China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists | Hacker News Reader

China’s Leaders Confront an Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists

nytimes.com

92 pointsfspeech60 comments

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

...and someone forgot to adapt the rhethoric.

- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)

Delicious irony. Though I doubt China won't be able to deal with them with the help of several to several thousand strategic disappearings.

yes they will have to go studying proper capitalistic values

One country, two systems, where two varies in value.

The politburo seems to play favorites with capitalism when there is rapid economic and military expansion. It'd be interesting to see how that sentiment changes/changed in a recession.

Special economic zones like Shenzhen (Silicon Valleys) vs rural dirt farmers. It's a command and control capitalist system, a weird inversion of the free market economy.

A different lens to view this through is Deng Xiaoping used SEZ to subvert Mao's communist model and steer it back towards capitalism. "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." Deng endured severe personal suffering to deliver his vision. Unfortunately Xi is rewinding much of Deng's progress.

An interesting dilemma, somewhat ironic I might say.

Many ideologies appeal to idealism; few in power live up to the idealism even of their own espousing.

Exactly the same thing is happening in the UK, the Labour Party has no idea how to deal with Momentum

Momentum aren't communists though, I don't think. They just want to reverse the drift of the party to the right under the leaderships from Blair onwards

Momentum aren't communists though, I don't think

I've heard them described as Nationalising Socialists.

Where, on breitbart?

From people concerned about the increasingly common anti-Semitism in the Labour Party

A lot of people feel that is a confection by Zionists, supported by israel, aimed at making criticism of Israeli policies equivalent to anti-semitism.

That's a Straw man, and you know it.

I'd love to know how you came to both of those conclusions.

So what you’re saying is, allegations of anti-Semitism are in fact a Jewish plot? Do you know how that sounds?

Do you believe, as Israel's Basic law states, that the right to exercise national self-determination in Israel is "unique to the Jewish people"?

Since you've edited your comment belatedly to ask if I know how that sounds, I'll add this answer.

Yes I know exactly how the words you're trying to put in my mouth sound and I know why you are doing it.

It was a good faith question to see if you were aware of it, and I see that you in fact are. "Confection by Zionists" indeed. Dog-whistling at its finest.

I needed to look up 'dog-whistling' and got this definition on wikipedia :

Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup.

Please explain how "Confection by Zionists" fits the bill?

Well, if I have misjudged you, I apologise for that!

The thing is that Israel is a red herring, the traditional anti-Semitism of the left pre-dates its existence and is rooted in the stereotypical association of Jews with finance and hence capitalism in general. Therefore often Zionist is a code-word meaning simply Jew. Banker is often used in a similar way too. Similarly, members of the far-right say Canadians when they mean black people.

Thank you. However Israel is not a red herring in this as far as I am concerned.

I believe that what's going on in the Labour Party is an attempt to stifle criticism of Israel and in particular its treatment of the Palestinians.

I don't know if it's directly related to Israeli Governemnt Minster Erdan's "PR Commando Unit", announced last year. but it sounds very similar.

There is a bit of this about, it's not entirely a fabrication, and it's always a risk for people who spend too much time getting involved in Palestine from abroad.

On the other hand, it's really obvious that all this media concern is directed only at the Labour party and not at the actual government, such as the support for Orban's antisemitic Hungarian government. Almost nobody in the media cares about antisemitism unless it can be used against the Labour party.

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-conservati...

Nationalising Socialists, you mean Nazis? They aren't Nazis.

Momentum and Corbyn represent the wing of the Labour party which the mainstream leadership have been fighting since the 1970’s. New Labour drifted to the right with privatization, PFI, Iraq etc, but Corbyn is not a step to the middle ground of the party, it’s from one extreme to the other.

The 70s weren't as bad as they are painted. There was much greater income equality. A lot of the problems in that decade had external causes, the oil crisis and the hangover, I suppose, from the commodity price inflation caused by the Vietnam War. I don't really understand these things but the rise of the financial sector to dominance in the UK economy and all the pain it's caused this last decade was apparently largely due to Thatcher's policies in the 80s. I've heard it said that today nearly every company wants to sell financial services, for example car makers. Apparently it's generally more profitable than their core product. Nothing real just financial 'instruments'.

I once sat in on a talk from a Marxist academic who claimed "you think people in China won't be swayed by the communist literature and iconography around them and realize their own state is opposed to those ideals?" It had a similar ringing to the protestant reformation and people in the us (to a lesser extent) who see the contradictions between "America home of the free" and its current state.

It might be a dirty truism: utopian promises are for children and the slow, reality requires messy, pragmatic nuances that often break and contradict simplistic, academic "wouldn't it be nice if" or wishes for a perfect, simple solution that is designed and pushed into policy.

One of the most pragmatic, matter-of-fact Marxist economists, R. Wolff, acknowledges the foibles, workarounds and tendencies... how people behave in reality, rather than how some people should like to make them, or would like, them to behave, or that libertarian, unregulated, utopian capitalist economics is some meritocratic magic wand that solves all externalities and inequalities in "the market," usually with "trickle down" economics that never happens. Reality is most definitely none of those things, even though people still try to pretend otherwise, likely for their own benefit.

> "trickle down" economics that never happens

Never say never. The problem is that "trickle down" economics happens to some degree. This is a problem because it convinces a large number of fence-sitters that all is good, at least compared to the straw-man opposite extreme: that no inequalities would be allowed at all under anything that has 'socialism' in it's name, be it democratic or not.

The most amazing thing about "trickle down economics" is that it was never a real economic theory .

It started as a Will Rogers joke. Opponents of Reagan administration started to use it [1]. Then amazing thing happened. Somehow people in the right started to believe that it's actually a thing with solid facts behind it. Then politicians followed. Some economists have even tried to find the effect. It seems not to exist.

[1]: Reagan administration believed in supply-side economics and free markets ad the cause of more economic growth.

I don't think it was ever a theory, just an idea.

If BigCorps, who employ a lot of people are healthy and stable, they will invest and grow. Related to supply side economics.

It's not irrational.

BigCos along with banks are at the center of the economy - their leaders have more direct and clear impact that others.

Demand side things like government subsidies are generally a little more indirect, take time, and of course come a long with a bunch of side effects.

2008 was 'trickle down' economics, i.e. 'the banks must survive' and they got some cherry deals.

Demand and supply must match. Too much supply creates just excess capacity and reduces the return of investment.

That matching quantity is the size of the economy.

Supply side argued that improving supply will increase demand and grow economy.

In practice the demand side is more often correct, supply side wrong. Demand creates incentives to increase supply, not other way around. Supply side can be correct in some special circumstances for a short time, but not so much that it would be solid macroeconomic policy.

Economy is like a rope. Demand is like pulling the rope. Supply is like pushing the rope.

"Demand and supply must match."

They never match match.

In an modern economy demand is created by innovation and marketing, i.e. by creating things like the iPhone, which change all previous consumer expectations, and other innovations change the dynamics of production for other things.

" demand side is more often correct, supply side wrong. .Demand creates incentives to increase supply, not other way around"

No. Printing money, or borrowing it to gin up demand is nothing but a temporary distortion and a waste of everyone's time unless you're trying to 'hold things over' while an economy recovers from some kind of shock (or fix a taxation situation that was whack), moreover, over any period this will just cause inflation and nothing will change in real-dollar terms, other than the temporary misreading of the economy by producers. To be clear: there can be no fundamental and secular shift in demand (and therefore growth) from demand side activities.

There was no 'demand' for electricity until someone figured out electricity and the lightbulb, there was no 'demand' for toasters until someone figured it out. There was no 'demand' for the XMen and Avengers films, until someone created them.

The majority of per-capita growth is predicated on some kind of fundamental innovation be it process, technology, organizational, geopolitical (i.e. trade deals). This is supply side.

Now this doesn't mean we should just go ahead and wipe out corporate taxes yada yada, and that's not to say that strategic investment can't yield longer term action, but that strategic investment would have to be inherently value creating, not just some pure economic shift.

We can't have discussion without common vocabulary and common economic concepts that we both understand.

Your are using words like demand and supply general concepts not a specific model of price determination and then arguing freely with them. This is why you don't understand what supply and demand must match means.

Rogers proposed a counter hypothesis that money trickles upwards:

>...The money was all appropriated for the top in the hopes that it would trickle down to the needy. Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. Put it uphill and let it go and it will reach the driest little spot. But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow.

"matter-of-fact Marxist economists,"

There can be no such thing.

A consistent theme throughout history is the need for a "story" justifying power. It doesn't need to be perfect but it needs some grounding.

A King is thought to simply have absolute power but this isn't true. The story is that he or she gained his power from "god", which is why Henry VIII nearly tore the country apart with his divorce. His decisions were the start of a dissent that ultimately culminated in the English Civil War.

This is also why dictators will go through the motions of a sham election. They derive their right to authority from the outcome of this election. If the dictator were to later say the election was a sham he would be disavowing his own right to authority.

The Chinese authority gains its power from the revolution. The people decided and fought to implement communism. If they back away too far from this in a way that is overt they will loose their moral authority to govern. Failure to maintain this story gives ammunition to political opponents.

I'm a Marxist, not a Marxist-Leninist or of other ideological factions, but I'm a Marxist in the sense that I read Marx' and Engels' and other people influenced by their ideas and thought their methods of trying understand social phenomenona are interesting and worthwhile. I don't wanna get into flamewars, I hate ideologies and believe at its core Marxism is materialism (which is the philosophical opposite of idealism).

Since China is a very hot topic in HN, and since I'm a software engineer, I want to share my ideas on this issue in a few sentences with my community. China's Communist Party was never about communism but rather about Big-C Communism which is the ideology formed in late 19th century, supposedly influenced by Marx' revolutionary ideas. What Big-C Communism captures is the method in which capitalims is sought to be destroyed, and thus by nature is not dynamic in and of itself. It cannot understand the real material conditions of modern China as it was formed before those conditions were realized. Since the natural process that creates capitalism is value generation and thus commodity production, it's pretty clear who paid attention to Marx that China is as capitalist as USA. I think our discussions would be more rational if we frame "China" discussions in terms of "authoritarianism" and not "communism".

For over a century, real, existing Communism has been Marxism-Leninism. That is because Marx's original prediction that capitalism would soon be replaced by socialsm proved mistaken, and so the Marxist political movement split into Social Democrats and Marxist-Leninists.

And then the Communists came to power, not in the advanced industrial countries as Marx had predicted, but instead feudal or semi-feudal ones like Russia and China. As a result the Communists put into effect not socialism, but state capitalism, in order to develop industrially to the stage where they would eventually be ready for socialism, a development that never happened. And then state capitalism bogged down, so China and Russia switched over to crony capitalism. And in China crony capitalism eventually slowed down, and the country became too Western in its values, so Xi Jinping is cracking down and puting things under more state control. I assume you are aware of this whole story.

Few things I want to note.

> For over a century, real, existing Communism has been Marxism-Leninism

In what way? There has been dozens of ideological factions calling themselves "Communists" like various types of anarchists, left-communists, Orthodox Marxists etc. More importantly, there was academic Marxism which wasn't revolutionary in its intention, which affected dozens of fields including history and sociology, and had factions too (e.g. Frankfurt School)

> And then the Communists came to power

The rest of your comment makes sense to me but I still want to be cautious to make such claims. In a Marxist sense ideological Communists weren't communists as communists can only be members of the working class willing to rise up against the bourgeoisie. The difference is the category: the Communists who came to power had ideological intentions and not material intentions whereas communism is a by-definition material concept. I believe it's true that maybe parts of Russian revolution started out as a communist revolution but, as you said, given the economic structure of the country (not highly developed) communism was already dead by the time revolution was over. And we can talk endlessly for hours whether Lenin was a good communist or an asshole; but this is irrelevant because communism (just like capitalism) is never about single persons but about classes. When the Russian Revolution started being more about Lenin and less about the people, it was already not communist regardless of the "ideology" of Lenin. Given the history, and how "Communist" is liberally used to attack Marx, it's intellectual laziness or intellectual dishonesty to mention USSR, China or other supposedly "Communist" countries to make an argument about Marx. I read the entire corpus of Marx and he very rarely talks about implementations, and oftentimes they're his very early work (like the Manifesto) or when he's critiquing other ideas on implementation (like the Critique of Gotha's Program). Given all these issues I have, I almost never find a good rational discussion about Marxism on the internet, not in HN, not on "socialist" sites like r/socialism, r/communism etc... It's always entirely about the ideology which is something Marx tried to criticise his whole life. It feels like when teenagers "discuss" Nietzsche and they think he's a nihilist when Nietzsche spent his entire life attacking nihilism.

>In what way? There has been dozens of ideological factions calling themselves "Communists" like various types of anarchists, left-communists, Orthodox Marxists etc. More importantly, there was academic Marxism which wasn't revolutionary in its intention, which affected dozens of fields including history and sociology, and had factions too (e.g. Frankfurt School)

I should have been more clear. I meant Marxism that achieved real political power. My point is that Marx's original vision could never be carried out successfully in the real world. Your further comments don't really present an argument to the contrary.

I don't suppose you read my comment since its entirety was about how there is no such thing as "Marx's original vision". If there is no political vision, there cannot be "Marxism that achieved real political power" so your argument is categorically wrong. I challenge you to give me examples of Marx's original vision; from what I understand Marx made himself pretty clear that communism is not an ideology and thus there cannot be a "vision" of it, the action of communists would be different depending on material conditions they live in. You can talk about personal vision of Communist revolutionaries (e.g. Lenin) but I already wrote an excessively long paragraph about why this is not relevant to Marxism.

Funny. Why you guys think China is Communists?

As a Chinese myself, in my eyes, the whole Communism thing is nothing more than a gimmick. A gimmick to keep public calm while the top heads fighting for domination at the back side of the TV camera and newspapers.

Ever heard of State capitalism?

I was checking out the Wiki for 21st century countries with "State Capitalism" and the list was - China, Singapore, Taiwan and Norway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism#Current_forms...

Communism is red fascism. It was invented and financed by the very same people who have invented fascism/nazism. Lenin was payed by German Kaiser to defeat socialism in Russia, money that came from the same industrial-power that pay for the same reason nazism after in Germany, Stalin was payed by UK crown, the very same body that pay mussolini in Italy to stop socialism. etc.

In substance despite formal origin and flag color communism, nazism, fascism etc are the very same dictatorship born to stop socialism.

Lovely, what a hole the party has dug itself into.

These guys found a security hole in the system. They can combine communist ideology with any other issue. The ideology gives them shielding, so that they can push through the piggybacked issues more easily.

It occurs to me that his is a feature of any ideologically driven system. And the leadership may be playing the same game.

Yeah. It is called a cult.

The shielding is bullet-resistant not bullet-proof. They can push a little further than without the ideology but even then there is a limit.

> A communist scarf with print ads from a local Wanda branch has gone viral on Chinese social media this weekend. “It’s all about the money,” some netizens write. A locally issued red scarf, worn by the ‘Young Pioneers of China’ to symbolize loyalty to communism, became the topic of great online controversy this weekend. The red scarfs worn by students in Heze (菏泽), Shandong, came with print advertising for Wanda, a Chinese multinational private real estate developer.

> Photos of the print ad red scarfs, promoting a local branch of the Wanda branch, went viral on September 29. The scarfs were worn by third-grade students of the Danyanglu primary school. The scarfs were reportedly handed out to the students in light of a road safety campaign on September 25. The school board allegedly did not notice the advertisement.

https://www.whatsonweibo.com/communist-blasphemy-red-scarf-w...

There are too many of these things, There is no place for justice

The Chinese "Communist" Party has learned an important lesson since the Cultural Revolution: idealistic young people create a bloody mess. China has a very long history of violent revolutions leading to extreme death tolls. It's why, I think, the CCP reacted so strongly at Tienanmen Square. Their thinking was, "Oh no, not another one of these!" And I'm not surprised that they still think that way.

Really irks me when people talk about China in 1989 and only mention Tienamen Square. There were bodies piled outside of every major city in China...burning piles of bodies.

Source?

Not OP, but wonder if they are talking about the ongoing persecution of Christians [1], Uighurs (in Xinjiang) [2] and Falun Gong practitioners [3]

[1] Chinese officials burn bibles, destroy crosses and force Christians to renounce their faith https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6149897/Group-Offic...

[2] China working to 'exterminate' Uighur people, detention facility eyewitness says http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-28/china-working-to-elimi...

[3] Defining a Genocide https://www.theepochtimes.com/defining-a-genocide_2624083.ht...

Communism is a tool to rule China, so it can only be used by President Xi.

How Ironic, that the current hybrid authoritarian China could be reset by Communists. Time for a new long march I suppose?

Someone should give Japan the memo.

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