[Laforet]

I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.

What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict[0] not unlike what took place in white Rhodesia/Namibia, Northern Ireland during the troubles, etc. There is a economic reason why these conflicts could not last indefinitely, no matter what ideologies drive them.

[0]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_intensity_conflict

[imglorp]

Technology is making the price plummet of policing a large population. Natural language recognition, face recognition, location tracking, pattern-matching, deep packet inspection, graph traversal, and of course AI can all run unattended pointing out dissidents to the authorities who just have to go round them up and reeducate them. Oh and guess what China is making a big investment in lately?

[Laforet]

TBH, AI worries me because it removes much of the human cooperation required to keep such regimes in place, however it is probably still a few decades ahead of us.

[Balgair]

The false-positive/negative rates are the key here. If they are not too bad, then yeah, it may 'work' in the short term. If they are sky high, like most facial recognition is today, then it's not going to work. Word will leak out very quickly that the surveillance is worthless.

[imglorp]

For an authoritarian police state, false positives are fine as a show of force.

If the system mistakes you for someone else, you might get your door kicked down, your dog shot, and get dragged in and interrogated. Then you will come to realize what will happen if you really run afoul of them. So maybe you think twice if you're planning an infraction in the future.

So they may well want to round up the top N suspects, knowing that N-1 are innocent.

[Balgair]

Yes, but this is a separate issue than surveillance. You can have totalitarianism and surveillance just as well as with democracy (not ever typical though).

[cabalamat]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable

Autocratic regimes have lasted for as long as 3000 years (pharonic Egypt).

I'm sure lots of people want to believe the Chinese system won't work; but that doesn't make it true.

[Laforet]

Ancient Egypt seems to be the exception in history. Such reliable agriculture and continued population concentration around the Nile are very peculiar situations that have no parallels elsewhere.

If Egypt was truly superior, it really should not have been so easily conquered by Ptolemy and then Rome which both had a much less authoritarian society.

[true_religion]

The arguement was that it was sustainable, not that it made Egypt superior to all less authoritarian countries everywhere, for all time.

[kinsomo]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable. The cost of policing is quite substantial and the productivity lost is hard to replace which adds to the cost.

Why do you think the Chinese government can't sustain the cost? Intensive policing is manpower intensive, and China presently has manpower to spare. They also don't have to deal with democratic pressures to contain the cost and redirect the savings to programs that benefit the general public.

[analog31]

In my view, they are not sustaining the cost. We are, by buying their products. If totalitarianism becomes universal, that's when it ceases to be sustainable.

The ruling class has luxuries that they could not have developed for themselves without them being broadly available. I'm thinking of things like cell phones, the Internet, and possibly the money system.

Parasites need a viable host.

[Can_Not]

I love that we're talking about how bad totalitarianism is meanwhile we literally have the upperclass exporting jobs to China for a quick buck and president who campaigned on bringing them back who just betrayed his base (and his country) by helping a Chinese company keep their jobs... Living in the free-ist country in the world apparently means you're free to sell out your fellow man to the totalitarian state overseas.

I think _that_ is the sustainability problem we need to talk about. We're feeding them and starving ourselves.

[graeme]

As automation reduced societal labour requirements, will that make societal repression via human labour more feasible?

[Laforet]

>China presently has manpower to spare.

And in twenty years they will not, that is the crux of the issue.

[woodandsteel]

That's correct. Due to the one-child policy and other causes, China is already suffering a worker shortage, and the demographers say it will get much worse in the future.

[jhanschoo]

Your argument does not preclude selective policing; if for example policing on Han ethnicities remains sufficiently light, this can remain indefinitely. Slavery as well as oppression of minorities used to be seen as part and parcel of human society; one should not doubt so easily that oppressive regimes can be sustainable

[guelo]

If technology is able to repress resistance in more powerful ways than was previously possible then things like Northern Ireland won't be possible.

[peteretep]

> then things like Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland (in the 1900s) was less about resistance to a tyrannical state, and much more about a population split 50/50ish who had hated each other for a few hundred years. British action there was far from exemplary, but had the people of Northern Ireland woken up one day to find they were part of the Republic of Ireland, precisely no problems would have been solved.

[SN76477]

I also doubt it is sustainable.

China has a social credit system that is locked in with this totalitarian system. Based on how irrational humans are I fully expect a huge spike in suicides. Once people get into so much social debt that people stop associating with them and they are locked out of work and simple things such as garbage collection they will start to end their lives.

I want to be wrong about suicide and right about social credit systems though....

[landryraccoon]

> I very much doubt it is sustainable.

What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

> What we are seeing today is essentially a low intensity conflict

This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict? The examples in Wikipedia are distinct identities or states. What identities are in contention in China?

[Laforet]

>What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

I am not in the clairvoyant business. Expressing doubt is as much as I could do.

>This part I don't see at all. Who are the sides in this low intensity conflict?

Armed insurrection has been ongoing on since the early 90s[0] loosely organised by ETIM[1] as well as various affiliated Islamist groups in neighboring countries especially of late. They are backed by sympathetic donors in the Gulf states, Turkey and (allegedly) the CIA. Since then there have been several high profile riots and terrorist attacks both in[2] and out[3] of Xinjiang.

Obviously they are fighting against the police and the army loyal to the government. In addition there are local entities known as Bingtuan[4] that are best described as a military-industrial complex with several company towns at strategic locations throughout the region. They are under the direct command of the state department and are expected to counter the provincial leadership should they become insubordinate.

There are also smaller groups of Hui (Chinese Muslims) seeking to consolidate their identity and Kazakh irredentists seeking reunification with Kazakhstan, but they are much less significant and tend to be allied with he government against the Uighur.

[0]：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baren_Township_riot [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkestan_independence_mo... [2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi_rio... [3]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack [4]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Production_and_Constr...

[ajross]

> What if you're wrong? You have doubts, where's the evidence?

There's not enough data to make predictions like that. But one very good reason for optimism is that China's current totalitarian stability is an unstable false vacuum. It's sustained by the outrageously rapid economic growth seen in the decades since the cultural revolution.

Basically: if you're Chinese, your grandparents (if they were lucky) survived a devastating world war and invasion by Japan, an even more devastating civil war, and a yet more devastating still famine forced on them by the nutjobs who won the civil war.

And now their grandkids are all running around with smartphones in their pockets, collecting college diplomas and international graduate degrees, vacationing in Thailand and Hawaii, and generally dancing on the world stage like the Americans do.

That kind of success pays for a lot of totalitarian angst. But it won't forever. These folks' kids aren't going to be happy with only 2% GDP growth as payment for their political dominance by a corrupt elite. The proletariat never has been.

[laretluval]

The Chinese proletariat isn’t running around the world colecting foreign graduate degrees; they are working in factories in Shenzhen to feed their children back in the village. But you’re right in that it’s typically privileged young people who are behind liberal revolutions.

[rtpg]

"Only sustainable for a couple decades" is , to a first order, the same as "sustainable" when you're looking at a 20 year time span

" Oh don't worry this nightmare will stop in about 2 decades"

[brianpgordon]

An existential threat to freedom in human societies is scarier than just tyranny in our lifetime.

[robotkdick]

I totally agree.

China seems to want to create a monoculture with norms that don't bend from locale to locale. I think the saying is: if it don't bend, it will break.

[slowburning]

http://read.gov/aesop/011.html The Oak and the Reeds, Aesop 'Better to yield when it is folly to resist, than to resist stubbornly and be destroyed.'

[mc32]

I think if the state enlists and coopts a sufficient percentage of the local population, then it can work indefinitely, if the gov't provides enough in terms of basic needs. The idea of local administrative committees and youth organizations as an arm to make others toe the line is not a foreign concept to the CCP.

[Laforet]

There really isn't one when most of the Uighur population is impoverished if not otherwise disaffected, and the local Han population are effectively incentivised to leave Xinjiang for better prospects elsewhere. Between 2010 and 2013, there have been 400,000 fewer Han Chinese living in Xinjiang through a combination of natural population decline and emigration[0]; this represents a solid 2% of total population and there is no evidence to suggest the trend is slowing down.

Heavy policing may put a lid on the problem for now but in the long run it will only undo several generations of hard work pacifying the region.

[0]:http://www.cqvip.com/qk/83491x/201503/665772571.html, the text is paywalled but a short excerpt containing relevant information can be viewed at https://www.1xuezhe.exuezhe.com/Qk/art/591377?dbcode=1&flag=...

[mc32]

I see what you are saying. I think there are ways to do it. The Soviets were successful in their central Asian and Caucasus "Republics". They tended to coopt a local leader and got them to do their bidding. Even Russia now with Chechnya has been able to use the same formula. It's not impossible for the CCP to do the same.