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Comment by rectang | Hacker News Reader

> With the Winter Olympics opening in Beijing in February, the IOC and corporate sponsors have multi-billion-dollar reasons to help China make the Peng Shuai story go away. Therein lies a bleak lesson. The WTA has been brave in challenging China, given that it has organised lucrative tournaments there. But as a women’s sports association, it depends on retaining the confidence of women players. Sometimes there are incentives larger than China’s market.

It's remarkable that the WTA has stood up for Peng Shuai. International corporations typically knuckle under to the CCP. See the IOC's response, and also Jamie Dimon recently backtracking on his mild joke.

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It is remarkable but it shouldn’t be surprising. As the article says, the WTA is a women’s sports association and arguably the most successful one in the world. If the WTA caved to pressure from China then they would rightly be vilified in the west for betraying women. There is no way they could ever do that and get away with it!

It's also great that WTA does not depend on Chinese market, so they won't sustain too much of loss by antagonizing Chinese authority. On the other hand, look at NBA. The righteous American conscience, the one and the only King James, kisses up to China to no end.

I would be really interested to see how things would go if it was a WNBA player making the sexual assault complaint against a party grandee. The NBA owns the WNBA and we might reasonably expect them to cave to the pressure as they have before. However I think they’d face a rebellion from their players as well as the public. It could get really ugly.

> It's also great that WTA does not depend on Chinese market

Due to Covid several tournaments in China were cancelled, which seems to have helped.

Perhaps women are also better at speaking truth to power.

I can't help but wonder this myself, although I don't think it is safe/easy to say this with confidence - but if you look at Jane Jacobs, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Rosa Luxemburg, Chelsea Manning and others, I sometimes think about whether being in the historically weaker societal role sharpens your insight and moral cohones. I don't believe there's enough evidence to say it's there, but I would buy a story that went something like the subtle machismo men suck up as they get socialised might hinder us in those regards.

But then I look to certain contemporary female lesbian politicians in my country and I reconsider that...and there have been people like David Graeber, James Scott, Mikhael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Snowden and many others as well.

Only the wealthy and powerful, The Right, can afford the luxury of being truly stupid. The Left can never afford not to be as smart and pragmatic. This is why reality is always left-leaning.

Manning was a man when he became a whistleblower.

Sure, but even as a gender questioning male he was definitely being placed in a "historically weaker social role".

He was an out gay man in the military, not a gender questioning male.

And honestly, I d be the party, I d embrace it and move with it. If the Church can take it, so can the party, fix it and get on with it.

The fact one dude has a mistress he raped then followed on, doesnt need to reflect on the political model, the party legitimity, or China's success.

Just look at Trump and the republicans in the US, they rolled with it, Toad dick or not.

Didn't know context of joke here, so looked it up: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/11/jamie-dimon-quickly-...

The quotation seems to be garbled in that link, https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/jamie-dimon-jokes-jpmorgan... has one that makes more sense

> The Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year. So is JPMorgan. And I’ll make you a bet we last longer.

Tho second link isn't a citation for:

> I can’t say that in China. They are probably listening anyway.

"Didn't know context of joke here"

Why are people referring to it as a joke? He may have said it in a jocular tone-of-voice, but I don't think it was a joke at all: it's a reasoned statement to make and furthermore it's a statement I agree with: given US blue-chip companies' propensity to entrench themselves and the CCP's reversion back to authoritarianism (which history has made abundantly clear: rarely ends-well for authoritarians) means that absent anything unexpected happening, the CCP may very-well no-longer exist within a generation or two from now - or at least the CCP won't exist as-we-know-it.

There is a view of history where the thousands of years of Chinese rule-by-bureaucracy is uninterrupted.

My grandfather grew up there and was fond of saying "you have to remember the Chinese did not pray to God. The average Chinese person is not important enough for that. They prayed to the third under-secretary to God's chamberlain. What they really worship is bureaucracy". I don't know China well enough to comment on this myself, but I always found it a fascinating take on the situation.

He didn't say "China", though. He said "the CCP". They don't have any claim on those thousands of years.

my point being that the CCP is merely the figurehead, much like the emperor was. It doesn't really matter if the CCP is replaced by something else, the rule-by-bureaucracy continues uninterrupted.

What is this thousands of years of uninterrupted rule thing? If nothing else there was a period where china's rule was very much interrupted by the mongols, not to mention warring states era, etc.

The Imperial China period from 200-something BC to 1912 had pretty solid control over a fair chunk of what we think of as modern China.

One could make a similar argument and generalize about Europeans and claim European unity exists because for most of the past 2,000 years practically all states in Europe were under the influence of the Catholic church in some way or another.

China's history is as complicated as any other similarly sized territory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_Dynasties.gif and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:D...

yes, you're right. There is a view of European history that sees the Roman Empire mutate into the Holy Roman Empire and maintain control over much of Europe for thousands of years (I guess from the end of the Republic in 27BC to the last Holy Roman Emperor in 1806, so not quite "thousands").

It depends what you mean with "roman empire mutate". HRE had no connection to the Roman Empire besides approval by the papacy.

Meanwhile, other "nations" entitled their ruler as a successor, bestowing upon them the title of Caesar, Kaiser, Tsar. So, you can link it up until the fall of Imperial Russia. Or you can even keep it up to today with Romania, or even Turkey.

When Constantinople fell, there were no lack of claims.

I'm always fascinated by the idea that some political genius way back in the 4th century realised that the Roman Empire was doomed as a military empire, but could survive as a church (of all things), and then managed to persuade everyone that this was a good idea and get it done. The Roman Empire changed its previous policy of wide tolerance regarding religion, adopted what had been a weird cult as the state religion, and survived its military annihilation (at least in the West - as you say, the story in the East is different).

almost no one seriously thinks of European history like that, except as a fun thought exercise.

> I don't think it was a joke at all: it's a reasoned statement

It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.

1. As I stated, I didn't know anything about this, so I'm using language chosen by those before me on topic

2. You're explaining why this "joke" might be taken serious by CCP

3. Most jokes have a hint of truth to them

> You're explaining why this "joke" might be taken serious by CCP

Actually, I'm not.

If you really want to ensure you're on the CCP's shit list, casually call it Occupied West Taiwan and show a Kuomintang flag.

I'm not a big fan of China, but it's probably best if our business leaders didn't mock each other's countries in poor taste.

Can you be more specific?

We are talking here about a former professional player the China government made disappear.

He’s referring to Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan. I thought Dimon has quite the balls to come out on China like that, touching CCP and Taiwan (“China’s Vietnam” he called it, referring to America’s war) in a way that no one with business interests in China would.

Yeah, I'm talking about Dimon. China deserves the negativity, but dunking on them publicly like that only makes it easier for the government to drum up anti-US sentiment.

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