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And you would know this because...?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murong_Xuecun In his acceptance speech for the Prize, Murong wrote a scathing commentary about his editor that he worked with for China: In the absence of a remedy. He also launched into a critique of the state of censorship in China in general. The speech was banned at the awards ceremony, but made its rounds across the internet. The draft of the speech was translated into English and delivered to the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club in February 2011, followed by a publication by The New York Times in November 2011. In the draft, Murong alluded to a wide array of censorship restrictions, including limits on discussing current affairs, contemporary personalities, and being forced to change the phrase "Chinese people" to "some people" in parts of his work. More obscure restrictions were also discussed, such as scrubbing the use of "Henan people" because it carries the air of regional discrimination, and removing references to "India-flavoured farts" because the editor was concerned about a diplomatic rift between China and India. Murong wrote that "The only truth is that we cannot speak the truth . The only acceptable viewpoint is that we cannot express a viewpoint. We cannot criticise the system, we cannot discuss current affairs, we cannot even mention distant Ethiopia."
Such oppression. Much bravery.
I don't really follow the media. And I've heard that the economist is essentially "neoliberal". But the fact that they have that book and even the review of that book makes me think they aren't that liberal?
And what do you mean by "china bad? " Are liberals supposed to hate China? I thought hate on china was party independent. Can you elucidate your perspective on the bias with the economist?
Needless to say they don't like China, who is kind of the opposite of all that.
There's only a tenuous (conspiratorial) connection to liberalism as practiced on twitter.
So do you think the three specific topics you’re referring to are unworthy of discussion? Or should China be off the table entirely?
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A technology-and-business guru at mit explains how the mindset that inspires Silicon Valley could be usefully applied in life and in other fields of business, with a focus on teamwork, producing prototypes quickly and avoiding bureaucracy through individual accountability.
Scaling People. By Claire Hughes Johnson. Stripe Press; 480 pages; $30 and £21.99
Good books about the nuts and bolts of management are vanishingly rare. A former executive at Google and Stripe offers a practical guide to everything from giving feedback and delegating to running a meeting and building teams.
The Coming Wave. By Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskar. Crown; 352 pages; $32.50. Bodley Head; $32.50
A cogent look at the potential of ai to transform the economy and society, along with the risks of misuse and surveillance. By a co-founder of DeepMind, a leading ai company, and board member of The Economist’s parent company.
But even without that one, my point still stands. Do you think the China-related topics should not be addressed and, say, the ones on the U.S. left-wing culture war and religious right-wingers should stay?
What emerges will, I think, tend in two directions with a spectrum of outcomes in between. On one trajectory, some liberal democratic states will continue to be eroded from within, becoming a kind of zombie government. Trappings of liberal democracy and the traditional nation-state remain, but functionally they are hollowed out, the core services increasingly threadbare, the polity unstable and fractious. Lurching on in the absence of anything else, they become ever more degraded and dysfunctional. On another, unthinking adoption of some aspects of the coming wave opens pathways to domineering state control, creating supercharged Leviathans whose power goes beyond even history’s most extreme totalitarian governments. Authoritarian regimes may also tend toward zombie status, but equally they may double down, get boosted, become fully fledged techno-dictatorships. On either path, the delicate balance holding states together is tipped into chaos.
So, the usual neoliberal-hypetripe.
As for what should be addressed, it's a free country, you can address whatever you want. I just think that if I picked 55 books to read in 2023, I wouldn't pick 3 China Bad books.
How many South Korea Bad books would you want to read? Or Japan Bad? There are more of those on the list than those about China when adjusting for population.