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Comment by obscurette | Hacker News Reader

I think that it's misunderstanding that dictatorships need any.

I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment. The idea that dictatorships have everything under control and can conduct themselves however they please is true ... until the point that it isn't. So while a dictator technically doesn't necessarily need to justify themselves or to have a reasonable, fair plan for some given situation that pleases their subjects - they probably don't want to needlessly push things too far if they can help it.

However in this case a badly managed change in their Covid strategy doesn't collapse the country or cost the CCP their control over China, but it could cause a bit of a power struggle within the party as factions jostle for position and attempt to shift blame and some higher-ranking politicians will probably lose their position or go to jail for reasons. If you're one of those people, you probably want some kind of plan.

> I don't know if it's correct to call China a "dictatorship" but I'll humour you for a moment.

Seriously? What's your definition of "dictatorship"? Let's take Wikipedia's one for example:

> A dictatorship is a form of government which is characterized by a leader or a group of leaders which holds governmental powers with few to no limitations on them.

Can you sincerely say that it doesn't apply?

China is a lot of things, it's nominally communist but that doesn't quite capture the whole situation on its own, it's technically a "dictatorship" by that definition (probably more so recently with Xi Jinping consolidating power) but that also doesn't quite capture it all either. I don't want to debate terminology because it's tedious and detracts from the actual point I was making - that just because the CCP has a lot of power, doesn't mean they don't believe they need a face-saving way out of zero-Covid.

Guys you're both right.

Well, don't start your comment by nitpicking terminology if you don't want to debate terminology. You can't just drop an argument and then evade contradiction like that.

I made a comment with a very light disagreement, but went along with the China=dictatorship premise anyway and you blew your top, didn’t engage with the original comment.

It’s the way of the internet, people think they smell blood in the water, get all riled up and lose sight of the actual topic

This argument about whether Xi is a dictator or not actually plays out with fair regularity on his Talk page[0] on Wikipedia. The general consensus – whether astroturfed by CCP I cannot tell – usually ends that he is not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Xi_Jinping/Archive_1

Wikipedia also deletes articles about female academics who go on to win the Nobel prize the next day. I don't particularly care about the "consensus" that they build.

I lived 30 years of my life in Soviet Union. If I have to choose a single thing which sucks even more than living best years of my life in this country, it's the people from free world discussing whether communism is bad or not so bad, dictatorship or authoritarian, whether the general idea of communism is right or not etc.

I am reasonably certain that a country well known for sending in the troops to crush rebellion would count as a dictatorship.

> reasonably certain that a country well known for sending in the troops to crush rebellion would count as a dictatorship

Authoritarian. China has been authoritarian for a long time. It only recently became a dictatorship, which is an inherently unstable form of government.

Yes, I agree. But the distinction isn't too useful. Most dictatorships are also authoritarian regimes.

Ok so you're going to have to resist all-caps replying "WHATABOUTISM!" but you realise by that definition both the USA and the UK could be "dictatorship" for sending in troops to crush both rebellion (the UK did in Northern Ireland) and protests (like USA did in Kent State)?

I said in another comment that I don’t wanna get into a debate on the subtleties of what is/isn’t a dictatorship, but THIS is an odd place to draw the line.

We're not arguing about the US or the UK here. Mainland China is the topic.

Well originally I was talking about why even though CCP is the single dominant party in China they still want some sort of exit from their Zero Covid policy that doesn't lose them face. Then you made an argument that they're a dictatorship on the grounds that they've turned their troops loose on their own people. Which is a surprising and extraordinary definition, because it also applies to the US and the UK - countries generally not thought of as "dictatorships".

Cool, have fun with that strawman

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