248 karma · joined June 30, 2021
> Under Charles Grant, the East India Company established the East India Company College at Haileybury near London, to train administrators, in 1806. The college was established on recommendation of officials in China who had seen the imperial examination system. In government, a civil service, replacing patronage with examination, similar to the Chinese system, was advocated a number of times over the next several decades.[10]
> William Ewart Gladstone, in 1850, an opposition member, sought a more efficient system based on expertise rather than favouritism. The East India Company provided a model for Stafford Northcote, private Secretary to Gladstone who, with Charles Trevelyan, drafted the key report in 1854.[11]
And western countries accepted it as part of the base assumption how government should work, then nobody points to its origin since now it's so obvious (from modern perspective).
(not sure which border from the table element. will try to figue out later)
Update: also fixed. Thanks again :)
Also China is always aggressive to DPP which isn’t something new and US government well understood the reason and used to assure China they will deter DPP’s independence agenda (if you’re familiar with that history. also https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/taiwan-china-true-sour...). Unfortunately there isn’t much political room now in US for that kind of assurance.
For some reason people can't translate the same process when talking about military capbility. The current assessment from China probably is some version of "China will be regard as superpower. to be regarded as a credible superpower, credible superpower level army is required". While most US officials think China builds this military power for a concrete goal (why spend money if you don't plan to use it?).
This misconception at least has been communicated by some US intellectuals many times though I think it's not very effective under current geopolitical climate.
What make things worse is the political incentive is local government has to grow economy and they can achieve that by borrowing money for investment. Even if the investment return is almost 0 there's a short term GDP boost (just think it as giving money to local workers, similar to Civilian Conservation Corps).
So now what they are pushing is force local government sell unused state assets they owned, cutting civil servant (hurting local consumption and local GDP), limiting their borrowing capacity and all other government reforms. Most importantly they want to break the expectations that local government debts are back by central government which distorted the market a lot in past decades.
If policy is designed locally or at least allowed to be adapted to the local context, it could be more effective but with the possibility of inconsistency; Otherwise the policy is implemented flawlessly but with the cost of effectiveness because of lacking local context.
Any attempt of increasing legibility means a policy being implemented consistently across different contexts so everyone can assume the same thing regardless of the context, and, as expected, not able to incorporate the complexity of local social orders.
At that time PDD is promoting the idea you buy what they think you will buy. PDD's search is barely functioning at that time and their bussiness model is solely relying on recommending system.
Though I'm not sure how much Alibaba's decision is affected by PDD because the story I heard is more driven by their internal politics. I feel like that's really a weird product decision for Alibaba and to me doesn't make a lot of sense.
Most of the people I know in the industry think Alibaba is one of the least efficient big tech company in China compare to e.g Tencent, Baidu, Bytedance, Huawei. They all have somewhat similar bureaucracy burden as big corp but not at the level of Alibaba. Their problem is much complex than pointing the finger at Chinese government to explain everything.
The actual diplomatic language for war is “勿谓言之不预” (from official diplomatic channels) and they use “core interests” for a vaguely defined redlines: https://www.strategictranslation.org/glossary/core-interests
So yes, cross “redlines” won’t trigger a war with PRC. And ignoring final warning is also fine.
(BTW the tech industry is not destroyed by any means. Since the goal at that time was anti-monopoly...it did limit the market power of top players though hard to tell its net utility)
Ironically Chinese government has quite a lot experience handling overcapacity, sometimes caused by them sometimes not :/
It doesn’t make sense from outside the party as I said so I think your feeling is probably why Kevin Rudd is lobbying in both U.S and Australia for better understanding the situation.
Also you can only go so far ideologically before stopped by the reality (or vice versa in realism because ideology is a larger part of our self-identity). A more ideological CCP only means they are more willing to afford the cost, push as far as they can, and retreat a little bit after over doing it. IMO cost-benefit analysis (or usually, who is the winner / the winning scenario) isn’t very helpful in such context because that’s not CCP’s calculation.
> one can't help but noticed Xi's much more conciliatory tone in the past few month
It maybe more relates to the fact that diplomas advocating for a more hawkish foreign policy being slowly wiped out from the power centre after mid 2021. Though a full swing policy change may only possible after the first plenary session of the 20th Central Committee (which was October 2022).
Xi never hides that he is just reading what was decided within the party for many of these foreign policies. SCMP has reported that during the Xi-Biden meeting for any issue not directly related to China, he will read the notes.
To the topic of ‘Wolf Warriors’, the policy dropped as early as May 2021 so it's highly possible that the change itself is not economic related (https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/is-china-putting-wolf-warrio...). The targeted audience (of the foreign policy) may not be the West, but global south. There is a paper (I'm too lazy to find the link) claim that the ‘Wolf Warriors’ rhetoric used by China's diplomats in non-west country doesn't change much.
If you are intrested in the changes under Xi, Kevin Rudd has a series of deep analysis: https://viet-studies.net/kinhte/WorldAccordingtoXi_FA.pdf. Generally China's decision making process doesn't care too much about winning or competing or any particular goal especially in short term. They are based on long-term analisys of "what will happen inevitably" and back track from that conclusion. Many of these decisions make no sense from West's perspective under a cost-benefit analysis.
Although more widely used.
The end result is a doom loop that if the team can’t retain enough staffing, developers will be overwhelmed by the boring maintenance work, which leads to more team transfers. They do use contractors to mitigate the issue but IMO it doesn’t work in every case.
Then the real choice is between doing boring maintenance or useful new things at same pay.
(To be clear the obligation is not they have to report to Chinese government first. They just totally forgot to tell the government agency for coordinating these kind of security incident cross companies)
TBH it’s hard to say which operate model is better anyway. They are simply incompatible :)
Related topic: https://youtu.be/Pzl1B7nB9Kc