Another crucial factor that's part of the CCP's victory in HK is that China inherited a police force essentially structured as a colonial occupying force. Police staff get benefits that include segregated housing (such as the West Kowoon Disciplined Services Quarters), which maintains morale in the ranks and allows those so inclined to live quite separately from the rest of the populace.
Look into 2019 protests
There was one guy who fell down a high rise garage and there was a street cleaner who was killed by the protesters.
Compare that to when the British were taking over Hong Kong, and hundreds of protesters were killed.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the pandemic didn’t occur soon after.
What’s crazy is the trigger was a Hong Kong national who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. Taiwan wanted to extradite him but there was no law in place to do so. Apparently the killer is still free today.
Chan yin-lam case is one that always sticks in my head.
I can well believe correlation is sometimes the answer but the odds of an award winning swimmer doing a midnight dip and washing up naked the next day, with a rushed police investigation and extremely expedited cremation is a fair bit to accept as coincidence
When a government has massive protests week after week, where close to 1 out of 5 citizens comes out in some cases, that's a huge problem.
Not to mention when it can only be "fixed" by baton swinging police and arrests for the very act of protesting.
"Lawmakers would go on to formally approve the national security law, essentially a foregone conclusion, about three weeks later. The legislation broadly criminalized political dissent and hamstrung the civil liberties that once distinguished Hong Kong from mainland China. A defense of those freedoms—which were already under increasing attack—had come to define Lai's legacy. Lai not only unapologetically advanced democracy and free expression in the region, but he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; at trial, Lai testified that he had asked them to voice their support for Hong Kong. He knew the law was coming, and he knew what it meant for him."
The same 'National Security Law' will pass soon. Who decides what's right or wrong? It defeats freedom of speech.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-ab...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_(Overseas)
> BN(O)s are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens. They are subject to immigration controls when entering the United Kingdom and do not have automatic right of abode there
Things were different before the 1981 British Nationality Act but it's not too relevant for HK as the 1981 act is before the Sino British Declaration.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Portugal-give-full-citizenship...
Canada was particularly affected. It absorbed the most immigrants, they were a larger share of the population, and this was a major increase in ethnic diversity. The resulting cultural clashes were sometimes an issue. Here is one that literally doubled car insurance rates in British Columbia around the time I left.
Three cars, 2 in front with the left-hand car being driven by a Canadian, and the back car driven by a recent immigrant. The immigrant sees the opportunity to pass, swings out into oncoming traffic, and guns it. Leaving just a few inches of room. Normal Hong Kong driving.
The Canadian has no idea that this is happening until OMG I'M ABOUT TO BE HIT! The Canadian then swerves right to avoid the emergency, and hits the car on the right.
The immigrant drives off. Presumably wondering about these crazy Canadians who don't know how to drive.
Everyone involved behaved reasonably for how they were used to driving. But the combination worked out very poorly...
When you immigrate into a country, all of a sudden all of your reflexes are wrong. Some are obviously wrong. Some are more subtle. It is overwhelming, and too much.
While in retrospect it is easy to say that they should prioritize some things over others, in practice they tend to learn from experience after people respond badly, and those who are a little more used to the culture explain why they are wrong. And the experience of being told that they are wrong all of the time will make many hold on to some of their old habits extremely strongly.
Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
I agree with you that it takes a while to adapt to new sociale mores and it's worth cutting immigrants some slack but that's different from driving a multi-ton heap of metal where safety is important.
Sidenote: Of the different cities I've lived in Asia, HK drivers are some of the worst. Combination of aggressive driving with refusal to signal their attention (by using their turn signal) makes for very poor driving. Not everyone but a significant percentage.
The theory "it happened like they said it" explains why the rise in accidents happened, and fits with normal driving habits in Hong Kong.
And it's not like the UK had much of a choice in the first place. China threatened to invade and there is very little the UK could have done to prevent a full control.
Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
The fact that British HK liberalized a little at the very last second before handover is better than nothing, and the National Security Law is definitely bad, but right now the scoreboard is 7/150 years of free speech under the UK, compared to 23/28 years of free speech under PRC. It'll take another 100 years for the PRC to have a worse record than the UK.
The Netherlands has a longer history of monarchy under their current government (present monarchy founded 1813) than North Korea (current government established 1948). Does that mean you’d rather live in North Korea than the Netherlands?
The plain and obvious fact remains that Hong Kongers would have more political liberties today if the UK retained control of the territory, regardless of the complete colonial insanity of the original arrangement.
Can you name one present existing British overseas territory that has less of a right to criticize the government than Hong Kong? There are still a bunch of them to choose from from.
Also they appear to be arresting more people for speech in total and per-capita than HK:
https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/30-people-arrested-daily-for-sp...
https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/30-people-arrested-daily-for-sp...
You can’t gloat that the sun never sets on your empire and then absolve yourself from responsibility for events that you had a heavy hand in influencing. Regardless, if you think the article is wrong, your point would he better served by providing examples of where it’s wrong and stating why.
That would be like blaming me for the Gulf War when I was in diapers.
Yes, it shows. 11th hour liberalization was the spiked punch that subverted/prevented PRC from doing useful reforms, like (patriotic) education (MNE / moral national education in 2010s), getting rid of colonial british textbooks that koolaid generations of minds and tethered them to muh anglo liberal values, libtards that would later collude with foreign powers to sanction their own gov. Instead PRC had to waste 20 years unwinding the shitshow because they didn't want to rock the boat too hard during period of heightened end of history wank, i.e. didn't want to risk unrolling last minute landmine reforms which could lead to sanctions / capital flight.
Then there's liberalization bullshit like court of final appeal (staffed with overseas anglo "judges", read compradors, friendly to UK values and interests) that replaced UK privy council to enshrine liberal, UK aligned, rulings vs Beijing. Under colonial UK rule, privy council, decision makers in London, got to overrule HK local moves that countered UK interest. Or Legco reforms that enabled direct elections / local veto that didn't exist prior, which stalled art 23 / NSL implementation for 20 years, something Beijing would have otherwise been able to ram through using old colonial system where governor or Beijing equivalent get to rubber stamp whatever the fuck they wanted... like NSL. Or retooling societies ordinance, public order ordinance, bill of rights ordinance, that was previously used by UK crush dissenting groups with absolute power/prejudice into liberal instruments that now allow retooled ordinance to proliferate with greater judicial power over PRC appointed executive vs pre 90s when these were all tools UK executives used to crush dissent. Liberalization took away all the fancy authoritarian killswitch UK used to rule HK as colony with iron fist.
Post NSL, PRC gave all the compromised none-Chinese judges the boot and get to designate PRC aligned judges that rule on PRC interests. Nature is healing etc.
How would it have made a difference when the Chinese military invaded?
Is there source evidence for this? I keep hearing various different things Jimmy supposedly advocated or asked for, but very little actual source.
If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.
China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.
Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
They went to China because it was cheaper. They went there in detriment of their countrymen that went without jobs, in detriment of the environment (what with all the shipping boom that followed), even in detriment of their own countries, since this would stifle development and industrialization. And they KNEW that technology transfer would follow, because China had made it clear.
No one forced them to do it. They did it knowingly in the name of short and medium-term profit. I’m not even judging if that is bad (I do THINK it’s bad overall, but I’m not arguing it here). I’m just pointing out what happened.
So now the West must not be surprised. And they aren’t! They just need to craft narratives that will paint them in good light.
It really was an intentional decision, largely on the part of the Clinton administration, to make investing in the country easier and improve the economic well being of Chinese citizens in the hopes it would inevitably lead to democratization. Clearly, those hopes were just that though
I'd say "in the hopes it would satisfy the political-donor class." The desired liberalization of the PRC was... not necessarily a falsehood, but not the main reason either.
Yes I think. At least a lot of Western policymakers did buy a "change through trade/investment" story, and it wasn't pulled from nowhere because it had worked in the past.
In postwar Japan and later South Korea, integration into the West's economic system coincided with eventual democratization, closer alignment of values, and alliance.
It was reasonable to think the same thing would work in China, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also the US intentionally set China up for investment by doing things like bringing them into the WTO. All that investment wouldn't have happened without some level of government support.
Didn't they have a dictatorship or two for quite a while? I think they've only been a democracy in fact, for about 35 years.
As did Taiwan.
On the other hand, China has always sought to regain what it considers to be its rightful place as a first world power and to recover from its “century of humiliation.”
I think the CCP has been pretty consistent in this stance. Policy makers in the West that didn’t notice were blinded by corporate wishful thinking.
I think the OP would frame this as the Western governments allowing Western businesses to invest in China.
You’re right in your assumption that profit-seeking was the major part of it - like, it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
But the idea that the West trading and interacting with China would mean the populous (and perhaps government) would come to understand the benefits of a free society, and so China would trend towards a Western political system - probably gradually rather than violently - was a mainstream view from the 80s to the early 2010s.
It worked in south korea and taiwan which were severe military dictatorships before (maybe you could throw japan im there too?) so the history of capitalism liberalizing countries isn't all failures
BDS is a thing. It toppled South Africa's regime and makes Israelis gnash their teeth. Part of the "sell" for investing in China, and buying Chinese products, was that we were bringing them Capitalism, which would bring them wealth and freedom. The alternative is that you're fueling a Communist regime that is going to become your rival and adversary. Maybe I'm mixing up which was explicit and which was implicit, but there's no way Americans would have been on board with everything if the latter was seen as a real possibility. So either big business knew and suppressed it, or they genuinely themselves believed that they could do business in China and not support strengthening the CCP. (And, before Xi rose to power, that was not an completely unreasonable thought.)
In the US we tend to see small companies get gobbled up by huge incumbents regularly, but in China the situation is much more in flux and it's not always obvious who the winners are going to be. It's the opposite of what you would expect from a command economy, at least in the tech and consumer product sectors.
Meanwhile in the land of the free, it's consolidation galore with very little competition.
The US has a massive number of small and medium companies. For example small part machining there are dozens per city.
43% of US GDP is small and medium size business. That’s effectively 50% of China’s entire GDP.
Sure China has more, but it also has 4x the population and an economy more focused on labor intensive industry.
"Authority comes from submission"; sure someone can threaten you with physical coercion, but they can't make you want to submit. I would strongly suspect that Jimmy knew what was coming, but the point isn't "winning" in the "hollywood" sense, but rather that he did the right thing even. I would suspect not even in spite of the cost, but because of the cost.
Are principles that don't cost you anything even principles?
His original intent in setting up the news outlet was often said to be market manipulation for personal gain rather than journalism. He was also known for publishing xenophobic content targeting mainland Chinese. One of the most controversial examples was running ads that portrayed mainland tourists as “locusts” and called for them to be driven out of Hong Kong.
In addition, he donated money to prominent US neoconservatives. I’m not sure whether Western media are unaware of his earlier background in Hong Kong, or if they are deliberately choosing to whitewash his reputation.
The miscalculation comes from thinking that the investment would actually have that effect. And I do think some people at the top knew it wouldn't have that effect, but of course, there was cheap labor to be had, and that was what they wanted more than anything else.
My opinion is still that capitalism (Western style) will win. Not because markets are never wrong but because the scope for fucking up is so much less. Markets can't decide "families can have only one child" or "we need to build 90 million units of housing" (that now sits empty). An accumulation of fuck-ups in this vein is inevitable when you have a small group of people making these kinds of decisions. In the long run, it will be fatal.
Sure they can. Just make it unaffordable to do anything else.
Actually they can. It's part of the reason why a lot of capitalist nations are seeing major problems with population stagnation and possibly shrinkage.
The problem is markets don't care at all about society. If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
Capitalism is geared towards minimizing workers' free time. And, unfortunately, free time is how babies get made and kids get raised.
That is where western capitalism is failing. Shouting louder and young adults to pull on bootstraps harder isn't making them have kids in their studio apartments.
South Korea and Japan are 2 examples of this train-wreck that's coming for the US and other nations.
This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Capitalism says nothing about free time. Make the connection in your argument - people without enough money work as much as they can, maybe… but I still don’t see the lower wage people I know working 16 hour days. In fact it is the people who have a use for the extra money, usually to buy free time later, as one would expect in a capitalistic system.
Oh no, it really doesn't.
Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.
> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.
> Capitalism says nothing about free time.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.
Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.
If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
This is nonsense. Capitalism is about the private ownership of productive stuff, i.e. capital. That’s it. Profit is a corollary, and one that is bounded by preferences and tastes.
"Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
Not a forcing function unless you’re levered. Competition can’t push your return on a productive asset below zero (by definition), just lower by increasing the value of said asset while reducing the cash flows from it.
Japan has had stagnant GDP growth for decades. Growth is not "necessary" as socialist like to project, it's just better. Productivity/innovation increases through growth have drastically improved our quality of life. Meanwhile socialists treat the world as zero-sum, as though everyone started out with a pile of cash which gets divvied up. Redistribution can be good, but you first need to generate the wealth.
You may find this marvelous piece enlightening:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Family planning was also massive successful in preventing frankly 100s of millions of useless mouths from being born and concentrating resources to upskill 1-2 kids, hence their massive catchup within a few generations. Now they make more technical talent than OCED combined and will have the greatest high skill demographic dividend to milk for at least our life times, giving them 40+ years to sort out better family planning.
BTW US overspending 5-10% of GDP aka 2.5 Trillion per year on healthcare vs OECD baseline is basically more wasteful misallocation than anything PRC has ever done, including RE misallocation (3-5% waste). And at least they still have housing units left to use (being converted into affordable housing), instead of piles of paper work and personal debt. Accumulation of fuckups that are not resolvable in western style capitalism, it will be fatal medium term.
PRC averted 200-300m birth who would have spread family resources into developing country trap. The family planning exchange is non-existing 400m low skilled workers / subsistent farmers that is net drain on national power vs having 100m tertiary to uplift into developed country. All PRC rising in the last 20 years is because PRC family planning aborted a fuckload of 2nd/3rd/4th+ siblings so families can concentrate resources to get 1st kid into STEM. They speedrun the high skill human capita game, compressing 100s of years of human capita accumulation in 50. There's downsides, but they come after the up.
What's better for development, a 1.8B country of 6 Nigeria's and 2 Japans or 1.4B country of 2 Nigerias and 6 Japans. The latter. And you would recognize the former, while all lives are special blah blah blah is absolute developing shitshow. Every Nigeria PRC avoids is 200m of less governance overhead, i.e. make work jobs. AKA see which way India trended. Look at new gen of PRC protein consumption and average height vs alternative, stunted growth from malnutrition that literally makes significant % of population too stupid to integrate into modern economy. That's what happens, you can literally fuck up your human capita stock so much by diffusing limited resources that 100s of million become too biologically stupid to do modern jobs i.e. even in PRC, 100s of millions from old times too stunted and innumerate to do even basic factory work. PRC didn't abort enough.
One "first principles" way to think about it is that money is power, and as the Chinese middle class grows bigger and richer, it will have more and more of the power. I expect it will want similar things as the middle class in other countries.
This may take any number of decades, which unfortunately makes this a hard theory to falsify.
China now _is_ far more liberal than in the 80-s. But it's also not even close to the Western democracies.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism.
Not really. "State capitalism" really is misleading. China is fiercely capitalistic, far more than any modern Western country. The ruling party has an unspoken agreement with the population: you stay out of politics, and they stay out of your business.
But I don't think this is sustainable. Russia had a similar social compact, and it had been broken after the Ukrainian invasion. There was too much power concentrated in one person, and it just never works.
I don't think it was a miscalculation. Greed always ran deep in the West too.
> If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics
It's not always possible. It works in some countries but not in others. For instance, it seems not possible in Russia.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state.
I somewhat agree, as the sinomarxist theorem and strategem is about that (and the sinomarxists also managed to bring out many people out of poverty too), but your analysis is not entirely correct either as China has many superrich now, which is a perversion in the system. So Xi also lies here. Because how can there be so many super-superrich? This is a master-slave situation, just like in other capitalistic countries. So why then the lie about sinomarxism? They just sell it like an ideology now, not unlike the Juche crap in North Korea.
But Russia has never removed the Communists from power. It removed the Communist party, that's true. But plenty of the revolutionaries were themselves Communists; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were very high-ranking Communists. They liked the idea of economic liberalization, but the political liberalization was only allowed as long as they stayed in power. I'm not sure Russia has seen even a single honest presidential election. The current "president" of Russia is a former KGB officer.
Yeltsin may have used Communists as a scare during his campaign. But today's Russia is in hands of a former Communist dictator, much like today's China is in the hands of a career-Communist dictator.
No, he didn't. The 1996 elections were honest, with maybe slight irregularities in favor of his _opponent_. There is statistical analysis by a professional mathematician: https://www.electoral.graphics/en-us/Home/Articles/sergei-sh...
It _is_ correct to say that Yeltsin fought a very dirty campaign, using "dark cash" (the infamous "Xerox box") and unfair agreements with the major media owners.
The US helped with that.
That's a rewriting of history and a common misconception I've seen repeated ad nauseam both on HN and (what I assume is it's origin) Reddit.
The West (primarily the US and then-West Germany) began investing in China in the 1970s to 1989 explicitly as a bulwark against the USSR [0] due to the Sino-Soviet Split. The "economic democratization" argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO [1] along with to reduce the sanctions enforced following the Tienanmen Square massacre [2].
George HW Bush as well as Clinton's NSC Asia Director Kenneth Lieberthal were both massive Chinaphiles, and played a major role in cementing the position China is in today.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264332
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/20/opinion/IHT-america-needs...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/14/opinion/forget-the-tianan...
You both agree.
“The ‘economic democratization’ argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO” is what they’re talking about. American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us.
Prior to that it was principally geostrategic. But prior to that, the argument was never made.
The NSC in the first Clinton admin and the HW admin was ambivalent-to-opposed to the "endogenous democratization" approach, as was seen with Clinton 1's decisions during the China Straits Crisis under Anthony Lake (who was canned in 1997) along with Bush 1's retrenchment of sanctions in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre under Brent Scowcroft. Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2 due to personnel changes and a significant loss of political capital due to then ongoing controversies.
> But prior to that, the argument was never made
Yep. The "endogenous democratization" argument only arose in 1997 after Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi's paper "Modernization: Theories and Facts" was published back in 1997 [0].
[0] - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Modernization%3A-Theor...
That’s when the relevant argument was made and, by my reading, mistakes made per OP’s comments.
Nobody is criticizing Nixon splitting China from the USSR. The criticism is in trade liberalization and technology transfer following the 1990s.
Both public and private. Read my first citation - I don't feel like relinking dozens of citations on 1970s-80s US-China relationship.
Tl;dr - the Carter and Reagan administrations both heavily invested in building the PRC's R&D, military, and industrial capacity through a mix of public-private investments primarily as a bulwark against the USSR along with US Army boots on the ground in Xinjiang.
Nixon's opening of relations with China was definitely a move against the USSR, but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe. The fact that the CPC was still very much in charge while all of this investing was occurring had to be rationalized somehow in the minds of people who were less cynical, and "it'll help liberalization" was probably one of the rationalizations used. And in some ways, you can use investment as a way to leverage social changes within countries, and some people (though apparently not enough) thought that was the intention with China, but there was only a carrot, not a stick, and by the time there was a desire to use a stick, there was too much dependency on China as a market and producer for the West. That's where we're at now.
Most of the capital investment and institution building that led to China Shock in the 2000s only happened due to the extreme degree of tech and capital transfer in the 1970s-80s, along with the visiting student program. Heck, Vietnam had a higher HDI [0] and GDP PPP per Capita [1] than the PRC until the early 2000s. The only difference was Vietnam was strictly in the Warsaw Bloc camp, and was negatively impacted by the collapse of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and GDR while China was able to leverage ties with the US during that period.
[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi?year=2005
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2...
I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.
Capitalism is optimized to reduce or eliminate property access. For example, a free market capitalist has no problems with a very rich individual buying a city and perpetually renting the property to it's employees at rates above their salary, putting them in perpetual debt to that individual. They own nothing and can't escape their circumstances. Nor can their children.
Capitalism with minimal or no regulation naturally devolves into feudalism.
Everyone owns the world oceans (“common heritage of humanity”). How is that going for its fisheries and sea bottoms.
Co-op fisheries are owned by the co-op. They aren’t a problem and regulate access.
Common heritage fisheries are trawled unregulated because when everyone owns something, nobody owns it.
For the communist model to work, the state has to own everything. Which in practice means apparatchiks control everything.
At first I used co-op's because I just assumed you meant democratically controlled companies rather than "communism" and now I know you don't know what communism means.
"state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society.
Do something like project Cybersyn [0], but give all decision making to a digital planning engine.
No humans, no apparatchiks.
Free market economics haven't worked out great for the vast majority of people.
The belief that a central "digital planning engine" could plan the lives of an entire society is an incredibly naive idea from early cybernetics. This doesn't work even in small thought experiments because of information limits. No central system can access all the local knowledge and constantly changing circumstances.
crazy, because the two biggest cases of economic central planning are the USSR which grew faster than any civilization ever (a literacy rate of 30% to 100% in 60 years) and China who is currently making the United States world power look like a toddler.
There's clearly something to central planning, it's still up in the air if you can totally plan an economy centrally. I tend to agree with Chibber.
China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs. And their economic successes over the past few decades have come about by embracing free market principles. The stuff they tried to centrally plan has largely failed.
> China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs.
So true, king.
> I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.
If the answer is "yes", you've just reinvented a communist dictatorship. If it's a "no", then such society will run out of food and goods, and something better will rise to replace it.
So you could take your earnings, buy some yarn, knit your friend a scarf, and there's no real change in societies.
The difference is that you'd get your money from a state run industry. Your home would be guaranteed. And where you ultimately end up working would be based on your capabilities.
You are free to knit or whittle gifts for friends. What you wouldn't be free to do is setup "mopsi's scarf business" without working through the state. You wouldn't be allowed to take the earning from "mopsi's scarf business" and use them to become a landlord. You could gain social status and benefits by running the scarf business, but those would be limited (barring corruption).
When I say "a communist society collectively owns everything" I'm talking mainly businesses, land, housing.
A mistake that people often make about communism is thinking it means "Everything is free" or "nobody owns anything". That's more of a collectivist approach. Communism is mostly centered around providing minimum guarantees through public ownership.
> You are free to knit or whittle gifts for friends. What you wouldn't be free to do is setup "mopsi's scarf business" without working through the state. You wouldn't be allowed to take the earning from "mopsi's scarf business" and use them to become a landlord.
I'd rather barter with others for the useful things they produce. My friend, for example, grows excellent tomatoes.
Over time, if we have many friends, we will live comfortable lives, while loners will wither away. Is this an acceptable outcome for you as the dictator of the Bestest Communist Paradise on Planet Earth (BCPPE), or will you do something about it?
Better contributions lead to better rewards. You might be able to buy more things if you setup an underground business, but you'd still be stuck in whatever house you currently live in (for example). You can get much nicer accommodations and a higher salary with bigger and better contributions to the state. That's the motivation for people to not just be farmers.
> I'd rather barter with others for the useful things they produce. My friend, for example, grows excellent tomatoes.
That's fine. Communism wouldn't stop simple bartering.
> Over time, if we have many friends, we will live comfortable lives, while loners will wither away.
Loners would be taken care of by the state. They don't wither.
The place where the communist state would step in is if you moved from simple barter to actually owning and operating businesses (where you employ people, give them a salary, etc). Again, mopsi's scarf business wouldn't be allowed without state approval. But you making scarfs for your community in exchange for the communities homemade stuff would not only be welcome but encouraged.
> Is this an acceptable outcome for you as the dictator of the Bestest Communist Paradise on Planet Earth (BCPPE), or will you do something about it?
I don't understand your snark. I get that you hate communism.
Again, as I stated elsewhere, I'm not a communist. I don't think misunderstanding and misrepresenting the position of communists does you any good if you are trying to convince others that it's a bad ideology.
I should also state that I'm basically just talking about simple marxism. However, I think what I'm describing applies to most forms of communism.
If you like I can give you my critique of communism.
> Loners would be taken care of by the state. They don't wither.
This is not as trivial question as it may sound. In the USSR, where I grew up, this was classified as a crime of "speculation". People were jailed and their property confiscated to intimidate others to work for the state without bypassing the forced redistribution.
The question of gifting a scarf to a friend, when someone else might need it more, is in disguise, the central question of communism. There is no way to preserve my freedom to give the scarf or other fruits of my labor to whomever I please (or keep it for myself) while simultaneously satisfying the needs of those whose needs are unmet. There simply aren't enough scarves to make everyone happy. If you try to coerce me, I won't knit any scarves at all, or they'll be of very poor quality.
This is essentially how and why the USSR stagnated for decades until it collapsed under its own weight. By the end, despite coercion, productivity had fallen so low that people with physical access to goods (like truck drivers) resorted to bartering, while others (like university professors) starved. The all-powerful state that was supposed to "take care of everything" was nowhere to be seen; they were busy bartering tanks for chicken.
For starters I think the only way for communism to actually work would be with robust checks and balances in place to properly address corruption within the government. AFAIK, basically all communist governments have started as autocracies. That's a really bad combo for corruption. The ideal communist state would arise from democracy, but I don't think democracy will ever create a communist state.
Next, I don't really think state control of all markets is a good idea. A good state would be too slow to react market requirements. You really want your population to self sort and organize as much as possible. That's what makes sure everyone gets all the scarfs they want. That said, I think there are fundamental duties that capitalism does not properly handle. For example, building roads or running a fire department. Capitalism, IMO, works best when there is a truly competitive market in place. Food production would be a good example where capitalism works well (but still might need government support since it's vital to survive).
Now to the USSR specifically (but AFAIK a lot of communist states are like this) the other big problem that goes along with corruption is that there aren't really second chances. I have a coworker that grew up the USSR and he mentioned this with schooling. Fail a class, fall behind, or need extra help and boom. The better job is permanently locked out and you have to settle for a crappy job. A chinese roommate of mine describe a similar phenomena in China. As it turns out, all the wealthy chinese families still ended up in positions of power and relationship ultimately mattered a lot more than competence. I think this mostly comes from the state optimizing for the wrong things. They assume that people wouldn't want to work on farms or that farmers would always want to be farmers. One of the benefits of a capitalist society is that, while no trivial, changing professions is accessible to pretty much everyone.
The core problem with the USSR's version of communism is that it concentrated too much power on too few people (well, and the fact that stalin operated by both being drunk and keeping all the heads of state perpetually drunk). People can get weird ideas (like mao's feelings towards birds) and putting too much power in those individuals' hands is doomed to pain for the citizenry. Some problems are best solved by a little bit of market anarchy.
There are many writings that address this misconception. Communist Manifesto https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man... provides a succinct response. You might also search for what class owns most of the property in the united states.
If the state requisitions everything above a certain threshold to prevent wealth disparities, as the communists did in the USSR with grain beyond what farmers needed for sustenance, people will not work beyond the threshold out of the goodness of their hearts. Why work extra hours on the fields if you get nothing out of it? Instead, production will drop to exactly meet that threshold. This is how famines were created.
To maintain production while still requisitioning, you will have to force people to work for free.
> USSR before the destruction of socialism - typically have 80%+ rates of home ownership
But hey, in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts, if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries . . . sure, give it another go.
Capitalism is the worst economic system that has ever been tried . . . except for all the others.
I suggest "Debt" from David Graeber for a great dissertation of this topic (which is not the core topic, but definitely touched).
All of this without considering that private property of means of production is different from private property in general.
Communism indeed is highly unlikely to works as a political state system, due to human nature.
> "in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts"
Just curious, there wasn't any interference from outside during these 'failures' was there? Any trade embargoes? Any military intervention? Any assassinations? Any deliberate destabilizing? Any puppet governments?
> "if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries"
There's 1.3 - 1.9 million people in American prisons now. 4.9 million who have been in prison. 19 million with felony convictions. Prisons are for-profit, and prisoners are used for forced labour, either paid nothing or paid less than minimum wage. The US ICE is disappearing people off the streets. The US president is targeting people who criticize him accusing them of treason (punishable by death)[1], recently writing """Chuck Schumer said trip was ‘a total dud’, even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!""".
Why is "Communism" the cause of gulags but "Capitalism" isn't the cause of mass incarceration, forced labour, and the government covering up how many people die while imprisoned? Why does this American "communism can't work, has never worked, and reminder Communism == mass graves" style comment always feel like a loud pledge of allegiance trying to make it clear to the powers that be that you aren't criticizing them, begging them not to disappear you? Are you not even allowed to entertain a different idea? To consider that even if any given Communism actually can't work and is crappy to live under, that what you're saying is more like a religious recital than something sensible?
[1] https://time.com/7290536/miles-taylor-president-trump-treaso...
What's been failing is neoliberalism. Every nation that's been moving in that direction has serious problems as their social safety nets have started to collapse.
What is this? Are the existing examples you mentioned considered examples of democratic socialism, or are you referring to something else?
It seems like you're proposing a regulated free market in parallel with a highly regulated UBI?
No UBI. Just basics for survival guaranteed. You should not starve if you can't find work. That doesn't mean we can support a non-working population at leisure. (Which, in our current model, occurs at both ends of the income spectrum.)
That's why I called it a "highly regulated UBI", which might not have been clear. You're proposing that all citizens receive the basics for survival in kind instead of the cash equivalent (which is how a UBI would work).
I think I prefer this model over what the OP ended up suggesting, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be in practice in the US.
> That doesn't mean we can support a non-working population at leisure.
Aren't the people who choose to live at a basic survival level living a life at leisure in your system?
I suppose so, given they’re subsisting. It should not luxurious, however, and would probably carry with it a modicum of indignity. (Which is fine as long as they aren’t discriminated against.)
And for who's done it, basically every capitalist nation at this point.
Simply put it's recognizing that capitalism has failings but so does communism. It doesn't seek full state control of everything, just over industries where it's needed. It tries to strike a balance between public and private ownership.
Everything from Vietnam to the US have aspects of market socialism. I think that there are more industries where the US should take ownership, particularly industries that lend themselves to natural monopolies or oligopolies.
I would be interested to know what industries you have in mind where the US should take ownership, and in what form.
A few that I'd see the need.
- Railroads - The lines themselves and the operation should be owned by the federal government. Private rail companies should buy access which pays for line expansion and maintenance. The US needs regulations on things like train length and line speeds (none of these super massive trains blocking roadways because they don't fit inside a rail yard).
- Medicine - Medicare for all, but honestly I think nationalizing major hospitals and pharmaceuticals would probably be warranted. It's in the national interest to fund a wide breadth of research and medicine production even if that medicine doesn't ultimately turn a profit. But even if we just did insurance, the US is already covering the most expensive pool of individuals with Medicare (old people) expanding it to all citizens wouldn't be that expensive. Reform to medicare would help (particularly removing Part C, that's just a slush fund for insurance companies, but then also expanding and simplifying the other parts).
Utilities ownership - Doesn't need to be nationalized, but having municipal or state ran utilities would, IMO, be preferable. The state utilities boards suck and putting in checks for utility companies. They aren't elected and are easy to corrupt. For example, my water utility was recently purchased by a company. In order to cover the loan they took out to purchase the previous water company, they raised rates (fat chance those go down). For telecommunications, I think a British telecom style system would work well. The government owns the lines while various telecommunication companies compete for service. That'd make it easier for more than just 2 companies providing internet service to a given location. Cellular networks practically already work like this, the big 3 own everything and sub-carriers just lease access. It'd be better if the government nationally owned cell service deployment. Especially in terms of spectrum usage.
- Food production - I don't really think government ownership is needed here, I think anti-trust and breakups are needed. These markets have consolidated to a huge extent which is really bad for everyone. Having just ~5 different national grocers is a bad thing. Having just a few mills (like general mills) is a bad thing.
- Chip fabrication - This should be owned by the government much like TSMC. And like TSMC, the likes of nvidia/intel/amd can buy a fab to do their runs. Fabs are just too crazy expensive and losing the competitive edge here is a security problem.
Basically, my view centers mostly around when an industry gets too consolidated. Especially when I think it's something that has critical importance to the general public. I could be open to more of these sorts of actions, it just depends on if an industry can be naturally competitive or not. Like, for example, I think a nationalized shoe manufacturing is a dumb idea as it's already a highly competitive market that could be easily broken up.
Hopefully that answers your question.
This is a weird religious belief. Property rights are an entirely unnatural construction. Under normal circumstances, you own exactly what you can defend, no more, no less. Property rights are a communal imposition to protect the weak from the strong, and are no more natural than any other socialist endeavor.
The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong). But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences, and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy (though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship. Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros oligarchs.)
We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now. Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries without nukes.
One reason why Lai's fate has only limited impact is because it doesn't resonate that strongly with working people for whom Hong Kong isn't an example of upward prosperity. His rags to riches 'boomer optimism' appeals more to the Western audience than to someone who has lived in the stagnation of Hong Kong of the last few decades, where ambitious tech talent now migrates to the mainland.
Likewise on the mainland the youth is significantly less interested in emulating the West or old Hong Kong which to them is not a symbol of dynamism.
HK failed their half of 2System by not implementing national security law on their accord after 20 years of failures and it became obvious they were never going to do it out of own volition. Frankly if local preferences is to be under national security umbrella and be free to commit treason their preferences should be completely nullified because that's unserious position. Hence PRC, after UNREASONABLE patience had shove it down their throats under 1C mandate (1C supercedes 2S) - HK only ever had "high" degree of autonomy, not full autonomy. It was always in Beijing's prerogative to force HK to eat their vegetables, it just took 20 years of HK incompetence before Beijing ran of patience. AKA the 1C2S muh HK has full autonomy under Sino British declaration tier of retarded western propaganda fed to useful idiots was a lie and got dispelled.
On the other hand, has John Lee made any real progress regarding the entwinement of the political economy and real estate developers leading to the high housing prices or overcompetition? Not really. So it's just full throated authoritarianism with no benefit. Unlike the West, HK already enjoys efficiency and infrastructure on par if not superior to Tier 1 Chinese Cities, so any appeals to "order" are farcical when the city is already far more orderly than the mainland.
What does that have to do with national security? Public order =/= national security. National security is HK having one of the largest US consulates in the world because it was widely recognized as the western intelligence hub into PRC (a consulate that directly reports strait to US state department lol), no small part due to lack of NSL. That's what HK was, a national security state of exception for treason, one that PRC waited 20 years to close. Cue significant consulate downsizing after PRC pushed through NSL. Beijing cares about national security for the 1C part, not some public order minutiae like grandma getting shanked in 2S.
> progress
Also who cares? HK drowning in stagnant end stage capitalism is exactly the kind of optics PRC wants right now. What is side effect? HK youths flooding to mainland for a good time. Also see recent online discussions around residential fires, many HKers recognizing, valid or not that HK, like rest of west, is farcical procedure shithole that can't get shit done, explicitly highlighting mainland tier1 cities urban management has better execution vs hk having "better" paper laws. They see benefit of actual authoritarianism, just like RoW including disenfranchised in west in the last couple years. They don't want retarded paper order and muh rule of law that hasn't worked for them before or after NSL, because PRC still light kid gloves on HK, increasingly they want to get shit done, like a proper tier1 city.
That's kind the point of 1C2S and embassies/consulates in general. Nor do they need or would find the NSC law effective to clamp down on the US Consulate if they wished, this just personal headcanon to justify clamping down on local figures you don't like.
>get shit done
Clearly they aren't lmao after 5 years of their candidate in control. Then again, looking at the job market or those useless bomb checks or mopeds in pedestrian streets, clearly they aren't getting much "shit done" in their "proper tier1 city" either.
> clearly
Well no, because Beijing still allows HK to stagnant on 2S, apart from half hearted directives to address absolute freemarket shithole dynamics like cage homes, PRC hands off with HK. Useless bombchecks (and XJ securitization) brought national terrorism to basically 0, how many school shootings have the very useful security checks in US prevented ¯\_(ツ)_/¯?. As for how much SZ gets done vs HK, tell that to the ~100m cross border trips from HKers to SZ. Revealed preference has a mainland bias. TLDR the play is letting HK system burn itself out, geoeconomically replacing HK libtards with PRC TTPS and eventually integrating desperate HKers into Northern Metropolis next SZ in next 30 years.
Tldr, its just full throated authoritarianism where I define local figures I don't like as "NSC" despite being no real threat to China while actual foreign intelligence just handshakes out of sight. What did I say about effectiveness?
>brought national terrorism to basically 0, how many school shootings have the very useful security checks in US
National Terrorism is 0 in Hong Kong and Asia in general. Let's not pretend that anybody actually believes those prevent attacks as they are political grifting, or it speaks more to unique CCP policies that they have a terrorism problem that other East Asians don't have.
>Revealed preference has a mainland bias.
You mean taking advantage of currency rates for cheaper lunch? That's not really "getting shit done" as it is a "big problem" for China as part of wider systemic involution.
>PRC hands off with HK.
So you agree then it's just full blown authoritarianism with no real benefit.
>Terrorism
There were 100s of domestic terrorist attacks in mainland PRC from XJ, somehow that stopped when PRC increased securitization. Funny that, almost like non fuckarounditis securitization works. Yes, all those other east asian countries with restive coocoo Salafist Muslim populations, oh wait they don't... meanwhile southeast asian countries with Muslims extremists keeps going boom.
> cheaper lunch
Or you know, clearing fire escapes so 150 people don't burn to death because real estate tycoons learn to rig muh free market proceduralism. Ultimately, it's not a problem for previously nativist HKer to regress towards a higher QoL under 1C2S privileges that they can't afford in HK. It's getting shit done in the sense it gives Hkers (and TWners) alternate life to inept local politics and conditions. Doesn't matter rest of PRC has to deal with involution, 2Sers get apartheid rights to be mediocre and comfortable in mainland. Or they get crushed opposing. More are picking the cheap lunch.
> full blown authoritarianism with no real benefit
Who said full blown authoritarianism, I said late stage liberal capitalist shithole where capitalists naturally get to benefit. AKA the 200,000+ and increasing wealthy/talented mainlanders demographic transfer via TTPS to get to enjoy HK by being PRC's loyal new guard. HKers who play along and integrate also benefit, where integrate is moving their ass to mainland / greater bay area where 1C2S apartheid gets them higher QoL than they otherwise deserve. Restive middle class HKers who don't play along gets the shaft. The point isn't to benefit all of HK, it's to benefit HKers who cooperate, and mainlanders. HKers who don't gets to rot in their increasingly unaffordable shoeboxes. As it should be.
>(1) man I hate this type of pol-speak (2) you're either incompetent or disingenuous if you think national security law is anything but a euphemism for 'we can throw you in jail if you criticize us'. People want free speech, they don't give a shit about trying to sell J-20 schematics worth $5. I guess you fall for think-of-the-kids laws too. They're not retarded, they actually have to live in the country you shitpost about and would rather have 20 years of freedom and have it forcefully taken from them than roll over. Good for them, might as well show the world what thuggery they're dealing with.
Does matter what NSL is lol, it matters if it exist or not, and in HK it did not so all other muh liberty considerations, is frankly immaterial. Retarded kids who don't care about selling J20 schematics is you know... the kind of retarded kids whose desire for free speech should be mercilessly curtailed. If retarded kids weren't retarded and gave a shit about J20 schematics, they wouldn't have got righteously slapped so hard. I don't know how you conflate literally naive fuck-the-kids endorsement with think-of-the-kids. The kids want immunity from treason. So yes, fuck those kind of kids. The same kids who are partying in Shenzhen now btw, good for them, might as well as show the world that thug tier1 city still preferable to end stage capitalist shithole of HK. TFW removing the retarded libtard virus from their brains and suddenly the kids are alright.
What exactly is that supposed to be describing, and what is he against? If all he's against is the financial setup that allowed him to become as rich as he did, and the fact that he would have to deal with new masters as Hong Kong's colonial period was ended, why the hell should I care? What does Jimmy Lai stand for that China stands against that I should care about?
"Illiberalism."
Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side. Not that Reason would support that, either, but China doesn't have any monopoly on "illiberalism," and illiberalism in the control of speech is far more important to me than the oppression of billionaires.
Lai's just getting Khodorkovsky'd: some of the rich think they're beyond government, when they operate purely through the blessing of and coddling by governments. You would think you would know that when all you do is accumulate and trade government promises in the form of currency, but the amount of praise you get as a disturbingly rich person must destroy brain function to some extent. There has got to be some atrophy in your sense of cause and effect and a distortion of your place in the world when you're on top in every room.
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* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
> Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.
> Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.
> Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side.
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; at trial, Lai testified that he had asked them to voice their support for Hong Kong.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to help convince anyone buddy.
What then?
I don't care about the specific politics, and I don't know his biography. You can love this man and hate China with the power of every cell in your body. But calling anyone a martyr, even with poetic license, has very specific connotations which don't seem to apply here.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/martyr
> a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/martyr
> 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
No, that wouldn't make me happy. A world without suffering and oppression would make me happy, but failing that, lets at least try to use words appropriately.
“He may be sentenced to die in prison in connection with his efforts promoting liberty in China.”
Martyr doesn’t sound like overstatement if that happens.
I think perhaps we've lionized the term martyr to mean too many things, but his actions seem in line with the dictionary definition
Your whole posting history is just inflammatory claims that you rarely stand behind. I keep bumping into you doing this, it's a bad look.
Explain why you think it's overstated.