Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order | Hacker News Reader

Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order

scholars-stage.org

118 pointsjseliger94 comments

I dont know if anyone read this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/27/china-to-limit...

A lot of the big drives that Xi is on seem to be simply to reduce cost per child for a family so they will have more children. Thats why they want to go after the after-school tuition industry. They want to go after the housing industry and now this Texas style restriction on reproductive rights. Of course everything Xi does is not motivated by a single objective. But the Chinese are laser focused right now on creating conditions which would increase their population.

I really do not appreciate this article. It exaggerated a Reuters article that itself exaggerated the document without saying anything outright false.

In the exact line where they talk about reducing abortions, they say that access to contraception and evidence based sex ed should be strengthened.

That seems to me to be the exact opposite of trying to have more children - and it's a lot closer to Bill Clinton's "safe accessible and rare" strategy than anything else.

The CCP and Xi are obsessed with planning everything, and that includes growing the population. Unplanned and especially unwanted pregnancies disrupt lives and social order. I don’t think there’s anything contradictory about encouraging having children, but also trying to make sure that happens within planned and orderly family situations.

I think they're obsessed with optimizing conditions for their country to flourish in the medium to long term. If only we had politicians in the West who thought like that. We could call it "socialism with western characteristics" ;) I'm a citizen of a European country and I regard our politicians as literal traitors. They serve the interests of an elite minority which has power in the USA.

In the area of demographics they're doing an appallingly crappy job of it. They should have reversed one child 20 years ago. It was based on a misconceived Malthusian view of the world that it became clear was bunk well before that. The trouble is it's tied up with their ideology so very hard to back pedal on.

I hadn't seen that; thank you.

It's depressing that the CCP hasn't learned from the experience of Romania[1] and everywhere else governments have tried to increase fertility.

As I see it the only ways China's fertility can lift to or above replacement are: 1. reverting back to a pre-industrial, pre-germ theory society; 2. introducing pensions, introducing free health care, allowing free movement within the country (revoking the hukou system), increasing mandatory parental leave, providing permanent tax breaks and child support payments, replacing the gaokao by a lottery system for tertiary education, and controlling property prices.

On second thought, even doing all of 2 may not do it. Doing any less than all of it certainly won't.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_orphans

China already has a public pension system and free health care, albeit not very good. What's mainly keeping people from wanting to have children is the cost of housing as you mention and the cost of child care. And yeah, the short parental leave.

Education costs also, China has public education but it is funded very oddly, there are lots of fees that you have to opt into, even if Xi really outlaws cram programs. Things become much more pricey if you raise them in a city away from where there hukou is.

> and now this Texas style restriction on reproductive rights

Now? Are we talking about the same country here? The one-child policy literally taking away one's _right to reproduce_, and it's been in effect for years (recently slightly modified).

This just shows the CCP is used to treating its people like cattle. Now you can breed, now you can't.

> He has promised Chinese a better life. Growing paychecks aside, the Chinese are not living it.

I mean... growing paychecks instead of stagnation would do a whole lot to arrest the instability that Western liberal democracies are experiencing.

Paychecks are rising in the US, certainly. Just not very equally.

But paychecks have no been outrunning inflation or follow productivity increase at least here in western Europe.

My paychecks if lucky grows like 2~3% but my house value rises with like 10~18% so do my taxes I need to pay for owning a house.

Securities, property, crypto and other related assets are the real rising stars.

The rise of paychecks against that backdrop is very small. In the context of everything else that's increasing in price, it feels like a wash.

Yup, thank the Federal Reserve. Elites profit the most from generous quantitative easing, aka "printer go brrr". Meanwhile you'll be paying double for a house.

Yes, all taxation is theft, but inflation is a tax that is especially bad since it is regressive (affects the poor most), extra-judicial (no one voted to authorize it), and hidden (or at least disguised).

In that case the poor should rejoice. The Fed has managed to keep inflation at 2% until the pandemic. It was 4% in the 80s and 3% in the 90s.

The fed has MEASURED it to be 2 percent using questionable methods. E.g. the biggest expense of yohr life is not counted

The Fed's mandate includes keeping unemployment low, and its main tool for that (lowering interest rates) has the side effect of inflating asset prices. But what else can they do? The alternative (fiscal policy) is congress's responsibility and outside their control. If congress decided to take action they would adjust accordingly, in the mean time they are doing what they are officially tasked with with the tools that they have, even if that may not be ideal.

Paying double for a house? You do know that you have to pay interest? Just because the resale price of the house is bigger doesn't mean financing has become more expensive.

Funny how the only dimension you can understand is the interest you have to pay. You know you still have to pay the house off right?

Increase can only be considered against inflation. They aren't really.

Wages are only going up if you are at the very top. The bottom half is not going up.

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/09/1...

This is a rough claim to make today. There a "fight" for 15, now most places are paying 15 for labor and Amazon warehouses are pushing 25. In the last year its pretty clear ages have gone up for the bottom half and by a large margin.

You can look at the actual numbers, or you can blindly conjecture something must be "pretty clear".

> In the last year its pretty clear ages have gone up for the bottom half and by a large margin.

Primarily because the very lowest paid have entirely left the labour market. Lop off the lowest 10% and the average rises.

As against in China?

It is the same situation in China, or should I hazard by saying the entire world?

Growing paychecks doesn't mean anything if the cost of things you want and need is growing faster.

On a side note, it wouldn't do to assume the Chinese behavior is fundamentally irrational.

I wouldn't understate the Marxist aspects of Chinese politics today which the author seems to tend towards. The technological determinism that guides Chinese politics is still very authentically Marxist. However he's right that there is a significant dose of what looks more like Confucianism than Communism in the reforms.

If one looks at the kind of intellectual work that is popular in China today next to Marx there is also Carl Schmitt or Strauss. A lot of state capacity in China is directed towards rebuilding Chinese civilization, the industrialism or hard-technology focus of Chinese politics has a distinct nationalist, Conservative bent.

>Each targets an industry that seems to strip people of their agency and rob them of their dignity. Each seems to hijack healthy behavior with a set of short term incentives whose end results are self destructive and degrading.

>One does not wish to waste a child’s youth away on 18 hours of evening cram school a week, but to do otherwise is to risk falling behind. It is a classic arms race problem: no player can stop the game from the inside, even though all players would benefit from a cap on the game. An outside force is needed to halt the madness. Xi Jinping has decided to be that force.

I feel the author's logic is flawed here. In the previous paragraph, he wrote-

>Xi Jinping is not reigning in capitalism writ large; Beijing is not scrapping market mechanisms altogether. Semiconductor foundries, agricultural conglomerates, and Christmas light factories (to choose three examples of hundreds) have been untouched by Xi’s ‘common prosperity’ agenda. It is a very select slice of Chinese capitalism that is being “reigned in.”

You mean, working in 'agricultural conglomerates' or being factory workers making 50 RMB a day, is not 'hijack healthy behavior with a set of short term incentives whose end results are self destructive and degrading.'? (short term benefit for the factory owners to the detriment of the society and workers.)

The author took a winded way to try to distinguish the reason why certain industries are targeted, but really there is no need- the PRC literally tells you why themselves: 'Fictitious Economy' vs 'Real Economy' .

(https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-cabinet-says-it-w...)

In Xi's eyes, anything that can't be physically grasp and control by the party belongs to 'Fictitious Economy' , hence the move to squash meal delivery (self-organized proto-union), k-pop/entertainment (voluntary idol worship), cram school (corruption and private source of education), and real estate (mass bubble speculation). Real Economy is output that the party can allocate and mobilize. The populace must lie down and accept whatever the party provides.

No need to invoke fancy Marxism philosophies.

Great great link. Thank you

"The extent to which Xi’s reading of classical Marxist texts has inspired this campaign is not clear."

It seems the article's author has not read Xi Jinping's multi-volume series "The Governance of China," which very clearly lays China's path toward building a "moderately prosperous socialist nation" using fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist thought adapted to China's material conditions -- i.e. "Socialism with Chinese Characteristics."

It's not a big secret. You can buy an English translation on Amazon or even get a free copy from your local embassy/consulate.

Now, this sounds like generic Marxist theology, likely writen by some nameless drone ghost writer.

Stalin had "Marxism in a specific country", Khruschev (or was it Brezhnev?) had "socialism with human face".

likely by Wang Huning

Stalin had "socialism in one country," and yes, that has significant material and historical meaning, as opposed to being generic fluff.

Because it was generally believed that building socialism required a number of successful workers' revolutions around the world. But basically every revolution at the time failed, other than the Bolshevik revolution. So they found themselves in an awkward position. Hence the strategy and policy of Stalin to build "socialism in one country."

This is one of the major breaks between Stalin and Trotsky.

Yup. Trotsky was a perpetual world-wide revolutionary. Revolution was a constant state in Trotsky's mind. Stalin just wasn't. Stalin was much more nationalist in his thinking.

I guess the question is how much of that is post-facto justification vs actual motivation.

My view is that Xi Jinping is basically practicing the classic technique of re-interpreting accepted texts to mean what you want, as a way of making your point while appearing to 'stay the course'. I think Strauss described and practiced this very well in "Persecution and the Art of Writing".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_and_the_Art_of_Wri...

Regardless of whether the method has some origin in classic technique, it is indeed a strategy that the vast majority of AES (actually existing socialism) states have done. That's why Soviet ideology was Marxism-Leninism vs...well...Marxism.

The Sandanistas, Cuba, Vietnam, etc. have done this as well. Also the Bolivarian socialists.

Every power structure does it. SCOTUS justices reach diametrically opposite conclusions through the same 'technique'.

In practical terms what China is doing right now is not so different from the NEP of Lenin.

My favourite point when dealing with USSR sympathiers is that Chinese success is owed to 40 years of NEP, which was shut down in the USSR and doomed it.

(And this is due to Soviet distrust of its own Russian population, and also due to habit of siphoning money out of consumer economy)

Edit: The thing is, USSR was doomed after winning WW2.

It had to compete with the rest of the world economically without having adequate economy. USA just had to choose the relevant weapon (consumer economy) to win this one.

It's not so clear that the shut-down of the NEP doomed the USSR. The argument that without Stalin's focus on heavy industry the USSR would have lost WW2 is a good one.

Naturally the NEP developed light industry much more strongly than Stalin has and neglected the heavy industry necessary to win WW2 relatively.

But Lenin viewed the NEP as a compromise with capitalism to gain time awaiting the world revolution, a dangerous one because it breed a new capitalist class out of peasants. Simultaneously with the NEP, Bolsheviks tried to help the world revolution (the policy of the third international before Stalin). China is not trying to foster any revolution, they have 100 billionaries as parliament members! China policy seems one of restoration of capitalism, not of compromise.

Lenin viewed it that way on a very, very, very long scale. Lenin thought the NEP would last 70-100 years.

What exactly does "moderately prosperous" mean here?

I think it means GDP PPP per capita of like 21 000$

A quora answer said that it resembled post WW2 US. Strong middle class with less inequality.

As someone who's lived in Shanghai for over a decade the idea of describing China as having less inequality than the US is hilarious. China isn't that poor. People were very close to equal in 1970 or 1980. They were poor in Tianjin. They were poor in Shanghai, They were poor in Hefei. Now large portions of the counytry are as well off as Poland and there are significant numbers of very wealthy people.

China is not poor enough to be equal. It's not Chad. It's developing rapidly economically.

It also does not resemble post WW2 USA in the pay structure. That artificially compressed pay structure, with doctors only earning 3 times what people in low level manufacturing make, requires a level of labor scarcity China still hasn't reached after 40 years of economic growth.

That's why it's the future goal, not now.

While I know nothing about Tanner Greer, the author of that article, it would not surprise me in the least if he had not read Xi's books. The intro callout is from Kevin Rudd, former prime minister of Australia. While I'd give his opinions some weight, I'd hardly consider him an expert on the inner workings of the CCP. And the book highlighted in the article "Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom" was written by Andrzej Walicki, that wikipedia describes as a prof at Notre Dame who "specialized in philosophy of sociopolitics, history of Polish and Russian philosophy, Marxism and liberal thought".

I can't recall who it was, but I recall viewing a lecture by a china-scholar maybe 10 years ago who was ranting about how the fall of the soviet union had spurred many economic-socio-political academic types to switch to china. And how most of them could not read chinese so could not read original sources. And how many of them had never visited china. Or communicated with any chinese officials, much less citizens. But that didn't stop them from pontificating about what china was like, what china would do and what china was thinking. I don't know if it's just me, but both western political leadership and media just seem... less than knowledgeable about China.

I think the problem is a bit like when you're reading western accademic's take on what some USSR marxist, or some Chinese marxist is saying. There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx, but it's just nothing in comparison to the degree of inculcation you get by actually being a marxist surrounded by other marxists.

Everything that's influential in China is like that. You don't learn it in school in the west, it's deep and difficult and takes a lifetime to learn (for instance, if you try to get into eastern philosophy, even with prior philosophy training, it's pretty hard). The history, even the parts of Chinese history europeans had a hand in, is not taught or generally remembered. So the ignorance becomes so compounded and pervasive that you get the situation where even domain experts end up having quite limited expertise, because they're missing deep proficiency in one of the many traditions that makes modern China make sense.

It's a bit like when you hear a non-programmer talk about programming. No matter how clever they are, it's always sort of immediately obvious.

> There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx, but it's just nothing in comparison to the degree of inculcation you get by actually being a marxist surrounded by other marxists.

Tanner Greer actually has an entire article on the necessity and difficulty of immersing oneself in the discourse: https://scholars-stage.org/the-education-china-hands-need-bu...

He's also definitely read "Governance of China", the book series droptablemain suggests he should read (he references it occasionally https://scholars-stage.org/?s=Governance%20of%20China ) Suffice to say he knows his stuff.

I guess the kind of immersion he's talking about doesn't give me much confidence. If you imagine party propaganda is like the most peripheral part of the entire discourse, and there's this gigantic machinery of ideas that makes the propaganda make sense, it's a bit hopeless just reading this kind of peripheral material with a skeptical eye - because skepticism itself stems from the ability to distinguish common sense from illusion, so if you don't have the right common sense, a lot of the time you'll think someobody is talking nonsense or being cynical when they're not, and vice versa.

"he must crack the code of the Communist political jargon and translate into ordinary speech this secret language full of symbols, riddles, cryptograms, hints, traps, dark allusions, and red herrings."

This, for instance, seems a bad way to understand ideology. If you see an ideology as just a jargon, ultimately translatable to 'ordinary speech', then you're never going to get to grips with ideology that's fundamentally different to your own. If you're a hegelian, for instance, your view of the world is fundamentally different to that of an empricist. You can't just call that jargon and translate it to ordinary speech. Ideas don't work like that.

It's also available online: https://www.xuexi.cn/d6399cd070074625b24eb5952a5ea64c/b7dd5b...

Amusingly, the book's website has a "how to buy" button that... links directly to the Amazon product page: http://www.china.org.cn/china/node_7214554.htm What, the Party can't run its own shipping operation?

Why would the CCP run an online bookstore?

If the Gideons can put a bible in every hotel room in the United States, you'd hope the biggest country in the world could ship a couple books. You don't charge people to view advertisements!

What you are saying makes no sense to me at all. Like, I just don't even remotely grok the logic of this.

Just because you have the money / resources to do something yourself, does not mean that you should do that thing. Generally speaking, a bookseller will be more efficient at selling and delivering books to people who want books. Why on earth would you expect a political party to try and duplicate that effort? There are tons of good reasons why so much effort is outsourced to third parties these days.

Second, it is downright common to charge people to view advertisements. That's what magazines are. Magazines are a bit dead now, but the way they work is you get a bunch of advertisements, bundle it up with some content, and then charge people for it. They're not paying for the content (the content is already funded by the advertisements) and they're not paying for the physical copy, they're paying because the advertisers demand that it be so. Not all magazines work this way, but this is the general idea.

It turns out that people are more receptive to advertising if you make them pay for it first.

> This talk of peaceful development needs to be taken seriously. So I set about combing through my two English volumes of Xi Jinping’s Governance of China looking for the phrase and sentiments similar to it. Occasionally I would consult the Chinese edition of the same books when I wanted to see how a certain phrase or idea was conveyed in the original. I then tried to think of major events in the years since Volume II was published where Xi would have had cause to touch on these themes, and eventually realized that the most important certainly would have been the 2018 Central Conference on Work Relating to Foreign Affairs, which gathered together the politburo, the heads of the intelligence, united front, and foreign affairs bureaucracies, and all of China’s ambassadors under one roof to learn about “Xi Jinping Thought on Foreign Work.” Xi’s speech at that event has not yet been published, but I spent some time going through the Xinhua read-outs of it, as well as reading Yang Jiechi’s two lengthy precis of XJP Thought on Foreign Work for Qiushi.

https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinping-and-the-laws-of-histor...

That turns out to be an article about writing this longer article: https://palladiummag.com/2020/07/08/the-theory-of-history-th...

And what jumps out at me from that longer article is how religious the CCP position is. "We have the revealed truth, have faith in it." It's not open to criticism by anyone other than the prophet Xi. And, since it's his revelation, he of course does not criticize it.

smart, we should also implement controls in the west, we can't rely on companies inside the capitalism system to do what is right for the people at large, if companies can get away with selling heroin to children, they will do so. The big problem these days is (software) companies essentially hijacking the primitive brain centers for pleasure, fear, attention etc... and commoditizing them.

Who would we give these controls to? Would this be the government? Hard pass on that. I do believe in controls, but those controls are best left to the individual. I don't need a bureaucrat telling my kids they can't play video games 8 hours a day, that's my responsibility. I don't need a government agency dictating I can't invest in risky real estate ventures, it's my fault if I invest and lose my money. I don't disagree that control is needed, just the level at which it is applied. I will admit to being conflicted. I don't like the idea of legalized herion, though I did support marijuana legalization initially.

Controls should be exerted on companies and institutions, not people. Case in point : the government has no place telling you how long your kids can play, but you might need the government to get rid of highly damaging practices like loot boxes.

> Controls should be exerted on companies and institutions, not people.

Not sure there is a clear distinction. Companies and institutions are owned and ran by people.

You can run a one-man corporation if you like.

Exactly - selling heroin to kids (outside of medicinal purposes) should be illegal. Whether it is a "company" (co-operating group of individuals) or an individual seems irrelevant.

It's my fault for being unclear. And really, companies and institutions are people, legally speaking. They have moral personality, at least in Civil Law.

In any case, they operate with a different incentive structure than single private citizens do. I don't think it's a revolutionary thing to say that companies don't, in fact, behave like physical people do.

> I don't need a bureaucrat telling my kids they can't play video games 8 hours a day, that's my responsibility.

Just like the Covid restrictions have shown, trying to appeal to the responsibility of the individual doesn't seem to be the winning move for governments.

There seems to be some thought that society can force people to do what is deemed best without the awareness that...

1.) Society may not know what is best 2.) Even if it is the best option the push back will still exist and in many cases attempting to force the issue will galvanize opposition

> if companies can get away with selling heroin to children, they will do so.

Companies quite literally marketed and sold opium for children[1] in the US before the FDA was created.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/15/long-o...

I do not believe in the Marxist interpretation that capitalism will ruin itself. Even if we are doomed to have leisure at the end of capitalism, the machine that brings the leisure has to be maintained by someone. That means a reduction in work hours on the individual level.

A works 40 hours and demands 30 hours

B works 40 hours and demands 20 hours

C works 0 hours and demands 30 hours

Total labor supplied = 80 hours = total labor demanded

We call C lazy even though the technology we invent and work we do has the goal of reducing the need for future labor. The problem isn't that robots will make us unemployed, it's that we measure our prosperity through employment rather than the work being done. People will hoard employment opportunities and work more than they need to. This creates a intensifying race to the bottom as being 1% better gets you the whole job, rather than let you have a fair portion of the job market according to your ability and how much labor you yourself demand.

Let's say everyone works full time including C. That would mean 40 hours of meaningless employment. If the meaninglessly worked for surplus is then being invested then interest rates must necessarily become negative. Work becomes leisure and investment becomes consumption. This is the starting line of leisure capitalism.

Conventional economists would just say "if there is a surplus just lower prices (wages)". Yes, that is why wages are stagnating. However, what is the purpose of the wage stagnation? Of course, lower prices are a signal to stop production and to stop working. The employers' response is to fire whole employees rather than cut their working hours. That is why C is unemployed.

Of course there is a problem with this model. It assumes a perfectly flexible debt market. The economy as a whole is doing fine because C can just borrow 30 hours of work for 0% interest. What if it isn't? If C cannot borrow because of his unemployment, then C will also cut his demand for labor to zero because his demand for work is capped by the amount of work he supplies. This is why depressions and recessions are so ugly. Total demand is now 50 hours, B gets fired, total demand is now 30 hours. It's also why Keynesian stimulus is so effective. All it does is increase the flexibility of the debt market because governments borrow money with good conditions and give it to those with bad financing conditions via unemployment benefits or food stamps.

If A worked 10 hours less, B worked 20 hours less and C worked 30 hours more there wouldn't be any intense competition for the scarce resource of employment, there also wouldn't be any need for debt growth or endless GDP growth.

An oversimplified conclusion of this argument is that economics is effectively built around a pyramid scheme of population growth because children demand labor without supplying labor, giving the illusion that full time employment is the normal state of an economy and that labor can be stored through money and even earn a return because it's always replaced with more young labor.

Think about it this way. If I work a constant amount of hours but my productivity keeps going up and my personal desire to consume does not, then the only way for me to work full time is by having more and more children as the robots get more and more efficient.

I'm part of the addiction recovery community, so I read it as Xi is doing an intervention on addictive and self-destructive aspects of capitalism. The author repeated twice the sentence "An outside force is needed to halt the madness. Xi Jinping has decided to be that force." Sounds like a healthy intervention to me.

This kind of reads like western propaganda trying to carry water desperately for capitalism. I forgot what part of communism meant you couldn't have semiconductor factories (Regardless, China's largest semiconductors are state owned so I don't know why he brings this up).

A much more rational view I've come to understand is the CCP now has very wealthy leaders from the private sector who are now getting more active in politics. This is standard - once a business grows large enough, business risk from the state grows larger and it becomes important to be able to influence the state. China will now have to balance the needs of the public and private sectors and I imagine the old guys aren't as keen to let the private sector do what it wants. The common prosperity initiative is now a tool that Xi can wield against more capitalist upstarts in the CCP.

A very dumb idea is to imagine CPC having factions being, "a poor one," and a "rich one."

That is something long passed, like 30 years ago. What's happening now is rather "old rich communists" fighting the "new rich communists" with both being equally heterodox, and distant from mainstream Marxism, and both being equal in them being terrible parasites on the body of the Chinese nantion.

There can only be the state. Anything that threatens the state's dominance in people's minds and lives must be subjugated to the state. That's the point of a totalitarian regime.

>Xi Jinping has weaved a “Chinese Dream.” He has promised Chinese a better life. Growing paychecks aside, the Chinese are not living it. Urban China is a society of miserable egoists who feel manipulated by forces beyond their own control.

Lots of opinions here without anything backing them up. 93% of Chinese citizens approve of their central government. It's been steadily growing year over year. Westerners love having opinions on how other countries are doing contrary to the facts.

https://www.chinausfocus.com/society-culture/why-chinese-peo...

I don't think that there exists any regime which will save the chinese people from overworking and overcompeting themselves.

You can give a person money and power but you can't force them to be laid back altruists.

So the "not living it" part is not relevant, but neither are Xi's "measures".

Also nearly 100 million members of the Communist Party -- roughly 1/3 the size of the entire U.S.

You don't generally join the party because you believe so strongly in communism. You join it for the improved job prospects.

So people in the west do the same, improving your social network nothing wrong with it.

Nothing wrong with joining a political party, empowering the single-party state, for better job prospects?

Nothing wrong with acting contrary to your believes in order to get ahead of someone honest?

Nothing wrong with it? What is right with it!?

There's a single party in the US, and people here seem fine with it. In fact, because that party has two factions, we call it "freedom."

A single party state is not an inherently evil thing. I think you can make a pretty strong argument that history has shown more negatives vs positives of single party states, but that’s not the same thing.

Acting contrary to your beliefs, not theirs necessarily, and since when is people joining a group for the purposes of mutual benefit (and yes, competition against outgroup members) dishonest?

There’s absolutely nothing inherently wrong with any of these behaviors, and I’m sure that there are many instances of behaviors you support in other circumstances.

> A single party state is not an inherently evil thing.

There’s different kinds of single party states: first, a transitory single party state that “single party” because the current political climate leaves only one party currently competitive but where other parties are not structurally prevented from competing, and thus factionalism within the dominant party will lead to the single party condition being short-lived (e.g., the U.S. during Democratic-Republican single-party rule in the 1810s-1820s.) This, while it can have problematic aspects, is not inherently evil or inconsistent with democratic governance.

On the other extreme are systems where the dominant party has a structural (possibly in-law) monopoly or at least privileged status. As systems of public governnance, these are inherently evil.

I don't think changing that to two-party makes any difference, when the parties just switch which one is in power.

I'm not saying there's something wrong with it -- my point is strictly limited to the claim that the size of the Communist Party is not related to the strength of support for communism in China.

(Though it's not all about improving your social network. You will still enjoy improved job prospects even if you have no relevant network.)

Ok, let's very conservatively estimate that 20% of them are deeply committed to China's ideological Marxism. That's 20 million people united.

To downplay the importance of scale here is a bit misguided.

What makes that estimate "conservative"?

I think it can be simultaneously true that Chinese (or rather urban Chinese) feel manipulated by forces beyond their own control, and that most of them approve of their central government. The fact that the central government is trying to reign in these forces might contribute to that approval.

> 93% of Chinese citizens approve of their central government.

I have doubts about both this assertion and the source provided.

was this a rigorous assesment? is this a reputable source?

I think you might want to read this recent study:

https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7...

>> 93% of Chinese citizens approve of their central government.

In a communist/dictatorship regime there is little room for a different opinion.

Anecdotally, most of the Chinese people I've met in the West are quite apathetic politically and at least tacitly support the CCP. It's not like Iran or Zimbabwe where everyone who leaves takes immense pride in hating the government back home.

(Of course, there's some selection bias here on both fronts; the people I'm meeting in Australia are wealthy enough to be able to move overseas).

I work with lots of Chinese nationals in the US and they all support their government and the progress they've made. It seems that only the western narrative on China is the only acceptable and valid one.

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