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endisneigh

Your take is interesting:

1. Hasn’t China’s economy been growing steadily for decades?

2. Hasn’t China formed new trading partnerships with many countries in Europe?

3. China is not a dictatorship.

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1) Yes, but that's slowing by all external measures

2) Yes, but as with the agreements with my state (Victoria), those are fleeting and mostly gesture - the tide is turning against China since these wheels were set in motion several years ago

3) President for life? How isn't it a dictatorship? How is the leader replaced if the populace does not like him - and how do they make that known, when you can't even use an open communication platform like Clubhouse in China?

The population can't but other high level party officials could perhaps. The CPP also has had much internal drama over centralization, the Xi pro-centralization faction could also loose out more broadly if there was a power struggle.

IMO dictatorship / monarchy is a funny thing because after a certain scale the person at the top simply cannot be an absolutely power in the same way because there's too much going on. I think there more reasonable things to look at are:

- How many extra luxuries does then nominal ruler get, and do they "distract" from their power/responsibilities. (Perhaps there is even a strict luxery power trade off? not sure.)

- How is centralized is the bureaucracy, e.g. how many people outside the capital have power greater than those in the capital.

Being President for life is not automatically a dictatorship. The Republic of Venice elected its Doge for life, as does the modern day state of Vatican City. Certainly it would be easier for the Pope to steer the barque of St. Peter if it were. And yet if you pay attention to the church there’s plenty of infighting and politics, enough that the Pope has to take years to gather enough political capital to act. Both of these countries are functionally oligarchies, I’d say.

That said the way in which Pooh Bear uses the anticorruption law to silence and jail political rivals is definitely evidence of dictatorship.

Dictators have broad powers -- the tenure is orthogonal. You could have a dictator who's in for a year

> Dictators have broad powers -- the tenure is orthogonal. You could have a dictator who's in for a year

Technically you're right, but typically the highest priority for a dictator is to extend their tenure, indefinitely if at all possible, by exercising those broad powers.

Making a foundational set of laws dictator-proof is actually a hard problem. It is kind of like designing a programming language that is deliberately Turing-incomplete. You're trying to make abusing the system impossible, without crippling the desired functionality.

> Hasn’t China’s economy been growing steadily for decades?

Not steadily - but geometrically (if not near-exponentially). Rapid expansion is not sustainable. I compare China's growth from the 1970s through to the early-2000s to the US's postwar boom years: eventually things settle-down. I suspect the people at the top (whether in the CCP, private business interests, whereever) are uncomfortably having to acclimatize to this slower world of theirs they now find themselves in.

> Hasn’t China formed new trading partnerships with many countries in Europe?

News to me. Link?

> China is not a dictatorship

You're technically correct - but consider that China is simply too big to be run as a dictatorship, and the CCP do not act in the interests of their citizens' human rights and individual freedoms.

I don't understand what China's leadership is afraid of such that they have their internet filter and suppress independent journalism. And I don't believe you can have economic freedom without also having individual freedom.

China setup a new trade deal in the beginning of the new year however it’s been pretty contentious due to the alleged human rights violations (I say alleged as China denies them). Prior to this China did trade with specific countries.

> You're technically correct - but consider that China is simply too big to be run as a dictatorship, and the CCP do not act in the interests of their citizens' human rights and individual freedoms. I don't understand what China's leadership is afraid of such that they have their internet filter and suppress independent journalism. You can't have economic freedom without individual freedom.

I’m not really here to defend or attack China - it just annoys me that such blatant misinformation is being spread.

> You're technically correct - but consider that China is simply too big to be run as a dictatorship, and the CCP do not act in the interests of their citizens' human rights and individual freedoms.

Ya, it’s more like a family dictatorship where economic and political power is concentrated in the hand of a few “red” families. That they made that obvious with Xi is interesting.

> 3. China is not a dictatorship

Technically no, but without term limits and little accountability isn't the paramount leader a dictator in practice?

You should read Populist Authoritarianism by Tang. They explain this better than I ever could.

The tldr however is there is a difference. China is not a dictatorship. I’m not sure why such blatant misinformation is being spread.

What's the practical difference? You get disappeared if you say anything bad about the government. There are no term limits for the head of state. While "dictatorship" is the wrong word, I think people are right to evoke the comparison.

Are you saying an authoritarian government and a dictatorship are the same type of government?

I mean they’re literally different things. You wouldn’t call China a monarchy even though a monarch can do similar things to a dictator, right? If the goal is to say China is bad let’s just say that - let’s not misrepresent their form of government.

I don’t understand the relevance of the lack of term limits. Does not having term limits make a dictatorship?

Nobody cares what you call it whether dictatorship, authoritarian or most democratic country ever.

Parent says “you get dissappeared if you say anything about government”. When that is true, we call it dictatorship. Terminology does not matter. We are talking about practical results of it.

So any country that can disappear critics is a dictatorship?

In practice, usually yes. I suppose there are a few counterexamples like Aristotle, though he was disliked for anti-democratic views. But even in the feudal era, kings couldn’t just go murder lords who opposed them. Not without an army.

Don't you find the pedantry a bit tiresome? I was curious to see where you were going with your earlier positions, but it now seems that you were just being a contrarian for the sake of some intellectual jousting and that you're now attempting to play on technicalities, but I can't see to what end.

A dictatorship is a country that is ruled by a single individual (or perhaps a very small clique of people, as in a military junta) where no one else has any effective power to countermand a decree. Monarchies can be dictatorships: there's no effective difference between an absolute monarchy and a dictatorship. In somewhat more informal terms, dictatorships are a form of government where suppression of dissension is a key goal of the regime, in addition to the emphasis on autocratic rule.

Xi Jinping's centralization efforts during his term do strengthen the case for China becoming a dictatorship. The ending of term limits (as it does elsewhere) also likely signals a desire to vest power in the personal authority of the leader and not in a broader political party.

> Hasn’t China’s economy been growing steadily for decades?

Fake GDP #s, especially since 2010. CCP does NOT have a growth goal in the recent five year plan, meaning they can't fake increasing defaults and can't increase construction spendings anymore due to ballooning debt.

> Hasn’t China formed new trading partnerships with many countries in Europe?

First time in 30 years EU has sanctioned China. The CAI deal (Europe-China trade deal) is now being put on hold since various members of EU being sanctioned. Potentially a dead trade deal going forward.

> China is not a dictatorship.

It is. Please read up on Xi Jing Ping's personality, his success on removing most of his enemies and secure his power, and changing the law for unlimited terms

If you think China’s growth is fake then I don’t know what to tell you. I invite you to talk to people who lived in China in the early 2000s and live there now.

> It is. Please read up on Xi Jing Ping's personality, his success on removing most of his enemies and secure his power, and changing the law for unlimited terms

How much do you know about Chinese politics? Xi Jing Pings power isn’t as absolute as the American media would like you to believe. In fact he’s in a very vulnerable position.

https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3015206/c...

China’s economic census uncovers more fake data as officials promise ‘zero tolerance’ to data manipulation

https://www.heritage.org/international-economies/commentary/...

The Problem of False Chinese Economic Data

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/yes-china-lying-about...

Yes China Is Lying About the Size of Their Economy

I very intentionally did not specify a number - I said very generally that the Chinese economy has been growing steadily. This is pretty much indisputable. Your links do not dispute that China has grown in this century, more the extent to which the growth has occurred.

China is likely exaggerating their growth but regardless it has been growing.

That’s a remarkably vague metric. I’d bet that almost every single country on earth would meet the criteria of “country X has grown this century”

Sure - however the post I responded to said China had a declining economy. Is that correct or not?

Some argue china has been underreporting it's GDP. It kinda aligns with my own experience, when I visited countries of similar per capita GDP like Mexico and Brazil, I definitely find that china has a much higher standard if living. I'm not just talking about first tier chinese cities, but tier 2-4 compared to places like Cancun and Sao Paolo

Are those reputable sources?

The heritage foundation at the very least is a conservative think tank, and American conservatives are every bit as ambitious and bad faith as the CPC when it comes to power.

I lived in Beijing in 2002 (for 6 months), first visited in 1999 (when north west 4th ring was just a ditch), and then lived in Beijing from 2007 to 2016.

Growth was extraordinary, but there are definitely problems with empty apartments and shopping malls (at least in Beijing). It is difficult to pick out what is real growth and what is simply government driven.

> How much do you know about Chinese politics? Xi Jing Pings power isn’t as absolute as the American media would like you to believe. In fact he’s in a very vulnerable position.

Chinese politics are famously opaque (the national congress is obviously rubber stamp), but I think it’s pretty obvious now that a few red families are calling the shots, and Xi’s power as a princeling is far from illusory as it was with Hu (before I would have said party elders)

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