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Comment by CitizenKane | Hacker News Reader

What an interesting tale and gripping read. I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of this before.

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/

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> The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old imperial system

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.

Yes it does, but they also imported the credit based fractional reserve monetary system. This really does require constant growth for positive (or even near zero negative) interest rates. Although there are a lot of monetary controls, there are really only trade-offs not fixes, if loans are made for which the asset does not cover a loss. You have to pick winners and losers.

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.

Constant growth in monetary terms doesn't require real growth. Most currencies are at least somewhat inflationary.

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.

Bad loans usually are not about mistrust and deception, but about business risks that don't work out. Lenders very much expect that to happen, and charge interest accordingly.

Yes, agreed. The same is often true of other promises.

They are different.

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.

Infidelity happens. So do divorces. Also, people get sick. People die. Society has procedures for these things.

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.

"If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government." - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Though I don't know enough about Chinese politics to tell how much the quote actually fits.

> People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness.

> 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

Born and raised and stuck here, I can tell you that it absolutely fits. It is kind of a vicious cycle, the government breed ignorant people and these people cultivate the ruthless authoritarian regime continuously. But I do believe history is on an upward trajectory, just with some twists and turns, or "spirals" as the people here call it. The problem is that maybe few of the people alive will live long enough to reap the benefit of it.

In my home country, Indonesia, many of us were not aware of the scale of the genocide of the left, or the massacres of civilians after World War II and the War of Independence. Most people pretend that it never happened and avoid discussing it. Only recently have people started talking about it, but they often face backlash.

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.

> I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of this before.

Why is that surprising? The regime is very thorough in scrubbing history.

That is why it is surprising - to them.

The system described in the second link has a lot of interesting implications. That is one of those systems that reminds me a bit of Enron - it sounds like a good idea, it probably looks like a good idea in superficial results, but that sort of elitism doesn't have a history of working out well.

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.

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