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Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

It depends on if you’re talking about authoritarianism as it relates to the average person or the political and ruling class. There have been a lot of reports of Xi getting rid of a lot of potential adversaries when he announced himself ruler for life and the imprisonment of Jack Ma and stripping him of his wealth for making challenging statements against Xi seems pretty authoritarian.

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Does it makes sense to discuss it relative to the ‘political and ruling class’?

Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand.

Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year.

So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit.

But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.

The kind of punishment authoritarian regimes dish out is much more severe in ways that you couldn’t do in the US (imprisonment, seizure of assets, death). In fact I’d argue it’s the only kind that matters. Authoritarian regimes rarely go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government (which China does) and instead focus on controlling and censoring anyone in a position of power and let the implicit censoring of the entire population flow downstream from that.

US does all the nasty crap China does. Less brazenly, but it's certainly there.

> imprisonment

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_cam...

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison...As of August 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 30 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.

> seizure of assets

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_Unit...

In the United States, civil forfeiture (also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture)[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from people who are suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing...To get back the seized property, owners must prove it was not involved in criminal activity.

> death

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_Un...

> go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange

There should be a word for when someone picks the most extreme situation to prove their point.

Yes, the U.S., Europe, and all well-governed democracies aren't perfect, but they're much better than China in that regard.

A litmus test: U.S. and European citizens are free to challenge their leaders, e.g., the recent glut of anti-establishment parties garnering more votes in the EU. Some of these guys are loons, yet they're free to challenge the status quo because that's part of democracy.

Remind me where Xi Jinping and Putin's political opponents end up again? In jail or dead.

If the party membership is revoked first, then the person wouldn’t be part of the ‘political and ruling class’ any longer.

Then they would just be a citizen who might formerly have been some bigshot, i.e. the second case.

It still doesn’t seem to make sense to discuss any increases relative to the first case, since in 2012 it was already unlimitedly authoritarian.

Revoking party membership doesn’t mean much necessarily if you still wield influence and power. Imagine if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton were kicked out by Joe Biden trying to consolidate power. They’d still have a voice and be influential outside of their party membership. That’s why Xi needs to imprison his rivals and root them out beyond just revoking their membership. And again I’ll point you to the example made of Jack Ma who wasn’t in the political party except maybe nominally but had wealth. I think you’ve never lived under an authoritarian regime and never talked with people who lived under it to understand what life is like.

This is getting too into the weeds, of course individual situations can be analyzed, but this doesn’t apply to ‘the political and ruling class’ as a whole.

To be more precise in wording, the net increase, or decrease, in net negative authoritarian decision making is what matters for me and probably most HN readers.

Since this increase, or decrease, may be positive and negative to varying degrees for various people and factions, it’s practically impossible to tell if it’s net negative for the class as a whole.

The difference between oligarchy that deliberately maintains balance of power and interests between, say, dozens or hundreds of prominent players, and a one-man rule where the "courtiers" are just richer than an average citizen, but equally subjugated to the Dear Leader, is enormous.

Both Russia and China developed since 2000 from one to the other, and I wonder what the end game will be. In Russian case, the development led to re-establishment of the imperial idea and an attempt to conquer formerly held lands by force; that is something that the oligarchs wouldn't start, but a neo-Tsar absolutely did.

Communist China used to be way less externally aggressive than Russia / USSR, but I don't like the current military gestures by Xi. Not at all.

So the degree of authoritarian decision making felt by ‘courtiers’ within the party can vary from year to year?

I guess that is possible, but if that’s the case, wouldn’t that naturally be their goal? To concentrate power and authority in one place, or person, that they can more readily manipulate.

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