied, and if your business does too well, you will get a knock on the door asking if you are a "good comrade". All big businesses there are tied to the CCP one way or another.
Yes, like the 74% Steel tariff the EU imposes on China
Or how about solar panels from China which are hit with 65% tariffs unless they are sold at a minimum price (which is higher than average EU equivalents)?
The EU not being protectionist is a widely believed meme.
When China has smog issue many in the West point and wave fingers. The truth is, that pollution is The West's. We're just too naive to admit it.
The "bonus" is, politicians in the West can claim they cleaned things up at home. Lol. Oh hell no. When the jobs left, so did the (direct) pollution.
Regardless, the point is, China's env regs are MUCH more lax. So chances are good Product X made in the USA was made with less pollution than the same product made in China.
Yes, pollution is a shared "resources." But some countries are less concerned than others. China is one of those coutries.
Some (Walmart, Apple, HP, Dell) want it as cheap workforce.
Other (Boeing Airbus, GM), want to sell things there.
Some in academy/press wish China can be democratic society.
Some in Military would like to see a strong opponent for another cold war style military build up.
China was able to see all them and sail / leverage along all the competing interests for their own benefits in the last 30 years.
A lot of the rhetoric in the past went the other way: freedom is good because capitalism requires it.
As a former and still sometimes libertarian who once read a lot of Ayn Rand and still thinks she made some good points, I personally get a big case of the "flying saucers didn't come blues" from this.
Freedom and free enterprise were supposed to go together. Then Singapore and China proved that you don't need freedom for capitalism and that it might even be a liability.
Markets love a kind of pragmatic totalitarianism that acts proactively to restrain any genuine "disruption" and much more importantly to prevent panic selling and crashes. Investors can feel confident in the market if there's a totalitarian backstop in place that will spring into action to prevent a market panic. Markets work great if they're just not allowed to go down.
Controlled societies are great for capitalism. Real freedom means the freedom to do things that do not increase GDP and behave in ways that disrupt or distract from corporate culture. Turn the world into an office park. We can see this mentality spreading to the West.
The lower classes can safely be ignored, drugged/entertained, or distracted by pitting different races and cultural identities against each other.
If the upper classes (upper middle class, technicians, academics, the "lower rich") get politically uppity or have moral reservations you can just flatter their sense of superiority and entitlement. Make them think they've been brought into the fold. Invite them to rub shoulders with the real elite. Give them a false sense of freedom through consumer choice and BoBo pop libertine indulgence. Take the hedonism pioneered by the counterculture and strip it of its rebellious and spiritual undercurrents. Tinder is a great example: a meat market night club without the music, dancing, or art. Create pseudo-free gated enclaves where the upper middle classes and the rich can enjoy custom tailored lifestyles optimized for the consumption of high-end goods and the production of intellectual capital that ultimately benefits the real aristocracy.
Edit:
To all the leftists and anarchists right now who are wagging their fingers at us libertarians saying "we told you so," please hold back a little on the schadenfreude. This future is absolutely not what we had in mind.
Edit #2:
In all seriousness though... independent of whether or not capitalism or markets are good things I think it's important to advocate freedom in and of itself as an independent moral, ethical, and political goal. Freedom is not good because it makes this or that work better. Freedom is good because human beings must be treated with dignity and deserve personal autonomy.
There are positive points to be taken from many political philosophies (including libertarians and communists alike), my personal outlook is to never attach too dogmatically to one side though. :)
Capitalism and basic freedoms are indeed separate entities, but I do think it remains an open question whether China can become a knowledge / innovation powerhouse, while at the same time heading backwards on basic freedoms as they seem to be now. This is more the key that I see has been historically linked together. Controlled societies may be just fine for the nuts and bolts portion of capitalism, but one can point to countless examples in history where suppressed / tightly controlled knowledge ended up holding societies back, severely suppressing innovation.
I sometimes compare Rand to Marx. Both were very astute critics -- Marx of capitalism and Rand of socialism/communism. Unfortunately neither had practical ideas of what to do about it. Both advocated some version of "put certain ideas into practice and then (magic happens here) and then the evil state withers away." The magic is what doesn't happen. We're now able to see that the real world endpoint of communism is mafia rule and that the real world endpoint of capitalism is techno-feudalism.
Rand's heroes all look like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. People like that are notable because they are rare. Most of the ultra-wealthy more closely resemble Rand's villains.
Real creators are too busy creating to play the kind of dominance games that most often lead to political and business success. You can succeed by creating, but doing so is many orders of magnitude harder than succeeding through manipulation and so you get a smaller pool of people who can pull it off.
Filial piety followed through to its logical conclusion as the leader being the father of the nation, risking dictatorship, while forgoing personal freedom for the sake of society leads to censorship.
“ It's been 4 days now. I look around, everything looks the same, but I know, it's not the same world anymore. He choose to become a dictator officially maybe means nothing to most foreigners, but as a Chinese born and raised in this land, I know it's just the beginning of a series following "1984" episodes, and maybe even worse: Cultural Revolution 2.0. This may not happend in 10 years, but I live here, we live here, someday, something very bad is gonna happen again, and I can't do anything to stop or evade it.
A lot people around me seems calm and quite. Maybe they already learned to "shut up and having fun while you still can", or, maybe they are just like me: too shocked and depressed to think of anything to comment. I feel so helpless and scaried, it's like, how do I put this? sitting in a biulding which is on fire, you watch the black smokes and red flame coming from the bottom, but you can't find a way out of your room, there isn't any extinguisher in the room neither. All you can do is just sitting in the corner, hugging yourself tight, waiting for that momnent to come, in despair and silence.
sorry my English sucks, I tried my best to write in English. As a native Chinese, I can't stop to feel pessimistic about the future, hell, now I know we are doomed, it'll be easier to suffer if just push me off the building instead of letting me watch it burning for decades.“
https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/80xttj/silence_this_...
And another one post from a student in China
"I’m studying in a university in China rn and holy fuck I thought I entered an alternate reality, my classmates were all talking and worrying about the issue on the internet few days ago before they were censored out but after that , no one dares to talk about it in the campus , it’s dead silence , I KNOW everyone cares but everyone is just so afraid , this is pretty much a 1984 scenario in real life and I don’t know what else can we do. I guess they have already won in this point . :("
I grew up fond of Asia: Martial Arts, Bruce Lee, asian food, spiritual ideas, that simplicity in art, architecture, clothing; Japanese culture too.. anyway I was very very positive about her culture.
She responded right away: cool but well you know.. it's not all rose here; with a few mild comments about economy and politics. Then a long silence, followed by panick-ish excuses around the fact that she shouldn't have said this and she disconnected.
Note that this was about the big firewall thing. Surely it didn't help for paranoia. Still it was the first time I ever talked to someone scared about her country as a whole.
----
Recently with the growth of international chinese tech brands, some news about raising wages, using robots instead of armies of exploited people .. I thought China would get a stable and peaceful rise. I did not envision this.
Seems like just different bubbles, actually. I'm somewhat skeptical of taking at face value the opinions of a population subject to authoritarian information controls. Even in such a case, you're likely to get very different opinions of a government like China's in Xinjiang or Tibet than you will in Beijing. Both groups are only able to form their opinions of the whole from the very limited pieces available to them.
I think the most interesting perspectives come from people with a foot in both worlds. I have friends who don't want China to become a democracy, at least not right away, because they're afraid of what it would do. The CCP has kept the necessary civil society weak, and encouraged popular nationalist sentiments that could be very dangerous if put into action.
The Chinese leadership knows too well what a complete trainwreck Mao and the Cultural Revolution have brought on the country. Their priority is always on developing the country further. They are way smarter and more pragmatic than some western media/elites want to imagine them to be (e.g. imagine them to be some Kim-esque figure who only cares about personal enjoyment and leaves the population dying. That's absolutely not the mentality of the current Chinese leadership.)
What if that guy was told that in Germany, UK etc. there are practically no limits on how long a head of state can serve, as long as they are re-elected? Substitute the name for China. Would they change their rhetoric 180 degrees around? All just ideological nonsense with no substance. Yes, Xi's reforms could fail. The power struggle could become so intense that it spirals out of control and harms the populace somehow. But it could also be the case that Xi truly realizes his vision and became the leader to make China the most powerful country for a long time to come, a la Lee Kuan Yew, Ataturk etc. It's all hugely uncertain at the moment. Talking as if China is doomed from now on exactly shows how ignorant and far from reality this person is.
Personally I hate the fact that China is becoming like another US on so many aspects of the society. But really, that is a totally separate matter.
Also the article, while well written, takes a very naive view of China's use of hard and soft power, which was very irritating. The USA constantly uses it's economic and military power in countries to ensure an 'America First' direction. On the front page of HN today, America accused a Latvian bank of money laundering and bypassing American sanctions so it shut it out of the FedWire service which eventually killed the bank within a matter of weeks [1]. Also see America's economic embargo of Cuba, invasion and occupation of Iraq, NATO's no fly zone over Libya in 2011, etc. All countries with enough power use it for their own benefit. This is neither a China-only nor a USA-only issue.
What's "asian values".
> But I don't share the hope of my liberal friends - give them ten years, [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration
It's been 30 years since tiannamen square demonstrations. There won't be another tiannamen square unless there is economic issues within china. And the same applies not just to china or "asia", but everywhere. Economic stress is what drives protests and societal chaos.
> no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.
When was there ever any marriage between capitalism and democracy? One isn't linked with the other. Democracy precedes capitalism by millenia. You can have democracy and no capitalism. You can have capitalism and no democracy. You can have both or neither.
The quote appears to say a lot but says nothing. It makes a host of false assumptions and runs with it.
What is so good about those Asian capitalism that those countries, after adopting this model, are all on course of their national suicide? It is clearly this model cannot even sustain itself, the prosperity it demonstrates is probably just a intermediate state before impending, pro-longed decline.
Then there were those who didn't care about the human rights issue and just wanted to make money, who thought they could use China as a massive cheap factory forever. Never thinking (or caring) that China could one day surpass us and turn the tables. This was greed.
Behind numerous cultures is a long tapestry of human exploitation punctuated by periods of total war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery_in_the_Musl...
The issue is that countries see each other as equals and the punishment trick can't be easily used when nuclear weapons are involved.
Should we dehumanize those who dehumanize others? I don't think so. The US for a very long time has grown in a moral authority that is overreaching and over simplistic in it's definition of humanity. The only way to break cycles of hate is to show that there is a better way, not through the domination/punishment lens.
We're all products of rape and murder. To see rape and murder and not remember our past is to bask in cultural wealth wondering why everyone else is so poor.
I believe that on the balance the systems as currently in place are relatively moral. Especially compared to historic precedent (also compare Russias war in Syria to the US wars, having to convince a domestic audience that you're the good guy puts real constraint on the use of military power). But the level of immoral behavior even just focusing on past WWII/Post-colonial times is still staggering and easy to point towards for others.
"He may be a bastard, but he's our bastard."
I don't think that China's recent success disproves this. China spent decades experimenting with ruthless authoritarianism, and wound up decades behind the world. They relaxed their hold for a time, and experienced massive catch-up growth -- growth they would have experienced much earlier if their government had been properly managed.
The real question is whether they'll be able to continue that growth if they turn to a much more authoritarian model, which seems to be the direction they're going. And I'll be frank that there seems to be very little historical evidence that this approach will lead to continued economic (and thus political) dominance. In fact, all signs point the other way. It's just unfortunate that we keep trying the experiment.
Western capitalism may be like a pack of wolves freely cooperating without leashes, but China's is like a pack of wolves wearing shock collars. Most of the time they're on their own, but they have to be mindful of what their master wants or they'll get zapped. That latter system might be good enough to compete with the West.
So was the thinking that they are the "natural end-state of human societies".
The idea that business from the USA, UK, and, other nations in the West all “wanted democracy” is blatantly not true. They wanted profit and success via the penetration of a huge potential market. Democracy? No, fair treatment.
The idea that the general public wanted a democracy in China is silly also. Most people are exposed to a very warped viewpoint of China, and I would argue, all people want is that their nation remains great, their jobs remain stable and their economic future is secure. Most average people I speak to (UK) still ask if if people eat dog meat and proclaim China is communist.
The strongest case for “wanting democracy” is most likely in the political sphere for western nations. The strength of cooperative democratic governments is weakened when an outside nation is playing by its own rules, gaining advantages that members could be envious of.
Having lived in China and having Chinese as my second language, I find recent events deeply troubling. The recent US-Taiwan travel agreement and new campaign for a referendum vote for independence on the 6th April is just adding to the anxiety. It’s an uncertain time, but I certainly agree that clear and hard rulings need to be made to ensure fairness between trading nations.
What do you answer? We have a saying in Austria that Chinese eat everything that throws a shadow (I don’t approve of this, just recount), and I as an uninformed person don’t know what to call it instead of communism (sure, not the traditional kind).
I would describe China's economy system as capitalism. There is however the caveat that the government has a history with interfering with private ownership to pursue its interests, and their law has a history of approving that. This is different from e.g. the USA where the law is very propetive of private ownership and the law usually sides with it against the government.
I would say that with respect to this metric Russia and the EU are somewhere in between.
I was eating with a Chinese client who at various times had served dishes like donkey and tree frog, and I really couldn't tell what I was eating but it sure was unusual. I asked what it was and the client chewed his food, paused thoughtfully for a minute and then reported "I think it is some type of meat". If I have ever eaten something furry that we keep as pets, that might have been the time.
Actually, if you permit me to give a personal opinion: I find it quite strange that we bias one animal over another for consumption (cow vs dog). I understand the moral connection to pets, but it seems slightly illogical to have one be taboo other the other for consumption. After all they are both animals. Also, it’s interesting that in the UK people turn their nose up at offal, when it seems like a more total and efficient usage of an animals meat.
I’m vegetarian though (which was a complete nightmare in China).
"Anything with legs except furniture, anything that swims except a ship, anything that flies except an airplane."
My point is that we apply questionable moral rules to differenciate us from 'the others'
Authoritarian is the most valid label. It has a mixed market economy, which the government claim is the necessary first stage in their long term goal of socialism.
If southern China is anything like northern Vietnam, which I have been led to believe it is, then dog meat consumption is widespread - I have seen it with my own eyes. According to Wikipedia, 20 million dogs are killed in China for consumption per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_meat#Mainland_China Most people, including myself, find the idea of eating dog meat abhorrent, and yet it is a cultural norm in China.
10,000 people were killed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and many of them were deliberately squished into mush by tanks. The thought of that happening in the West is beyond the scope of my imagination. Chinese people live in a world of brutal, ruthless dictatorship that will literally grind them to mush under tank treads by the thousands if they protest. To act as if finding that supremely unappealing and objectionable is "warped" is delusional.
The number of injuried people was very high also. And the arrests afterwards were numerous, too.
Be aware that that is the highest end of a very contested range of estimates. While I by no means believe the governmental estimate of "0-300", 10,000 is so huge I personally find it hard to believe.
As always the truth is probably somewhere in between. I personally believe the number was probably between 500 and 1,000 dead. It was a brutal repression of a student protest, not an extermination.
Absolutely. So long as we remember it's in other party's interests to boost the body count, too. You're right though - we'll never know.
You just have to go back to the times when Hitler ruled large parts of Europe.
Have you ever asked yourself why? Pigs are roughly comprable to dogs in intelligence[1], yet we eat them by the millions. There is little ethical distinction here - instead purely a cultural one.
[1] http://animalstudiesrepository.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
To my surprise it seems that horses in the US still become food at some point. They first have to be shipped to Mexico, where it is legal to slaughter and butcher them for meat, but not to consume them. The meat is shipped to Asia and Europe where the consumption is acceptable and legal.
The commonly cited reason behind horse meat being illegal is that horses are given drugs throughout their lives that may make their meat unfit for consumption. Yet there are no provisions for consuming horse meat that is raised like normal livestock. Indeed, whenever horse meat becomes an issue in the US, activists take action, which lends credence to the idea that the ban is more moralistic than a regular safety precaution.
The idiotic part is that this doesn't prevent horses from being slaughtered and eaten. Instead, horses are shipped thousands of miles to Mexico, where many die due to the heat on the journey, before being slaughtered anyway. All I wanted was to try what I've read described as "like very lean beef"
I totally think that this 'eat animal' 'pet animal' thinking is beyond stupid and only shows how limited we humans think.
[0] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6232/333
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog
As someone else have pointed out there is no legitimate economic reason to raise dogs for food due to their being carnivores. If people are starving to death then sure, eat dogs to survive. Otherwise my point above stands.
Pigs may be smart, but they have no such special relationship with humanity beyond being domesticated for food. Killing a pig is not killing an animal whose brain is physiologically structured to love you. And while I personally eat pork & beef, I don't necessarily think that people who view it as abhorrent are wrong. 95% of animal consumption in today's world is abhorrently wasteful and destructive. I will gladly eat lab grown meat when it's widely available and of acceptable quality, which can't come soon enough.
A Muslim person might find someone eating pig morally abhorrent and a Hindu may find someone eating beef reprehensible.
Grow up — people can eat what they like and what’s food is going to differ between places. If you prioritize your own personal food preferences over the right of others to eat a perfectly ethical food, you’re just spreading xenophobia.
I have never understood why people are so upset that other humans eat animals.
The vast majority of the people I know don't think of China in those terms. And they may call China communist but what they really mean is non-democratic rather than a comment on the market. (The term 'communist' is somewhat overloaded in everyday talk.)
And I don't meet many people at all in the UK who want their nation to remain 'great'. That's a very foreign sentiment to us - patriotism doesn't sit that comfortably. They probably do want a good life for themselves and others though.
Lastly, I think you're a bit too cynical on people actually wanting democracy for China. I think a lot of people do genuinely want this for altruistic, but also selfish reasons.
Sorry if I am oversimplifying, but at a TLDR, that is how I view things.
This is not correct. There are plenty of people complaining. It’s just that they are censored and silenced.
Long to short, 30 - 40 years ago the media ALWAYS referred to China as Communist China. I can't remember the last time I heard that phrase. That's no accident.
Perhaps the politicians got it wrong. That's no surprise. They're (pardon the editorial) just stupid hand puppets anyway. But the elite capitalist? They were spot on. Just look at how the income inequality gap has widened. Again, no accident.
p.s. If anything, China suckered the West, believing it could influence the West's structure, more than the other way around.
Yeah, they're still communist. But you'd never know it.
The language is no accident.
Most articles in the western media on China are fairly pro-China, and have been for a very long time. But selection bias means we just focus on the critical ones.
Yes. China knows they're communist. Yes, China says they're communist. But at this point the West's propaganda masks that because...there's massive money to be made.
Though people’s personal lives remain relatively free, he is creating a surveillance state to monitor discontent and deviance.
Meanwhile, foreign businesses are profitable but miserable, because commerce always seems to be on ___’s terms.
The initiative asks countries to accept ____-based dispute-resolution. Should today’s ___ norms frustrate ___ ambition, this mechanism could become an alternative.
Putting up with misbehaviour today in the hope that engagement will make ____ better tomorrow does not make sense.
______ societies should seek to shed light on links between independent foundations, even student groups, and the ____ state.
The point is that there are many different democracies and the USA is not and never was a poster example of it. Some have argued that the US is more of an oligarchic republic based on the example of ancient Rome rather than a modern democracy. However, the fact that people like Noam Chomsky who make this critique can freely live and talk in the US readily tells you how misleading it is to ride on popular anti-American sentiment when it is done on behalf of a country where critics are simply imprisoned.
This is an article in a British magazine. Why blame the US?
> people like Noam Chomsky who make this critique can freely live and talk in the US readily tells you how misleading it is
In the US freedom of speech is part of the system of control. It is a safety valve that releases social pressure to prevent explosive revolutionary outbursts.
The rulers of the US are no less dictatorial, they are just more sophisticated in their understanding of social control.
>The rulers of the US are no less dictatorial, they are just more sophisticated in their understanding of social control.
Though I'm not very fond of the US's political system, I don't think so.
In a nutshell, it was triumphalist. The Soviet Union, was oppressive, had a failed economy, it’s people wanted out.. wanted democracy, rights, capitalism.
All the aspects of soviet failure (and the West’s success) were pinned in the “ideology” or system of government. Free markets, liberal democracy, independent courts, late night talk shows… These were all taken as a single system, which beat out a rival system.
Looking back… Do we think that if the US had a Leninist revolution 100 years ago and Russia had had Tatcher & Churchill, that everything would be reversed. We see countries succeeding and failing regardless of clear ideological links.
Implementation is usually more important than ideas. Stalinism was a very bad implementation. China’s last generation was a good one. The ideological underpinnings… less important.
Anyway… the major & minor powers run almost identical economic systems these days. China, US, Russia, Japan, EU, UK…
“Large Corporations”, almost sums up the system. At the scales modern corporations live on, the concept of free markets is fairly watered down. Banking, real estate (housing), transport, education… there are no free markets here.
Elsewhere in the economy (e.g. consumer tech), oligopolies run the show.
China has inched its way over to an almost identical economic system. I think the west has taken a few steps towards china’s. They’ll “intervene” more (like using the great firewall to keep out foreign competition), but … meh .. China runs a local monopoly rather than adopting the international one. It’s not really a big deal, economically.
Basically, the economic system of china is the same as the west’s. Neither are very similar to the ideological systems they pay lip services to.
Also, free markets don’t exist within companies. Companies are “islands of planning.” Well, the corporations are continents these days. Inside a company, totalitarianism is perfectly acceptable in Ohio, just like it is in Xiamen.
When it comes to linking western rule-of-law, rights-centric constitutions and such to economic success… I’m not sure that link is really there. I think this was triumphalism and wishful thinking.
Anyway, Russia accepted a lot of western systems. They have a free-ish market, a democratic constitutions.
Yet, Putin is running yet again. The betting odds are currently @ 1/500 of him winning.
My TLDR point is that the ideological lens is very, very foggy. It distorts our view of the world with easy-to-digest narratives and categories, but it really doesn’t describe the world.
We need to drop this cold war mentality. I was 7 years old when the Berlin wall came down, why am I still thinking in these terms!!
Right. All of this talk about capitalism, communism, etc is intellectually nonsense.
The whole world is actually moving towards the Chinese model with highly interventionist monetary policy, the majority of GDP allocated by the government, etc. That is the case in every major country now.
No serious policy makers believe in free markets any more. They believe in democracy to the extent that they see it as a mechanism for social control, but that is it.
That might be shocking to some people but the other thing to take into account is that all of these smart people have come to this conclusion so maybe they are right and free markets and real democracy are just dumb ideas.
Baidu was essentially picked by the CCP, as the Chinese Google. Google was produced by the "free market." The end result is the same. Similar privacy/surveillance implications, similar business models. Similar market share (monopoly). I bet the offices look pretty similar too.
Generally speaking, I am very skeptical of free market ideas applied at the >$1bn level. Corporations that size have political power, inevitably. They also tend to operate in less dynamic & competitive environments. The power differential between them and the employees they are "freely transacting" with are huge. Mostly though, it's the political thing. A mayor of a city is not going to ignore a $5bn going under, or moving away. They have influence on the rules that get made.
After all it's just ideological propaganda. Singapore has been much more "authoritarian" than China in many aspects. Regimes in Central America supported by CIA brutally kill their citizens every day. Saudi backed by the US wrecks havoc in the region. The media doesn't give a damn, or at least has very restricted reportage. They only want to constantly attack China because China is regarded as a competitor/enemy, while Singapore and Saudi allies. As simple as that.
In fact China is just rapidly turning into another US in a lot of aspects of the society. Xi is compared with Reagan for his pro-market stance. (Though he does indeed implement a lot of surveillance etc. as well.)
The west just doesn't want to see their old order challenged. But little can be done to stop the rise of China now. Whether the reforms of Xi totally succeed is still unknown. There are of course a lot of uncertainties. But China as a world power is probably there to stay for a long time. The better thing to do for the western elites/governments is cope with this fact and think of strategies under this premise, instead of trying to deny/sabotage it with wishful thinking.
Personally I'm horrified that China is turning into another US but that apparently doesn't have anything to do with the ideological buzzwords that those media so like to use.
Hobbes's Leviathan is China. Because Hobbes lived through a very tumultuous period of strife and conflict what he optimised for is stability and peace and prosperity at the expense of individual freedoms like the ability to choose one's destiny through either representative democracy or direct democracy.
If the lives of the vast majority of Chinese are improving, who is to say their system is morally wrong?
In fairness, the West only has itself to blame. Nobody with an honest heart can look at the post-colonial period and say that the West has not meddled in the affairs of other sovereign states. Also, many of the West's so-called republics and democracies are very hollow and corrupt often veering towards plutocracy, the system of law and political legislation is controlled by money and so corporate lobbying and eventually even political capture by corporations is rife. Workers rights are trampled at home and abroad though international agreements. Corporations evade paying taxes, they pollute the environment, collective bargaining is seen as a communist horror rather a democratic good.
The West is in no position to point fingers. That's what gets my goat up. Who the fuck do we think we are that we can tell others how to run their lives. What fucking gall. After all we've done? And we wonder why others respond indignantly and with contempt. I don't blame them. Get your own house in order first as Peterson says.
No, the correct response the Xi's power grab is not a suicidal arms race or political pressure. The correct response is to make the West an example others want to follow. We could start by taking back democracy by making citizen rule more direct so that people feel empowered. Let's move to the Swiss model. Let's reform the courts so that everybody has a fair chance, not the just the wealthy–it does not matter a whit if everybody is equal before the eyes of the law in theory if in practice they are not. We need to counter the evil of nationalism. We need to be sympathetic towards migrants. We need better separation of powers and we need to reject all forms of fundamentalism. Identity politics is a side-show, the arc of history is clear. Most importantly I think is that we need to place real limits on social media companies and we have to dismantle global surveillance, this is an evil so large it boggles the mind. We have to figure out how to combat rising economic inequality! We really do.
They built Leviathan, we built the Panopticon.
I recognise the freedoms we do have, such as my ability to criticise the system without repercussion, though if you agitate too much various agencies may open up a file on you.
The West on the otherhand had that in 2008, it survived although the repurcussions are still being felt (Trump).
Can the Chinese avoid a serious recession forever? You would have to assume not, that will ultimately be the test of how well their system holds up.
Trump is hardly the repercussions though, and the West has hardly survived in the sense of "overcoming" the recession.
Trump is a result of (and a reaction of the people to) the recession, and the recession (jobs lost, dwindling middle class, etc) still holds, even though figures paint a rosy pictures and those outside the affected masses hardly know better.
China is sitting on a knife edge, I suspect. There are all manner of things than can bring it crashing down. Automation--demographic imbalance(too many men)--nuke from North Korea.
(As much as the West frets about North Korean nukes--practically all the major Chinese cities are closer. Can you imagine if North Korea nuked a Chinese city?)
The problem is what will happen as the dinosaur falls. Dinosaurs can take a long time to die and cause a lot of damage while doing so.
That is not just China though.
Since 2008 the entire world is following the same interventionist policies.
Hobbes didn't write anything quite so... obvious, and I think we read 'leviathan' today because he makes such a clear and compelling argument against anarchy; I'm not saying it was his intent, but the leviathan can be read as tirade against Anarchy rather than a paean to tyranny. anarchy is so bad that if the only alternative is some ridiculously absolutist ruler, well, that's still better than the state of nature.
My own feeling is that his support of absolutism was mostly about how people were asked to choose sides. I think you can't understand Hobbes and his weird authoritarianism without the context of the English civil war
There is a very simple answer to that: because you won't sound convincing to the other side.
I agree with you from a moral point of view: just because your side did something wrong doesn't mean you can't criticize the wrongs of the other side. But from a practical point of view, your side probably already agrees with you, and the other side will just ignore you.
Let me put it this way. If Microsoft wants you to believe that they are no longer evil, they have to do more than simply having the latest CEO proclaim "I am not Bill Gates and what he did was not what I did".
On the other hand, if you're somebody like Chomsky, i.e. also see your own government for what it is and criticize its problems, then your arguments can be as fair and unbiased as possible. That is to say, they do not inherently have double standards or want to actually advance the interests of western countries, while trying to restrict the rise of China. You actually think in terms of the Chinese populace.
Unfortunately, it has become very hard to tell these things apart, i.e. a normal American probably gets a lot of their information from the mainstream media that they read every day, after all. Therefore it's very hard for their criticism to not be tainted by the hidden agenda propagated by the media. That is a big problem.
What's evil about me wanting to live with people with whom I share cultural heritage, language, ethics and peculiarities of perception of life? What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government, with having laws and rules tailored specifically to this large tribe I belong to?
I have no desire for my nation to invade other countries or to impose our rules and ways of life on other people. That said, I also will not tolerate foreign interference in my nation's affairs, come it from a single country or international gang, such as UN.
Nations and nationalism are not evil, they are manifestations of different, unique ways of human development, manifestations of the very diversity Western leftists crave for.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
Of course, Nietzsche wrote this before companies with "no I in team" and whatnot :P
> What's wrong with having an independent sovereign government
Nothing, but "nationalism" to me implies some sort identification with a symbol, rather than interacting with reality. Sufficiently developed individuals don't "belong to" groups, it's the other way around. Tribalism is a great method to stop that development dead in its tracks.
http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat
> The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.
In so far that is the case for what you would consider nationalism, carry on. To me, a sense of responsibility towards the place where you live and towards the people that live there is just that, while nationalism adds more and only bad things to it. I generally see it used as crutch or excuse.
EDIT: Oh my that was a fast downvote, < 10 seconds. I wonder if a clever HN member has set a "thought police" style bot upon me. Sorry, I shall try harder to stick to the narrative.
If the people of the PRC are not permitted to speak freely, then it is all the more important that the rest of us do. You are as entitled to criticize the government of the PRC as you are of any Western government. Therefore let us speak plainly to the matter at hand; let us not evade the issue by pretending we, as human beings, have neither the wit nor the right to look and judge; let us not be so naive as to think that an increasingly authoritarian and chauvinistic China does not affect the rest of the world.
Also, some European countries do have better democracies than the US. It horrifies me that the China is now basically becoming another US in so many aspects of the society. But it seems to be very hard to stop now. I can only hope that the European countries can preserve their democracy longer. I dunno.
In the meantime, my personal opinion is that China is heading for disaster somewhere along the road if they don't liberalise increasingly over time.
The Chinese leadership is much smarter and pragmatic than many western media and elites would imagine them to be. Doom-sayers have been there for a few decades, but China is still booming.
First, Xi is known precisely for his pro-market reforms and has been compared to Ronald Reagan for this. Under Xi's reign, the benefits for public servants have been drastically cut and many formerly commonplace practices will now be considered as corruption and land you in deep troubles. Therefore, many have been simply abandoning posts in the public sector and have gone into the private sector. If anything, China is accelerating on its path to become another US. Basically everything is modeled after the US society, and Xi wants to put everything into "the hands of the market". Depending on who you ask it's either fantastic (for the conservatives) or disastrous (for the leftists who much favor the European model of governments). But in no way will there be more restrictions on capitalism and stronger "government rule" out there. Xi wanting to stay on to continue his reforms doesn't automatically mean he wants to curb the market and expand the government. Exactly the contrary is happening. Drawing conclusions automatically from ideological grounds is just ridiculous.
Second, many mature so-called western "democracies" perfectly allow one person in power for many years. Merkel is desperately trying to start her fourth term right now, and German economy has been always booming under her reign. Another obvious example (though not really a "western democracy" of course) is Singapore. China is even "more democratic" than Singapore in that the leadership is never passed on to a family member. Yet where are the criticisms against Singapore in the mainstream media during all these years? Zero, simply because Singapore is considered a strategic partner of the US while China a rising competitor, enemy. Could the media and western governments be even more hypocritical than that? Such double standards is quite some feat. Again, Xi's wanting to stay on doesn't automatically mean that China is going to be plunged into a reign of terror and chaos. Nobody can predict how his measures turn out to be, but to say that it's destined for failure and using "dictatorship" which implies something similar to North Korea or some Central American country (its brutal regime supported by the CIA and US politicians all the time, of course), is just laughable.
Xi is indeed coming up with some measures that one may call authoritarian such as video surveillance coupled with facial recognition systems everywhere. But so is the US, especially after 911, with the massive overreach of government into civil lives. I sincerely don't think the US is much more a "democracy" than China is. There are some truer democracies among the European countries, which should indeed be protected. I am quite horrified witnessing the transformation of China into another US right now, but I'm afraid that cannot be stopped and the western political establishments would be better off thinking how to cope under a new world order instead of trying their best to deny or distort such a fact with such double standards thinly coated with ideological nonsense, as always.
They openly mock western liberal values, they have their own slang for it. It seems so natural for the westerners that all countries will naturally drift towards democratic governments and more freedom, but it seems that some regions of the world just don't work that way. Just like Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable) under military dictatorships, China seems to prefer authoritarian rule that at the same time doesn't really get in the way of them living their lives the way they're used to. It's a tough pill to swallow, but some nations just don't like democracy and don't want to implement it in any form.
This is extremely easy to say after any attempts at democracy in the middle east(Nasser and the Nasserites, Mossadegh, and now Rojava) are crushed by foreign powers and military dictatorships are actively supported since they are easier to control.
If the West would leave the Middle East alone for a decade, it is highly likely that we'd see a much different picture. Its very difficult to develop free, social, democratic society when the institutions which support that development are perpetually bombed into oblivion: universities, hospitals, infrastructure.
Under times of intense duress, all humans survive better under military dictatorships. Its not just the Middle East. Not having had their infrastructure destroyed by outside forces, there isn't a single modern western democracy that we can use as a model to demonstrate this fact. If we stop bombing the Middle East, they'll have a chance to develop institutions which allow for their progress. Its just we, in the West, don't want to ever allow that to occur; it would interrupt our own development as Military-Industrial oligarchies.
Highly unlikely since the Middle East is composed of hundred of tribes and other populations like the Kurds who want nothing to do with each others and will enter conflict whenever appropriate.
Kurds have been continuously in that existential conflict long before the gulf wars. Their identity has been systemically under attack by brutal military dictatorships and nationalism for over a century now. Self-determination, survival and freedom from tyranny has always been their motivation. One does not have the option to choose when homicide knocks on one's front door.
Kurds, most people of the Middle East and humanity in general want peaceful coexistence, progress, freedom and live productive lives. However, inorganic oscillations due to oppressive force and might wreak havoc in reaching any sustainable equilibrium.
I really don't understand all this self flagellation in the West about the Middle East, we got drawn into these places because they are basket cases.
Different Islamic sects don't get along so well either.
Fighter Jets, Aircraft Carriers, Tanks, Drones, Nukes changes that to military power being equal to your economic power. Meaning that authoritarian governments are much harder to displace if they have enough economic power.
> Their lives are largely unaffected.
This might be true for a large portion of the population. That does not justify treating the rest as enemies of the state. Not allowing people the freedom to speak their mind is never moral.
UK is democratic. The current prime minister TM is from the same political party as her predecessor DC but nobody even talks about the promises made at the vote for creating an independent Wales.
Sorry, I think I failed to be clear. I meant to signal the lack of the Tories talking about keeping their promise. SNP wants more devolution. It is silly for the English to say why Scotland should have a say in English affairs if the English should not have a say in Scotland.
> "The Vow" is highly contentious.
Well, of course it is.
> What you believe was promised largely depends on what side of the nationalist divide you sit on.
Isn't that very convenient? The way I understand it, Labour expects to win a lot of seats in Scotland so it is against their interest as well for Scotland to be independent?
In any case, the point is not how England screws over Scotland but rather use it as an example that a fully democratic government to replace China PR will still screw over Hong Kong and Tibet.
I agree that democracy in itself does not guarantee rights for minorities. It depends on the majority adhering to a moral system that enshrines human equality. We know that this system can break down, a population can agree to subjugate some of its members. I would still rather put my trust in the majority over in one person and especially in a system that allows me to replace the government after some period of time.
Not true for every Chinese person. They can't do anything about it, or in a more accurate account, they FEEL they can't do anything about it, is more universally agreed.
Cynicism is deeply rooted in the young Chinese today, maybe the fear facing a gigantic state machine alone is too real, and the fact their have more options than their parents' generation is also real, thus rather than confronting the problem, they embrace escapism and showing compliance on the surface.
Such a ridiculous claim which shows your lack of understanding of the Middle East. The Middle East is not composed of countries, all the borders on the map were artificially created by colonial powers and the only political structure that existed before was simply a tribal one. So you don't go from nomad tribes to democratic regimes in one step.
That doesn't exactly contradict what the parent said. If anything it supports it.
Precisely because "you don't go from nomad tribes to democratic regimes in one step" modern "Middle Eastern countries work best (as in, remain relatively stable)" as non-democracies.
>The Middle East is not composed of countries, all the borders on the map were artificially created by colonial powers
That's true, but those artificially created countries are still all we have, and are still countries (states) in all senses of the world, and those are the parent was talking about.
What is true? If you ask locals they don't have any feeling of belonging to any larger-than-them nation, they clearly describe themselves by the community/tribe they come from. This is the only reality that matters.
Rural locals? Because city locals, and increasingly rural locals as well, will feel like belonging to a larger-than-them nation.
>This is the only reality that matters.*
Obviously not. This might be the only reality they know, but in the outside world, the state they belong to, their government and the general national identity the have to live under matters as well. When such a state is at war with another state, it's not a tribal matter anymore.
Authoritarianism is easy to support when the economy is booming and living standards are increasing. When this falters, which it inevitably will, then discontent will spread from a relatively small group of political discontents to the population at large, who will start to demand change. And that demand can be the pressure that tips the balance in favour of democratic rule.
If anything, history has taught us the reverse. Nazi Germany became that way exactly because "living standards" were decreasing in the Weimar republic. And all those Latin American countries with low living standards had (and some have) mostly dictatorships and compromised "democracies".