The Chinese Communist Party’s fear of its people spells trouble
economist.com
economist.com
Here in JP we see people holding cardboard stating how they are miss-treated in front of the ward office. Letting these voice be heard means more leverage to the citizen. like pressuring law changes. A large part of the world is not like America. In Chinese twitter there are quite a few words you simply can not type.
This is a good opportunity to quote Bert Brecht, who (after seeing which way the wind blew, doing a 180 degree flip on his original stance) penned the poem 'Die Lösung' in response to the East German Worker's Uprising of June 17th, 1953 -
"Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni / Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands / In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen / Auf denen zu lesen war, dass das Volk / Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe / Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit / Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da / Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung / Löste das Volk auf und / Wählte ein anderes?“
The translation is my own, and neither German nor English is my first language, so please bear with me:
"After the June 17th uprising / The secretary of the Writers' Union / Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee / They said that the people had lost the trust of the government / And could only regain the trust by doubling their efforts / Wouldn't it be simpler, then / If the government dissolved the people / and elected another?"
Anyway... I disagree (amicably). I think this is a terrible state of affairs. A fearful regime is a dangerous one. Fear is the enemy of "us" and this is degenerative to a republic, and oppressive in non-republics. The GDR feared the people would overthrow. Assad fears the people.
It doesn't generally result in "we'll do a better job so they like us." It results in building up a populist (and sometimes violent) popular counterbalance. It results in paranoid spying and attempts at control.
I know HN prefers high brow, philosophical quotes but this really does sum everything up, even if it's campy.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering - yoda
I don't know about other countries, but you're right, some Frenchmen want the government to fear them, because it's one way to keep the power in check. We also have a really strong executive power who kinda own legislative rights and have control over a tiny bit of the judiciary system, so it's understandable.
I won't pretend I understand the nuances but to us it seems almost comical. Train schedule changes, and people are upset? Fires will be lit.
I mean, given who Macron was this was entirely predictable, but many people believed he'd changed. For what reason ... I cannot fathom. But then again, Australia did essentially the same: an ex-Goldman Sachs vice president (with half his immediate family still GS VPs) will change the country to be more fair ! Oh wait ... he didn't. Quite the opposite in fact. Cue complete and total amazement.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-labor-reform-5-key-po...
And Assad does not fear the people.
Damascus: https://www.unusualtraveler.com/damascus/
In a way, in the extreme, it is literal: in a healthy democracy, the citizens are so comfortable in their sovereignty that they would be willing as a last resort to forcibly, physically remove a despotic leader. But healthy democracies also have strong institutions that will check such a leader and eventually replace him peacefully - so this fear is mostly theoretical.
In the more symbolic sense, the "fear" is simply to be understood as the citizens having the absolute power to get rid of their leaders through the democratic process. If you want to be a leader, and if you want to stay in office, you basically have to keep the people happy (very broadly speaking, of course), there are no shortcuts in the long run for this. It's "fear" in the sense of "fearing the next election".
The definition of “fear” is then just very different.
I submit the dissolution of the Soviet Union is an example of a large communist goverment transferring power outside the party without it being 'catastrophic'. While it was a politically and economically turbulent time, control of the goverment was relinquished without civil war. Some protesters were killed in various countries, but there were many orders of magnitude less death in the USSR relinquishing control than the USSR to gaining control.
China has no choice to keep pumping their economy. Even a mild recession could lead to really bad things.
Xi answers to the communist party. The communist party is more invested in staying in power than keeping Xi in office. Every five years the National Congress of the Communist Party of China convenes, which selects the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, the Central Committee, and has the authority to change the Community Party of China's Constitution.
China has had a long run of good years. It'll be interesting to see how the party reacts to unruly citizens.
On any given day, there are a few hundred protests in China; eg some migrant workers didn’t get paid. Your question is not hypothetical.
> A confident power permits debate to flourish, unthreatened by ideas; a fearful
> one will seek to manipulate or shut it down. The party is increasingly obliged
> to try to replicate its domestic censorship on a global scale, to suppress
> views of China that the party does not like, wherever they are manifested.
> Sustained investment in propaganda in Chinese-language media and in Western
> media, subtle and unsubtle attempts to exert influence through the party’s
> United Front Work Department, pressuring business partners to support
> political positions on Taiwan and the South China Sea, buying political
> influence and muscle-flexing on Western campuses—all have caused alarm in
> several countries recently, notably in Australia and New Zealand.
For example, is the quality of life in Mexico--with free speech and democracy--better than one like Singapore or even China?
There are also different ideals of free speech too. The US version is very different from the European version.
Free speech should be ultimate goal, but perhaps there are other steps that need to be achieved first.
That is technically correct, but being allowed to criticize the government without getting send to a prison seems to be a common denominator, so we could start with that.
That assumes you cannot work on free speech and "other steps" at the same time. Free speech is so easy, blocking it costs more resources than just accepting it. These resources could be used for "other steps", so blocking free speech is detrimental to them.
If you want to know what the quality of life is like in China you can visit China and meet people living there. Visas are easy to get. It's not a secret, and there are plenty of first hand accounts of even their darkest hours.
"liberal democracy’s current ills have opened an.."
While I'm not disagreeing, just don't recall reading a decent narration on what exactly is going on. What are liberal democracies' current ills? Did we agree on a list, when I wasn't looking?
To be sure some of these are self-inflicted. The Euro was badly conceived and implemented. Brexit and Trump are the result of democratic votes. However they are clearly signs of a general swing away from liberal values. Liberalism and it's proponents in it's broadest sense bears much of the blame for all of this.
By liberalism I do not mean socialism. I'm a lifelong Conservative voter. I believe in individual freedom and see the EU with it's freedoms of movement and trade as a cornerstone of individual liberties here in Britain and the rest of Europe. Trade free of arbitrary and capricious tariffs is another important freedom we are in danger of having curtailed. The Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland did so by granting Northern Irish the freedom to choose British or Irish citizenship or both and opened up the border, a triumph of increased individual liberty, and is under threat due to Brexit. Liberalism in it's broad sense cuts across the left/right political divide, at least here in the UK.
Investors, by contrast, might say that despite all the damage done to Eurozone economies (most, but of course, not all, Eurozone economies, ie. the PIIGS), European banks are ... well "teetering on the edge of bankruptcy" is perhaps not a fair assessment, but they're ~90% closer to it than they were at the beginning of the Euro project.
Savers, bond investors, ... have similar complaints : they haven't been able to invest productively.
And for what ? Even if they were altruistic : GDP hasn't exactly taken off in the Eurozone, in fact quite the opposite. Even Germany's GDP evolution can at best be referred to as "not a disaster". Greece's would be far beyond "catastrophe", and everyone else is in between.
But yes, 25 year olds who have a stable job find travel easier (of course, that's because the economic misery of others makes travel cheaper, otherwise the Euro would just have made it more obvious that they couldn't travel)
The Euro was supposed to stop things like that happening, but instead it made them considerably worse than they needed to be. That was a failure. I mean it failed to achieve some vitally important goals of economic stability it was supposed to guarantee.
> By liberalism I do not mean socialism. I'm a lifelong Conservative voter.
From his perspective, the Euro has failed. But then again, this guy supports the party that caused Brexit, has decimated our healthcare system and is literally in power at the whim of a group of corrupt far-right religious nutjobs with direct links to terrorism (by which I mean the DUP, not the Conservative Party).
Edit: all I'm trying to point out here is that the parent's comment on GFA is merely an opinion, and there are opposing viewpoints also.
They covered that in an article, "After decades of triumph, democracy is losing ground" — https://www.economist.com/international/2018/06/16/after-dec...
I was slightly disconcerted that the Economist would just throw in that line, as a matter of trivial fact. It's like a major discussion concluded without my knowledge.
Their comparison to frailing 19th century European nobility, I think, is totally appropriate.
What they afraid the most is "becoming nothing special people."
The world outside China scares them, as they see there is no place for people like them in the modern society that China will inevitably and invariably become as it evolves economically
It was in Jiang's times when things turned "position in the party !== automatic position in the government." Jiang was waaay to afraid of party members. He saw the party as a dual structure:
1. An assembly of oafs, and loosers
2. Along with a hornet's nest of Maoists, Hua-ists, Deng-ists, and 20 other "ists," all of whom were a threat to his rule.
So he simply decided to recruit technocrats from aside. All kinds of good boy Harvard graduates were perfect for that role, for them being politically insulated from the rest of Chinese politics. And as an added benefit, they can actually run the government more or less well.
What the CPP is today? In its majority, the same thing it was in Jiang's times, except Jiang is not the top dog anymore, and an average age went up even more.
What things can change? The party is getting older, and few young cadres they have come from communist families. Those amount to around a half of new members of twenties age cohort. The other half are just people for whom the party member card is nothing more than a way to get free rides on public transport, along with a very very very remote hope that this will get them to a position of prominence.
Xi came to power in large thanks to that cohort of party members who thought of themselves being marginalized, and thrown away to dustbin of history. His political platform inside the CCP was pretty much like "Make the party membership great again." But you guys probably know, every communist is very good at reneging at his promises, and Xi is not an exception. Aside for few symbolic nods, I don't think he will run the country in a manner much different from how things were in Jiang's era.
He himself is afraid of the colossus which is the CCP, for him it is also a dark lake full of his own set of "-ists" and, worse for him, people who are genuine reformers. He is much favoring the party becoming a seat of few gerantocrats who will be dying one after another.
BTW, the two dudes who voted against Xi on the last congress were Jiang and Hu.
The FT ran a more informative and sober piece a week or two ago, on China's gambit to create a global energy network:
https://www.ft.com/content/bdc31f94-68aa-11e8-b6eb-4acfcfb08...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/1991/10/-quot...
As you say, doom-mongering about various parts of the world is a venerable genre and one which the Economist resorts to on a fairly regular basis (at least once a year there'll be scare pieces on China, and an article on why the French economy is doomed).
On another note, I don't like the moral equivalency that seems to be popular between China and the US. The "but America does bad things too" response. The reality of America is often ugly, but it was founded and has always preached ideals like democracy and liberty and human rights and the rule of law. America's great failings are generally when it doesn't live up to its own ideals. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party holds none of those ideals, sees the rights of the individual as completely subservient to the needs of the state, and has no qualms with wide scale censorship, jailing human rights lawyers and activists, harvesting the organs of political prisoners, etc.
In my opinion, one of the most unfortunate consequences of China's growing power is that it gives other authoritarian countries cover to abuse human rights. We seem to be seeing it in the Philippines with Duterte, and just last week a US citizen was arrested (and hasn't been released) in Vietnam after being involved in a protest.
Popularity (both apparent and actual) and respect for human rights are frustratingly orthogonal.
Japan was already a strong US (and western) ally in the 1980s at any rate.
Why? The US posturing and genocide in South America for 200 years did not stop it from being a great power, that the pacific rim will now see the same from a yellow and not white face doesn't change much.
"aggression in the South China Sea"? The US has invaded 3+ countries in the last 20 years producing as much failed states. Is it just a "big" and not a "great" power?
They are just giving China equal treatment, and it is only Chinese insecurity that must bring up the USA in any talk about it (in contrast, you won’t find people talking about China when reviewing articles about US aggression).
On the contrary, I find Economist playing the anglosaxon party line in almost any international issue.
Many, that criticize those countries from the perspective of what the power elites of those same countries want them to do.
That other countries are their subjects upon which to use carrots and sticks, however, they agree perfectly.
It isn’t as bad as The People’s Daily, for example.
While you may have wished to divert attention from China or simply return to your favorite whipping boy, you also highlight the need to conform with Western ideals.
And please call it what it is: genocide.
I do enjoy a bit of whataboutism in the morning, the need to not murder millions is not a western ideal, the First, Second, Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars all show how little value democracies place on the lives of non-citizens.
Real purpose behind EU's copyright filter?