But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
He sees it as a challenge to his legitimacy and China’s power, which, as you’d expect are the most important things to him; even if you take the most cynical view.
Another timely example, because it is the World Cup, is the Chinese football programs. They’ve been decimated because of corruption prosecutions, both executives and players. It’s a major reason why China isn’t competitive on the global stage, which much smaller countries with significantly smaller budgets can compete. And, yes, Xi does care about competing in the World Cup. Prestige is very important to his concept of China’s honor and global standing.
This right here is why “corruption” should be looked on with great skepticism. In an authoritarian government basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption. You know, like having a say in how people are governed. This is a high crime in a state with 1 party that cannot be replaced.
In that way, “corruption” can mean “not being loyal to the dictator.”
This guy took $325M in bribes, embezzlement, abuse of power, and money laundering. And he did this as a public servant for over 30 years.
I say good on China for attacking such brazen corruption so directly. Violating the public trust should be extremely harsh.
and it was discovered just now? May it be that he played exactly by the rules, the real rules, of the regime - corruption being among the foundational rules of it - and thus it was going for 30 years? And right now he just got his turn like it usually happens in totalitarian regimes. The regime will for show find an excuse to execute you if you got your turn, corruption is just the easiest one.
Also note that corruption is for the officials, state treason is for regular citizens. Same as in Russia. The regime wouldn't want to create impression of political disunity among the officials.
>Violating the public trust should be extremely harsh.
definitely. The only question why the comrade Xi is still not executed?
Yeah, that would be wild if any of that completely unsubstantiated conjecture, bordering on fan-fiction, was what actually happened.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught. They get complacent. They get messy. Each round of embezzlement leads to a larger body of evidence that exists somewhere that becomes more and more damning as time goes on.
> The regime wouldn't want to create impression of political disunity among the officials.
In this thread we have dozens of examples of political officials being prosecuted. I'd strongly suggest you park your McCarthyism, take a break, perhaps go for a nice walk.
>White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught.
You’ve definitely never seen the castles and fleets of exotic cars that government officials in those countries manage to get on their meager government salaries. Yet you post such authoritative comments …
China has laws especially regarding significant financial crimes like embezzlement, theft, money laundering. And most governments also have rules against breaching public trust, corruption by favoritism, bribery, and more.
This guy was in multiple public servant roles, and exfiltrated $325M. This isn't a 'possible smell of impropriety ' in taking a supper with a potential vendor. This is basically highly illegal anywhere in the world.
But the Americans go back to their 'but communist China!' howls. The punishment's harsh, sure. But I think its a great standard to hold leaders and public servants to.
For example, you're making an effort to try legitimize the regime by framing a factual gross illegal conduct as a overarching policy.
But is it like that when you observe the whole structure?
How wealthy are the ruling elites? Or for example, how has IP theft policy changed?
Or we can reframe this: how do we tell the difference between a genuine tackle on corruption, from a weed out of the system with a public display?
You have plenty of cases in other corrupt regimes when they want to seize assets from someone the regime wants to push away: it's corruption.
Which again, they could be very well be corrupt, but they are corrupt because they're part of the regime.
You'll probably say: "Oh but the USS!!!" Yes, there's some level of systemic corruption there, just not an institution - yet!
>> corruption is an institution
>> Or for example, how has IP theft policy changed?
Another country may decide to have no IP protections, that’s not a crime.
Furthermore Intellectual property is legal fiction, some people and countries don’t believe in it.
Apparently Anthropic don’t believe in IP either, they are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, but cry wolf when someone does it to them. And they are asking for legal immunity on IP theft.
If this was just a political action to take down just another corrupt official enabled by the government, how is this a good thing?
Well for a lot of countries protecting inventions with patents was a major trigger for development, so much so it became a cornerstone and you can even say an institution. So of course it would be viewed as corruption by any country with such institutions.
And it's not like China says it would never abide by IP, else they would have never got the investment that made them into what they are today.
But look further from IP theft, what about seizing assets from companies, or whole companies?
It’s not viewed as corruption. US gov made numerous public statements condemning IP theft, and never even once classified it as corruption - it’s simply a different crime.
Furthermore, you suggested a benchmark is: “How wealthy are the ruling elites”
Well let’s see - the richest man in the world is American, 70% of 100 richest people are American, American has higher inequality than China.
By what robust quantitative measurement does this effort look less genuine than American one?
Are you accessing any objective facts or you simply are unable to accept that a country you are opposed to is making genuine progress?
Go look up the history of the USA and creation of copyright/patent/trademark was done, and how we dis-recognized all European claims. They were howling similarly.
Go look at how extreme patent law perverted and kept airplanes locked to the Wright brothers, and held down an industry, while other countries (many European as well) were at the forefront of avionics. Patents held the USA back until the US GOV eminent domained the patent freeing it for WW1 armament.
Or go look up why Hollywood was a thing. Again, patent laws on cameras, and eacaping to California was all about screwing over patrnt holders over royalties.
And sure, China didnt recognize our copyrights. Ok. And? We dont recognize theirs either.
The point of totalitarian regime is that nobody should feel safe, nobody should have an agency. In particular the people shouldn't be able to obtain safety themselves even by the way of being totally loyal.
I have no doubt that that guy was corrupt like any other official there. Yet, he isn't punished for the corruption. The show needed another star, and he was chosen to be that star.
That does not mean that you should google "China bad" and paste a bunch of random urls in a reply, though.
What Cold War propaganda did to Western brains is tragic.
Some weird fantasies you have.
I grew up in USSR. So very well familiar with inner workings of such regimes.
Just wondering how old you are? 60? 70?
Like insider trading by congress?
Jokes aside, this is not how dictatorships normally deal with democratic activists? I don’t see how you can come to this conclusion u less you believe that corporations are people, election spending is a form of legally protected free speech, and corporations should vote in elections:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
No. Like Kushner and Witkoff and Trump (and probably Hunter Biden) literally peddling influence for money.
Could you list some of those basic liberties? Are they the sort of liberties whose exercise involves taking half a billion in bribes?
---
Generally, basic liberties like showing up to a protest aren't considered corruption, they get called terrorism, or somesuch. A Texas judge just sentenced a dozen people to 30-70 years in prison for exercising them, by the way. Some of the people given 30 weren't even at the protest. Half this forum looked at that, and saw nothing wrong with it. I can only imagine that if they were born on the other side of the Pacific ocean, they would be card-carrying party members.
> The protest was a late-night/noise demonstration (involving fireworks) against immigration detention policies. It turned violent when a shooting injured a police officer. Prosecutors described it as an "act of terrorism" linked to an alleged antifa cell; defendants and supporters denied organized antifa ties and framed it as protected protest activity
https://x.com/i/grok/share/87352ef0ac4b454aba924157c44f476f
It sounds like they arrived in tactical gear, started destroying property, and when cops arrived opened fire.
This seems like a bad example on your part, as the people opposing ICE are some of the most misaligned people in the country. That said, we have a right to protest in traditional public forms, you don't have a right to shoot up an ICE facility.
The rest got 70. None of them had guns.
The guy who got 30 years wasn't even at the protest.
---
There is no universe where this is not completely batshit insane, but it's interesting to see you use the exact same logic[1] the CCP has in its crackdowns and pogroms to justify it.
The reason the sentences were so high, by the way, was because the judge took dozens of minor offenses and added the sentences for each. It's the equivalent of sentencing someone who stole a 12-pack for 12 counts of theft, or someone tagging 'FUCK ICE' for 8 counts[1] of destruction of federal property.
For some reason, the current regime does not hold its footsoldiers and other useful idiots to the same standard.
---
[1] Someone in a protest/movement/group did something bad, brand them all terrorists, and make sure that everyone's going to a 're-education' camp for what will remain of their lives.
[2] One for each letter, and another one for the space.
Certainly if this was a jihadist attack, a lifetime sentence would be appropriate. Why should it be different just because they're white?
The Federal Building where he murdered the security guard is just an administrative building; at least the people in Texas were motivated by the somewhat reasonable belief that they were attacking guards at a concentration camp.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/steven-carrillo-sentenc...
Most people at these facilities can leave at any time, right? Just so long as it isn't back into the United States? They can return to their country of origin, or another country. I'm sure someone will offer a correction if this particular facility was holding people for other crimes in addition to their unauthorized alien status.
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/detained-immigra...
A guy deliberately drove his car through a street full of scattering protesters in my neighbourhood a few years ago, and when people tried to pull him out of it, he shot one of them, and then ran off, waving his gun (with a jungle-taped pair of mags inserted into it).
Was he a (disorganized) political terrorist? If these guys got 70 years for being at the protest, how many hundreds of years in prison do you think were warranted for him?
He could have had the book thrown at him. As for the rest, if you seriously think that getting 70 years for being at a protest where one person shot a gun is appropriate, you have a lot in common with a Stalin-era Soviet judge.
That by itself isn't a convincing argument. You can't plan a bank heist and be waiting at your safe house and say, "I'm not guilty of anything, because I wasn't in the bank!". The mafia guy doesn't get to say, "I didn't actually whack the victim, I just nodded to Joey, and he did the whacking".
You might be interested in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_conspiracy
...maybe this is mostly a thing in common law jurisdictions? Maybe there is a lawyer here who can point us to a interesting history of conspiracy in common law vs civil law jurisdictions? Also of interest might be things like:
https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-mur...
- volleyball. Probably their best team sport. Men's team have nothing to show but the women's team won the competition 3 times (1984, 2004, 2016) and the World Cup twice (1982, 1986)
- basketball. Women's team are usually there at the Olympic games and they won a silver medal in 1992 and a bronze in 1984 but nothing ever since. They were the runner ups in the last World Cup final (2022) against the US. Men's team have 0 results.
- football, irrelevant. Men's team only qualified to the World Cup once in 2002. Women's team is slightly better being the runner up once in 1999, and they also won silver medal in the 1996 Olympic games. But that was a one generation thing, nothing to show ever since.
- water polo, irrelevant. Women's team is slightly better usually qualifying for the Olympic games but 0 results. Same at the World Cup.
- baseball/softball, irrelevant.
- field hockey, irrelevant.
- handball, irrelevant.
- rugby sevens, irrelevant.
China is good at group sports where everyone have to do the same thing together (artistic swimming and diving) but team sports needs individuals working together where everyone have to be good at their given position, in their own little world, so almost the exact opposite.
To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.
Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?
Lots of posts about how the CPC isn't really doing the will of the people, they are just following and the people are too docile or subdued to resist. Chinese people are bad at team sports where an individual contribution can play a big part. They are only good at the ones where they all do the same thing.
It ties in with the western ideology that we are unique, dynamic, flawed but able to push ahead in a way collectives aren't.
I will also posit the downplaying and discrediting of Chinese tech and industry is also related with this mindset.
Not sure when we will see this but when we have the Century of Africa, I'd love to see the spin on the front-page of NYT then. I predict something similar to the shade like "Nationalism/Hinduism by Modhi" when he won't play ball with the West on Russian sanction; when African countries rise up with their own ambitions and visions for their own people.
One thing we know is important for a country to be globally competitive in team athletics is having pervasive grass roots youth leagues developing talent from an early age. My sense is the Chinese have a structured selection system where they try out kids in key sports and select the best for special development.
Compare this with Western democracies where kids of most skill levels are generally able to keep playing club sports through high school as long as they have an interest and any aptitude at all. In America, pee wee football, girl's soccer leagues, etc are part of the social fabric of communities. It's considered worthwhile to let kids practice, play and develop even when they show no professional or collegiate potential.
The deep reach and years of development of kids with no clear aptitude matter because it's about identifying outliers. I suspect it comes down to chaotic but pervasive casual development beating central planning.
[1]. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-corruption-rocket-forc...
This is a person who invites war criminals to his country and rolls out the red carpet...then again...
Or his sinocentricity and even racism (as in superiority of chinese people). There's been a long standing view in China about their own superiority of others, including all the way into the way they view their national pride as extending back further than any other civilization, even though external historians might view it more like several disjoint civilizations in a similar region... Kinda like how we don't call American history as starting when previous groups from contemporary russian crossed ice bridges to the Americas... We say it started in 1776 because it was a new major iteration of the regime.
The point is, there's a lot more to history than political organization. A continuous culture and language is a big part of why civilizations extend far beyond the current governing regime.
Xi is also fantastically corrupt. He wasn’t born a billionaire.
There is credible evidence his family controls billions of dollars of assets. Those assets accumulated in direct correlation with his power. Chinese state media disagrees, and if that's your cup of tea for Chinese leaders' corruption, I guess sure, Trump's also clean as a whistle.
None sequitur / who cares? Xi personally doesn't have obscene wealth/assets according to relevant evidence which is what matters.
Many CCP red family nepo babies/princelings influence peddled their way to wealth in last 50 years, they get are first dibs aristocracy class and their wealth should logically snowball with PRC moving from billion to trillion $ economy.
But Xi himself specifically has been outlier in how squeaky clean, even by western investigations. Nothing has been tied to him, hence lame "but his family manages his wealth" cope. Like the bro married Chinese 80s Taylor Swift and all signs point to him being fine what he has, which is not nothing, but also not extravagant, which makes trying to associate him to stupendous graft levels corruption he is trying to fix impossible.
Of course broader PRC leadership class has lots of corruption from development, it should be expected that Xi's sister/husband, both from red families to be wealthy from PRC development, but timeline of Xi's sister/husband wealth predates Xi - i.e. early real estate / rare earth investments. Difference between Xi and Trump is Xi himself has been historically clean, and in office made his family divest/liquidate 100ms in assets vs Trump is is historically unclean and family uses his influence to accumulate.
So no, all signs point to Xi is clean as a whistle while Trump isn't, and its ridiculous to equate the two just because both families are wealthy.
And to circle to original claim, there is no evidence that Xi is fantastically corrupt, only evidence to the contrary, that he is outlier in how uniquely uncorrupt he is relative to elite prestige, access, opportunities.
that's BS
cracking down on corruption has been a common tactic for decades to get rid of people who are a threat to the top dog at the CCP, and Xi has employed this perhaps better than anyone since Mao
are those people being purged corrupt? probably most are. but plenty of people who are corrupt aren't purged, it's a highly selective process.
Xi started this a few years after coming into power -- and it was obviously to the educated class was it was (I was living in Beijing at the time), but "mei banfa" (or emigrate, as many people with the $/ability to do so, did).
This sounds really interesting, do you have any examples?
Honest question to anyone who may be from China - the perception I've been fed in the US is that almost every bureaucrat is on the take. They certainly were in the USSR, you had to "know someone" to get anything done or just eat.
Perhaps it's just a RIF.
It’s not totally clear what the consequences were for those purged or if their crimes were legit but seems like they are all in prison.
[1]. https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-inevitability...
It's a risky play to try to communicate over the internet to a bunch of us literalist nerds :p.
But yes agreed. It’s very hard to parse what is going on from the outside.
My very uninformed read is that the people who were purged seemed already loyal allies to Xi but had more clout to disagree with him, while the new guys know they are replaceable. The PLA is notoriously corrupt as well so hard to say which of those purges were political control vs corruption based.
I kinda doubt the new guys are unambiguous though you need to be ambitious and risk taking to rise like that in the CCP.
Almost certainly. But it's not simple to understand because four things are simultaneously true:
1. Corruption is a serious problem Xi is genuinely focused on reducing through high-profile prosecutions with extreme sentences.
2. Xi and his party lieutenants have certainly used corruption charges to eliminate central party 'Titans' because they got too powerful, got too greedy, or were deemed insufficiently 'loyal'.
3. Corruption is pervasive at almost every level and there's no way most of it can be eliminated anytime soon. In fact, the system relies on it to function as well as it does. The purpose of these high-profile prosecutions is only to reduce the size and frequency of corruption. It reminds officials that stealing half the money half the time can be bad for their health. So they stick closer to taking 10-20% only 10-20% of the time.
4. The sub-1% of corrupt officials who are prosecuted, likely end up being busted because they got 'too greedy' and were made a sacrificial lamb by their corrupt peers to fill the system's need for a few high-profile examples. The 'too greedy' isn't from taking too much, it's usually from not greasing enough palms with enough money (including the provincial corruption investigators themselves). When there's tens of millions of dollars of illicit money at stake, the dynamics become like de facto organized crime mobs and there's always competition between factions. This guy probably knows exactly which rival played the game better and beat him.
In a competitive employment market, paid time off is just another part of the cash value of any compensation package. Employees compare the overall packages, so companies need to offer 'competitive' PTO. In the past decade, FAANG-ish valley companies have had to offer 4-6 (or more) weeks of PTO. I know people who took two weeks every year and 'banked' four weeks. They retired early after 12 years with an extra YEAR of cash salary paid in full the day they left. When 5-10% of a company's debt is owed to their own employees and could become immediately due at any moment - it can be a cash flow and accounting issue for companies.
By 'not counting' the PTO, any time off you don't take in the year you earn it doesn't go on the balance sheet as an unpaid debt from the prior year - meaning PTO becomes 'use it or lose it'. This isn't materially different than the EU where it's normal for most corporate employees always take every day of PTO anyway. In the U.S., where historical PTO trends were closer to 2-3 weeks and only recently grew to 4-6 weeks, the result was more employees took more PTO each year (which is net good), but one component of their overall comp package became a little less good because they could no longer 'bank' more than one year's PTO and cash it out. Earned PTO carry-over was capped at one year and any you didn't take disappeared, unless you made an agreement with your manager.
For example, I deferred a chunk of my vacation into the next calendar year because we were shipping a major product (I was happy to do so and suggested it myself as I was leading the product). Technically, I guess it wasn't 'counted' in any HR record-keeping so if I suddenly quit before I took the vacation, I might not have been paid for the extra two weeks I deferred from the prior year - but only if my boss and the company decided to be real jerks about it. Another reason not to work for jerks if you can avoid it. Also, it isn't smart for companies to not reasonably honor verbal agreements with employees because word gets around and no other employee would agree to defer any PTO and future big projects would suffer. This flexibility wasn't always only in the company's favor. There was also a time I deferred a week of PTO to the next year by verbal agreement which I lumped together with paternity leave when my kid was born. Note: I'm only familiar with the dynamics in the U.S. I believe they also apply in some other geos but regulations and financial reporting requirements differ per country.
Worker protection rights in the U.S.A. truly are seen as a joke.
As a thought experiment, if offered a tech job in, say, downtown Zurich, how much extra money would be required for an avg EU tech worker to happily accept that same job under Bay Area employment law, protections and standards (at-will employment, non-banked PTO, etc) than under EU employment law, protections and standards? In other words, apples-to-apples what are those extra protections actually worth in cash value? I suspect the answer would be, at most, around $25K to $50K/year. But when you look at the total comp packages (salary, benefits, equity, 401k, etc) between Bay Area and Zurich tech workers, the delta is far greater than that. In effect, the bay area tech worker 'sold' that extra protection for a big chunk of cash and is using some of it to self-insure against the potentially increased volatility. I think a lot of EU tech workers would be delighted to make the same trade. Another way of looking at it is you've given up a lot of upside for a relatively small amount of guaranteed extra protection on the downside.
This might surprise you but the reality is, many of the potential employment abuses you may be concerned about are vanishingly unlikely to occur in practice. The point is, you can end up paying a lot for expensive 'tiger insurance' you probably won't ever use and don't really need. While you can feel good knowing you have extra protection from tigers, on a purely economic basis I averaged over $500k/yr over my multi-decade career in bay area tech. In good years, the equity could take it over a million. My own admin (with no college degree) averaged over $200k a year in total comp. The highest paid admin at the Zurich company I'm on the board of makes closer to 50k CHF (and living in downtown Zurich isn't much less than SF). So, the "US tech employment deal" may seem weird and perhaps less fair, but the extra half million dollars my admin earned over several years put a lot of 'social safety net' in the bank that she can spend whenever and however she wants - and she still works there for my old boss, still loves her job and has never had to use any protections or social safety net yet (she's probably over a million in extra total comp banked by now). In short, viewed objectively, it's a different deal but not necessarily a worse deal. In many cases, EU workers may be giving up far more value than they're actually receiving in return.
Tiger insurance seems very necessary for e. g. retail, restaurant, construction etc. workers in the U.S., as they seem to be disproportionally targeted by tigers and earn next to nothing.
Everyone deserves to be treated fairly, even if they don't live in California and know how to programm.
While I'm sure he doesn't catch all corruption and the CCP overall has selective enforcement, the reason they do have measures like this is in large part because of Xi Jinping's specific reputation and positioning.
"Similarly, Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews held assets worth over $1 billion in business investments and real estate"
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Un...
Far too often when you see stories about how someone was persecuted for corruption it boils down to "he stole from rich people".
You mean in China specifically? Otherwise there are some pretty harsh counterexamples to that "all".
Just like Trump and Modi
Maybe, but they hit the rich. All the selective prosecution in the US hits those least able to resist.
no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.
Are we really heralding purging political opponents as anti corruption? Imagine if Trump won and put Harris in jail.
Trump definitely thought about doing that, but even the judges he appointed wouldn't go for it. He still talks about putting Obama in jail for reasons.
Corruption is, of course, universal. China has a corruption problem that will be eternally difficult to tackle from the top-down—local officials are notoriously much more corrupt than central ones. But in the west, we simply pretend to not have the issue at all, or we simply make it legal. I would prefer if our politicians or popular media could at least acknowledge this.
This thing about not caring about appearances is new. (And also the only thing I commented about.)
So is crime. But it's all about prevalence.
And not just because corruption has some "indirect taxation" effect, but also because low corruption/trust is a big enabler for a society.
You are never gonna get rid of clannish mentality, vigilantism, nepotism and other undesirable behavior if your citizens don't have any trust in the system.
If you just look at e.g.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Corruptio...
you will see that the spread is very wide, and China/India is significantly behind most western nations.
Corruption is everywhere and varies in degree. The US likes to claim a mantle of superiority when it seems quite the opposite. We have a bully/greatest conman ever in the white house
Are they?
Price Andrew got a name change, but hasn’t had any real penalty to date. He had the Queen protecting him. Mandelson probably will end up in court but it won’t be for anything related to child abuse.
For the British Royals, I suspect becoming persona non grata is more impactful than a jail sentence.
Class-based systems get pretty weird at the top.
The CCP derives a significant part of its legitimacy from improving quality of life and living standards for the common Han Chinese. Waste and fraud that harms consumers is a drag on this progress; the incentives somewhat align. Real economic harm often causes real political harm.
Sometimes systemic, competent purge the political rivals program is gud and what you want. But IMO US too young/stubborn, doesn't have institutional memory of REAL political crisis, nor humility to learn from history.
* he goes after corrupt officials, in both minor roles and very public big cases; and * he also accused inconvenient people (mostly potential contenders) of corruption to get rid of them (see the list of party leaders purged since Xi came to power, with some even led off stage at the main CCP Congress in a show of power). * How many corrupt officials are not persecuted due to political favouritism is by definition impossible to know from the outside.
The west is inundated with simplistic anti-chinese propaganda, so you would never perceive it as such, the way it would be presented to you in the west is as the evil dictator Xi Jingping purging his opposition, for instance:
This is single party autocracy, no matter how much people cry about propaganda.
You don't understand how calling you a victim of propaganda is me being charitable, I could've also called you a typical western ignorant sinophobe.
Taiwan is Chinese, they don’t have this system. So spare me the crocodile tears.
Single party rule and state controlled media with one of the most sophisticated censorship infrastructure in the world has exactly one simple goal.
You can’t squeeze blood from a brick. At a certain point, you need to tolerate a little messiness to optimize societal growth.
Think of it as a dial you can turn clockwise or counterclockwise:
Security <——> Freedom
A healthy society would have good feedback mechanisms that allow it to change the dial of the government in power, to adjust to the current situation. Obviously, there’s no one optimal position; to use a historical example: Churchill was great for Britain during WW2, and immediately elected out afterwards.
The problem is, if they dont like their governance they cant trade it back for their freedom.
The way the mainstream media freaked out about him asking Bill O'Reilly, "what, you think our country is so innocent?" is a good example. Or saying we're in Venezuela for oil at the outset. Or talking about how they killed so many Iranians they don't even know who they are negotiating with anymore. I mean at least we didn't have to suffer through fumbling Bushisms about freedom. If the day ever comes when presidents are held to the same standards as the people, then ironically in many regards we will have to at least give him some points for honesty... it is quite sad how he is the only person to succeed to such an extent on such an "outsider", really anticorruption message ("drain the swamp"), then turn around and do the same thing. I think it is probably related to the core problem of American society - the doublespeak, the dual consciousness, the resistance to self reflection. People don't want honest answers - including to their own complicity (who elected these people anyway?). They want slogans. The results are sad, but predictable. A society that elects (and then worse, reelects) someone like Trump to end corruption is clearly a society that cannot look itself in the mirror. The same goes for the other side of the aisle. The "democracy" party that has no primaries and says it's either "fascism" or geriatric grandpa. We take this election very seriously that is why we have nominated a corpse. Don't mention it or you're a fascist. No you don't get another choice. Vote for us or democracy dies...
Sad... maybe if politics was a venue where people weren't punished for being honest we wouldn't have such low quality politicians. Brings to mind the George Carlin line:
That would be a nice realistic campaign slogan for somebody: 'The public sucks. Elect me.'"
Everyone in China knows how dynasties end.
There's no evidence that Xi Jinping is like Putin (who has enriched himself to abe unknown but expectedly high dgree), no evidence the military generals have enriched themselves with corruption (again, like Russia) or really anything else. Instead there's evidence that the likes of Jack Ma, a billionaire, are brought to heel, China has cracked down on so-called yin-yang contracts, sentenced to death people who messed with the baby formula supply chain and so on.
People really should reflect on why they're so willing to seek confirmation bias and why they have that bias at all.
Here's a tip: if you take anything China says or does at face value you will be more correct than 95% of the China "experts" that have entrenched themselves in the media and Western policy circles.
Admittedly, in a lot of the western world one side of the conversation has seen Trump take this place, only without any sort of completion of the narrative arc. Good for business, bad for emotional strength for some people. Will be interesting to see what comes after him.
All of these white collar criminals were pardoned by Biden
Nina Simona Allen (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud financial institutions.
Duran Arthur Brown (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a mortgage fraud scheme.
Ravidath Ragbir (January 2025): Convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Jerry Donald Manning (December 2024): Convicted of two counts of mail fraud.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey (January 2025 - Posthumous): Convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Alex Nain Saab Moran (December 2023): Convicted of money laundering conspiracy (released as part of a U.S.–Venezuela prisoner swap).
Abraham W. Bolden Sr. (April 2022): Former Secret Service agent convicted of bribery attempts, fraud, and obstruction.
Kim Douglas Haman (December 2024): Convicted of making false claims against the government.
Vadim Konoshchenok (July 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., smuggling goods, and export control law violations (released as part of a multi-national prisoner swap).
Paul John Garcia (December 2024): Convicted of signing false documents with intent to deceive and theft/sale of government property while serving in the Navy.
Hunter Biden (December 2024): Convicted of federal tax offenses (alongside separate firearm charges). The pardon broadly covers any federal offenses committed or taken part in between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024.
Gerald Glenn Lundergan (January 2025): Convicted of unlawful campaign contributions, making false statements, and falsifying documents.
Ernest William Cromartie (January 2025): Convicted of attempting to evade or defeat tax, as well as structuring financial transactions to evade reporting requirements.
It will have the same answer, no
who would be able to prosecute them and how?
who would even investigate them
Inner circle leadership won't be prosecuted anywhere as long as their group holds some power.
So, then, question is, how can this be improved?, can it be improved?
Trump was convicted, he still won. He probably would have won from jail as well.
So original question remains, what can be done?
If anything, I think it actually reduces the quality of discussion because it tries to say that dynamics in China are equivalent to the next you would find in pretty much any country which is is vague and lazy as analysis goes, and goes against the HN recommendation that conversations get more precise over time.
it's not a question of "prosecute this one or the other person" - it's the choice between "prosecute this one or nobody"
thus celebration that at least something got done
Also, from a practical standpoint, charging some and not others is not necessarily better if the selection is made politically. That moves the needle from "at least something got done" to "law is just a tool of oppression".
Or, you do what the democratic party in the US has been afraid to do: Rip the bandaid off, accusations of weaponization of the DOJ be damned. The parent's hypothetical situation is precisely what is happening in the US right now where Garland failed to prosecute, and the entire democratic party was far too afraid of appearing to weaponize the justice system meanwhile the opposition has no qualms about doing so. Yes, the public will view it as entirely partisan but there's no other path forward.
But if you just do nothing at all, eventually the social contract breaks. The cost of the corruption becomes too high and the state fails, or you get a forced regime change.
The day this happens is the day that 90% (or more) of our "leaders" find themselves suddenly in prison.
when in actuality the choice is between "both sides steal" or "one side steals"
and allowing both sides to steal is in no way better
---
the main way desired "both sides get caught" state becomes a thing is after "one side" splits in two - still being close in horizontal connections to stabilize, but with developed instruments for either half to guard against the other
crying about oppression only leaves you stuck in "everyone steals" state
Even that assumes a normal of being lucky that anything is prosecuted, ever. So it's good but against a low bar rather than rising to the bar parent commenter suggested.
> thus celebration that at least something got done
Is it really something to celebrate if:
1. Someone got sentenced to death because they lost some internal power struggle, and bribery was falsely used as the public reason?
2. The guy's getting killed as a scapegoat, or because he pissed off his superiors by not sharing more of his bribes, etc.?
You kill some corrupt guy, just to replace him with another corrupt guy who's in the leader's good-graces. How is that "a net-better outcome for everyone else"?
Given that this one took nearly half a billion, it is, in fact, quite likely.
I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence, which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world as far as I can understand.
So harsher punishment means people with less power will get shafted harder
I agree with you, but we also can't reverse entropy.
I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
> Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence
I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.
Let's say that some new evidence comes out that exonerates the person. You can indeed reverse the "no longer hold office" punishment. You can't bring someone back from the dead.
You can't select some random person and do a bit of bureaucracy and then tell a family whose member you killed that this rando is now part of their family as restitution for your mistake. You can give them money but in general it is considered somewhat distasteful to put an immediate pecuniary value on human life.
Of course, attempts are made to "reverse" even after someone had been put to death. Posthumous pardons are a thing. It may not bring anything to the person who has passed, but it could give somewhat similar benefits to living descendants.
It's just to say we shouldn't undermine how impactful something like incarceration is on the theory that it is "reversible". Evidence suggests such experiences mess people up in pretty severe ways. Lets also remember thinking of death in these distinct terms may be very cultural. Few penal systems escape barbarity. There are worse things than death. There are many instances or societies were it is preferable or expected people kill themselves rather than go through something like the ignominy of incarceration.
As to the last line, I'm also not sure. Brutal societies have a way of turning on themselves. Nations that accord more protections to their people are generally a better place for their rulers, even if the reverse is not always true. Personally I would love a legal system that baked into its norms higher punishments for people with more power. I think these have existed in the past, even if enforced through less modern mechanisms.
It is also the case that people in power do things that people with less power are incapable of. Getting rid of notions of executive privilege or qualified immunity would be a good start. The way the law is written currently, people in power won't simply not be punished - they won't even be charged. Take George Bush. Did he ever even just have to testify under oath about the rationale for the Iraq War once? Would the United States really descend into a banana republic if he had been charged for perjury or war crimes? It seems like the push in that direction can instead trace its genesis to the fact that in America, we evidently make our leaders untouchable.
In Iran, Gaza, Russia (no no, it is not you, it is.. "Ukraine").
You are much worse than them, actually. Though believing yourself to be the light of civilization, soulless robots..
edit: some interesting trivia. Due to the combination of America's incarceration rate, a racist justice system, and a completely wealthless and desperate class of freed slaves who were never compensated (although their owners were), Black Americans are 0.5% of the world's population but 5% of the world's prison population.
Your american KGB knows nearly everything about me, as well as about any other person with internet access (and also those without), without any "warrants", "judges", etc
Never even imagined in Soviet Union.
You are the ultimate horror.
"american KGB"? pray tell, who would that be? FBI? NSA? ICE? Even with their tooling, they are still struggling to legally acquire information, and even more so to act on it. There's even considerations of abolishing these agencies.
Try suggesting the abolition of the MSS as a mainland Chinese national and see what happens.
"Still struggling to legally acquire information.."
I dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest. Now whether it was acquired "legally" i dont know, but when they choose people to murder abroad, I dont think that matters much.
So I call bullshit on your argument.
> dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest.
I do. Perhaps I am there. Perhaps I'm not. Perhaps my name is there, but the data is wrong and/or misleading. I'm not going to deny USA's alphabet boys abilities, but I'm not going to glaze them either.
Nor I'm going to ignore that I might also be on the PRC's databases as well. They might not bombing people yet, but foreign policy can change easily.
I'm simply going to do my best to protect my privacy, not pretend that either of these regimes wouldn't kill me if they find it convenient.
That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally. PRC has an entire legal apparatus for doing this domestically.
Though you are right I guess in what regards the legal apparatus of PRC.
But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative (though this is eventually what you become when your mouth is being consistently shut with a big fat lap).
As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
Yes, because it means you don't have a good idea of the claims being presented. Perhaps there's a point in there, but you should think it through rather than just allowing it to remain nebulous as suggested in "I dont care much about their [...] organizational structure". Organizational structures matter, they make certain corporate actions easier and others more expensive.
> But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative
I appreciate the change in tone, but I have to ask whether that's really the case, as you're being ambiguous with the suppression methodology. There's quite a gap between "flagged into oblivion in a site" and "arrested for a year for posting anti-government opinions". Given the initial comments on your profile, you haven't done any favors in keeping downvotes and flags away. Not just provocations, but also gratuitous accusations. I try to avoid those because all they do is give ammo to the enemy.
> As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
That's a oversimplified view about privacy. Every piece of information about a person, when enough is collected, can be used to identidy them. Collecting said information, specially when the infrastructure for that is not trivially available (as is the case in the USA in comparison to the PRC) is easier than done. When was the last time someone got identified by law enforcement in the US via their internet traffic? You are better off worrying about GDID in Windows.
A similar story goes for Tor. For starters, it was developed by US Navy, not the intelligence/law enforcement agencies. Second, the protocol is open and publicly being developed, so even if the NSA added a backdoor, it can be caught and removed. Finally, Tor is not the only option, see I2P for an example.
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.
It's true that the US may be more of a immediate threat to those in its territories, but to compare it to KGB is to either massively oversell US domestic forces abilities or undersell KGB's. Even in the closest cases of political executions, extrajudicial murders through abuses of force and qualified immunity, as seen in the recent ICE shootings, they still caused a lot of national instability, even within the right wing. Similar happenings in the USSR didn't come close in reactions.