Jack Ma makes first live appearance in three months in online meet
reuters.com
reuters.com
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There have been ugly mob behaviors on this site in the past, which have hounded people out of the community. Is that who you want to be? who we want to be? No it is not. Yet it happens all too easily, and the people doing it don't even realize that they're doing it—they just think they're righteously defending truth or freedom or the home team. If you don't want to be that way, then err on the side of respect, benefit of the doubt, and not jumping to predetermined conclusions. (If you do want to be that way, please find some other site to post to.)
We ban accounts that break these rules, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended. It has a very specific intended spirit and most of the people who've posted in this thread so far have been breaking it.
It seems weirder to just pop up like this like nothing has been going on.
Here's one from 2020. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/07/c_138685262.htm
Old UN article. https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2016/08/jack-...
To elaborate more broadly on the subject: these incidents are relatively formulaic to the point where it's reasonably straight forward to guess outcomes based on political status of individual and nature of infraction. Prominent individuals severely contradicting official line = CCP send you on temporary contrition vacation, repeat infractions = corruption charges -> jail. If individual is public official or nature of infraction affects political structure i.e. actual massive corruption or negligence that undermines public safety -> up to death, though more life sentences or death with reprieves in recent times. Less significant individuals (like activists) get invited to drink tea at police stations, sign and various warnings before escalating to boilerplate disturbing social order sentences and successively longer sentences. Ma's more business class than political, he overstepped at a time and on a topic he was precisely not suppose to over step, so he got sent to vacation. I'm sure he got talks by relevant cadres, maybe self-criticism letter is in the works, but he was always going to be let out of the dog house. Like many systems in China, rule by law is not capricious, but customary.
If they ever acknowledge it, it will be as a public apology for their past conduct. This is what Ma's protege Justin Sun did after he got into hot water with the Chinese government for promoting his crypto currency project too loudly:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tron-crypto-founder-justin-su...
Because nothing happened. So many westerners are so brainwashed on any China related topics that conspiracy theories are accepted as fact without any sort of filtering. If you think CCP is going to make the richest man(a popular public figure no less) in China disappear overnight, you ate way too much propaganda.
Back in 2012 the party is controled by a group of elder guys, though there is someone at the top.
Now it is dictated by Xi, who has already changed many things, like Chairman should only serve two terms. Luckily, he has no son.
The reform did happen, replacing e.g. labor camps for drug addicts by forced detox camps, but those were mostly the same, still using hard labor as their main method to "rehabilitate" addicts. So not much changed in practice. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... (this one is in English)
You may wonder why you haven't heard about this before. The answer is, I think, that most groups subjected to "reeducation through labor" are not organized and scarcely have any international contacts, so they have a hard time getting mainstream international media to report on them.
"So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
I've also thought I'd love to see a Netflix style documentary of "a day in dang's life" to help us get to know you, to humanize you more + would be good marketing for HN and YCombinator. You're often very poetic in your responses, I think a documentary focused on you could be quite good.
Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue.
The very fact that people keep bringing this up should clue you in. Once or twice, okay maybe it's the complainer's perception that's wrong, but again and again, for over a year? Then your damn system has a problem.
The least you could do to address it is not let downvotes instantly affect a comment's visibility. Fucking delay it for a few hours to allow everyone at least a chance to be seen.
Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?
Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way.
The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a high level by not talking about the rules is at least condescending to the participants.
It doesn't matter to them if they lose you on these grounds since talking about the rules appears only on extremes which are shallow in a normal distribution. They will lose the few participants that care enough about that while maintaining those in the middle. (Of course, cutting of the extremes will grow newer ones in the empty space but I digress...).
What happens with time is that people adjust their discourse to the middle ground making it void of any new or interesting information. Thus, HN becomes an echo chamber of mainstream ideas and people will leave when they got bored enough of the same thing. We're already there and @dang is more vocal now because he knows it.
Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.
Oh fucking boy, no. What even is that logic
We have a bunch of tabs open on a bunch of other social sites and forums. We don’t prefer HN to any other place, we just think something about it sucks badly enough to express our disdain of it.
Moloch is always and everywhere.
Maybe maybe not, but clearly not in this case. It was troll-ish and looking for a fight. Just like your own:
>How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up.
Would you talk to your mother that way? It isn't respectful and it doesn't add anything to the discussion.
>Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?
I rest my case.
If we were to have a seperate thread, then folks should absolutely not post these things in regular threads, thus leaving them cleaner and with a better tone.
they are free to reference this incident on the grievance thread. There, different downvote rules should apply of course.
There might be others who feel the same way, and therefore might upvote it. So, this way, you can get a sense of how many/deeply feel about a particular issue, and then address it suitably.
Once this particular case is addressed, then we create a link of sorts, and the next month someone brings this up, we just point to it.
I am thinking - maybe once a quarter -- to start with, and vary frequency as needed.
It would be a lost cause because it goes against human nature. People feel what they feel when they feel it; you can't stop them from expressing it, and trying to stop them would only multiply it.
All that being said. None of this is evidence for his books actually being wrong.
I scrolled to a random section and I read:
"In fact, [the west] have quite as much to learn from [China] as they from us, but there is far less chance of our learning it."
"[There's] a great eagerness to acquire Western learning, not simply in order to acquire national strength and be able to resist Western aggression, but because a very large number of people consider learning a good thing in itself"
Nothing has changed in 100 years...
TBH like most westerners, most Chinese don't even understand how CCP works. I surely won't trust a book written in 1922.
That's on purpose, the first test of getting power to work for you is an intelligence and ambition check: can you focus enough ability for long enough to sniff out where the networks of power are ?
It works because a large part of it is based not just on Chinese culture, but on human nature.
Its the reason that the Ten Commandments are still relevant today, because as Paul Mooney said, "It puts its foot in man's ass", or in other words, because many of the stories in the Bible were written by people with an understanding of human nature.
The same reason so much of the Constitution of the United States of America still works. Its written to humanity's nature, not current events of 1776.
Another book that may help is "Has China Won?" by Kishore Mahbubani.
https://www.amazon.com/Red-Capitalism-Financial-Foundation-E...
The author is an excellent China Watcher who works at an Australian think tank and basically covers this topic for a living.
His blog post on the matter is a good starting point, which was before the IPO was cancelled, and many before that were prescient.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/many-trails-an...
„The awakening of China“ - by Sun Yat Sen. Old but informative least but not last becauseit was the only book heralded by both Chinas (PRC and Taiwan) and even allowed during Mao‘s heydays of Terror (in which the official amount of allowed books was in the single digits, and most of those were authored by Mao).
The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.
Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history.
This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point.
However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.
On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause?
Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.
In fact, there is a limit: A German citizen might hold the office of Chancellor ("Kanzler", or "Kanzlerin" for female form) four times, or sixteen years in total.
https://www.trtworld.com/europe/merkel-helmut-kohl-s-little-...
Kohl: 1 October 1982 - 27 October 1998
Schroder: 27 October 1998 - 22 November 2005
Merkel: 22 November 2005 - whenever Corona ends I suppose. Thuringia already postponed their state elections from April to September because of Corona.
This is very similar in concept to the SA/SS (Nazi Germany) or the Red Army (USSR). All were paramilitary wings of political parties before their rise to power.
> One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is
> not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political
> party's own security forces have assumed that role
Chinese leaders though try really hard to allow tech advancements to happen, and perform quite well on the market.
The Chinese Navy is called "People's Liberation Army Navy"
There are also some English language Chinese government produced youtube videos that also do a pretty good job at giving basic civics lessons on how their government works if you can look past all the self-congratulations. It's definitely "complicated" and is not just Xi Jinping barking his every desire and whim as it tends to get reduced to.
For example: https://youtu.be/Qu4QTxl9GVw
There are plenty of others like: https://youtu.be/fgor9fmA6po
https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-l...
And we're talking about state-level actors here doing the holding, not some random nobody with a gun. Those don't have any need for "insider trading".
I've only met one billionaire, but he was definitely not guarded by anyone, and had I the inclination, skills, and firepower, I could have easily taken him at gunpoint.
I don't accept the notion that Jack Ma is guarded 100% of the time, that's movie fiction.
Some billionaires are relatively unknown, so maybe they get away without needing that.
> had I the inclination, skills, and firepower
That's a very big "had I", and certainly not "anyone with a gun" as you said previously.
Let me put it this way: suppose you're Bezos or Jack Ma and had access to unimaginable resources, comfort, and security from the best of the best. Surely it would be absolutely trivial to hire someone so that the vast, vast, majority of people with guns wouldn't be able to get to you, no matter how hard they tried, even _with_ so-called inclination and skills?
I'm not even referring to having guard detail around them all the time; when you're that important and hundreds of billions of market cap depends on your very existence, their entire schedules will be mapped down to the smallest detail to minimize risk of harm to them, since if they were to get kidnapped, it would immediately wipe billions off the stock price. Do you really think that the only reason Bezos hasn't been captured is because ordinary people with guns just chose not to do so, and if anyone wanted, they could just kidnap Bezos easily? What percent of ordinary people like you or I have "skills" and "inclination" that can beat that hired by Bezos' billions?
But message received -- Jack Ma probably would have a team of bodyguards, and the people who could get past that probably wouldn't need to manipulate markets using his appearance on a conference call to make money.
I was wrong, I see that now!
1. https://www.ft.com/content/b3a94f55-5e44-417f-a869-a542d0527...
I am pretty sure all sane people knowing that this video is going online had hold a huge long position on Alibaba shares.
I think the whole point of the messaging is to make it obvious what’s happened without explicitly saying it and a deepfake doesn’t help with that. If they had done something worse they would have done it deliberately and would want to prove it. Kind of like when the Russians assassinate some dissident and go on their news to say “we absolutely deny the allegations that so and so was assassinated but I guess it just shows what happens when you are a traitor”
Uh, resurfacing from a fancy prison cell, perhaps? Can anyone find the video?
EDIT: Here's the raw video: https://twitter.com/globaltimesnews/status/13517514568277196....
If you watch his eye movements, it looks like he's reading from a script.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3118454/alibaba-f...
Looks like it could be some form of house arrest.
If Bezos or Gates were to give an address like this, they'd have a great camera setup in their fancy home office with good lighting.
For reference, take a look at Gates appearing on the Daily Show: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iyFT8qXcOrM.
Ma looks the opposite here.
I mean if I video conferenced with you right now you'd probably speculate I've been coopted by Communist powers because simply because my background isn't up to your standards (it'd be of a water heater and radon pipes since I'm in the basement).
If I saw Zuck, Satya or Sundar do a video conference looking like they're chained to the radiator in somebody's basement, I'd also be kinda concerned. (At least for the latter two. Zuck, maybe not so much.)
The OP's comments about the appearance of the video is completely irrelevant and merely serving to throw speculative shade. For what it's worth, something probably did happen but his choice of webcam + background probably has nothing to do with it, but rampant speculation and false information is how we lead to the capital riots.
While the idea of gulags and "re-education camps" pervade Western perceptions of Chinese life, the reality is that conformity and centralized government is probably more dull than you think.
Everyone is not how they normally appear because of the pandemic, and Ma addresses the reason why he's just video taping himself in a room because of this. Stop armchair speculating.
That said, I actually agree with you that the "hurr durr CCP torture cell" comments are overblown. It's entirely plausible that he's keeping a low profile for a while, if likely in response to some rather heavy-handed advice.
So yes we are in agreement that the OP's comment is adds no substance to the conversation and is pure "hurr durr CCP torture cell" that just furthers the stereotypes of China.
Just to clarify, I'm not really in a position to analyze the meaning behind his current attire and choice of background relative to his past, so I'll take your word on your analysis of that.
This is a picture from today.
https://x0.ifengimg.com/ucms/2021_04/C5A7B512BF72106A6497177...
Same event from 2019.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/09/10/world/10alibaba/m...
He upgraded from sweatpants to khakis. I think people are over reading the situation. All the usual factors that gets someone disappeared is not present with Ma's current faux pas.
The Bezos and Gates example is just that, and example of famous people that we familiar with and that's it.
Chill man. Not everything is about race.
Most people would consider Elon to be eccentric, Paul Graham to not look like traditional VC, and these superficial aspects are frankly irrelevant. So why is it ok to use that to insinuate stereotypes and hand-wavy assertions of malfeasance.
Perhaps for you there is no consequence, but much like calling the coronavirus the "China virus", you're doing cultural damage by spreading negative stereotypes via fabricated or insinuated purely speculative assertions. The stereotype here is that China is associated with as some dystopian backwards society that has done no favors for its citizenry, which may or may not be true, but is definitely not defended by any objective evidence presented by the OP.
To flip the scenario, imagine if some random people from China commented about how the US elections seems like there was rampant fraud, without much supporting evidence. By lending credence to something without any concrete evidence you give it some air of legitimacy. When you do so by purely speculating on non-important things you've entered the realm of purely pushing an agenda with no substance.
I think people are mostly just trying to figure out what is going on with one of the richest/most powerful people in the world. There's not a lot of evidence to go on, so any scrap is potentially relevant. In your view, what are the best theories for his behavior?
And this isn't just an academic or social exercise; Alibaba jumped billions due to this appearance.
The HN commentary went from 'Jack Ma is a national security threat' to 'Jack Ma is a poor victim of the CCP will will never be seen again' to 'this is fake, he is still jailed'. If he shows up someone else in person next time, will people say that the CCP staged that too? It's getting too ridiculous.
Cyrus Janssen, an expat who has worked in China for 12 years, blogged about this. I think he has a much more accurate view of what happened. Jack Ma was laying low, not jailed. And the rrason why his comments pissed off people is because the phase of development China is now in, rather than a generic "thou shall not criticize the party" https://cyrusjanssen.substack.com/p/trump-free-speech-and-wh...
In contrast to China's reputation here in the west, the govt actually DOES listen to criticism. Yes they censor at the same time. Calling for violence and overthrow of the govt is not allowed. But at the same time they do listen, and for the past 20 years they've continuously reformed policy based on citizen's criticism on social media, or those submitted via official channels. The key is to be constructive, and to criticize policy rather than people.
This also applies to this latest incident. Yes it bugged a lot of people in the government, but at the same time they're really looking into the actual criticism made and whether there's a need for reform.
I am from China and I have family in China.
The only mental gymnastics I see are in the post I am replying to.
I'm not sure where on HN you found the sentiment Jack Ma was considered a national security threat. I think you're painting a picture here that is very bizarre, and not supplying the context necessary to understand why.
During the HN submission about Ant's IPO, before it was halted. For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24910410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24906771
China is awesome. The CCP sucks.
CCP is mainland China. According to a poll by Harvard, who collected data over a 15 year period through anonymous in-person interviews, support for the central government has increased in this 15 year period. In 2016 (last year of the study), it was at an all-time high: 96% of respondents said they're satisfied or very satisfied with the central government.
That doesn't mean I "love the CCP". But is there any other party out there who actually advances the interests of Chinese civilization?
We’ve been through this before with other business people or defrocked public officials: Jack Ma is currently having a peaceful relaxing vacation at one of the party’s many secure resorts (Chinese have memes too). Whether he comes out of this like Fan Binbin or not isn’t anything we will know until it happens.
Second, you're essentially saying that if the other person lives in China it doesn't matter what they say. Think about that for a second, and also about whether or not it really matters where they live if you've put some critical thought into their arguments. Granted some of what he says is subjective, but for something like this that's all you can really get. But if you've already decided the enemy must be wrong then there's no point discussing anything.
Third, the OP you were replying to said he lived in China, but according to his Twitter he's not living in China. So does that meet your standards of considering his opinions?
Neither myself, nor Cyrus Janssen, are currently living in China. This is my genuine opinion, believe it or not. Nobody forces me, nobody pays me. I thought people are supposed to be "against the CCP but support the Chinese people". Is your support limited to Chinese people who are against the CCP? Why do you not reflect for a while on why someone like me, who has grown up with western culture and has independently investigated China, is not as anti-China as you are? Why is it hard to accept that maybe some of of core assumptions you have about China is wrong?
And no, you don't go to jail for not toeing the party line. That's not how it works. They censor you if your views are stirring up social unrest or calling for overthrow. But they don't force you to say things they want.
At least, that's the case for average citizen. I suppose if you're a high-level business executive with many ties to the government, then things become more complex. But that's not very different from the west, is it? If you piss off a government customer, you won't be jailed, but do you think they'd be happy to continue doing business with you?
We don't see Jeff Bezos in hiding for doing that, nor would he have to go into hiding for anything far less.
I don't say this to accuse you (@dang trying not to flamewar) — do you not see that this argument is a little disingenuous? If you don't, I'd love to hear your thinking on why.
It's not at all strange to have multiple factions in an organizations who are after multiple vendors, as tool for an internal power war. Maybe if I piss off the guy who chose me as vendor, then his rivals will use that fact against him.
My point is, social relations are complex. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequence.
In general it does mean freedom from legal consequences and government interference, with few exceptions.
I consider freedom of speech a baseline, and I think it's one of the only things the US Constitution got right.
No you don’t. But you might find your work visa renewal denied. Things can get inconvenient really quickly, as a foreigner you don’t want to be a grass mud horse while in China, river crab is the only way to go.
> If you're Jeff Bezos and you piss off the guy in a government department...
Then Jeff Bezos sues the government, which is exactly what happened.
Daniel Dumbrill, a vlogger in China, literally criticized the Guangzhou government for its negligent behavior against African workers. I did the same. We did this more than a year ago and we're both still fine.
> Then Jeff Bezos sues the government, which is exactly what happened.
You missed the point. You can't sue the government into continuing to do business with you.
You can do that actually.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/22/amazon-files-suit-protesting...
https://www.onmsft.com/news/corrected-evaluation-flaw-may-fa...
> You missed the point. You can't sue the government into continuing to do business with you.
No, of course you can, and that is what Amazon is doing.
C'mon now, this isn't exactly some big exoneration one way or the other, is it? This happens from time to time. We both know there's a list of famous and semi-famous people as long as your arm you haven't heard from in a while.
Where's Fan Bingbing? Where's the former head of Interpol, Meng Hongwei? [2] Think they too have discovered a sudden need for mainland medical treatment -- or do you think it's more likely they may have discovered a passion for mining minerals also?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/world/asia/xiao-jianhua-c...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-06/the-people-who-china-...
So no I don't buy the retoric of misunderstood China
> I am from China and I have family in China.
So you're not behind the great firewall and don't need to contend with official internet censorship.
Urgh, let me tell you some facts.
On February 1 2020, I travelled from China (not Wuhan) back to the Netherlands, having aborted my holiday early. Wuhan was in lockdown for a week at that point, and my flight to the Netherlands was the very last one I could get. At that point, the WHO also declared global emergency.
I arrived in Germany and the Netherlands. What happened in the airports? No temperature checks or other checks. Nobody who took note of my name for contact tracing. Nothing.
Back in the Netherlands, I called the CDC: can I get tested? Reply: no, not even if I pay for it myself. I ask: do I need to quarantine myself? Reply: nope.
I didn't trust that. Chinese media has been raging for weeks about how infectious and dangerous it was, and that it could be spread asymptomatically. So I voluntarily quarantined myself and my family for 2 weeks. Turned out I wasn't infected.
Up until March or April or so, I saw on tv and newspapers and how multiple western governments called covid just a flu, that we're "well prepared", even criticizing the lockdown in Wuhan as a human rights violation.
You want to talk negligence? Okay, China could have done a better job, but let's say they were earlier by 2 weeks and reported to WHO mid-Dec rather than late-Dec. Would that have changed anything when for months the west totally dismissed the virus as being dangerous, and gleed at China's misfortune?
> and how they treated the doctors that sounded the alarm
Li Wenliang was not jailed. He was reprimanded by the police, and could go back to work the next day. He wasn't the first one: the first doctor who said something was Jiang Jixian, whose work led to the WHO escalation on Dec 31, 1 day after Li Wenliang said something. The Chinese court later ruled that the police's treatment of Li Wenliang was unjustified. The police then apologized.
See also: "Some whistleblowers are more equal than others" https://www.mango-press.com/some-whistleblowers-are-more-equ...
> the HK issue and with the Uighur concentration camps
These are whole different, and rather complicated topics. I could go into them, but I need to know from you: do you actually want to discuss, or is this meant as a diss to me?
> So you're not behind the great firewall huh? Reminds me of Chinese agents bullying Chinese students in Canada to not badmouth the government
So what? I don't "bully" others for disagreeing with me about China, I talk to them. If you ask me whether those students should bully, then I'd say no: they should discuss. That's something they need to learn.
But the same applies to a great many people in the west, who despite being raised in a free society, prefer to cancel rather than talk.
Still, that doesn't mean that those students' support for China is not genuine or legit.
The reality is exact the opposite, and elites routinely keeping shooting the country, and themselves in the foot. Why should they care?
Any ranked party member half way the ladder already has enough privileges to swim in lard for the rest of his life.
I was pretty much there when Shenzhen govt bulldozed close to 10000 factories in between 2009, and 2012 for universiade vanities. That was one third of regions industry! One third
That was single most economically suicidal move I've seen any government do, and that was right after the global financial crisis.
That made a double digit dip in country's exports, and industrial output, so big it was.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gui_Minhai#Release_from_PSB_cu...
And it is bad. The country run by a freaking communist party, if somebody didn't notice. And we are not even mentioning gulag, and hookers.
> In contrast to China's reputation here in the west, the govt actually DOES listen to criticism.
Because it is afraid of it?
> The key is to be constructive, and to criticize policy rather than people.
And follow the example of thousands of Chinese rural petitioners "constructively" sent to gulags.
> Calling for violence and overthrow of the govt is not allowed.
But how else would people stage a revolution against Beijing?
The GULAG was a specific USSR agency and their camps. You can't just call any prison system you personally don't like GULAG.
In the past 40 years, the freedoms of Chinese people have exploded. People could not choose what to wear, where to work, what to eat, where to live. Now they can. Millions travel world-wide every year, and all of them return home. Why would they do that if China is as bad as you say?
As for "a revolution against Beijing": prof. Mahbubani says that there are actually hundreds of protests in China every year. But those people aren't protesting against the central government: they're trying to get the central government's attention, to help them with their grievances. The central government is very popular. According to a poll by Harvard, who collected data over a 15 year period through anonymous in-person interviews, support for the central government has increased in this 15 year period. In 2016 (last year of the study), it was at an all-time high: 96% of respondents said they're satisfied or very satisfied with the central government.
What makes you believe you are more right than prof. Mahbubani and Harvard?
It's easy to say "X is bad" when you don't have to care about practical consequences, like whether there are better alternatives, why we're in a suboptimal situation in the first place, and how to get to a better place.
Yes, very much so.
Your presumption is that if CPCs rule, whose rule is a chaos itself, disappears, there will be more chaos?
We are talking about immediate ruinous effects for the majority of Chinese every day communists stay in power.
The moment it stops, lawless land repossessions instantaneously stop, house confiscations stop, fake cases, and expropriations against entrepreneurs stop.
> It's easy to say "X is bad" when you don't have to care about practical consequences
Practical consequences of letting communists to stay in power are millions left destitute every year after their land, property, and businesses are stolen.
To make it more concrete, there are people (granted, overwhelmingly ethnically Had Chinese fluent in the language) who voluntarily choose to reside in China over the US or EU, and I don't think they are irrational about it.
Because getting a Visa that lets you stay abroad is actually really hard
Are you saying East Germany was awesome and things should have stayed as they were?
Heck today's China is not the 70s China.
I'm more afraid of going to the US, where any Chinese person can be labeled a 'CCP spy' for no reason.
If you actually want to discuss this, I'd be happy to. But I need to know whether you are genuine, or whether you merely mean to diss me.
Telling that the Global Times (CPC-affiliated media) refers to him as the "former executive chairman of #Alibaba", and that he's making the video from some "rural teacher-themed social welfare event".
This isn't what normally happens to billionaire corporate executives, unless they've been convicted of violating the law.
It's less strange than time tested.
No need to make it up to be more eerie than it is
The real Jack Ma is getting his kidneys harvested right now, because apparently, that’s what the CCP does to their own citizens (according to western media).
/s
https://web.archive.org/web/20120205064042/http://www.usemba...
https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/4b6fe16df.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20090620050738/http://www.americ...
At this time, Chinese political structure was _thoroughly_ infiltrated by CIA assets. There's also orthogonal indicators like amount of immuno-suppressant drugs in Chinese market cannot support a vast shadow organ harvesting system like FLG claims. There's a reason no credible institutions without FLG sponsorship have ever endorsed these findings. Including Mike Pompeo, at the urging for US lawmakers no less, who got drunk on FLG/epochtime coolaid. There's a special tier of ridiculous claims when even Pompeo can't spin it against China. FLG organ harvesting / vivisection has always been atrocity porn for useful idiots. It shouldn't be surprising these narratives are finally gaining traction during a period where media landscape is generating loads of them, when epochetimes is the #1 news paper on the appstore.
I say this as someone with several FLG family members who was prosecuted in China, they are delusional cultists. Everything is peaceful and good intensions until they convince themselves not to seek medical advice and dies from completely preventable illnesses.
Also — I didn't know the Epoch Times was the #1 newspaper in the App Store. I'm definitely not on that side of the political spectrum, if that's your worry. My concerns about China come more from a progressive perspective. That said, I do think the treatment of Falun Gong in China is atrocious, and I have some Falun Gong friends/acquaintances in the Netherlands (perhaps a bias).
Organ harvesting is a real problem in China, whether on a small scale (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-55097424) or large scale (read through this article and souces https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...).
Black market organ trading is real problem but also stop gap solution in China, a country with abysmally low organ donation rates that's improving since reforms. Reference per capita transplant rate, China is 1/4 of west, however large the market, it isn't enough to provide even parity availability, not to mention large numbers goes towards transplant tourism for western customers who never seem to get appropriate denouncement from FLG despite their massive discourse power. It takes two to tango.
At the end of the day, there are irreconcilable priorities and moral calculus due to differences in culture and development. CN transplant system is moving in the right direction - FLG didn't convince west to stop getting transplants in China, CCP had to legislate against when the time was right. Things improve incrementally, otherwise FLG would need to resurrect long debunked accusations to suit their agenda.
My guess, applying this both ways, is that he's been ill or having some treatment or been in hospital, and that perhaps if it was bad, the calculation came out that disappearance rumours were better than "Jack Ma on his death bed" stories.
How can we be sure it’s not a deepfake? I would have been more confident if he met them in person.
thank you dang
Maybe Ma was just trying to stay out of the limelight[0] until the investigation of Ant Financial settled down a bit. He also owns SCMP[1], which has a mix of supportive and critical articles on the central government. Assuming he wanted to throw some pressure, in the mild form of (probably mostly disregarded) external censure back on the investigation, he may have been passive aggressively refusing to show his face. Perhaps to sow suspicion he'd been mysteriously detained in order to draw (Western) media scrutiny, and the "inevitable" torrent of China-critical speculation that invites. Of course, it could also be an Elon Musk-style stock manipulation play, but I think he's more motivated by the passions than pure financials.
Speculation is fun, but it's possible this is apophenia.
[0]no pun intended, he does like to dress up in camp drag and sing, if you don't believe, search for the videos, it's pretty funny for an (ex) CEO to do this
[1]this article doesn't have much more than the Reuters link, but does have a couple of videos https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3118454/alibaba-f...
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/facebook-uses-...
Together with the geopolitics surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, the public disappearance [1] of Jack Ma may turn out to be a key turning point for the modern Chinese state.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#Public_disappearance
https://www.odditycentral.com/news/chinas-rich-can-hire-body...
China has done this before to other 'elites'. So did Saudi Arabia... this isn't showing up for a prison sentence.