Does anyone have any book recommendations for non-chinese people to understand CCP power structures? I'm completely lost in all of this Jack Ma stuff.
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://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).
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.
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.
Another book that may help is "Has China Won?" by Kishore Mahbubani.
https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-l...
"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.