[jcytong]

Serious question: How does one get educated about modern China? (I'm Chinese but mostly Western educated)

Having seen my grandparents/parents/relatives escaping communist China and now my generation escaping HK, it has heavily influenced me on how even people who identified as Chinese and hoping for democracy and freedom for their own cousins in China are being played and lied to for multiple decades.

My people in HK are screaming that the West previous engagement policies have proven again and again to be ineffective. It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades.

I do not claim to know everything about how the Chinese system functions and can only observe how my immediate network is being oppressed but still hope that there's a way to engage the CCP if at all possible.

[vkou]

I am not from China, but I am from Russia.

Western posturing and brinksmanship isn't going to bring about any meaningful change. It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]. All that a foreign enemy (that loudly proclaims their belligerence) does is unite people behind shitty leaders. (As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.)

Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.

Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government. At the end of the day, no government can govern without the consent of its people. It's just a much slower feedback loop than what you see in countries that have regular elections [2].

Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China, and its architects know that. China is not the target of their behaviour - looking strong in front of domestic audiences is. In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences. Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)

[1] The USSR imploded in a combination of incompetence, complacency, and a desire for its leaders (Gorbachev and his allies, who won a power struggle against Brezhnev's circle) to stop the worst of its repressive practices.

[2] Which in itself operates on a timeline of decades, if you look at how long it takes to go from public sentiment, to the primaries, to actual results in elections.

[BobbyJo]

>It's been tried for seventy years against the USSR, with no effect [1]

Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell? That's the first time I've heard that take. I mean, obviously what killed the USSR was a failure to dictate an efficient economy (what is likely to kill the CCP as well), but the Cold War defenitely, in my opinion and in the opinion of every piece I've ever read on the subject, sped things up significantly.

>As we have seen in Western democracies when their governments are more concerned with blaming external enemies, rather than fixing internal problems.

I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies. The most publicized actions are those taked by leaders in unilateral context, which are most often related to foreign relations and military operations, and thus not related to domestic issues. However, if you look at what the vast majority of these democracies spend their time on, on a man/hr basis, it's solving domestic problems. The US is a prime example. Trump represented <1% of the government's actions, but got 90%+ of the media time. Meanwhile the entirety of congress was working on nothing but domestic issues.

>Change in the CCP will have to come from movements within China. These kinds of changes take generations, and will not always result in the kind of change you would like to see.

Agree for the most part.

> Even in an authoritarian country, there is still a feedback loop between public sentiment, and their ruling government

The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.

>Strong-man anti-China posturing will not do anything to China

Posturing, no, but policies can and do have a large effect.

>In the 90s, tough-on-crime was popular in America, for the same reasons, to devastating consequences.

It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.

> Today, we've moved on to tough-on-China (which will result in devastating consequences if it ever moves past rhetoric, and into a shooting war.)

Well yeah. No one wants a war. It would pretty much destroy earth at this point. I think if you want to point to rising risk though, most of the blame needs to go to China itself. It's ever expanding territorial claims are the largest risk factor. We can talk about how the US lays claim to a large part of the Pacific, but then we have to start talking about the validity of most of the world's borders, so that's kind of moot in my opinion.

[vkou]

I am quite surprised at the negative sentiment you're getting for your post. It's well-reasoned.

> Uhhhh, so you don't think the cold war was a major reason the USSR fell?

That's correct. The cold war wasn't the reason the USSR fell. Neither was 'Ronald Reagan', or Star Wars.

To elaborate on that point - it wasn't outspent by Star Wars - Soviet planners were not seriously proposing that the USSR maintain parity in that arena, just like they weren't proposing that the USSR maintain 11 carrier strike groups. MAD would still work, and with stockpiles of thousands of nuclear weapons, its territorial integrity was assured. "We outspent the reds" was more of a domestic justification for bloated DoD budgets, than it was an actual, credible, Soviet-empire-ending military threat.

The disaster in Afghanistan contributed to Brezhnev's circle losing power, but it was entirely self-inflicted. The USSR over-reached, only to discover, to great embarrassment that it was no longer actually capable of projecting military force outside its borders - half due to its domestic economic problems, and half due to Afghanistan being an empire-killing quagmire. It's not the first waning empire to come to this realization, nor will it be the last.

> I think this is a skewed view based on a shallow view of most western democracies.

You're correctly observing that the purpose of foreign-affairs-posturing is media optics. I agree. The thing is that, to take Trump as an example - the observable impact of his domestic politics was... Not dramatically different from the status quo. He branded himself as a fireball reformist - and he did it by loudly complaining about Mexico, China, Iran, etc. Meanwhile, domestically - which is what really matters to his constituents - he has accomplished nothing. (To be precise, he accomplished less than nothing - COVID would have probably been handled better if he went on vacation for all of 2020.)

It's a stretch to say that Congress was working on domestic issues - Congress was spending their past year, keenly focused on doing... Nothing. That's the result of congressional deadlock. (To their credit, that's better than active sabotage.)

> The fact that these feedback loops do not exist is why most authoritarian regimes fail. We are seeing the slow decay of those feedback loops in China from their more liberal economic policies 10+ years ago.

I believe you are overstating the importance of economic dogma. The people of China, just like the people of the United States, or Myanmar, or Sweden, ultimately don't care about whether or not their economic policies are liberal, conservative, or martian. The political axis on which your economic policies fall on isn't interesting to anyone outside of a tribal political argument.

What they care about is results.

What they care about is answers to questions like:

"Do I have a job? Does my job let me make ends meet? Will my children be better off than I am? Do I feel secure in my economic future? Will I be better off five years from now, then I am now?"

Those questions are how you should be evaluating economic success, or failure - not where the policies fall on an economic compass. The average person doesn't give a rat's ass about the legal structure around a foreign-owned branch office in their country, or how some billionaire is treated. The average person cares about whether or not their government pension will be honored, and whether or not they'll be able to afford to buy an apartment, so that they can marry, etc, etc.

Of course, if you are consuming media that is written from the perspective of an un-average person - say, a foreign business owner, then of course it will make it sound like the most important question in the world is "But how neo-liberal are your economic policies with respect to foreign ownership?"

For the past twenty years, ever since the 'China will liberalize because foreign investment' meme was making the rounds in the newspapers (which sounded quite ridiculous to me at the time, but what did I know, I was 12...), all discussion of the subject was focused on the latter question, as opposed to the former. The only time the former was ever mentioned, was to argue a point about the latter.

To summarize - economic policies surrounding foreign ownership are not a bellwether for feedback loops of political sentiment in China. They are a bellwether for the sentiment of foreign business owners about China. There's an ocean of difference between the two.

> It had it's problems, but the falling crime rate over that time was in part because of these policies. NYC is a perfect example of both sides of that coin.

I am under the understanding that the elimination of leaded gasoline was the only meaningful factor for falling crime rates. Countries that did not undertake tough-on-crime legislature fared just as well as tough-on-crime did, without subjecting themselves to the social disaster that surrounded it.

So, the way I see it, it didn't 'have it's problems'. It was nothing but problems.

> Well yeah. No one wants a war.

I disagree. There are factions in the US that want a limited shooting war, because they think they can win it, without it going nuclear. There's the occasional post on HN calling for this sort of thing. I don't think one's likely to happen, but history tells us that its not outside the realm of possibility.

[jogundas]

Your point [1] argues that the USSR collapsed due to internal reasons only. I believe that it is an oversimplification.

Cooperation with totalitarian states often prolong their existence. An example that comes to mind is the US subsidizing grain being sold to the USSR and thus preventing starvation, which would have arguably led to a collapse of the communist regime [a].

However, it is also possible to encourage the "feedback loop" that you mention by merely demonstrating the alternatives that are out there. Radio from the other side of the Iron Curtain [b] gave hope to many people in the USSR.

To sum up, thoughtful action from the outside can help bring down totalitarian regimes faster.

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Grain_Robbery [b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America#Cold_War

[euix]

Before covid I would have just said go visit China and travel the country. I don't think westerners really understand China as cliched as that sounds. If you add up all the western countries together + their westernized protecterates/allies, Japan, SK, Taiwan. You would only get half the population of China. Think of the scale of that, your internal market is literally twice the size of the entire western market. That goes for domestic products like soap bars or video sharing but also industrial policy like airplanes, high speed trains, etc.

China is basically another planet that also happens to be located on Earth. That's a good analogy I think. The CCP is the current planetary govt. If you are the government of Mar's you wouldn't really care much about happens on Earth would you? (I.E. the rest of the world).

Relations in China are the ultimate expression of realism. Politics is power politics, authority resides in he who controls the guns. The branches of government that matter are intelligence, military and security. Because at the end of the day, the only force is coercive force. This isn't particularly new or fascinating as it's been true throughout Chinese history. The rules of international politics applies to domestic politics in China. I.E. the law of the jungle. It's a very old political culture so I imagine a lot of methods were tried and ultimately centralized authority backed by a strong army came out as the most efficient way to unify and govern the land. The governing method of China has and always has been for the last 2000 years some variation of Legalism. Dress it up as communism or socialism with Chinese Characteristics or any other neologism but Legalism has always ruled the land in an unified China.

I don't think the west is kowtowing to China, the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground" so to speak, but they have not communicated this in any coherent way to their domestic population which continue to cling onto the pretence of the economic and political superiority of the western bloc, hence the dissonance between what is preached and what is actioned.

As for the article I don't put too much stock (no pun intended) in it, mostly because I follow BABA stock quite closely and while it has lost a lot of value recently, news like this should really cause big moves if it is true. I could be wrong and maybe in a month's time we will all be nursing big losses from the rug being pulled from underneath us. But as it stands this has not been picked up any major newswire as far as I know (FT, WSJ, Bloomberg) so I am holding my positions, not shorting or placing puts. Money talks, bullshit walks.

[onecommentman]

“the western elites just recognize the balance of power has shifted in China's favour and have started to accept the "facts of the ground””

What’s a “Western Elite”? Russia, India, Japan, Australia? What “power” are we talking about? Military power? Economic power? Intellectual power? Cultural power? What are the “facts of the ground” you are talking about? How have the Western elites accepted “facts”?

These are all open questions to the unbiased reader. Could you elucidate? Otherwise it sounds like you are just juicing Chinese stocks...

[pedrosorio]

> You would only get half the population of China.

The population of the PRC is 1.4 billion people.

The population of NATO countries is 941 million [0]

The population of Japan, South Korean and Australia combined exceeds 200 million.

That's 1.14 billion without including any other "protectorates". Far exceeding half of 1.4

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/alliances/nato-north-atlantic-tre...

[alisonatwork]

It's extremely difficult to get unbiased information on China. However, there are some good sources.

If you have the money, Sinocism[0] is a great newsletter that collects the top (mostly political) stories of the day. Some other good (free) Substacks are Chinarrative[1], which publishes translated human interest stories, and Chinese Journal Review[2], which translates abstracts of a selection of academic papers.

If you would like a local insight into more young/liberal perspectives, Sixth Tone[3] is fairly interesting. Be aware that this is a state-owned media source, so it has an interest in presenting China as progressive in ways that outside of middle class communities in top tier cities it usually isn't. Just because it's state-owned doesn't mean it's not informative, though! China Media Project[4] is perhaps a useful accompanying source to try understand exactly how the state media is biased.

Of the western media, New York Times probably does the best reporting on China (they even have a Chinese language version), but like all western media they struggle to get access. Inside China, Caixin is probably the best newspaper, but unfortunately it is pay-walled.

From left wing perspective I can also recommend Made In China Journal[5].

[0] https://sinocism.com/

[1] https://chinarrative.substack.com/

[2] https://chinesejournalreview.substack.com/

[3] http://www.sixthtone.com/

[4] https://chinamediaproject.org/

[5] https://madeinchinajournal.com/

[rayiner]

The CCP is walking a fine line between relaxing it’s hold over day to day things enough to make western businesses feel comfortable operating there, and maintaining the CCP as the ultimate source of authority over all aspects of society. Just from my knowledge, courts is an example. They’ve had western legal scholars come in and help reform their legal system. These days, it’s not lawless in the sense that arbitrary whims of party officials will decide court cases. But the courts are there to ultimately implement party will—it’s not like in the US where some federal judge will randomly enjoin something Trump does. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-policy-law/chinas-t...

[baybal2]

> It's believed that the only way is to "distrust and verify" and not kowtow to their ways like what the West had been doing for the previous decades

The only way that will work will be dropping few tank divisions on direction to Beijing.

I've dealt a lot with people like Xi, and Putin in my life, during my childhood, and youth in worse parts of Russia. I've tried everything, nothing stops them, they will keep pushing with brazen arrogance.

I had once such guy taken away by police, he came out on bail, and came back to bully me the next day.

They are pretty much like cartoon zombies, keep coming back until they cannot.

[baybal2]

In other words, what I want to say is that Puting, or Xi will not go anywhere from seats of power, nor would they back down, unless they are down, like down physically. Not advocating a war, per se.