tonylinn80

Both Xi and communist party wants stability and economic growth, and they cannot get that if they can't keep most of the people happy.

Even with media censorship, the Chinese government has to react to people's comments (and a lot of times, much faster and effective than western governments, contradictory to what western media wants to believe)

How is removing hard limit on two terms "crossing that gap"? It'd be a much greater leap if Xi wants to rule indefinitely. Xi (and the communist party) wants stability, and he has to answer to what the people want to keep staying in power

There're certainly other government forms outside western democracy and pure dictatorship

Why does it have to be voting

The concept of "Party" works in very different ways in China as it does in western world.

When people in western governments started to form conflicting opinions, they'd say, let's create different parties and compete with each other.

When people in Chinese government started to form conflicting opinions, they'd say, let's keep the conflicts internal and unite under the same party.

Or something like public support rate. Doesn't have to be a vote.

Is the hard term limit really something can't be abolished then? Obama spent years of efforts building something and Trump spent its term tears it down. Can the government achieve anything meaningful like that?

Whether Taiwan's democracy is "functioning" is very questionable

Sure, what do we label Donald Trump?

Worry about that after 30 years then. I don't pretend i can predict what's going to happen at that time frame. Isn't AI supposed to take over everything by then?

That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people.

The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?

The current credit systems in China works very, very differently from what the western media describes. Major commercial systems like "Zhemaxinyong" are actually way more transparent than US credit system. You get to see a lot of the details about what's impacting your score at all time, and you have lots of control on where do you want to share your score to.

The official "social credit" system that the government wants to build is still at a very early stage right now, and it'll be no where close to what the western media imagined (or rather, hoped)

The fairy tales about Chinese social credit system denying loans because of private messages are malicious wishes of western media or Chinese activists at most

"no one worries about US activists the same way they do about Chinese ones"? You have only heard one sided stories from western media so far.

Why do Assange and Snowden needs to hide then? Of course US don't need to do anything sketchy, they make them illegal and lawfully send them to jail

Apple got some good number with iPhoneX launch it seems, after several years' of decline in market share. They're no where close to getting killed though.

The fact it's moving servers to China is most likely going to have positive effect on their sales, not negative.

Whichever way, it doesn't matter that much. At least where Apple wants to put their server makes no difference.

It's not that we are "unaware" of anything, we just don't feel the same way about privacy (and many other western values as well). Not that they're bad, we just don't believe they're so important. Sure you think you "know the importance of privacy", but that's rather just an opinion, not a fact.

In fact, another apparent trend in China is that people who have been studying and living in US for some time tends to become more agreeable with Chinese government afterwards.

Totally agree! I would have already switched if I hadn't bought so many iOS apps.

Yeah, other iCloud services are just widely unpopular in China, they're basically irrelevant.

Need to store photos? Baidu disk and tons of other services provide much larger space with no cost, and much more affordable paid version. Wallet? almost everyone in China uses Wechat pay or Alipay now. Even App Store supports Alipay for purchasing apps. Maybe they can steal my contacts? If so, they would have all my Wechat and QQ contacts already, maybe even all the messages. While I do like more privacy, but it's basically at the bottom of my list of concerns.

People mention "Chinese activists", well, almost all of them don't even live in China. Rest assured their lives are not impacted as well

Well, I do live in China and I don't see anyone feeling any fear about this... Seriously, you can easily turn off keychain if you don't trust a cloud service to store all your passwords. And if i decide to use such a service, I'd certainly trust a local company much more than Apple or anything of US origin.

Exactly, top Chinese engineers are also much more likely to choose to work in China now. The local IT industry is booming