Hacker News Reader

Comment by sio8ohPi | Hacker News Reader

It's the difference between iterated and one-time games.

Shum has a decision to Publish or Not Publish (P or NP). CCP has the decision to Retaliate or Not Retaliate (R or NR). In a one-time game, Shun chooses P and CCP chooses NR, because P/NR > P/R for CCP.

A one-time game may be a good model if there's only one thing you wish to keep out of the public eye (e.g. photos of Barbara Streisand's house). But CCP will play this game many times: establishing that they're able and willing to harm their critics, even at cost to themselves, has value. It encourages future critics to never publish in the first place.

View on HN

Well said. This is the classic, “You can’t negotiate with terrorists” situation. It might seem like a local maxima in one instance to give in to fear and consequence, but it only feeds repeated instances.

China is betting on the reverse and honestly I think they’ll win. The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy is just not there.

Isn't this what the US and UK did to Julian Assuage?

Perhaps, but that's off-topic what aboutism. What does that have to do with the story?

I think it is relevant here because it provides evidence on whether other countries are likely to put their foot down against China over things like this.

The Assange situation is very different than this one on many levels. I can't see much similarity. It came across as a poor attempt to defend the CCP with the old "America is no better" trope

whataboutism usually refers to irrelevant things. Given Assange is recent (and ongoing) why is it not relevant?

And relevant usually refers to something that relates to the topic. Again, I ask, what does it have to do with the story?

Its a comparison to us/uk relations, that relates to the topic. It literally refers to the story as "this".

"But what about the US/UK!? They do it too!"

Combined with the fact that the Assange situation is not at all similar, I don't see it as relevant.

Different situation, same behaviour - the trampling of individuals for political gain.

BTW, even the historical example of Russian "and you lynch blacks" to the US in response to human-right criticism is relevant, as exemplified by the export of BLM as a general civil rights movement. The US/UK should still be able to criticise China, but without pretending to be a laudable moral example.

Ah then this is where our difference of opinion is. I can see now why you think it's relevant. For me, I always viewed the Russian responses to criticism as diversionary in nature, meant to just essentially say "Well you're not perfect either!". To me, that is just a diversionary tactic to disregard the subject at hand

You mean the US and UK disappeared one of Julian Assange's closest relatives, kept them detained for four years, and trotted them out as blackmail to keep him silent? It doesn't seem the same to me.

> The sheer force of will needed to cut them off from the global economy

It's already happening. China is no longer the us' #1 trading partner. Europe is deleveraging off of china. Canada is on the verge of boycotting the chinese olympics.

Even if there weren't geopolitical conflict involved, it's going to happen out of sheer economics; labor costs in china are no longer competitive with those in neighboring countries e.g. thailand, vietnam, bangladesh, and, for the US, mexico, and there is going to be a rough demographic transition as due to decades of one child, there are fewer entry-level people to take on entry-level low-skilled jobs in china (and basically no one wants to immigrate to china because the government has stoked chauvinistic nationalism way worse than trump ever did).

I should add that there is a way out for china -- high skilled production, but they are really shooting themeselves in the foot on that one. High skilled production requires input of low-skilled labor, and after several decades of what looked like it could be a rapprochement, since the ascendancy of Xi Jinping, china has increasingly alienated its closest neighbors (phillipines, vietnam, taiwan, japan, south korea, india), some of whom would be ideal sources of low-skill inputs. And a LOT of their tech comes from copying the west. That will get you only so far; to be truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena you need to have a source of creativity and critical thought which after a short period of flourishing, I hear is being repressed by the state again these days (I don't know for certain, I'm not in china).

China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply, and there's less of a language barrier, where not none. Personally I think they'll do better than many are expecting, the biggest threat to their success being their own governance.

> and there's less of a language barrier, where not none.

They are working hard on eliminating the language barrier.

The coastal urbanites (respectively their children) learn foreign languages because they can afford the teachers.

The rurals do not benefit.

I'm talking about the various Chinese dialects, which my understanding is share a written language.

They don't; what do you think it would mean for two different languages to "share a written language"? Everyone is trained to read and write Mandarin; writing other dialects is not encouraged.

But more than that, China is hard at work at ensuring that all Chinese speak Mandarin.

Mandarin isn't the written language fyi.

Yes, it is.

Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. There are simplified and traditional Chinese in written form. Mandarin is close to how Northern Chinese speak and can be written in both form without any difficulty and most of times equivalent

Edit: perhaps you mean other Chinese dialects use different words to describe something - commonly seen in Southern dialects which inherits more from ancient Chinese. However for many common esp professional sentence the written form is universal

Source: I’m native Chinese

> Mandarin is not written Chinese to my knowledge. […] Source: I’m native Chinese

You are confusing written language with writing system, probably due to domestic and global propaganda efforts that have been going on for 70 years. This really undermines the scientific effort of linguists and just sows confusion, as evidenced by your mislabelling languages as dialects, and forcing the rest of the world to invent new words like "topolect" for existing concepts that the communist party does not like to be true.

My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.

Another writing system is the Cyrillic alphabet. I can write Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian etc. with it.

So the writing system is an orthogonal concept to the written language.

As an analogue, the writing system we are discussing is the Chinese characters. One can write with it for example Cantonese, classical Chinese, Hokkien, Japanese, Mandarin, Zhuang, among others.

The distinction between traditional and simplified you mentioned is minor and not a fundamental property of the language written with it. Example: Cantonese can be and is written in both simplified and traditional.

> the written form is universal

That's not true. The languages Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin belong to the same family (Sinitic) but have different grammar, lexicon and word order; these differences are also reflected in writing.

> My writing system is the Latin alphabet. I can write the languages Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian etc. etc. with it.

This is only true in a very strained sense of "the Latin alphabet". No two of the languages you mention have an alphabet in common.

The Latin alphabet has no U or J, and while Y and Z were known to Latin speakers they do not appear in any Latin words.

Compare ø, ç , ß, and ő.

Even alphabets that appear visually similar may be quite different. The Spanish alphabet I was taught went:

A B C CH D E F G H I J K L LL M N Ñ O P Q R RR S T U V W X Y Z

The Ñ is not the only difference there.

Something analogous is true for the different varieties of Chinese; there are a handful of "regional" characters with no standard use.

I made a mistake, I meant to write Latin script.

I mean, the same objection applies. ø, ç , ß, and ő are not part of the Latin script. They are additions.

But here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH

Can you articulate a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?

"Latin alphabet" is ambiguous, you understood this to mean "the classical Latin alphabet", I was sloppy and meant "the set of letters in the Latin alphabets that make up the Latin script". Now it's my turn to call you out for a very strained sense because in contrast "Latin script" is well defined and I see you are straying away from the definition for some reason.

ø, ç, ß and ő are definitely part of the Latin script.¹ Any Latin letter was added to the set at some point in time; the definition makes no special distinction for this fact.

> here's Russian Cyrillic for "restaurant": PECTOPAH

That's not how scripts work. Those are Latin look-alikes (homoglyphs). These are the correct letters: РЕСТОРАН

Just because the letters have a common ancestor, it does not mean they are the same today.

> a way in which Russian writing differs from Latin script, but Danish writing doesn't?

Russian uses the Cyrillic script (specifically Cyrillic letters from the Russian alphabet), Danish uses the Latin script.² The scripts are distinct sets. It's quite tautological when I write it that way, but I don't know how else I can makeself understood.

¹ In a technical sense, we are constrained here on this Web site by communicating within the confines of Unicode. You could look up the properties of "ø" and see that it is indeed a letter in the Latin script: `\p{General_Category=Letter}` `\p{Script=Latin}` Currently, there are 1335 registered in this set product. The properties don't come from nowhere: Unicode merely codifies what was already linguistically/sociologically agreed upon beforehand. IMO the standard is not quite as expressive as e.g. me sitting next to you with pencil and paper, but good enough for most practical purposes.

² As always, there are exceptions for niche uses and because human language is a messy concept, but we can ignore that and concentrate on the broad strokes. An example for an exception would be that names mentioned in a Latin script embedding are typically transliterated/adapted instead of remaining in Cyrillic, e.g. "Puschkin"/"Puškins"; that's a Russian word, but written in Latin.

Wow that’s super informative and thanks!

I think something is lost in translation since first reaction to normal Chinese is Mandarin == 普通话 whose direct meaning is about spoken form. As I think deeper you are mostly correct although I still think writing language, system and the dialects need a quite formal definition and the difference is subtle. Educated Chinese learns ancient Chinese, read some book written in traditional Chinese, laugh at comedy spoken with “topplect” and watch many Hongkong Movies, there aren’t many gaps in understanding.

Historically many dialects evolves from different races that has invaded China and get absorbed(including CCP). In written form it converges to Chinese system. It makes the topic more confusing - does those count as languages

In China, people refer to written Chinese as 中文, whereas the spoken language as 普通话, 汉语, etc. Colloquially people sometimes say 中文 to mean the spoken language, but that's imprecise.

Yes, and?

That means many of your points will be sadly lost in translation

There's a specific word in Chinese for the written language. The Chinese words for Mandarin are specifically for the spoken "dialect". Your writing system vs language distinction doesn't really apply in this case. Different Chinese languages are mutually intelligible when read by speakers of another "dialect" of Chinese, though another dialect may come across oddly. Ask any Chinese.

People who speak other Chinese languages are translating to and from written Mandarin. They are not taught to write their spoken language. Nobody would read it if they did.

Spelling with Chinese characters is a tricky business. It is not enough to write the syllables; for each of ~1200 syllables there are several characters to choose from. Which to use in each word is purely a product of history, but the rules people learn are only for Mandarin.

It is funny that Chinese people who only know Mandarin mostly don't know this; it is not safe to talk about in China. So, Cantonese speakers let them continue to believe that Cantonese is "just pronounced differently", rather than being a whole language of its own. (Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?)

'Are French and Spanish just dialects of Latin?' Yes :)

"Dialect" here means mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is a fuzzy threshold, incidentally. I was in Spain once hanging out with an Italian guy. The Spanish speakers around could make sense of his Italian but he couldn't make sense of their Spanish. I think the essential problem was that they were more interested in understanding him than he was in understanding them, so they put in more effort.

Hypothesis: The Italian guy might have a better chance of picking up Spanish if the Spaniards were to speak a bit slower than usual :) Especially at the fuzzy mutual intelligibility boundary, a lower communication speed helps.

Italian syllables/minute: 405

Spanish syllables/minute: 526

https://irisreading.com/average-reading-speed-in-various-lan...

Wouldn't speaking speed be a more relevant metric than reading speed?

Correct. They correlate though. In practice going half speed would probably be better, giving the brain time to recognize the unusual dialect.

Italian: 6.99 syllables per second

Spanish: 7.82 syllables per second

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/list-of-the-fastest-spoken...

God, so many dead languages.

> China has a vast hinterland of rural Chinese, much larger than the Phillipines or Vietnam could supply

Whose fertility has for the last several decades taken a historically massive hit from one child, sex-selective abortion and the policy of taking young rural women to single-sex urban dorms to provide their once cheap labor. A rural region with increasingly middle aged farmers with a rapidly shrinking highly gender imbalanced youth is not a recipe for medium to long term abundant labor supply. Certainly, China’s economy is a profligate debt fueled fever, however, their biggest bill coming due is the demographics.

They're doing okay on the TFR front compared to South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan. And their past birth rate being <2.0 helps a lot to limit the likelihood of revolution and keeps them from consuming all their natural resources. The problems you describe are financial. The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost. They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.

> They're doing okay on the TFR front compared to South Korea, Taiwan, or Japan.

According to highly suspect official Chinese statistics.

> The misallocation of resources associated with the debt fueled fever is a spent cost.

It’s not a sunken cost because it’s ongoing and must be ongoing as if it ended the whole Chinese economy would sink.

> They can deal with the population pyramid by letting the old be poor.

They’re not exactly rich to begin with. Or by poor do you mean let them starve? Nor is that a recipe for staving off revolution!

Clone legacy tech, leapfrog at the cutting edge. Masterful strategic execution, hats off to China.

One example. Drones have proven to be a strategic gamechanger in the 2020 Azeri-Armenian war. In the same league with the musket, the machine gun, the tank, the airplane, the carrier. Who is the world leader in commercial drones? DJI, a Chinese company. US market share? 76%. It's not even close.

https://dronelife.com/2021/03/05/has-the-u-s-china-trade-war...

Is this for professional drones (say > US$ 2000) or including all the RC toy drones?

> leapfrog at the cutting edge

is there anything cutting edge about DJI products aside from volume? TBH I think probably the only thing truly special about DJI is that their software interface actually works, but in the world of "all software" it's still pretty janky (the bar is low in drone-world).

I'm addressing the condescending Western trope, IMHO stemming from denial, that China somehow lacks 'a source of creativity and critical thought' to be 'truly innovative and successful in the high-skill arena'. Commercial drones, mobile computing, 5G, Internet. High skill high growth industries that barely existed 25 years ago where China is at least on par with the West, and with evergrowing market share.

Well I'm an American born asian, and I've worked with 1) Chinese professors, postdocs and grad students and 2) Chinese postdocs who did their undergrad in the US. The difference in creativity levels is night and day.

That's intriguing. My original comment was longer and included https://macropolo.org/digital-projects/the-global-ai-talent-.... A plurality of top AI researchers are Chinese. The Chinese undergrad pipeline appears very strong. If China figures a way to keep over half of its most promising undergrads from moving to US for grad school and/or work, chances are there would be a new unquestionable top tech dog (err, dragon) of the XXI century.

haha I mean not just china, but it's not like the worldwide AI pipeline is rife with innovation these days. Do you watch Yannic Kilcher's paper reviews?

I keep waiting for a model that will do something I want (image -> language with a transformer model that doesn't have a fixed token length during training). I have been waiting for about 3 years, haven't seen it yet.

You can't measure innovation by bulk flow of humans through a system. If anything if you force too many humans through a pipeline that needs innovation you risk kneecapping progress because the separation of wheat and chaff becomes quadratically harder, increasingly gamed, and the people who actually have talent and creativity inevitably burn out and fuck off to do something else.

It will never happen. The talk will keep going, but it will never happen. In the case it does, it would be over Taiwan, not over a writer. I know people want to think human rights' are important (to their governments), but the governments would never place too much value on human rights in their calculation. (Taliban being the example)

Cutting business ties is a playable card, but not over this. China knew. If you were the president of a country, you wouldn't either. There is too much on the table already to just give it away.

We can get everything we currently get from China from India and Vietnam instead. It's just a matter of time.

The focus of the 2020s and 2030s will be decoupling and decentralizing. New trading partners will be comfortably lower down the value chain, and we won't make the mistake of letting suppliers turn into adversaries again.

Oh yes we will, because business chases after the absolute lowest cost, and for manufacturing anything more complex than a T-shirt, the place to be remains China.

Businesses tend to prefer paying through the nose when it makes sense to for the executives to pay themselves and their allies. The absolute lowest number on cost is zero. China's governing organising principle over the last two U. S. presidents sounds rational if you compare the imagery of Jan 6's q-anon-man to 89's tankman.

You are reading a lot on the 'conflicts' between China and the United States because China is potentially challenging US' dominance, and having competing interests in more areas than any would want.

You wouldn't read this thirty years ago, not when the Soviet Union still have its influence. When the US is trying to have China on its side. Shared and competiing interest is, and will always the core of any diplomatic relationship. China isn't any less commie or more worker-friendly back then, but that wasn't the focus of the conversation isn't it.

Vietnam isn't less commie than China is. India doesn't have better working conditions than China is. We aren't reading them because they are not as significant. Vietnam is simply too small, and India is still struggling to find its own way.

I'm not sure about India, but why not Taiwan / Thailand / Indonesia etc.

> In the case it does, it would be over Taiwan, not over a writer.

I don't think the parent post is implying they'll do anything over a writer. But there is significant awareness now regarding the threat CCP poses.

Last week Lithuania recalled their ambassador to China, and they're urging EU to cut dependence on China. Post-Merkel Germany might take a stronger stance against China, going by what their leaders are saying of late.

German here. At the moment, our government is bought out by the automotive industry which has achieved market saturation... the only markets they can grow is China and India.

That changing entirely depends on who wins the election in a month. If it will be Red-Green (Social Democrat + Greens) or Red-Red-Green (Socialists + Social Democrat + Greens), it might very well be that we will cutting down the influence of the automotive lobbyists... but if we end up with the free-market liberals (FDP, yellow) or, worse, the endemically corrupt Conservatives (CDU/CSU, black) we will keep on bowing to the whims of everyone who can't grow in the Western markets.

For everyone in Germany: please vote. This election is crucial.

I am as critical of the German car industry as you are. And with their dependence on the Chinese market they are in a really miserable situation.

But as so often, things are not that easy and are more grey than black and white:

The liberals (FDP) are among the biggest supports of closer contacts to Taiwan, while some parts of the Socialists (Die Linke) argue that the Tiananmen Square massacre did not happen.

The FDP will fold in the way that lines their pockets, I don't have an ounce of trust in them - and I didn't forget their "besser nicht regieren als falsch regieren" either.

Regarding the tankies in our leftie rows... you are completely correct and I hope that in an R2G coalition the foreign ministry ends up at someone from the Greens. SPD botched it the last time with Maas and we have too many questionable comrades to fill that job with someone guaranteed sane...

Take it as concrete examples if you want, but the sentence was meant to demonstrate the scale of things and how they might impact governmental decisions, which gives heavy weight to a lot of things, but not as much as you might expect to human rights issues and national values.

The predictions of China's demise will continue until they're all written in Chinese.

> China is no longer the us' #1 trading partner.

China has never been the US' #1 trading partner. That has been Canada, because Canada imports ~300 billion, and exports ~300 billion to the US. China only imports ~100 billion from the US, but exports ~452 billion. Both numbers are growing, year over year.

I would like to see it your way but all of this so-called decoupling from China seems very half-arsed and appears to me to be nothing more than a show for the electorate. None of it seems very concrete, for years we’ve read that country X is going to hold China accountable for Y but China just keeps on steamrolling forwards without much consequence.

Decoupling is happening due to labor costs in China and its hardening stance on foreign investment. It'll take time, but it'll happen.

Without the mutual benefit of trade, what will prevent war?

Good old nukes, that worked rather well between US and the far more expansionist USSR for decades without a significant trade environment.

It also ravaged the third world continuously over that time while we fought proxy wars.

Why do you need to cut them off? I mean, isn't the fact that most countries in the world are dictatorship (or failed states, and these are a much bigger problem) a surprise? China is different from other dictatorships only in size.

If anything, maximising interoperation with non-free countries only benefits free countries, making their position more exclusive. Say: Chinese rich are likely to settle in US and Europe once they made it, just because it's too scary to stay in China, but they spend and pay taxes there.

The world will never be "free" in the Western sense of it, because even the very concept of "society" is foreign to the vast majority of people, the concept of "public good" is foreign too, damn it, in the most countries people can't even queue: they fight for their turn to be served and everyone accepts it as fair. Not just democracy, but even freedom or "rights" in the very basic sense are not understood, or actively rejected by people from all walks of life in most of the world.

Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia? Extent of human right abuses in the former is bigger than in either of the latter; it's a no-brainer to invade and occupy it - it's a plain desert great for tanks and they have no nukes; and they have oil. Yet this isn't done for the simple reason - no one is going to benefit from it.

> Just a thought experiment: if you could "fix" those countries, why not start with Saudi Arabia, instead of China or Russia?

On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country. China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea and Taliban. And threatening democratic Taiwan almost every other week with invasion.

>On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country.

SA has been directly involved in funding terrorism(1), they're fighting a war in Yemen for their own national interest(2), they are pressuring countries in very concrete ways (e.g. Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri's resignation in 2017 was basically forced by SA)(3), they've been trying to isolate Qatar since 2017(4), they have no qualms about murdering a critic in an embassy overseas(5), they're increasing their influence in places like Bosnia(6).

________________

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...

(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Lebanon%E2%80%93Saudi_Ara...

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_diplomatic_crisis

(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Jamal_Khashog...

(6) https://www.france24.com/en/20181113-focus-bosnia-herzegovin...

They've patched up with Qatar by the way. Now they're picking a bone with the UAE.

>On account of them being tiny, they aren't a threat to freedoms outside of their own country.

Lmao what. Have you followed anything at all they've been doing?

>China on the other hand, is busy forging alliances with North Korea

You know they've had those relations with north korea since forever. You might remember a bit of a war that split the country.

>and Taliban

Just like every other surrounding country and countries like the US with business interests in the nation.

Saudi Arabia was the second country to recognize their government in the past. Pakistan was bombing for and aiding the taliban before the invasion because they prefer them over pashtun nationalists and for other reasons. Iran which was fighting the Taliban has dropped their rhetoric a good bit.

> This is the classic, “You can’t negotiate with terrorists” situation.

Even older, it is the classic "don't pay the danegeld" situation:

https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.htm...

>> It encourages future critics to never publish in the first place.

No. It is meant to encourage others to never write such things in any context. This then leads to the masses not thinking such things, after which the censorship will be unnecessary as such thought patterns will not exist. This is Orwell manifest.

Which is exactly why everyone must oppose dictatorships with maximum possible force.

Communism is in with the kids nowadays, and society is largely not unified in anything, so I think this is going to be here to stay.

On you go then.

Or did you just mean other people?

The united states pulls these tricks all the time and claims to not be a dictatorship

I don't understand why we should let some countries get away with horrible things just because they call themselves democracy...

> claims to not be a dictatorship

Is it?

Some days it's difficult to tell which organization is truly in charge of the united states. Nominally for example, the state governments are in charge of things like medical care regulation, but increasingly unelected national business men threaten retaliation whenever the legislature passes law they don't like.

Allright. I'll bite.

How many millions of people are you ready to kill in this mission of opposing dictatorships? How many of them your own countrymen, and how many of them foreigners? Just looking for an order of magnitude estimate, here.

I'd like to see the ethical calculus on this, before joining in on this maximum use of force.

Or, did you mean that everyone should talk a big game about opposing dictatorships? We're already doing that. Talk is cheap, as is foreign oil and other goods.

Most dictatorships are paper thin. A few people with guns, tanks, and fighter jets can hold down millions of others without those. Those few people are easily defeated when facing a superior external force though, even if they have millions of supposed troops (these are willing to surrender immediately). Examples include Iraq, Afghanistan, etc in frontal battle with foreign troops.

Even if the fight IS hard and kills many people, it is worth it right? Or do you want your wife to disappear for four years and be kept in a black prison? Or do you want to watch millions of ethnic minorities being murdered in concentration camps?

It's better to fight, risk death, and be free than to cower in fear while your loved ones are tortured and murdered.

Which is exactly why anyone who treats the CCP or any member or advocate as anything other than an illegitimate, brutally dishonest, murderous, expansionist authoritarian state is a fool, or willing to tolerate such for their own temporary gain.

And of course they’re called racist by the CCP propaganda machine.

What’s with people calling governments they don’t like illegitimate? People do the same with North Korea all the time.

Those governments may be distasteful and do things you don’t like, but they’re very real and have been for nearly a century now.

The legitimate government of China is in Taipei. If Vichy France had existed for 40 years, rather than 4, it still wouldn't have been the legitimate government of France. Other examples abound.

They’re entirely separate governments ruling over different countries.

There’s no reason for people outside of politics to pretend otherwise. It always comes off as childish, really.

>> There’s no reason for people outside of politics to pretend otherwise

Then I guess John Cena can retract his apology...

The government seated in Taipei would gladly disagree with you if it didn't imply missiles would be incoming.

Legitimate government? A warlord the US liked was over thrown by a warlord the US didn't like. Taiwan was under martial law for almost 40 years! It only recently became a democracy, what is the claim?

Taiwan wasn’t always a democracy, so if that is the standard for “legitimate” then Taiwan fails on that measure too.

Same with South Korea. Both countries started as US-backed dictatorships, and US backed them mainly for its self-interest of halting communism (a threat to American invested political ideals).

Like it or not the majority of Chinese people fought for and aided the communists, and continue to legitimize the communist party government by engaging in orderly civil participation.

Like it or not, anything bad the Chinese government does the Chinese citizenry are culpable because they are not agent-less slaves of the party.

People in China can participate in government. Believe it or not a government which has no finger on the pulse of their constituency or acting outside of their interests can and will be overthrown. You eventually run out of bullets—and people, if you point a gun to their heads.

Taiwan didn’t start as a US backed dictatorship. Truman had pretty much given up n Chiang Kai Shek until China crossed over to side with the North Koreans during the Korean War, making the USA much more interested in supporting the ROC again. One can easily say that China traded Taiwan (which it surely would have been able to take back without USA backing) for North Korea (which probably would have been folded into the ROK without Chinese intervention).

> Taiwan didn’t start as a US backed dictatorship.

Sure because they weren't US backed but they still were a dictatorship...

Truman publicly signaled the US had no intention of defending Taiwan or SK, but public sentiment changed in the US after Kim il-sung invaded.

> One can easily say that China traded Taiwan (which it surely would have been able to take back without USA backing) for North Korea (which probably would have been folded into the ROK without Chinese intervention).

Korea was also the Japanese invasion point into China in WW2, which made it sensitive for the US to mobilize in.

> Sure because they weren't US backed but they still were a dictatorship...

Definitely. A lot of sentiment against mainlanders in Taiwan was created by the KMT’s rule as much as by the communists.

Truman’s hand was called as soon as North Korea invaded South Korea while UN troops were still stationed there. There would have been no way that the USA was going to stay out of that conflict.

> but they’re very real and have been for nearly a century now.

Royalty existed for much longer than that in many countries, and it was never ever legitimate unless you believed in god-given power bullshit.

All governments are based on some kind of belief.

(Which is not to say CCP or monarchies are good, just that that's not the pillar I'd attack them on)

The government is most certainly legitimate if they're able to hold a country together for centuries. Whether or not the claims of being blessed by their god is legitimate is a different matter entirely.

Just saying you don't like a form of government makes it illegitimate is a silly proposition. You get people every election in democratic countries saying the government is illegitimate. Usually they're considered crazy. Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate? What about tyranny of the minority, since in many countries, most people don't even vote?

You can recognize that a dictator is the legitimate ruler of a country, while also acknowledging that he's not working in favor of the people. If someone has an entire territory's military at their command and they can write and enforce laws, that's usually a sign that they have a legitimate government.

> The government is most certainly legitimate if they're able to hold a country together for centuries.

Legitimacy based on force is not legitimacy. It's just tyranny: if you never ask people how to want to govern themselves how can you meet the criteria of legitimacy, like EVER? Holding the biggest guns does not replace agreement and contractual acceptance of how things are run.

> Should "tyranny of the majority", as they'd say, be considered legitimate

It's a hell lot more legitimate since you can actually expect to change the rulers/people in power at some point through popular action. Under royalty/tyranny, you are forced to accept whoever is at the top and you have no recourse until they die.

That's kind of a huge difference.

That legitimacy is only granted via democracy is a very new concept. Even the coining ancient Greeks had trouble with it, and it definitely did not emerge quickly during the Neolithic revolution when governments were created at all.

It seems that Saudi Arabia or Bahrain’s regimes tend not to get called 'illegitimate', so 'not democratic' would not imply 'illegitimate'.

I think it’s more like this: Governments the US doesn’t like very much are 'illegitimate' because 'not liberal democracies'; regimes the US does like are 'important allies' or otherwise not talked about.

The whole 'not democratic' thing is more like a type of post-hoc justification for what, to many, looks like blatant imperialism. It would appear it is successful at least some of the time.

Legitimacy is more about representing the people and ruling with consent. It's a spectrum, not a binary. The Saudi royal family have a patronage system in place that funnels money down to the regions and the tribes in return for loyalty. The country has no democratic traditions or expectations. For all they're a horrible dynasty of murderous autocrats, it's actually not that simple to argue that they don't rule with consent.

As governments get more oppressive and arbitrary in their exercise of power, it becomes harder for them to make credible claims of legitimacy. I'm not saying the Saudi government is legitimate, but it is possible for it to do things that increase or decrease it's relative legitimacy. Increase consultation and individual freedoms? More legitimate. Crack down on peaceful protests or oppress minorities? Less legitimate.

The strongest signal here is US ally vs adversary. Everything else is fluff in comparison.

Saudi Arabia does not get called illegitimate, but Cuba does.

Pinochet was 'legitimate'.

You’re just using two different definitions of “legitimate” which is as common as two people using different boundaries for “blue” vs “green.” You’re talking about legitimacy as having effective control of the country, as the North Korean government does and the Somalian government does not. The person you’re arguing with uses “legitimate” to mean something like “with the just consent of the governed” which a government can have even without de facto control of its territory.

I would imagine that people are calling these governments illegitimate because they lack a democratic mandate to rule and independent opposition to that rule.

i.e. they weren't voted in; they ceased power by violence.

You can't vote them out.

No one has freedom of association to form an alternative political party that strongly opposes the status quo.

Without those things one party governments can't say they are legitimate, only vanguard dictatorships.

No, that's obviously not it. Read the comments.

It's 2021. People claim governments are illegitimate for any number of selfish reasons, usually disconnected from reality.

It's not about liking or not liking. Legitimacy in this sense is about whether those governments genuinely represent the people they rule. There exist governments that I strongly disagree with and dislike, but which do legitimately represent their people.

OK, fine, the CCP is as legitimate as any warlord who came to power by armed conquest and performs some governmental functions.

It stays in power by a combination of active repression, murder of potential opposition (great leap, but not forward), and bread & circuses (we provide economic progress, you keep quiet), and disinformation via controlled media.

To me and many others, legitimacy requires some mechanism for the people to consent to the rule.

they have already brought so much pain to this world and yet we continue to pump up their economy .. make them even more powerful by continuing to make and buy millions of products made in China.

The CCP (not it's people) are scourge to this world and should be dealt with by all countries it has brought pain too!

The Chinese people, even if not all, support their own government, at least more so than a foreign government. Trying to separate the two is misguided. Chinese people shape the CCP, make up its ranks, and for the most part tolerate it and grant it legitimacy by the act of not rebelling.

If that were true the CCP would have nothing to fear from democratic elections or free media.

Not rebelling against the heavily armed PLA is a pretty low bar for legitimacy.

They fear democracy for the same reason the US used to fear communism: because it is an incompatible system and political party. Are Democrats and Republicans truly that much different besides some differences in policy platforms? They are two separate factions vying for the role of who can govern better, but people these days aren't really looking too closely at results and just voting based on factionalism. China's system is more top-down control, and thus risks failure if the top is corrupted. I think it's probably less tenable long term, but I also don't believe it needs a finger to tip it over the edge.

You've probably been fed propaganda that legitimacy comes from democracy, but it does not. Democracy has long been seen as the least worst of any system for Americans. It is only as legitimate as those of use who fight to defend it, because freedom isn't free, and neither is our system: democracy.

Ultimately legitimacy comes from whether people fight for their government and defend their way of life, regardless of however wrong you may think it is. What is the legitimate government of Vietnam, Afghanistan? Clearly the the US-backed democratic government in Afghanistan is now going the way of illegitimacy (because no one cares enough to support it), despite being fully democratic. It's illegitimate because neither the US aid, weaponry, training, was able to get its democratic supporters to care enough to fight for their way of life. If people had to fight for what government they wanted (democracy, dictatorship, monarchy, oligarchy), and a foreign nation comes in and props one of these up with advanced weaponry and military force, and still fails, is it still legitimate just because it was a Democratic government?

Current version of the CCP seems worse than more recent versions. It depends quite a lot on who is at the top and how much authority they wield.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com