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This is why for all the fear of China, the country cannot succeed on its current trajectory.

Things look great until the leaders are doing well, but all it takes is for 1 bad set of leadership for all to fall apart.

And Xi Jinping has guaranteed failure by removing term limits. Term limits meant that other ambitious political leaders were willing to wait and try their luck next turn. But with no term limits multiple generations of leaders are locked out of even the possibility of becoming the party leader, which means they have become a threat to Jinping.

And since so many people are now a threat to him, his selection criteria for people to lead different parts of the party and government has to be based entirely on loyalty rather than competence.

Which almost guarantees a lot of counter productive incompetence.

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> This is why for all the fear of China, the country cannot succeed on its current trajectory.

I really really really want this to be true, but I don't think it's wise to discount China as a threat to worldwide autonomy just because they're behaving like typical authoritarians, and have the weaknesses that you'd expect from that kind of government.

Personally I think China's demographic issues should be more of a worry for them. The aftermath of the one-child policy, as well as all the selective abortion (under one-child, parents preferred to give birth to a boy) creating a imbalance between the number of men and women, means their population will start shrinking soon. And there will be a lot of only children supporting both of their parents when they start getting older, not to mention a glut of older folks leaving the workforce without equal replacement from the younger generations.

You think of China in american terms. For all they care, the world stops at their borders and having to trade outside is a temporary inconvenience. They re not going to be able to expand, you can already see their cultural gradients on its periphery having a lot of issue.

If China was to deal with French, Japanese or Senegalese people, it would immediately crumble. All they can do is firefight for internal stability, or change enormously to inspire positively, but it's not yet looking that way.

Even in the worst case scenaro China ends up having twice the population of the USA. The nee 3 child policy for ccp members might help.

Having a contracting population and a smaller fraction of that population working age makes it hard to sustain economic growth. (Ask Japan).

I think per capita numbers are more interesting than absolute numbers, and I'd expect that automation will improve that in the coming decades more than in the last couple of decades.

Russia has been skirting along in mediocrity with its one leader pseudo parliament system for longer than China. Xi is copying Putins playbook here.

The major difference is their positions in economic transitions.

I think the biggest risk for China would be entering mediocrity and flatlining like Russia. Not growing seems to be their biggest fear.

Russia failed to build economy not based on oil. China's economy much more stable.

According to machine translation (both Google Translate and DeepL) of the law itself, it seems that this is not actually the case, and that the article is simply wrong. Indeed, it seems that they have a legal responsibility to notify the MIIT within two days, but a legal responsibility to notify upstream immediately (according to another commenter, they do not even have any responsibility to disclose to the government, only to Apache).

Perhaps this translation is incorrect, but Chinese speaking commenters below think that it is accurate, so it's probably just the article being wrong (as usual), leading to incorrect conclusions that China is not a threat and will not succeed because they will shoot themselves in the foot etc, while reality is a lot more reasonable.

The article is correct on all factual grounds; Alibaba has been suspended of its participation as a 网络安全威胁信息共享平台合作单位 (whatever that means), and the agency sources that law as the reason. Now you can argue the law does not actually say Alibaba is obligated to report the incident to the China government, but the government is acting as it should, and Alibaba has no recourse but to accept (you have no chance to get a course ruling to overturn the decision in China anyway so what other choice do they have).

The ease with which the term limits were removed indicates that they were never a real limitation in the first place. What prior leader was actually bounded by them?

Jiang and Hu both stepped down after 2 terms. So yes they agreed to it.

Doesn't seem like much of a limitation if they have to agree to it. What happens if they don't?

Wasn't Jiang still leading the military? Hu appears to be the only one that stepped down on time - but more from the rise of Xi rather than this rule.

> Which almost guarantees a lot of counter productive incompetence.

What do dictators do when their policies start failing and popularity declines?

They go to war. Nothing distracts the population as much. This is the biggest risk with China's expanding military power.

This is not how China works. Previous leaders only exited power because they were pretty much ousted, and their power was never really institutionally checked.

Mainland China never been ever close to constitutional rule. It's unbelievably naive to think that term limits would've ever been something other than a decoration, and a propaganda point with communists.

There were emperors in China and many other countries all through the past several thousand years and it is the expectation of the world that they suddenly give up that entire way of life and thinking in one century?

Yeah bro, there were kings and feudal lords and chieftains and emperors (like Rome) all over the rest of the world for thousands of years too. To say that the Chinese are incapable of democracy because being ruled by an autocrat steadily increasing his own power is their "way of life" is frankly insulting to the Chinese.

The Chinese are one of the most crowded nations for a long long time, and their dynamics, views, priorities and choices are different. Also they have a much different history on social dynamics and outcomes.

Judging their systems and dynamics from our point of view misses the point in some cases.

There's an eye opening video about "The Social Credit System" from CCC (Chaos Communication Conference). Take a look if you have time:

https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9904-the_social_credit_system

It's an hour long talk.

The Taiwanese seem to have managed the transition.

Taiwan is not a shining beacon of democracy either. Since the creation of the country in 1949, the total number of parties holding power is: two. For important issues like the geopolitical orientation and the business model of the country - the choice between KMT and DPP is like a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola

Which is fairly common among democracies. How many parties has held power in the US since 1940?

Are you suggesting the USA is still a democracy rather than a republic or an oligarchy where only the political position of the rich matter?

Why should other countries be capable of it and the Chinese incapable?

There were slaves for thousands of years too, and we ended that pretty quickly.

That's just plainly not true. Deng Xiaopeng set the country up for orderly succession, and it did work up through Xi Jinping. Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin both cycled through office without any of the things we associate with authoritarian rulers. There was no execution of your political opponents, after you beat them to office, or afterwards.

The argument has been that China needed a reset badly. Free-for-all capitalism hasn't been so great for most folks in the U.S. either, has it? That has been the justification for the heavy hand of the government during Xi's rule. There's also the argument that Western-style term limits prevent long-term strategic planning.

All of those are really tempting and solid arguments, especially given how corrupt China had become with capitalism-ruling-all, but one really does wonder.

As far as Alibaba goes, it's to my understanding that there are no real alternatives to Alibaba Cloud in China (unless you want to go for a foreign solution like AWS or Azure). It would seem that the current government thinks they can get away with making an example of the company as they see fit. There may be some geopolitical logic to that, because Xi's government seeks to make China more independent after Trump's trade wars, and if you have a big, wealthy internet company drawing in the country's top talent, then that's fewer that's e.g. going towards the semiconductor companies they now seek to bolster.

Now there may have been a "correct" policy solution to this, a la antitrust, but it seems Xi's government prefers to be heavy-handed. For me, that's setting some scary precedents, because as other commenters have said, it isn't clear how succession will be handled going forward, and it may well be brutal.

> There's also the argument that Western-style term limits prevent long-term strategic planning.

It seems to me that term limits are mostly the reserve of countries that have a genuine fear of authoritarian takeovers from recent experience, e.g. the nonaligned countries in South America and Africa.

Countries with executive power vested in a member of Parliament don’t have such limits, hence how you get people like Merkel, Thatcher and Mark Rutte serving as Prime Minister for so long. You also have long-term planning with the maintenance of a professional civil service rather than political appointees and the use of cabinet level decision making rather than allowing the Head of Government to unilaterally make decisions.

America and France are really the only significant “western” (politically rather than geographically) countries you can say have term limits on executive power. In both cases the introduction of term limits are post-ww2 changes. To use either example as a criticism of “the west” as a whole requires a rather narrow view of the world I think.

> Xiaopeng set the country up for orderly succession

No, he did not. He built a cabinet of marionettes, and set himself to be a gray cardinal to run the state from behind the curtain. Jiang Zemin then ousted him out of power.

You know nothing about China past the popular propaganda image they wanted Westerners to see.

> Deng Xiaopeng set the country up for orderly succession, and it did work up through Xi Jinping. Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin both cycled through office without any of the things we associate with authoritarian rulers. There was no execution of your political opponents, after you beat them to office, or afterwards.

Two orderly successions with no political executions isn’t a particularly high bar…

For somewhere like China, under authoritarian rule, that is a pretty high bar. The stakes are very high and there are a lot of talented, ambitious individuals. There is no theoretical framework for why one person shouldn't put their family in charge once you accept the idea that one party should be in charge. Deng, Jiang & Hu are all basically heros of the modern era for resisting any temptation.

>Two orderly successions with no political executions isn’t a particularly high bar…

disagree. Mao started the culture revolution because he was ousted and succeed in taking back the powers. its a high bar that all leaders after Mao didn't try another culture revolution.

That's worked remarkably well for Russia.

From Wikipedia

> The Communist Party of China proposed amending the Constitution, for the first time after 2004,[3] including writing Scientific Outlook on Development and Xi Jinping Thought into the Preamble,[4] and removing the provision that the President and Vice President "shall serve no more than two consecutive terms" from the Constitution.[5]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_National_People%27s_Con...

The most powerful man in China is the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” - Mao. The title President is less important so term limits on that position don’t matter. Recent ”anti-corruption” actions have weighed heavily on Jiang Zemin’s allies

Yes, but that same leader is conventionally also the President.

By eliminating term limits in 2018 Xi Jinping was clearly signaling that he did not intend on relinquishing power.

Interestingly Hu Jintao only gained control of the army two years into his term.

> The most powerful man in China is the Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

It's interesting to me that they allowed that to happen, both the US, with its civilian control of the military, and the Soviets, with their convoluted division of manpower, equipment, and commands, took measures to stop that situation from occurring.

China just doesn't try to hide it

You just look back at China's 5000 years Imperial history. It is no surprise of current development. Chinese history has never had Greek style democracy system. The closest in terms of political development will be Song dynasty which it has a chance to further survive, will likely turn into something like USA. Alas, ask any Chinese scholars, Song dynasty is considered the worst in China as it is "weak". Surprisingly, if you ask the same person, people living during Song dynasty were way better off than Tang or Han dynasty, both golden periods of China before Song. Even if you ask about science and literarure developments, it too was ahead of previous dynasty. Still, it is consider a failure when in terms of dynasty ranking.

I know about Dr. Sun's republic, Taiwan and "voting politburo" . But these are considered modern development which hasn't really sunk into physche of Chinese race worldwide.

> the country cannot succeed on its current trajectory

What, exactly, is it doing right now? This sounds a lot like "Tom Brady cannot succeed with his current height." Um, he already has, and continues to do so.

This is why for all the fear of America, the country cannot succeed on its current trajectory. Things look great until the leaders are doing well, but all it takes is 1 Brandon for all to fall apart.

And since so many Americans are now a threat to the Democrats, their selection criteria for people to lead different parts of the party and government has to be based entirely on race and gender rather than competence.

Which almost guarantees a lot of counter productive incompetence.

That's the point of the comment you're responding to - the USA has term limits, which means that the damage a single bad leader can do is limited.

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