I think it's because they want their best and brightest working on physics, materials, technological breakthroughs, etc., instead of ad tech.
> I don't think it's created anywhere near the amount of value that's come out of e.g. space race
The space race gave us a lot of tangible, physics/materials/hard-engineering related tech. Software gives us a lot of internet infrastructure, communications, algorithms, etc. that are incredibly useful for the average consumer. Lots of people in this thread complaining about the negative value of ads and such, but the communications infrastructure, knowledge sharing, social change due to marginalized people being able to communicate things far and wide ... there's a lot of intangible benefits that have come as a direct result of focusing heavily on consumer internet.
That’s like saying the Cook maybe fat and morbidly obese but look at how efficiently he consumes such a large number of calories every day.
Clearly these sectors are powerful or they wouldn't be targeted. Whats the plan to make them obsolete beyond taking Chinese software down a peg?
The USSR fell because people didn't care about space exploration and Opera, they wanted washing machines and pop music.
The ridiculously expensive college education can't even prepare us for our own workforce, which has very little demand for engineering, sadly.
This is a not true. Dictators do long speeches. Often quite explicitly stating why they do what they do.
Funnily sometimes in democracies there is a bigger space betweeen what is done and what is communicated.
The only logical way to interpret the intentions of political leaders is to look at their effects. Anything else, even personal diaries, are likely full of interested reasoning and outright lies.
You might describe it as a dictatorship, but it's more data-driven than you might suspect. The Chinese keep the pulse on decisions they make, and if it's unpopular - it's gone. Of course there is a line - you can't go head-on against the Party and call them out directly. Compare this situation here, where we are trying to patch up our infrastructure and instead have to deal with a collection of spectacular douches in Congress, propagandizing against science to such an extent that our top epidemiologist has to get a security detail.
Who would you bet on in this movie?
More serious response: I don’t want to live under a dictatorship where a generational change could lead to corruption and suffering on a much bigger scale. I think America as a project might also be lost and we should consider if this crazy idea (democracy, freedom of religion, free speech etc.) is worth fighting for. I think it is and I believe in the values that the US has, despite some very obvious mistakes America isn’t ethnic cleansing Muslims or having a press that can’t criticise the government. I will bet on America not because China won’t win but because I still believe the (relative) peace and prosperity of the post war period isn’t worth throwing away as easily as some want. We need someone focused on this in a clear way and to get Americans stop arguing amongst themselves and look at the bigger picture.
What I am saying is, given the decay of the western society, which is our fault entirely, our chances of staying ahead are slim.
The problem is, the Chinese have a team. They do not easily sell out. We, however, have an entire layer of high-level government that will readily go to the highest bidder. This is not sustainable. The only way to fix this is a crisis that unites us, but if a global pandemic did not do it, what will?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
I think the testimony of so many Uyghur people about this and the huge “re-education” holiday camps you mentioned I’m not sure the West is fabricating such things. There’s simply too much evidence the other way.
Also, note that those numbers are only the direct victims. How many people died because of US sanctions?
As for Uyghurs - I’m sure there were a lot of horrible crimes there. It’s unavoidable when doing things at that scale, in a country which still has a long way to go about human rights. The propaganda part is 1. claiming this is a “genocide”, as in something deliberate, rather than crimes committed by individuals, and 2. claiming it’s somehow worse than the US solution to the same problem, which is killing those people on the spot.
You must not understand that Iraq was like North Korea before the war, I suggest you read Christopher Hitchens on this as he puts how dark and evil Saddam’s regime was into some light.
You’re arguing both ways in your comments by the way, you say on the one hand America is responsible for all deaths perpetuated even by others because it created the situation for it to happen but when confronted with evil by the Chinese state you make out that individuals did it and it wasn’t intentional by the CCP. I think you have to understand if you lock up 3 million people without trial you’re going to be running a completely unmanageable version of the Stanford prison experiment and cause horrendous unjust suffering. This wasn’t guaranteed in Iraq if we’d have understood the country had such serious internal divisions when we went it.
As for “both ways” - there is a fundamental difference between government sending people with an explicit mission of killing people - which is what US did in Iraq - and the government sending people to doing something else entirely, yet ending with some of the victims dead.
Let’s assume your numbers are right, and the number of incarcerated Uyghurs really is as high as the number of incarcerated Americans: is that genocide, in both cases? Would you say it would be better for those people to get killed instead?
I think you have a point with your use of "technocratic," but it is an oligarchy. The party is the olígos. Autocracy implies stuff like the army reports to the leader, not the party. I think things are trending that way, but I don't think it's historically accurate (at least for the last several decades).
Term limits are horrible for the working class in the U.S. Constant political turnover means groups like ALEC basically run our legislating process. Killing term limits for certain offices means that as someone gains experience and competence, they continue to lead, whereas in the U.S. they'd arbitrarily have to leave office right when they're getting the lay of the land.
It'd be like firing our senior dev and putting in a junior – no wonder shit never gets done in the States.
Paging California. Paging California. Which is now in the process of its second recall of a governor.
Seems a very odd thing to complain about 'neutered impeachment processes' in Western democracies whilst claiming he can be 'voted out at any time'. The US President can be impeached at any time too and removed from office. You claim impeachment is neutered presumably because the power has never successfully removed anyone from office. How then do you manage to praise the Chinese system for its ability to remove leaders. They don't have democratic recall either despite the theatre of voting, their President has never been removed and is essentially selected by his predecessor, the worst performing president at election captured more than 90% of the vote and even with the addition of state sanctioned 'independents' the leader still captures 99% of the vote.
Secondly, I'm not sure exactly why you say 'Western democracies' when you really just mean the US. Just because you're unhappy with the most recent impeachment failures doesn't mean other 'Western democracies' lack the ability to remove the ruling party or the leader.
Sure a "dictator" (more accurately "central power" for China) wants to consolidate power but to think the dictator is a one dimensional being and that all actions a dictator takes only serves that single minded motivation of power solidification is really not reasonable.
Consolidating power is only one aspect of their motivation that much is true. However the article is not about this aspect of the CCP. The actions taken by the regime here represent broad views about what constitutes economic health. The OPs comment is spot on, and captures the main point of the article.
This incentivizes said people to emigrate.