China is having an internal information crackdown. It's approaching the nutty level, which probably indicates that Xi is losing it. The latest thing is a crackdown on clothing "detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people."[1]
The US economy doesn't stop when we switch leaders regularly.
Certainly there would be changes but they aren't predictable. (For instance the new leadership could censor even more due to not having as established based on less as they got into power by promising less invasive actions)
For the sake of good analysis, it's important to focus on real alternatives to that hypothesis, and avoid getting bogged down in semantics.
Liberal democracies arose out of the realisation that autocracies have bad endings like this.
Pretending Xi is insane is twisting yourself in knots to avoid the unpleasant conclusion that China is a challenge to the West that won’t conveniently fail.
So often people are first to accuse others of what they are themselves…
Similar to how the Republican party always try to inhibit abortion wherever they can. You won't say that Republican party successfully passing an anti-abortion law indicates they are losing, will you?
- internal purging of military senior officials. 5 out of the 7 senior officials are now missing in action. https://www.newsweek.com/china-defence-minister-li-shangfu-m.... Very similar to Mao Zedong's purging of his generals https://www.hoover.org/research/lin-biao-incident-and-people.... China has had to transfer generals from airforce and army to head up missile force, because so many generals in the missile forces were purged.
- Xi Jing Ping was privately scalded by party elders during the recent party summit Beidaihe. There's an internal unrest and struggle occurring
- china's export drop 4th straight month https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/business/china-exports-au...
- the great flooding of northeast farmland this summer wiped out 1/3 of China's grain production. in order to mitigate the flooding of Beijing, they instead flooded provinces next to Beijing, which incidentally housed many military forces. Those forces were destroyed without warning.
- another big real estate developer, sunac, filed for bankruptcy https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/19/economy/china-sunac-ny-bankru....
- the Hangzhou asian games was a massive failure, attended by no major heads from developed countries. Cost $30 billion, while its local governments are so desperate for money, they are raiding temples
- marriages in China in 2022 are down 10% from 2021, lowest record since 1986. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/12/china/china-marriages-record-...
- Huawei homegrown chips was a nothing burger. iPhones were sold out in seconds online. Full Apple Store crowds. Very empty Huawei stores. People didn't like the overheated mate 60, or the broken software.
In short, political, economic, demographic, and tech collapse in China.
About Huawei stores being empty, some seems pretty crowded at least on the first day. https://youtu.be/YFeE2xHQVRI?si=2-tqnqXj8aF8srN6
There are good indicators that an economic stagnation or recession are coming, and that could potentially hurt the CCP long term.
Now are you going to say the data collected before is unreliable somehow and this time it's reliable?
China central planning pushed for and encouraged 'over buiding' for efficiency and surplus, doing bulk deals on concrete, streamlining steel creation from iron ore, etc.
If you put aside the traditional western stock market view of companies trading in the building domain (which grew and collapsed) and look at it as state planning for bulk efficiences of scale it perhaps makes more sense.
Right now it makes sense to look at what the next five to ten year state backed push will be as we might anticipate more "one foot in the free market" bubble like growth there.
Someone could easily cherry pick stories about the US and make the same argument. Unsustainable debt, rampant homelessness and addiction, lifespan and healthspan plummeting, birth rates dropping, etc.
Africa and South America would take major investing to bring up to that point.
Huawei seems to be doing well domestically somehow. Way too many store front that aren't too busy.. But they have their own car brand now that seems to be selling well. I'd say half the cars in the street were some domestic electric car brand. I'd guess gasoline cars will be phased out soon
I kept reading about how devastated the country was by the pandemic - but what I saw was a ton of progress. Talking to locals though, they didn't seem to really percieve the difference :)
The original article talks about China misinformation in Taiwan. Maybe western society is running the same thing to China. Like like they did for North Korea.
Remember the "people can only get certain types of haircuts in North Korea"? Fake news, and I believed it at the time. So now I'm always sceptical on what I read from western news talking about Asian countries.
Here's an interesting satire about this https://youtu.be/2BO83Ig-E8E?si=MziI90I7xP5W4g-m
Of course, you can still criticize these draft laws for vagueness and unenforceability: these concerns have already been extensively covered in mainstream Chinese media outlets.
There's nothing along those lines in any EU country, let alone the US (where such a concept is in extremely flagrant violation of the First Amendment). The closest you'd come is laws against Holocaust denial--but notice the key difference between a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a "good" person might have done something bad versus a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a bad deed never happened.
In China you certainly can point out, even criticize, Mao's role in the Great Leap Forward. Even "Official History" criticizes Mao! You can't be too "over the top" about it, such as comparing him to Hitler or accuse him of being a mass murderer, lest you get cancelled. But the reason you can't has nothing to do with the draft laws being proposed here.
> The closest you'd come is laws against Holocaust denial--but notice the key difference between a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a "good" person might have done something bad versus a law that makes it a crime to suggest that a bad deed never happened.
If you make the first kind of claim and you are wrong, you falsely accuse an innocent person. If you make the second kind of claim and you are wrong, you unjustly exonerate a guilty person. Which is worse? I don't think there's a clear answer! So I fail to see the "key difference" you are trying to highlight between these kinds of claims. Of course, if one of them is true and the other false, then there's a clearly worse claim, but then the worse claim is worse because it's false, not because of the objectionable/offensive nature of its content.
I suspect you never read commentary about the Great Leap Forward from the official gov.cn web sites...
In other news, if we're here to sling dirt: https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/31/23004339/uk-twitter-user-...
Of course UK isn't in "EU country" any more, but hey, I don't have a habit of collecting human rights violations of other countries as a hobby.