Why China Turned Against Jack Ma

Xi also cannot dictate an election result. At least there was no precedence. As there is only one candidate for the highest position. Of course, US has 2 candidates, how much better/worse? I don't know, anyone can judge themselves.

As a matter of fact, no election can be held in China. Election was never a thing anyone can understand. Like when I was in elementary school, the classroom head was appointed. No important position was ever elected.

You might stand before Xi, and claim that Xi would be powerless if China is to hold an election. And himself and mostly everyone statistically picked on street, would look at you bewildered, probably laugh hard and walks away like anyone who encounter some lunatic. The analogy could be a Chinese run to US Senate speech, and claim that communism is better for US. The next day all the media would laugh so hard that I bet even divided as Trump's US, everyone would unit and celebrate this rare consensus that this Chinese guys is mad. Essentially, both concepts are virtually foreign to each other's mental system. They cannot process them.

What I want to say is that, China runs a system that is neither democracy nor dictatorship, in western sense.

A lot of people hate China, they often think that's because China is oppressive or authoritarian. While in fact, China is far more exotic than oppressive or authoritarian.

I often speculate that people hate China out of the deep fear of unknown. Not only unknown, China is strong enough that they basically position themselves to be unshakable in the current geopolitical system, unlike the old empire, which also claim superiority and reject inspection, but they were not really strong enough to resist.

I guess China learned the lesson since the opium war: it's important to be actually powerful than just claiming to have the mandate of the heaven.

If China was so great the Children of the US rich would go there to study. Instead they either stay in the US, or go to Europe/the Anglosphere if they want to be more cosmopolitan.

The reverse however is very true.

If we were to evaluate China objectively we would have to recognize its huge achievements. Living in China for much of the last 20 years and being able to witness the changes first hand, the subject often comes up in conversation both here and overseas. Without getting bogged down in tangential statistics, I generally point out that at the beginning of the 20th century, China was roughly parallel to India in many macro-economic metrics. Now look at the difference. It is a viable superpower, a space power, the world's renewable energy technology and perhaps also deployment leader (certainly e-vehicles), the world's reforestation leader, a far more educated (eg. popularly literate and numerate) and healthy (well fed) population, a population no longer dangerously expanding, corruption is under control, world leading mobile payments, world leading logistics, and it is at the center of the world's global supply chain (and consumption!) for almost every industry.

That said, China has many problems (living here is earth-shatteringly frustrating a lot of the time), @alisonatwork's comment is on the mark, and the achievements of the 20th century do not by any means excuse the grave and terrible costs, but to suggest that its government is inept in a hand-wave is shatteringly naive.

That’s the point: there is no bad information coming out of China, it’s always “positive,” like it was written by a PR team. No nation is perfect, but China works very hard so that nothing comes out of the country that is negative. By manipulating the news so that nothing is ever negative, you destroy all confidence in the accuracy of that reporting.

If China was serious about being a world power, worthy of respect, they wouldn’t work so hard to hide all the negative, censor, and punish people who speak the truth.

https://www.skynews.com.au/details/_6215946537001

I'd argue there is US mass media manipulation. There's simply clear monetary (and nationalistic) incentive in riling Americans against an evil enemy. In my eyes, the US paints China as evil just as much as NK paints US as evil. Do you not think it's propaganda that all the news is one sided, have you not considered a scenario where Americans might have been planted a bias by the media?

Also, I'd be an effin' amazing impostor to act as a plant as a YC alum on HN with my username orange. Maybe China wired me some money.