Apple’s strict on App Store rules but gives WeChat a free pass (2020)

The protest were a massive mixture of different ideologies, but the dominant ones were democratic politics, and communist economics, opposing the trend towards oligarchic/autocratic rule and liberalized economy.

Yes? That number is decreasing, is the point.

> What aristocracy?

The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.

The key thing to notice is that, in realpolitik terms, an "oligarch" is only aristocracy — rather than haute bourgeoisie — if they have a collegial relationship with the state. I.e. if their interests inherently align with the state's interests (or they can personally negotiate such alignment) such that that they have no reason to act against the state.

But if you have enough oligarchs who don't have such relationships with the state — disenfranchised oligarchs — then they will inevitably plot to manipulate the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat together into organizing a revolt; and will then — critically — sit back and collectively withhold their support from the state for implementing any suppression of said revolt.

(Look at what's happening in Russia right now. You think they'd have such shitty military equipment if the oligarch owners of their defense contractors believed in Putin and wanted him to stay in power?)

Every successful "populist" revolt/revolution in political history, has had an underlying set of disenfranchised oligarchs, who could have aided in the suppression of the revolt, but instead chose to stand by (or "work to rule") and let it happen, because the revolution would inevitably put them in a better, more powerful position.

Why does every politically-stable country — whether democracy, constitutional monarchy, etc. — have a senate? Because a senate is a body made up of (representatives of) oligarchs whose interests don't inherently align with the state, where the job of everyone in the room is to negotiate a group equilibrium between state interests and industrial interests that both the state and the oligarchs can be happy-enough with that the oligarchs will stop undermining state power.

China has a legislature (the NPC), but insofar as it is only a rubber-stamp — it cannot control the Party – seats there are worthless as an "enfranchisement" for oligarchs. They want a real hand in power.

China, obviously, makes friends with oligarchs whenever it can. But certain oligarchs' power bases are just inherently misaligned with Chinese state interests — in a way that a real senate body would solve, but which cannot otherwise be resolved peacefully.

For example: why did China push both Jack Ma out of ownership of Alibaba Group, and Colin Huang out of his chairman position of Pinduoduo, at around the same time? Well, both of these companies now own petit borgeoisie wealth-creation engines — AliExpress and Temu. But Temu didn't exist yet when Huang was ousted. And AliExpress (via Alibaba Group) is majority foreign-owned, while PDD is a domestic private company (and thereby likely implicitly highly state-invested.)

My interpretation of those facts: the state wanted to replace AliExpress — a company proven to both support foreign interference and the empowerment of local petit-bourgeoisie interests (that could eventually lead to destabilization of power) — with another company the state could control indefinitely: one that seemingly serves the same market function, but with tricks (profit-margin caps, distributor-set sale prices) that mean that Temu is not an engine of wealth-creation for the middle class in practice. (It tricks you into thinking that it is, and continues that illusion for the first few months, "going easy" on new sellers to get them to quit other channels, before coming down on you.)

Ma wouldn't stand for just giving up on the forward momentum of an entire business venture, so he was ousted. Huang wasn't interested in his B2B agrobusiness company being pivoted to focus on replacing AliExpress — so he was ousted too. China's replacement board seats of Alibaba acted to cut off new investment into AliExpress; while China's replacement board seats of PDD Holdings acted to get the company going toward building Temu.

Yes, you could describe this as 'making sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china'. But you can also describe it as disenfranchising some very rich people. Dumb move, tbh.

Or consider: every blockchain/cryptocurrency company in China. Again often foreign-funded, again usually highly successful — but at something that China just can't square with (enabling capital flight out of China, minimizing the state's economic hold over other oligarchs.) In a functioning/long-term-stable China, the Chinese cryptocurrency industry would form an industry body with a lobby, get that lobby represented in the senate, and then that lobby's interests would get carefully negotiated against state interests. In the China we have, these companies are just quashed... despite each shutdown generating new disenfranchised oligarchs by the dozens.

Deng was only being blatantly honest.

How many people died due do US involvement to "restore order"? [1]

I know from experience what happened to Greece and Argentina and I wouldn't call it an accomplishment nor something that made the World a better place.

There are no reasons to consider "being liberal" a goal, it's just one of the options, doesn't mean it's the best or the only one.

Of course the US cannot afford to not be hyper-liberal (meaning in reality hyper-capitalistic-run-by-greedy-corporations) because it would kill their economy, even though it could benefit a large squat of the population that, for one reason or another, is being considered a burden for the society by the "liberals" whose only solution is "throw money at the problem and hide it under the carpet".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

E.g. if someone comes to our organization and ask to rewrite half of what we do in their new language, we won't move. Should that someone hold a grudge against us?

I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.

I imagine some kind of deal along the lines of “no WeChat no iPhone in China” was done.

There is a special entitlement to allow some Apple apps and frameworks to do this — Apple’s JavaScriptCore can do JIT, which requires executing data pages. Similarly, Swift Playgrounds can compile to native code and execute that code

So, for example, you could ship a C compiler on iOS and it would compile perfectly valid binaries, but you would never be able to execute those binaries natively without code-signing them and deploying them in an Apple sanctioned way, which you cannot do on-device (except with the above mentioned exceptions)

But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer.

In this case we decided to just remove that feature and re-publish.

i.e. Wechat users would rather switch to Android than lose the app.

I guess the lesson is that exceptions will be made if you can grow an app literally a million fold in a few years and become a vital part of your user's day-to-day lives.

They don't push it on the user side but on the vendor side.