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Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

>China speaks with one voice, Xi, everyone else a thousand voices. US has 10 000 people at least who make up the power of Xi. President, senator, CEO, senior bureaucrat, judge, heads of NGOs, Universities, police, military etc. all 'put in one group and coordinated with an ambitious 50 year plan' in the West. Even in a single country.

This is an orientalist and simplistic take. The CCP is an enormously complicated system and there are many cliques and ideological debates within it. As any sinologist will tell you, the power struggles at the very top are mostly unknown to us (except years later, to historians) but even in Mao's era there was certainly not a single voice.

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I don't think it's simplistic and certainly not orientalist, as it has nothing to do with anything Asian or Oriental specifically.

That the CCP is an 'enormous and complex system with many debates within' doesn't matter if the party speaks very directly and coherently, and the party is very tightly controlled and of course they have all of the power.

The degree of centralization of authority by Xi is unlike we've seen since Mao, and due to universal power of technology, you could say 'more power than any leader in history'.

Xi very quickly and arbitrarily grabbed the nations top tech leaders off of the street. Literally disappeared. He imposed aggressive governmental oversight and controls over those organizations (and others) including government ownership, board seats, CCP members as staffers for internal oversight, censorship requirements, etc. etc.. It's unthinkable outside China, in any normal kind of country.

If any 'outside' leader speaks up against China - be it a Dean, or Prime Minster - the CCP will respond assertively and quickly.

When China does some questionable or malign act - where is the response? Who should respond? Is anyone powerful enough to respond? Can there be a coordinated action?

As the Australian political leadership spoke up against Chinese lies over COVID origins, they were slapped with billions in trade damages, and was attacked in a number of indirect ways. Were Australia to have acted in concert and direct cohesion with USA, EU and UK on that, and were policy and actions to be aligned, it would be a different story.

There's nothing comparable to Xi outside of China (in any normal country - I won't say 'western' country because it goes way beyond that), not even Putin.

There are two different ideas here. The fact that the CCP can act decisively and has an iron grip on China does not contradict the idea that it is still a granular organization with its own internal logic. Xi is not the CCP and the CCP is not Xi. And the iron grip and the decisiveness are not as total as you imagine them to be.

This is in fact where the orientalism comes in: the rejection of granularity. If you think about it for a few seconds, it really makes no sense that a single person would be able to entirely control a structure of 96 million adherents, or that this latter structure would have no internal dissension and tumult. The only reason we might come to these conclusions is if we are deeply unfamiliar with the history, culture, ideology, way of doing things that apply and thus reject the individuality and complexity that are part of these systems. Few Westerners would qualify Western institutions in this way. I don't mean in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with what they do, but analyzing them as just a unified blob and thinking nothing of it.

I mean, that's technically true of any dictator of a large country, no? Stalin was a dictator but also not immune from political machinations.

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