Xi Jinping’s Capitalist Smackdown Sparks a $1T Reckoning
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Bitcoin is the obvious example of something that should have been banned years ago (and all proof of work crypto), but there are so many examples coming up daily, if there was ever any faith in institutions it's eroding quickly, and once you remove that you accelerate the pathologies (people start acting like anything goes) and society starts to destabilise.
not that i would invest in bitcoins (or any crypto), but i don't see it as an obvious ban. The only reason i can deduce from your "obviousness" comment is that proof of works "wastes" energy. But then it is hypocritical to argue this when other modern conveniences also "waste" energy, and yet you don't call for a ban.
If a car burnt through a months worth of electricity for your home just so you could drive to the shops to get groceries and come back, then that would quickly be banned. Bitcoin and other currencies have a lot of money being pumped into the system by people who refuse to account for the wastefulness that is crypto and instead, want to drive up their investment.
There's no replacement of traditional digital payments by cryptocurrencies.
Going back to the article, I'm glad China priorities it's people (funny to say that given the Xinjiang situation) over the profits of big corporations.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001
To beat the rest of the countries into submission. If all co2 emissions are under same cap-and-trade emissions system, from climate pov it doesn't matter that bitcoin is energy inefficient. The bitcoin miners will simply have to buy their emissions rights or use clean energy. Even if bitcoin energy use would skyrocket, the co2 emissions would continue to drop at the same rate as the co2 cap drops...
The root of the problem goes deeper - why haven't developed nations such as USA and Australia have co2 cap and trade? I'd blame fox news and its ilk, which have figured out which buttons to press on people to make them dumb. Despite the immense damage to environment and society they have created, democratic societies have not figured out how to fix that problem. Come on, we have had decades of time to monitor and learn of Murdoch et atll, and the problem has only got worse...
It's clear cut that o the whole crypto is a huge negative for society.
With your reasoning, they provide no utility, waste an insane amount of energy, mostly involve violence, etc.
I don't want to live in a country that starts banning things for those reasons.
The utility of cryptocurrencies is not decided by governments, or companies, or you. The utility will be decided by reality. I like living in democracy and capitalism, but it seems you prefer a dictatorships.
No the utility is determined by you me and everyone else collectively. The problem is financial mechanisms that allow inflating these bubbles are not market driven, central banks are flooding the markets with low interest rates, if they want to direct the markets they need to react to negative distortions they cause.
Seems like a good reason to store your value in something else than central bank tokens.
You call it "inflating bubbles", I call it competition for something central banks have a monopoly on.
Not the way a car, a phone, a hairdresser, a movie or Google maps does. The economy is just what everyone does/make. Think of the opportunity cost of all that human resource being wasted on a pyramid/ponzi scheme, which does not produce any value. It only redistributes it, poorly. Yeah thanks. We really need more gambling infrastructure with even less oversight.
If we would make a list of important things we want to explore further, how would crypto be on it? Why?
It's ok as a storage of wealth, but the amount of investment money and energy wasted on this stuff. And in the end it's going to bankrupt gullible idiots that put their pension in dogecoin. Maybe in the US you just let these morons starve, but in the most of the world, you wouldn't. So it makes sense to protect society against having to bail out suckers from a completely useless and pointless economic exploitation.
So I can imagine banning on on the sheer notion the existence is a net loss for society.
What is sad is that some of the top comments on hacker news are dismissing this cool new tech by choosing to focus only on the negatives.
While other activities may be wasteful, proof-of-work is waste distilled almost to its purest essence. It's literally a race to see who can waste the most. There's really no comparison.
If they didn't have their thumb on the scale, interest rates would be higher and boring, stodgy savers would be in control of the money instead of the sort of people who think Bitcoin looks like a good idea.
If they don't want people putting money into insanely risky ventures they should stop punishing people who invest in low risk ventures.
* If the US Congress were capable of identifying pathological cases, would the government go through the ceremony of shutting down every couple of years just to remind everyone they can't balance budget?
* If the Chinese government could identify pathological cases, would we have error bars of +- 15 million deaths around their 60s-era economic policies when they tried to rush improvements through central planning?
Those are my top two favourites, but there are others. The approach the government has to climate change also springs to mind. You're calling for something that we have fairly solid evidence that they can't reliably and safely do. They can kill off things that are novel, sure. They aren't reliable at making sweeping judgements about what technological changes are good or bad. Government's are very marginally competent at identifying value for money.
It is far safer to let something like Bitcoin run than risk, eg, a government nipping the next internet in the bud because people are using it to look at dirty photos. The only thing to complain about here is that they've disabled the extremely reliable capitalist incentive structure that would stop people doing things they know to be a waste of time and money.
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/asia/2021/07/west-isn-t-d...
The previous leader however must be reeling in pain.
I think it was Warren Buffet that compared the US economy to a fast moving train, and that a stick or a stone in the rails won't make it derail. We also have to acknowledge that China is also a massive moving train at high speed, and it won't derail.
That's why they can make these decisions. Remember that companies are apologizing to China on a monthly basis, I haven't seen a single Chinese company issue apologies for anything related to offences to western countries.
This was true ten years ago. It hasn't been since Xi became more...permanent.
The headline case is Hong Kong's accession, where a territory that would have--without much controversy--reverted to Beijing within a generation was accelerated to meet a 68-year old man's timeline. This not only cost China internationally, not only cost it in Hong Kong, it also neutered support in Taiwan for peaceful reunification. Bad for China. Good for Xi.
> haven't seen a single Chinese company issue apologies for anything related to offences to western countries
Corporate apologies to governments have zero value in the West. One could argue its pragmatism. One could argue we're jaded. But a Chinese company doing something wrong and apologizing for it could be seen as possibly more insulting than paying the fine and fixing the problem.
Similarly, if our companies can save money or gain advantage by issuing apologies, power to them.
With that said:
Global investors are getting squashed. But there must be global investors who shorted these stocks or bought put options. Why aren’t they covered in this article?
I’m missing nuance on the investment side. From a political standpoint, I want to follow this more closely. I can imagine that the west might take some inspiration on how to deal with big tech.
Armchair investor and my political pedigree is “I vote” (aka a total commoner).
But even so, shorts "dont make the world go round". They are a necessary mechanism against exuberance, but companies selling shares and using those to invest/grow -- that's the heart of the promise of shareholder capitalism.
Why would you short a tutoring stock, especially if whats publicly traded is an investment fund that only does it as a small part of their business?
In China, politicians control billionaires. At least in theory, especially given how much the Chinese political establishment is attuned to the needs of the Chinese commoner, this does protect the national interest.
In China the corruption of government officials is several orders of magnitude higher. We’re talking wholesale theft of govt assets in the billions of dollars.
Chinese leaders also have a much more tenuous hold on power. They aren’t smacking down Jack Ma because they are looking out for the Chinese commoner (though they might benefit), their top priority is looking out for themselves.
For now their priorities intersect with the chinese commoner, ie. Protecting themselves via serving the chinese commoner. Another bonus to this is the ability to make harder decisions now for the sake of the future.
The fact of the matter is that with this 'aligned interests' dictatorial style you can more done and plan for the future - so long as that future is aligned with your population.
I'd say the standoffish bipartisan politics of the US is far harder to get things done, but hey, as I'm sure some of you would say, it's better to have the freedom.
The bipartisan politics of the the US is not a bug, it’s a feature. It was entirely intentional that power was split and broad consensus was required to get anything done.
by the way, i actually really disdain founding fathers veneration, but two-party deadlock was infamously _not_ intentional. neither was our increasingly corporatocratic government.
It absolutely was.
Canada, where the majority party can pass whatever they want (their majority practically guarantees it), the unelected Senate almost always rubber stamps it and the head of state is one and the same as the ruling party, it's clear that the US design is intentional.
Nothing gets passed in the US unless: 1) House approves it, 2) Senate approves it, 3) President signs it. All three bodies are independently elected.
It was clearly intentional to be much more challenging to pass legislation in the US. What you call gridlock, I call the system operating as designed.
As another example, the NRA preventing gun control laws in spite of school shootings. The path the US has chosen is both poison and boon. The trouble is who gets to suffer from the poison?
Once you accumulate enough wealth and/or power unintended consequences just keep increasing. They never decrease. And the 6 inch chimp brain everyone has dooms it to blunder.
The East India Company did hand over ownership to the Queen after 200 years of raking it in. Why? And look at the state of the Queen today.
Xi and the Billionaires are trapped by their own hubris.
The problem is when said politicians are a small faction of fallible people with unlimited power and no procedure of being peacefully replaced. Such a setup strongly hints at the fact that they really don’t want to give up control, which implies any policy is bound to protect their position first. They might act selflessly or benefit the nation at some particular point in time, but blindly counting on it being consistently so seems foolish.
Xi Jinping is literally a billionaire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/business/china-parliament...
There is no altruistic motivation to better the lot of the common person. The only motivation is to maintain control.
I don't take it even as a control maintenance. They are now literally back to years when they were taking it as an insult for anybody to be more rich, and successful than a village party head.
It's 100% truth. Heard stories of people having their houses demolished for building them more fancy than the house of a party leader nearby, and that was not in the cultural revolution era, but barely 3 decades ago.
Bad old times are back.
...
>PRC (national) interests
Governance priorities and development generally going right under Xi. Crack egg to make omelette etc. Incidentally, political executions also way down after his reforms, customary executions now "death with reprieve" sentences, where death is suspended. Way things are going, Xi's hagliography is going to be 10% bad and 90% good, especially if he can avoid war with US. Otherwise, hard to argue he isn't resolving or trying to resolves some of modern PRC's most entrenched problems across many domains.
https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...
That’s a terrible term. Bloomberg already has a bad history of journalism, but appreciating Authoritarianism is a new low
People should stop calling China a communist state, when isn't. If they we are truly communist, not will be medical insurances or a "entrepreneur" driving it. It would have a public medical system that cover everything, and the business would be driven by the workers of it.
However, that they hit hard on private education, it's a good step. Private education never should allowed to exists. Only a quality public education system can give access to good education to everybody.
The only communistic country that had a moderately good public medical system was German Democratic Republic, and it was because the constant influx of help and resources from the West.
The more communist a State is, the more miserable it is. You had China with Mao making tens of millions of people die of Hunger. Was Mao not communistic?
At the start of the 20th century Russia population was bigger and richer than the US of A.
Lenin destroyed the economy and made millions of people die from hunger, way more than on WWI. Was he not communistic?
Let's not talk about Stalin or PolPot.
>Private education never should allowed to exists. Only a quality public education system can give access to good education to everybody.
You are confusing education with forced indoctrination and propaganda.
I can educate and think for myself. Just repeating a mantra or dogma ignoring History like you do is not education.
They're correct that a state built on communist principles would have free healthcare for all, and would have proper free education for all. However, the reality is markedly different, and all the so-called communist countries are anything but.
There is no such thing as communist state that has achieved communism because at that point in the world states no longer exist because classes no longer exist. Such a world actually existed for hundreds of thousands of years as technology didn't allow one set of people to produce so much surplus so that another set of people could live without directly producing, a requirement for a state.
There are no known steps to "achieve communism", so there is no laundry list of requirements that make a communist state. In practice however some kind of liberal market is required because the world is currently dominated by capitalist ideology which will destroy any obviously communist state and a destroyed state cannot achieve communism.
These, as each is usually understood, are not even approximately the same thing, and any theory which posits that they are identical has either adopted nonuseful definitions of at least one of them to make that true, or is simply logically wrong.
> Such a world actually existed for hundreds of thousands of years as technology didn't allow one set of people to produce so much surplus so that another set of people could live without directly producing
Sets of people that don't directly produce have existed throughout all of human existence.
> a requirement for a state.
It's a requirement for the continuation of the species; infants aren't direct producers. How many total (and total-equivalent composed of part-time slices of sometime-direct-producers) non-direct-producers a society supports is a product of productivity, sure.
But at almost any level of that where one can have continuity of the species one could also have (and, indeed, human societies have had) a state; agents and decisionmakers of the state can, after all, be direct producers as well, and historically largely have been.
There are just not enough proper schools for them to attend. They have to compete for the spot to get an education. And all these elite colleges/high schools are located in Beijign, Shanghai, etc. They usually take in local students first.
So you see the problem. They will always be some form of private tutoring as long as there are immensive competition for basic education.
Obviously educating citizens is good for a nation. And if it is really what people want to do, that's good. But it would also be good to ensure people can make a good living and self actualize without a formal education.
How? Wanting magic to be true doesn't make it possible. If your economy is already strong enough to provide a good living to anyone who wants to be a noncontributing poorly educated self-actualizer, then OK, let them enjoy that. But what if it's not? Who supports them? Even developed countries with good social welfare usually make it hard to be voluntarily unemployed and receiving welfare just because you'd rather play on your hobbies than work for others' benefit. It's meant for people who want to work but can't, not those who don't want to but can.
You twisted my comment into a false dichotomy. Societies obviously cannot fully subsidize people to enjoy a life of the most self indulgent or pretentious interests. But a society can acknowledge that not everyone is going to grow skills, discover talents or develop interests in the same way. Perhaps the most efficient thing is to shrink agriculture work to the bare machine assisted minimum with a dichotomy of skilled labor at the top and a balloon of grunt workers at the bottom. On the other hand, growing a wide professional class of ag workers with more stake in the system may lead to happier workers and perhaps a more sustainable and durable ag sector. If a society needs to subsidize that or create a pipeline that carries workers out of primary education into that kind of work it may be preferable for less tangible reasons. It's absurd that we should drive forward with efficiency no matter how much it emiserates people. And to insist upon it with so much of the reward for it accruing at the top is downright feudal.
Even still, it's not necessarily true that funneling everyone into the knowledge economy is in fact better. If someone would be happy and productive farming five acres but they go to the city, get half a degree, crash out and end up in a very low value labor market, society has probably lost out. It is my opinion that economists view labor markets aa far too fluid. They don't account for the fact that people are more like bits of rock, sand and clay than they are like water. They clump together, break apart and get stuck.
But people mostly seem to want to be richer and are happy to forgo that kind of lifestyle in exchange for a higher paying job. Who are we to tell them that what they want is not what they should really want?
China needs more young people to be happy to be factory workers forever, instead of seeking out white-collar jobs.
But many young men and their parents are convinced that a University degree is essential to find a wife.
If the situation reverses to more women than men, by simple microeconomics the dating standards of women will fall and more families and men will be content in lower-status (but economically important) roles.
China could incentivize more women being born by allowing 'bride prices', paid to the bride's family instead of just being used for the wedding. Another option could be to encourage excess males to emigrate, as seems to be occurring in India.
> "Activity that is harmful to the economy?" I think they get much more glaring issues to care about if it comes to this.
> What about their wrong simply being "getting too rich, and successful," and causing somebody a burst of jealousy?
> Becoming richer than a partyman in some small village is very much a challenge to the party. What changed now is that the entire China has become that village.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28028463
> I keep the claim that the explanation is even more simpler: whomever becomes a big man in a country like China eventually goes down, and that's the whole story.
> There can only be one "big man" in such system, and he tolerates no competition.
> This consistently held true through the whole 40 years of modern China: whomever attains too much of the social, political, economical, cultural, moral, or even genealogical prominence consistently gets taken down. This is why most mainland Chinese have that fear of publicity, and standing out almost bordering on panic disorder. And this is why people attaining any level of prominence there keep leaving the country for the West.
> After 40 years of allowing the market to play an expanding role in driving prosperity, China’s leaders have remembered something important — they’re Communists.
China isn't a true communist state and hasn't been for a while. Yet the author feels the need to dunk on this straw man and defend capitalism and venture capitalists who lost money in the tutoring crackdown. The muddy Shanghai construction photo is a nice touch too.
If you just contrast what Xi is orchestrating vs what's happening in the US with open eyes, you'd see that maintaining the status quo is impossible. We're too fat and complacent and there are too many leeches on government spending. This is the holy shit kind of article that made me realize we're going to lose our place on top. I don't even know how to help stop it.
I've always used it as a way of testing my internet connection there since HN loads quickly and has been ignored by basically every filter everywhere. I haven't been to China since borders were shut down, but HN worked there last January.
And to address everything else, I wouldn't say China is Norway-level, but they're definitely on a very clear upward path of development and accelerating. I think a lot of other countries have gotten comfortable with their place somewhere near the top and assume it's an intrinsic trait their country holds, and not something they need to work for.
e.g., As an American, loads of people I know say America is the absolute greatest place on earth (maybe it is in some aspects). But mention that it's falling behind in some ways (crumbling infrastructure, etc) and some people refuse to acknowledge it. Say some countries (especially any country in Asia and particularly China) do any single thing better than the US, and a large number of people get absolutely enraged. It's wild. Even people who a couple years ago would've proudly shouted about how much they hate nationalism and especially jingoism seem to be falling into that trap.
It's hard to improve your country when people think country development is an immutable trait, and not something you need to constantly work for.
It been banner around a year ago when links to Github repos with Wuhan exposes started popping here.
The idea that a site should be banned because its users 'see nothing but negatives' is repugnant.
Edited: I'm talking specifically about Chinese tutoring industry. One comment below gives a very detailed description, which perfectly explains why I think it's worthless. We are all in the process of a revolution initiated by wiki/scihub/libgen. Whether agree with me or not, you are welcome.
Have you never had a great lecturer who can deliver information in a way which makes more sense to you then just reading it off a website?
Eventually this is a lazy mechanism to select prospective students to a course. The purpose of the course is to prepare people to build an air plane or be a good doctor, historian, architect, journalist or whatever. Not be good at exams and interviews.
When you make testing all about gatekeeping, wikis don't help, because the questions are not about test of knowledge of skill.
If you have a pervasive cram school culture in your country, eventually you have to import/buy from other people because your people are considered on-paper geniuses but are not good at any thing apart from acing testing.
I guess for where China stands now. Making chips, airplanes and space stations needs the real engineers not just the ones who can score well in exams.
For example they are not allowed to teach calculus, despite calculus making the tests easier, for the exact reason public schools do not introduce it in the standard curriculum. Instead the schools are places to drill test taking and memorize tricks to be used on said single exam.
It is an entire industry geared to a single once per year test. Every dollar spent targeting said test is an economic loss. It is the exact sort of economic loss one should expect from perverse incentives. Banning this industry papers over the symptoms of a broken system, it is an obvious move but not a brilliant one.
Why don't they teach calculus, i'm genuinely interested, you've left us hanging!
Edit: thinking on it a little, I'm guessing the missing sentence is 'because such calculus is not on the test'.
The tests are not easy, and the "passing score" is set by the sum of competition. The techniques allowed to be taught, and which get tested are obtuse. Instead of allowing brilliant students to progress into more difficult subjects the tests funnel the entire country into the same testing flow. It would be like trying to score everyone based on arithmetic.
Yes arithmetic is easy, but given enough volume of overly complex questions even easy skills can be tortured to create a grading curve.
Shanghai was leading the way. They gave individual teachers more freedom that allows move away from rote learning (taking lessons from Nordic countries). They also increased teachers’ pay. The results have been amazing. Shanghai ranked first in OECD PISA 2009 and 2012 assessments.
In the latest 2018 assessments Bejing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang areas ranked first. Rest of the China is still behind.