A Spark Extinguished
chinabooksreview.com
chinabooksreview.com
The latter is more worrisome to me because it required enthusiastic participation by lots of normal people to get off the ground. That lesson should be remembered.
From Huang Shu-min's The Spiral Road:
We decided to attack the five bad elements first, to set an example for the villagers and to intimidate anyone who dared to challenge our authority. Members of the five bad elements were brought up to the podium and forced to kneel down facing the crowd. There was a middle-aged woman among the bad elements. The high-level cadre from the prefecture signaled a poor peasant to come and asked him at close earshot: 'Is that a "landlord's wife" (dizhupo)?' The poor peasant answered: 'Yes, cadre,' went up to that woman, and pressed her head down to the floor throughout the struggle session. At the end of the meeting the high-level cadre asked this poor peasant, 'Why did you force that woman's head down for so long? I thought that this campaign was supposed to avoid unnecessary physical abuse.' The poor peasant answered: 'But, cadre, I thought you had given me the order to force her "head down" (dizhetou)!'
They created democracy, women's rights, etc. despite almost an entire human history of doing otherwise. We only have to look back 10 years.
It is harder to start any democratic revolution against authoritarianism now than in the past. The modern information age makes it harder, not easier. To search someone's papers, you used to have to get police officers to physically enter their home and break their locks, in front of all their neighbors.
You used to need to enlist 5-10 people to spy on a single potential dissident 24/7, and that surveillance is easier to detect. To effectively spy on a population, you used to need to enlist 10-30% of the population to spy on their neighbors and filter reports.
To get the people's attention, you didn't have to get your message through a chaotic attention economy powered by the platforms that filter the information overload. There was literally a public square where you could reach your audience by handing out hand produced pamphlets.
This film is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iay4eXyUb7k
For those unaware, not a whole lot has changed since that time unfortunately. China has had certain periods where they had opened up somewhat, but those days are long gone to my knowledge. If anything the repression may be even greater these days in some ways, though at least there isn't any kind of mass starvation going on as far as I'm aware.
The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system rather than something fundamentally new. In the past it was an imperial examination to join the Mandarin class[1], now it's a test to join the CPC [2]. Either way, if you don't get in your opportunities are limited.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) [2] https://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/
From a distance it seems like government policy is, in many ways, also the imperial system returned, almost like the CCP is the new dynasty (though not hereditary). The focus on corruption (not among political allies, of course), which the imperial system saw as its eventual downfall - IIRC Chinese history at least traditionally taught there were three repeating phases to a dynastic cycle: ascendency, corruption, chaos, then ascendency again .... The perspective on other countries as inevitably inferior. The attempt, post-Opium Wars, to hold onto power by adopting Western technology without adopting Western culture, such as political, intellectual, and economic freedom (it never went well, as you might expect). Even the nine dashed line geographical claims are, IIRC, from the Qing dynasty.
That said monetary controls are much stronger than you'd see in an open market country, and one could force a digital currency with negative interest rates.
Bad loans, like broken promises, will always be with us. Sometimes you take a risk and trust someone, and it doesn't work out, so you're poorer than you thought. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take risks.
When I get a business loan from a bank, I make no promise to pay it back. I promise to pay it back with interest if the business succeeds, and we agree that it might not succeed and they might lose their principal.
When I tell my romantic partner that I won't sleep with other people, it's an absolute promise.
There are very few absolute promises. Most contracts have some provision for what happens when they're broken. If there isn't one, it's poorly written.
Though I don't know enough about Chinese politics to tell how much the quote actually fits.
> And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.
-- Night Watch (2002) by Terry Pratchett
Additionally, you will not find books on this topic in the local library.
I think it is normal for a community to choose selected amnesia.
Why is that surprising? The regime is very thorough in scrubbing history.
The comparison to the Ivy League for example. I don't think there has been a plain Ivy League president in the US since George W. Bush. I don't really see how to comment on him without being political, but I note that his presidency was such a success the right wing of politics is uniting behind a man who very publicly said "[Bush] lied us into a war" as an argument for why his family members weren't competent to lead again based on his record. Elitism doesn't lead to excellence outside a fairly narrow definition of the word.
That's a fancy name for a CIA propagandist.
But how silly of me to even suggest that, for the US is a democracy and thus doesn't play this propaganda game, right guys?
Edit: thought it would be obvious I meant “After reading this in its entirety, I realize that compared to the troubles these people went through, my life is so sweet and easy”
The situation is clearly suboptimal from a human perspective: oppressive power is categorically bad, we take this truth to be self-evident.
In terms of catalytic change, what are some out of the box ideas that would rise to the challenge?
1. New forms of biotechnology minorly resemblant of targeted mind control. For example, any nanotechnology-based vector sufficiently power to trigger behaviors like a voluntary mass resignation of party members. Alternatively, a controlled pandemic that somehow interfaces with compromised electronics to temporarily modulate behavior. But this ask is too high, and such technology would surely be deployed towards even geopolitical goals first.
2. Incredibly high velocity targeted counterpropaganda that is also historically truthful. Some of the earliest StarCraft bots that defeated humans were simply very good at controlling mass mutalisk swarm. A rapid and unexpected infiltration with truth bombs, ideally physical or written rather than electronic to make censorship challenges, could cause a (probably uncontrolled chain reaction).
3. Inducement of a Taiwan takeover, and subsequent loss. Very high collateral damage and seems widely destructive rather than more “peaceful.”
4. Weird deus ex machinas. In the Three Body Problem, theoretical physicist start hallucinating a countdown timer. A covert leap in physics or technologies to induce “mystic breaks” in relevant sub populations, particularly those in power, could lead to mostly voluntary abdications of power.
5. Something more insidious or pernicious related to improved clandestine operation.
6. Straightforward domination, such as through a deployment of a sovereign but appropriately aligned or controlled AI fleet that maintains the balance of a covert takeover / disassembly of the power structure but phase transitions organically to redistribute power to the wider populace before halting or terminating itself.
A lot of these require sci fi, non-existence technology, or risk of armageddon. Are there alternatives (that don’t require classified information or a SCIF) that don’t rely on these or is the task complexity simply at that scale?
The most brutal few that make it to the top have to spend much of their energy to get there or defend their position. That is not saying they don't have any ideologies, but leadership in these systems rewards obedience and tribute paying first of all. So you get a system that optimizes optics for a hierarchy of overlords.
Contrast that with the chaotic looking processes that happens within free democratic societies. Leadership has a much broader accountability, faces scrutiny from all sides, has to tolerate opposition, are bound to laws and have term limits. This system, with all buts and ifs, allows societies to innovate, learn, adapt and prosper.
Chinese leadership should thank the late Kissinger for the enormous transfer of wealth, intellectual properties, and highly favorable trading conditions from the West. It is still very dependent on it for its economics. Totalitarian states will in the long run not be able to compete with free states.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, but that stuff can take decades.
Dreaming of some mind-controlling bioweapon to change the minds of politicians we don't like seems particularly dystopian to me.
If this technology existed, you can guarantee it will be deployed in your country, wherever that is.
(3) wouldn't work either, I think. Propaganda can absorb losses and paint them as a heroic struggle against overhelming odds.
> Are there alternatives (that don’t require classified information or a SCIF) that don’t rely on these or is the task complexity simply at that scale?
I don't know any, but I think that some way to form societies independent from the government might help. Some way to meet people, to discuss things with them, to plan actions and to do it at a large scale. But the problem is how you can distinguish a goverment spy from a freedom fighter? It is the key problem, everything else is just an implementation detail.
The first questions should be more things like "Why are the current stakeholders willing to play along with the CCP system" or "How can a more 'western-norms' approach be packaged to appear less threatening and more compelling so it won't be instinctively rejected" and less "how do we invent MIND CONTROL NANOBOTS to make people change their political affiliation."
Any political system survives because some core percentage of the population benefits from it and buys into it. The cartoonish stereotype examples tended to be the small third-world countries where it was clear the local leader was financing the army to keep him afloat to the detriment of other services. The CCP has a far broader buy-in. I'm sure some of that might be people trying to use the Party for personal economic or social gain, but right now it's still easy for them to say "you're better off today than your parents were 30 years ago" and trade on that.
They also happen to be sitting around at a time where a lot of the original guardrails of good faith happen to be falling off of Western institutions. Situations like Brexit, runaway income inequality, the rise of fascist-adjacent leaders in Europe, and the non-function of the US legislature seem to scream "this nifty 'Capitalist Democracy' product we're selling? We can't even make it work on our machine!"
If you want to win over China, you have to show them that your value system will provide better outcomes. You can't exactly trot out Liz Truss and Kevin McCarthy and say "this is the sort of stable, respected government that will preserve the progress you've made over the last century." It's also inherently antagonistic to present a message that's "we'd love if if you voted out your current leaders"-- just look at the glare Schumer is catching over that type of language to a country that already has a multi-party norm.
I almost wonder if the way to sell democracy is less as a values-oriented Freedom(tm) message, and more pragmatic, like trying to apply the Toyota Process to government-- empower citizenry and look for ways that they can incorporate feedback at the ground level to root out performance and waste and enhance value for existing stakeholders. That could get to a government that's more responsive and respectful of its citizenry through an internal process it can own and see as "organic", rather than "foreigners insist we must have elections."