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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

The first time I heard this story from him some years ago I tried not to fall into the conspiracy theory trap, because of assassinations in foreign countries disguised as suicides it's a "classic setup", so I simply decided to watch one of his predictions: keep an eye on Jack Ma.

The result was quite scary, Jack indeed started to fade away, first by suddenly parting from Alibaba, diluting his position, then he stopped showing in international media (which he was relatively active, since he was a reference in china entrepreneurship), and now he vanishes.

Basically these individuals grow with the hand of the CCP on their back, and when it's time to collect they are stripped off and put on tight leash, and at any moment they can easily be muffled.

Why do the major trade blocks ignore these actions? USA, EU...

Edit: the predictions I'm talking about are from this youtube interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJK_5qDraM , which bare in mind it's still a biased source.

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I still feel it’s a conspiracy theory but Jack Ma is absolutely being targeted. He was beloved by the Chinese media as a motivational speaker as well as a business man, when he started not speaking highly of CCP (which is tantamount to criticizing) I told my wife that in a year he would be vilified by the media, and sure enough here we are at the first stages of that. This might be happening on a case by case basis with those who don’t want to “play ball”, but I don’t believe there is a concerted effort to bring down all billionaires. Reminds me of the rise of the middle class in Europe as they threatened the existing power structure. Sometimes it feels China is going through the same stages of history Europe went through over centuries but at breakneck speed.

It is in fact a conspiracy theory. But a small reminder that conspiracy theory doesn't tell you anything about the truthfulness, e.g. that the Iraq War was based on made-up evidence was a conspiracy theory.

That being said: Your explanation makes more sense to me. It is often enough to anger the wrong person to get a bad treatment (well, even assassination). And looking at history this is exponentiated in dictatorships, where power is concentrated on few ppl, who can act with impunity.

> that the Iraq War was based on made-up evidence was a conspiracy theory.

To be fair though, that never was much of a conspiracy. Maybe in the United States it was but in the rest of the world I don't think people believe the WMD story, rather, we believed the UN weapons inspectors' story.

A poorly executed conspiracy is still a conspiracy.

The word ‘conspiracy’ itself has a legal, original, meaning entirely different from the popular meaning. I find all good discussions involving this clarify what meaning is intended.

I resort to just saying the definition of words, in a sentence, instead of the word itself.

I've told and convinced plenty of anti-vaxxers about the magical secret way our body naturally produces antibodies if we expose our body to dead versions of a virus (or, now, things shaped like that virus). They like magic, secrets and nature, they do not like the word vaccine.

I do the same with the word conspiracy, "That is a secret plan by a group to do something harmful". It rolls off the tongue.

The only really effective way to change someone's mind is to make them believe they came up with the conclusions themselves

No, it was simply a lie. And one that should have fallen completely flat. My respect for Colin Powell went through the floor that day.

> It is in fact a conspiracy theory. But a small reminder that conspiracy theory doesn't tell you anything about the truthfulness, e.g. that the Iraq War was based on made-up evidence was a conspiracy theory.

I think that's interpreting the term "conspiracy theory" more broadly than it's typically used. IMHO, colloquially it pretty much only refers to outlandish theories, based little to no actual evidence, and usually requiring a conspiracy so impossibly large and impossibly well executed that it beggars belief.

I don't think the idea that Jack Ma is being targeted by the CCP is just a plausible theory, not a conspiracy theory (in the colloquial sense). You have a group with the motive, means, and MO to do so, you just need to find the proof.

> I don't think the idea that Jack Ma is being targeted by the CCP is just a plausible theory, not a conspiracy theory (in the colloquial sense). You have a group with the motive, means, and MO to do so, you just need to find the proof.

Which is the definition of a conspiracy theory. Words have meaning and this is a technical term; and altho it is common knowledge that it is being used as a smear word, this doesn't mean we have to play the same game here as well.

There is also no reason to pretend that the colloquial usage of conspiracy theory is more than opinion.

Watergate would've been a better example of a time when the conspiracy theorists turned out to be right.

> Sometimes it feels China is going through the same stages of history Europe went through over centuries but at breakneck speed.

And you feel it right. This is what is the explanation for the schizophrenic public position of the Chinese establishment: on one hand they shout out loud that "economic liberalisation is irreversible, opening up will go on," and on other keep tightening all legal, and extralegal nuts on private enterprise, and in overall sliding back into the madness of seventies.

They have accepted the fact of millionaire chicken run to the West being unstoppable, but they at least want to prevent the multimillionaire, and billionaire chicken run.

They simply want their money that much, and that started to outweight the rational interest of "not slaughtering a hen laying golden eggs" in recent 2-3 years.

Your post reminded me of my recent encounter with the phrase "damning with faint praise". It is interesting how applicable it is in authoritarian governments; you can't simply praise, you must give enthusiastic encomiums. That is particularly interesting in business, where it may be obvious to business leaders that something is wrong, but anything lackluster brings about government condemnation, which is part of the problem the business people can see. Startup founders are usually sharp, rebellious individuals trying to upend current business practices, so the condemnations damper the business spirit to some degree.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damning_with_faint_praise)

Reminds me of the legend that the first person to stop clapping for Stalin in a meeting would be arrested, interrogated, and executed for treason.

That was an episode in The Gulag Archipelago. (I'm not sure how factual that makes it. I don't doubt it illustrates a real dynamic.)

I mean, I get the same feeling from Apple events, everything is constantly the best ever.

Compared to other companies that present new products with something like "this year we've made a product worse than what we had before"?

Haven't been following Macbook quality much, huh?

I'd reverse the question.

Keyboard design aside (which was fixed a year ago, and wasn't a poor production standards/cheap materials, etc. issue, it was a BS make-it-thinner-design issue), you mean the best built laptops in the industry, or the CPUs, battery, etc. with universal praise (M1)?

The worst possible condemnation of a powerful national government: to compare its normal everyday functioning to a corporate product launch. Orwell was too optimistic.

Eh, it was just a more relatable example. If anything, it shows you that our idea of oppression is Apple overstating their product's capabilities.

The Orwellian part is people talking as though it’s a fact that Apple is overstating something.

As far as I can see that’s bullshit.

They say what they are measuring, and people do check it.

They’d be open to straight up legal action from both customers and shareholders if they were lying.

The Orwell's of the future will be writing about China and western social media (and a bit of Apple thrown in there)

> everything is constantly the best ever.

Not just the best ever, always 3x or 300% better according to fake benchmarks that nobody can audit. It's beyond Marketing, basically propaganda.

>Not just the best ever, always 3x or 300% better

Well that is the new / recent Apple. Steve rarely use these technical benchmarks with specific numbers and only talk about the experience or it is being faster, better.

Now it is just a more polished event Keynote which felt the same as Google event in that they were prepared by tech people for tech people.

"It's Magic!"

They indicate what they are comparing in the smallprint and they do get audited by people like AnandTech or Ars.

So far, every single time, they have been shown to be accurate.

> They indicate what they are comparing in the smallprint

(smallprint) * tested in very specific condition X that does not reflect at all everyday usage of 99.9999% of users.

(The tech media) Apple did it again with 300% perf increase! Mad engineering!

That's just legal department finding a way to make propaganda harder to challenge. It's still propaganda in effect.

The fact that you are using a made up exaggeration doesn’t help your point.

They don’t in fact make exaggerations like that, otherwise you’d be able to quote a real one.

Accurate, with an asterisk (i.e. technically true, but intentionally misleading), which results in headlines like "No, the new Arm MacBook Air is not faster than 98% of PC laptops" when they are "audited".

"No, the new Arm MacBook Air is not faster than 98% of PC laptops"

The piece with that headline is about the only thing that has been audited and found to be false.

Search for commentary anywhere on that piece and you’ll find it has been completely debunked.

Putin does the same thing. and literally just takes companies from billionaires.

Ah, if only our governments would take companies from billionaires too!

Or perhaps they could start with properly taxing them!

how about first journalists that don't tell lies about how taxes work.

99% they report on gross revenue and complain about how little tax is paid. And almost everyone buys it.

I know how taxes work.

That's why I don't buy the "gross revenue" argument, or the "actually the rich pay more of their income in taxes" arguments.

The rich and big corporations have billions (pun intended) of ways of padding their expenses, hiding their net, moving their wealth around so it can't be taxes, making shell companies etc.

>>>*Shell Companies*

Panama Papers is the most unreported, under-investigated scandal of the century

IF those are all legal actions, you do not know how taxes work (knowing how an internal combustion engine works generally does not mean you understand valve timing formulae) Your anger is misplaced, and should fall at the feet of lawmakers.

“Sometimes it feels China is going through the same stages of history Europe went through over centuries but at breakneck speed.” A dangerously ethnocentric perspective.

It's all very interesting. I'd say the CCP is the most powerful group in the world right now. That they can control billionaires like that is impressive and scary.

I have to admit, a one party system does seem like the best type of government, on paper. It can be more efficient and do things much faster than anything else. Billionaires can't just pay politicians to create/modify laws in their favour. And for the average citizen, life's the same as in a democracy.

But that only works if the party is working for the country, gives people a decent amount of freedom and listens to their needs.

When the party no longer keeps the people content (which seems inevitable, looking at history), there's practically no way to change it besides a violent revolution. That's a huge drawback, and the reason we're better off with a slower democratic system that doesn't have a single point of (catastrophic) failure.

Modern China seems to work a lot like Imperial China. Just with different names for the emperor and his officials, more freedom and rights for the population, as well as more means to keep them in check.

That is the problem with autocracy. If the leadership is good, it is very efficient and effective. Unfortunately based on thousands of years of examples, good leaders are rare. Without checks on power, bad leaders can tear a country down at lightening speed. Democracy is absolutely a messy government and it is frustrating to watch the glacial speed and bickering. It is also a very stable government that checks the worst impulses of the human lust for power. It keeps the power-hungry chasing each other's tails and away from the ship's wheel.

Democracy is the worst form of government there is, except for all the others. -- Winston Churchill.

I may be factually wrong, but I hear that Singapore is/was somewhat autocratic. However, the government was competent and honest, avoiding things like nepotism and suchlike. The result of all this is that starting from the mid-20th century, it grew from one of the poorest nations on earth to one of the richest. All this as a small island country that even has to import its own water.

China is basically a giant kleptocracy. My dad is fond of China, but I am hesitant. China is so corrupt that it's hard for good things to come from it. I guess it is slowly industrialising and getting better, but it seems to be labouring under a heavy burden.

I have long been suspicious that the Chinese economy would collapse. My theory is that it produces returns below the cost of capital. That's why we've seen movement in production from places like America to China.

My argument is that you produce wealth by creating returns that are in excess of the cost of capital. You destroy it if it's the reverse. So we could find out that America has actually done the right thing by letting China do the manufacturing.

That's all just my theory, though. I've been thinking like this since the 90's. So far, I've been shown to be resoundingly completely wrong (at least as it appears on the surface. Will I have been proven to be very wrong until I'm proven very right, or is the whole thing just a completely invalid theory on my part).

Good leaders don't even have to be rare. They just have to be not forever. Sooner or later you get a bad one. The more power they have, the worse the damage.

The US has had bad presidents. They did damage. But without the checks and balances, they would have done far more.

And we got to watch those checks and balances play out this very weekend. Incredible to watch somone who would happily accept a crown be taken as a fool instead. Our system of governments may not be perfect, but it has certainly avoided a major historical event.

Yeah. I'm rather pleased with how well the US system held up to Trump. It wasn't perfect, and there has been damage, but overall the checks and balances did their job.

> That is the problem with autocracy. If the leadership is good, it is very efficient and effective.

It really depends on the demographics. For example, I think you need a more decentralized and federal government when the state is comprised of different nations.

It’s a zero or one game for China —- they can make 10000 right decisions but the system could collapse with one, just one wrong decision. It’s not fault tolerant as the democracy system

Which single wrong decision is going to collapse China? Their administration have made wrong decisions before — unless you subscribe to some outlandish conspiracy theory. It seems far more likely that if they collapse, it will be as a consequence of a series of wrong decisions, in a completely boring way. The straw that breaks the camel's back will be the same as all the straws before it, except that everyone will analyse it to death considering the camel could hold thousands of other very similar straws, just not this one.

What I meant is high level strategic decisions. Example like cultural revolution. It’s really a single decision from one dictator and get carried out super efficiently. If you are Chinese, you’ll probably understand what I meant how single decisions could collapse China without even my explanation. China is strange, critical policies like cultural revolution and Deng’s decision to open the country was really very short and succinct words on paper

Like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

What single wrong decision? Invading Taiwan (depending on the US response). That could collapse a lot more than China...

Any military decision that could trigger nuclear war has that potential.

I was thinking that going after Ma so publicly could be one such decision, however what news is the CCP allowing regular citizens to see - what propaganda they're promoting to demonize Ma, etc. makes me realize it's probably a non-issue; even other billionaires in China may not be much wiser.

The advantage China has is that they can plan over the long term without worrying about short term concerns. This means that they are in a better position to avoid the slide into wrong decisions that compound over time, though by no means immune to it.

If they are so good at long term planning, then why is so much stuff they do shortsighted? IE...

Building the 3 Gorges dam out of various types of concrete, and not letting it cure properly, etc. Every possible corner was cut, repeatedly. This is a project that not only supplies power- it is supposed to control floods, and they more or less agreed that it won't work for that. The damage to the dam this year must have been immense, and as the climate changes we can expect more of the same kind of rainfall and flooding. In no possible universe is a major dam collapse flooding Wuhan under 2m of water and washing away Pudong an example of "short term concerns".

Building empty cities, despite having a population that will decline very soon, and low quality construction that degrades relatively quickly. Ok, short-term consequence is the real estate bubble keeps on going, but if you are worried about the long term, probably better to nip that in the bud. And don't even get me started on the Belt and Road initiative, which is an expensive jobs program that has hurt China's image abroad.

Speculations such as these should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Consider that:

* Jack Ma is himself a CCP member.

* Before regulators stopped Ant's IPO, people were worrying about how Ant is a CCP ploy to take over the world, and a national security threat.

Speculations about China have a tendency to view everything through the "CCP is evil and the only thing that's constantly on their minds is how to kill/jail/invade more" lens. As if all behavior in China is solely attributable to the CCP. This lens distorts things so much that a lot of the time you end up with nonsense.

Have you lived in China? CCP membership means nothing. There are dozens, if not hundreds of government officials and corporate identities in prison (or worse, executed) who were party members.

Global perceptions about Ant Financial are completely irrelevant to Jack Ma. This is all internal politics. Anyone who poses a potential threat to the party (read: Xi Jinping) is liable to disappear (even if only temporarily).

> CCP membership means nothing.

I know. But that's not the point. Not that long ago people were speculating all over the place that Jack Ma's CCP membership means that Ant is a wholly state-controlled company and a national security threat. The 180 degree turn of all the comments, shows that at the end of the day, people don't actually know anything about China, and therefore we should be critical of speculations.

The disappearance of Jack Ma only confirms that all big Chinese corporations are an extension of the party. You don't follow the party line, you disappear.

That leaves us with a conundrum since the dealings of the ruling class in China are almost completely opaque. Speculation is often all we have, so yes of course we need to be judicious in what we believe, but we also need to keep open minds.

Since there are many factions within the upper echelons of the CCP, many of these speculations may not even be contradictory. It's quite plausible that Ant group was planned as a stalking horse for Chinese state infiltration of foreign banking systems, and also that Jack Ma and Ant were seen as conflicting with power groups within the CCP who eventually took them down.

It is far more plausible that people are just deliberately looking for reasons to fit a 'CCP bad' narrative.

X happens: "CCP is bad"

Opposite of X happens: "CCP is bad"

What is this, a children's story? Where is all the nuance? Reality can't be reduced to a simple "X is bad" narrative.

This narrative overshadows the actual issues, and thus produces nonsense. Note that nearly nobody talks about the ACTUAL financial issue, which is that Ant's way of dealing with money is very dangerous and has the potential to cause a financial crisis.

Yes I know the regulator's timing is suspicious. But to completely ignore the actual issue, or to casually brush it away as an illegitimate distraction, and instead to focus 100% on just the 'CCP bad' narrative, is just sensationalism, stereotyping and oversimplification.

You’ve hit on the fundamental problem of intellectual discussion.

It’s impossible to competently discuss entities more sophisticated than oneself, by definition. If one comprehends all the competing and confounding factors involved in the actions of the CCP, for example, then they would at least be as sophisticated as the CCP, by definition.

If not, then sooner or later reality intrudes.

Of course it may be that no human is intelligent enough to actually comprehend all the dynamics within an organization of 100+ million. Therefore no one on this planet, even in China, fully understands all the factions, factors, reasonings, etc., of such an organization. And actions may happen for mysterious reasons because no one fully comprehends all the underlying reasons.

> If one comprehends all the competing and confounding factors involved in the actions of the CCP, for example, then they would at least be as sophisticated as the CCP, by definition.

> Of course it may be that no human is intelligent enough to actually comprehend all the dynamics within an organization of 100+ million.

"The knowledge of some principles easily compensates for the ignorance of some facts", a.k.a. you really don't need to know how shit tastes to keep away from it, you just need to know what it looks like.

What if the ‘shit’ you mention was capable of self organization and self-modification and self-evolution towards goals, and through techniques, that may confound your senses?

In fact this example is a bit humorous because there is a type of fruit called the ‘miracle berry’ that is sold commercially to trick the taste receptors on human tongues, turning sour foods into sweet tasting foods temporarily.

I am sure if it doesn’t already exist one day products will be created to do so for the entire taste spectrum and beyond that all the human senses...

Genuinely beneficial things may be disguised as harmful and vice versa in such an environment. And then we would be back to the original point.

> What if the ‘shit’ you mention was capable of self organization and self-modification and self-evolution towards goals, and through techniques, that may confound your senses?

What if we could see how phenomena draw projections in the fourth dimension and reveal that the same underlying traits of these self-modifying and self-evolving entities? a.k.a. we can play imaginary worlds infinitely deep.

But the bottom-line of the previous comment was that people are conceptually-reasoning beings, and we can build and refine meaningful ideas and abstractions that help us to properly orient ourselves in the world. The proof of that would be the fact that you and I are interacting here on HN, and neither of us comprehends the full complexity of the systems (and relations between them) that provide us this ability.

Regardless of Jack Ma's CCP membership, any major firm in China has close ties to the government at every level of the organization (including the officially embedded Chinese Communist Party cell).

The recent Jack Ma + Ant kerfuffle started after he gave a public speech that was mildly critical of the CCP's financial regulation. He probably should have known better given the current political environment in China, but alas.

He knows better, we would never know what pushed him to say that.

He clearly doesn't.

>Speculations about China have a tendency to view everything through the "CCP is evil and the only thing that's constantly on their minds is how to kill/jail/invade more" lens.

That's because they are unquestionably, unambiguously evil. The CCP has murdered more people than any organization in the history of the world -- more than the nazis, more than the bolsheviks. But unlike the nazis or bolsheviks, the CCP death count continues to increase every day.

Regardless of the truth of your narrative, viewing EVERY SINGLE ISSUE through the "x is evil" narrative is guaranteed to produce nonsense. We're very close to "a traffic accident occurred? Oh it's because evil CCP forces drivers to run over innocent people"

Yes, the "X is Evil and Evil do what Evil does" kind of reductive and anti-intellectual arguments here are disappointing.

I'll offer an alternative, although admittedly simplistic lens to understand the actions of the CCP:

To pull their population of 1.4 billion people out of poverty. To which political stability is essential.

I disagree we are near to that, and believe if we don't keep an eye on their tactics and society, we will have them exported to us, upon us.

That is a great attitude to justify a war by creating imaginary enemies.

Are they a competitor and do they want to protect their interests? Yes. Export their governance model to you? No, why would they want to do that?

China just signed the RCEP -- an initiative by ASEAN. Clearly their neighbors don't think they're going to invade make everyone their slaves.

> Export their governance model to you? No, why would they want to do that?

ever heard of Taiwan, Hong Kong? They are trying hard to keep away from this plague at the moment, if you haven't noticed. But please don't start another thread on how CCP claims their legitimacy over all chinese territories, because that would be indeed a true fairytale for children you mentioned above.

Neither of those cases have got anything to do with CCP wanting to export their governance model or invade foreign countries. This is apparent if you look at the historical context of the issues in those areas.

China isn't in Hong Kong because they're afraid of democracy. Under British rule, Hong Kong never had democracy in the first place. In 2014, CCP offered a limited form free elections for Hong Kong -- that's more democracy than under British Hong Kong. Why would they do that if they want to destroy democracy? The Hong Kong opposition shot down the proposal because they wanted more concessions. Unfortunate, because if it was accepted, it could have paved way for more democratization down the road.

As for Taiwan, the conflict exists because it's a leftover of the Chinese civil war. At the end of WW2, the Chinese Nationalist Party fled to Taiwan -- a part of the [People's Republic of China]'s predecessor, the [Republic of China]. Officially, both Taiwan and China claim to be the legitimate goverment of the whole of China -- this is the One China Principle. Heck, Taiwan' s modern-day flag is the exact same as that of the Republic of China.

Ever heard of Macau? It's democratic, part of China, and is doing fine under One Country Two Systems.

Whether anyone thinks Hong Kong and Taiwan should or should not be independent is besides the point, as well as totally irrelevant. The CCP has issues in those areas because they are, or used to be Chinese terrority. These issues are not new, and have been there since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, back when the CCP was small and weak and in no position to invade anybody.

But these issues persist because many mainland Chinese people care. Unity is and has been a Chinese core value for thousands of years. The issues don't persist because the CCP is evil and want to destroy democracy. Even if Hong Kong and Taiwan were under a seperate communist rule, the CCP would still have issues with those areas.

The narrative that China is an expansionist invader is based on the twisting of half-truths, for the purpose of painting a "China threat" in order to justify spending more money on the military industrial complex. China has not fought a war or shot a bullet outside its borders for more than 30 years. In fact, if you take out the People's Republic's map, and compare ot to the maps of the last 2 predecessors (the Republic, and the Qing dynasty), you'll see that the People's Republic's map is smaller.

>Under British rule, Hong Kong never had democracy in the first place.

British Hong Kong has elected local council and officials that are given power and budget within their constituency. The small council was disband just after 1997. Hong Kong had far more democracy than it ever had under China.

And China did not do away with the local elections, nor have they plans to do so. The 2014 proposal was to allow more options for electing the Chief Executive.

Local elections also exist on the mainland.

Anyway, this is still irrelevant. The point still stands: the above doesn’t indicate in any way that China is an expansionist invader out to crush democracy.

The major trade blocks ignore these actions because they profit from it. Once they won’t, we will see “democracy values” based moral statements and arguments.

But does it make sense in the long term? I don't see it honestly... it's not just democracy values, it ranges from that to things like hacking/IP theft.

It's a massive loss.

Also, if we're at the point where "democracy values" are stumped by short term profits then maybe we deserve all of this.

The Western political institutions have short-term incentives for their constituents.

That's an unfortunate drawback of a constituency trained to prioritize short-term goals.

I wonder if it's possible to change this and have a 'wise' constituency that is able to do a more long-term prioritization.

From my understanding, Jack Ma having these troubles recently because he's filing the Ant Group IPO. Everybody was talking about the stock because everybody believes it would be skyrocketing. Also combined with the fact that the Ant Group is abusing rules under fintech's cover (eg: Banks need to follow regulations on the interest rate but the Ant Group along with other financial companies can get away with it, or they lure graduates to lend money they can't afford to pay back). These caused concern from the government because it has potentially huge impacts on society (most likely reap shit ton of money from people). As the government see it, if they caused such problems it's the government that has to deal with the consequence.

PS: Some information about Guo from the video. According to Vice, He was rich because he was close to high ranking officials, and fled because the Government ally he linked to was under investigation because of accepting bribes [0]. Everybody would know in China, a close relationship comes from bribing at least from those times, and bribing is a crime in most countries especially in the US. It seems to me, he callout corruption issues only because he's out of the game.

[0] https://youtu.be/LkOsgh5kcgQ?t=92

> Everybody would know in China, a close relationship comes from bribing at least from those times, and bribing is a crime in most countries

It is a classic tactic in dictatorship: Make sure that for anybody to advance, they need to get their hands dirty (i.e bribes) so that you always have a Damocles sword over their head. It's one way to ensure obedience.

However even in the oversea chinese community he (Guo) is poorly regarded and very dubious. He gained a lot of attention much earlier because of these callouts but later proven not accurate and not different from other controversial figures in order to gain popularity. Their motto is 爆料革命 - 'callout revolution'. Many even major chinese celebrities fall for that.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%88%86%E6%96%99%E9%9D%A9%E5...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/20/business/media/steve-bann...

> Basically these individuals grow with the hand of the CCP on their back, and when it's time to collect they are stripped off and put on tight leash, and at any moment they can easily be muffled.

That's the reason I never got why all the fanfare for Jack Ma. I don't know how much of his success can be attributed to CCP's belssings.

What can the trade blocks do? Sanctions would be tantamount to what was seen at the start of the pandemic. Basically cutting your local economy off from the world’s manufacturing. War would be even more extreme.

There’s 1.3 billion Chinese. Their government is capable of being infinitely more organized and long thinking than just about all the others.

Maybe a world war could curb the inevitable sans nuclear weapons. With nuclear weapons...

Perhaps if the smaller trade blocs all rejected vehemently China along with the major it’d be a stronger position. Say in reaction to such actions. The large trade parties could help this by investing with infrastructure and other such programs in those countries.

Possibly hoping for the Chinese people to change their form of government from within is the “nicest” option.

The long thinking aspect of the Chinese government is Chinese propaganda.

You see them announcing long term goals and going on giant infrastructure projects, which go on to be under used, poorly built e&.

China has serious structural issues that the CCP is trying to hide. Massive food, drug and alcohol fraud hurting people (fake alcohol is a HUGE issue). Riots, mass stabbings/attacks, economic slowdown/hardship. All of which the CCP covers up because foreign media can't easily penetrate, and the CCP control the domestic media/narrative.

China is a house of lies, they're essentially trying to fake it until they make it.

I agree with you about the overblown aspect of long term thinking... but I dont think you can fully discount it. Like it or not, a long term leader does have the benefit of seeing through long term ideas to the fullest. There is a lot of value in that, however that doesn't mean I'm fully convinced that winnie the pooh over there knows a good long term investment even if it threw honey in his face. A lot of their foreign infrastructure investments have been... either great genius we cant comprehend or they're complete idiots. There could be background plays that we'll never know about that actually do make them good maneuvers. As they stand, er, as they crumble from lack of use and maintenance, they dont seem good on the surface.

Now, the long term taking stake in foreign entities, that one... that seems smart on the surface. As to what end, dont know and without a long form of discussion isnt practical to talk about here.

House of lies... eh, barn full of horseshit if you ask me... but even horseshit has its uses... and flies. So many fucking flies. I hate horses.

That and dude yea, the mass stabbings are insane over there.

China is definitely facing some fundamental issues now - #1 being their aging population. Their demographic profile is a major drag on growth and will only get worse over the next few decades.

When you have an aging population, the young need to take care of them, and when the old outnumber the young that tends to result in angst as the young are not as well off as those who came before them.

“massive” is somewhat ambiguous and common Chinese citizens would disagree with you that they have “massive” attacks and riots every few days. Fake alcohol WAS an issue that people talked about years ago but it’s rarely heard nowadays.

It's very very common. But when domestic media won't cover it full stop, and even social media is heavily censored, it's hard to tell.

My view is based on ex-pats who've shared their experience and did pseudo journalism there.

> There’s 1.3 billion Chinese. Their government is capable of being infinitely more organized and long thinking than just about all the others.

Those are the people that inhabit the territory. Don't attribute them all to a single party and to the same set of moral values that the party proclaims. One day it can turn out that their government is a joke, as it had happened before with USSR.

Basically, you've got to reproduce the factors within China making them such strong trading partners outside of them in a way they cannot diminish unilaterally. This could be done with political will or reproduction of their capacity.

Personally, I wonder whether a UBI in a developed country could work to essentially lower their external 'trading costs'. Try to change their thought processes at the margin. i.e. Make the local goods and services out compete the foreign goods/services through moving local costs not observed in foreign goods/services to localized costs. i.e. Maybe a person making a UBI would be willing to do a job for (X+U) - where (X+U) is their reservation price, X is the foreign price, and U the UBI.

Edit-flipped signs

Because there is little to no benefit to the EU or USA to challenging the CCP, be it because of their treatment of a few billionaires or millions of Uighers. Unlike the Soviet Union China doesn't represent an existential threat to the USA or EU, largely as a matter of geography. The promotion of human rights, liberal democracy, the rule of law etc. has always been fairly low on the priority list of most western states in actuality and has usually played second fiddle to national interests.

>Unlike the Soviet Union China doesn't represent an existential threat to the USA or EU, largely as a matter of geography.

That is categorically untrue. The model of government and economic success of China is the biggest existential threat to western hegemony, much bigger than the USSR. China is well in the process of building a strong military with greater capabilities than Russia and once this is complete, the world order will undoubtedly change unless something is done about it now.

The only reason we don't see more noise on this is because a lot of people depend on trade with China for their wealth, which was never the case during the cold war with the USSR.

The state department was fully aware of the Chinese threat, hence why the TPP was proposed as a measure of containment. Too bad that play was ruined and replaced with ineffective populist measures that sound good on AM radio and internet forums, but are actually counterproductive in practice.

Well China is obviously a bigger threat than the USSR now because the USSR hasn't existed for about 30 years. And while China may threaten western, or rather US hegemony it isn't an existential threat to the USA or EU in that China is unlikely to try to invade and / or nuke Western Europe or USA in the same way the USSR did at various points. I'm not saying that China isn't a threat to the USA's position of hegemonic super power but that's a very different claim.

USSR controlled half of Europe and had enough ground forces on hand to bust through Germany and be in France in a week(without nukes being involved).

PRC is nowhere close. It is a threat to Japan, India, Russia, Vietnam etc to US and Europe not so much

I don't understand that perspective - large ground armies haven't been relevant to superpower conflicts since pre-Cold War.

Force projection, like the US has been able to do for 30 years, is relevant and when China ramps up in that regard there's no telling how things will change.

IMO China doesn't even need to bother much with military advancement to become a massive threat to Western democracies though, as they can simply continue to build their economic engine and leverage it whenever necessary. They are already doing so to great effect against multinational corporations.

1.The main reason land armies are no longer relevant to superpower conflicts is due to the nuclear peace. This is hopefully a long term situation but if the genie of normalizing nuclear weapons use comes out of the bottle, or if a method of using nukes that are "optimized" for manageable long term damage is developed, I can nearly guarantee you that large powers will again start having conflicts more often. If this happens, big armies will definitely become important again. Smart warfare, drones, guided weapons and all sorts of shiny systems for technologically sophisticated killing are fine as far as they go (especially for small localized police actions) but only large military forces and equipment ultimately allow any one major country to seriously fight another major country.

2. Also, as a quick note to the comment above yours, China is an economic and possibly to some extent resource threat to Russia, but the obvious target of simply overtaking a huge chunk of Russian territory through Siberia (which in purely conventional military terms I think China could easily pull off) wouldn't happen, because Russia despite all its modern systemic weaknesses, crumbling demographics and terrible military administration still has the single largest nuclear arsenal on Earth, which takes us back to point one above.

3. China is a strong power with a vast population that dwarfs that of the U.S and an economy that's getting very close to rivalling it in both sophistication and raw wealth production, but it's also strangely isolated in its power. The U.S on the other hand has strong affinities with much of western and central Europe, several other asian nations with large populations and also a much better relationship with the second most populous country on Earth, right next door to China. Russia would never readily take China's side in a global conflict even if it dislikes the western hegemony and all of these things combined along with others leave china in a state of extreme vulnerability if we were to start talking about a real, serious multinational conflict between it and the U.S.

China's biggest strength is the economic dependence it has created in so much of the world, especially for manufacturing, but if a war were to break out between it and the west, this would in any case become a moot point, removing the one major incentive that any other country not directly next to it would have for trying to stay on China's good side.

The Little Red Checkbook

> Why do the major trade blocks ignore these actions? USA, EU...

These people are literally disappearing millions from an ethnic group into concentration camps in a genuine genocide and nobody cares. Why would anyone care about some puppet "billionaire" who gets disappeared for acting up?

As a matter of fact/demonstrable behavior, regardless of the things we would like to be true, most people would value the life of a billionaire business person well above the lives of millions of poor people who don't speak the same as us. This is especially true the higher up in power you go; and since it requires power to do anything about it, the chances of anything being done about it are much greater when it's a billionaire business person than a nation of poor people.

God damn, they killed Jack Ma?

Jack Ma is missing since October.

No one knows what happened to him, in my opinion I doubt they killed him simply because he was in China. What's the point of killing him there? They can simply remove him from the picture.

> Jack Ma is missing since October.

Recent article on this [1], because I must admit that for me also this was a tough thing to believe.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/alibaba-founder-jack-ma-susp...

Although i think it will reflect poorly on CCP to secretly make Jack go missing, who is actually a world famous personality at this point. One should also remember that anything is possible in a totalitarian regime.

Making a man like Jack Ma disappear and possibly dead sends a message that no matter how rich and famous you are, don't fuck with the CCP. That's how it will reflect. Poorly, and fearsomely.

Will it though?

You live in the time where there's massive outrage for one week, but the next week that's the subject of the past that lost hype and momentum so it's forgotten.

I think the CCP knows this, hell even political leaders of the free world know this - no one resigns due to scandals anymore. They just sit tight, don't acknowledge it, and it blows over.

That is true, but Jack isnt any ordinary Billionaire, this would affect Chinese businesses.

Didn't stop Putin from stomping Khodorkovsky. Who worries or thinks about him (khodorkovsky) now? Meanwhile Putin is still there, more powerful than ever.

I genuinely have no idea how these articles are making this claim. They say that "reports surfaced" making the claim, but the only source they show making any claim is the Financial Times saying he did not attend a TV show taping in November.

Are people that normally see him also reporting him missing? Or other events he had to cancel lately?

He also stopped posting on social media and has yet to surface to reject claims that he's missing.

His Twitter account was created in March and he follows zero people. I'd guess it was created as PR for the IPO, and possibly controlled by others.

I remember when the actress Fan Bing Bing went “missing” and now she’s back in the spotlight.

Or when the media reported Dr. Ai Fen (one of the first to identify COVID-19) was “missing,” but less than a week later she posting on Weibo and back at work.

Once Jack Ma is found, I wonder who will be the next person the media claims is missing?

Wuhan citizen journalists Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin are still missing almost a year after disappearing, but they were regular people with less international media scrutiny.

No one knows? Most likely a man like that is probably dead at this point or being held against his will waiting to die.

I meant "no one" as in foreign organizations outside of China control (media, etc).

According to the experience, he was most likely invited to 'having tea'.

The idea is prevent him from fled, or moving his money aboard, or retaliate through medias.

PS: Even criminal businessmen lives in separate jails which conditions are extraordinary compared to other crimes. Let alone Jack Ma is not a criminal at all.

Maybe he fled.

> Why do the major trade blocks ignore these actions? USA, EU...

Careful now ... I know of several people who were banned from HN for being critical of China ...

EDIT: I suspect this post will be gone soon.

Who and when? If you're going make a grand claim like that, you should supply links so readers can make up their minds for themselves.

HN is full of criticisms of China on any thread that touches even tangentially on China. We don't ban users for that. We ban users who repeatedly break the site guidelines, such as by posting nationalistic flamebait—especially if they do it repeatedly. Those are not at all the same thing.

It's common, of course, for people to make grandiose claims about being banned for their noble views when really it was for their bad behavior.

Let's not jump to conclusions with Jack Ma. It could all be explained by an illness.

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