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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

But that’s the problem - the risk of losing a power struggle in a democracy with rule of law, separation of powers, an independent court system, and regular elections is vastly different from the risks of losing a power struggle in the CCP, which controls all branches of government, law enforcement, and the military and is accountable to no one.

The former has a limited downside, the latter unlimited. Whatever the Central Committee decides happens to you is law with no recourse - execution, disappearing and re-education, etc. - and law enforcement and the courts are just there to justify it after the fact.

It’s clueless to publicly mouth off about the CCP if you’re a high-profile influential Chinese billionaire and therefore a potential threat to the current ruling faction, or some future ruling faction when there’s turnover. Discretion is definitely the better part of valor there.

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I always figured that's why high-level power struggles were so constant and severely fought in totalitarian regimes.

If the downside is unlimited then you do whatever it takes to win, always.

And if there isn't currently a struggle then you prepare for the next one, constantly.

Or in other words, you only spend a small portion of your total ability and time on the job, because you have to constantly expend effort on protecting your back.

I have that impression too. Without having directly experienced it myself, it seems like a hellish system. Though it does at least seem like getting “purged” isn’t always final, and that execution is the last choice.

Xi Jinping himself got purged in his youth and spent that time living and working in the countryside and building his ‘man of the common people’ cred, then made it back into the CCP’s favor later. Though Xi was a princeling, his father was one of Mao’s inner circle, so he might have been untouchable and only at risk of exile and not actual execution for that reason, unlike most other CCP members and Chinese people.

And to be fair, US politicians spend most of their time fundraising for their next campaign, so in terms of total ability and time spent on the job it’s probably similar in both systems. But losing a power struggle in the US just means losing your election, and trying again in the next one. In the CCP there’s a wider range of consequences.

For anybody looking to get some understanding of Xi Jinping's life and ascension to power, I'd recommend listening to "The Prince: Searching for Xi Jinping" from the Economist: https://www.economist.com/theprincepod

As reasonable as your argument is, let's apply Occam's Razor. Which is more likely?

1. Jack Ma knows things you don't, and those things made mouthing off seem worthwhile to him. Still, he miscalculated, but not out of sheer cluelessness.

2. You, HN commenter, understand Chinese politics and power better than Jack Ma, a prominent Chinese billionaire. He is clueless.

Doesn't 2 seem a little arrogant to you?

Haha, you're not wrong.

Though I would argue that the explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is not that Ma was being calculating and strategic, but that he just got cocky and said something dumb in the moment. He let all the global feting of his rise from schoolteacher to China's richest man go to his head, made an all-too-human mistake, and said something inadvisable.

He may even have been trying to defend the CCP in that moment, trying to communicate to US audiences that the CCP doesn't need to be feared because it's not scary, and thus he himself didn't fear it. But Xi and the powers that be interpreted it differently, and disappeared him. Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies.

Fair enough! There are certainly other recent examples of billionaires getting themselves in trouble by saying too much....

I know right. A lot of that going around these days. Maybe something in their bottled water.

>Which is always a risk in that system, but not in liberal democracies. No, you just get arrested by the authorities, and later committed suicide before the trial.

Missing option (3). Jack Ma, prominent billionaire, was surrounded by kiss-asses for the past 5-10 years. In doing so, he developed a distorted sense of his own intelligence/power/allies which caused him to make a calculation about the current state of Chinese politics and power that is obviously false to an outside observer.

See also, Twitter is was not worth $44 billion in 2022.

Missing option (4). If you have billions, sacrificing a lot of wealth and power to do something you want is just another valid option.

See also, sacrificing 20% of your net worth to support "freedom of speech" is a reasonable choice, especially if you are left with an objective fortune.

Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech. For a while he banned any mention of Mastodon, or the ElonJet account, and he's banned a whole slew of antifascist accounts and journalists who report on the far right (he will claim that it's because they violated rules, but in each case it seems it was a new rule: journalism he doesn't like is "doxxing": reporting on who did what). So sure, it looks like he is willing to lose a big chunk of his net worth to change Twitter, but his intent seems to be to promote certain speech and suppress other speech, or as he would say, to kill the "woke mind virus".

It’s worth noting that Elon unbanned a whole slew of accounts that had been silenced simply for disagreeing with what happen to be your political priorities. Who has Elon banned for their politics? Being banned for tweeting Andy Ngo’s current home address is very different from being banned for saying that COVID-19 likely originated in a laboratory.

He suspended ADSBExchange and Elonjet. Accounts sharing open source and public data that he didn’t like. He went so far as to specifically ban the use of the link to his jet on Twitter.

FWIW I know it’s his right to do this as he owns the platform but it is relevant in the context of “but Elon didn’t do X”

If this were the reason Ngo managed to get a lot of his critics banned you might have a point. But: https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...

It doesn't matter for what we're talking about if Elon's "freedom of speech" is an ironic take on people only being able to listen to him or actual freedom or whatever. The point is, blowing 44 billion USD on a hobby/for a point he cares about is a reasonable cost for him (and Bezos. Maybe a few others)

> Except that Musk's Twitter in no way supports freedom of speech.

It seems to be supporting Musk's freedom of speech just fine.

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