When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.
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.
If anything it's the opposite. Many in HK in the 60s and 70s were much in favor of uniting with China, there were protests and movements about that. Took lots of British propaganda and a lot of clampdown to change the minds of the younger more inexperienced generations.
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.
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
I checked Chan Yi Lam’s Wikipedia page. It was ruled a suicide. The conspiracy theories surrounding this case are absurd and out of control. People even challenged her mother’s identity, forcing a DNA test to be done, and yet the crowd still continued to harass her mother.
Minor blip? First one million people marching. Then a week later nearly two. Street battles between police and protesters supported by many thousands of people. I saw a video of a guy being shoved out of a high-rise window. No doubt that was ruled "suicide" too, but it never broke out as a news story. A protester was shot but not killed by police. It's a miracle more lives weren't lost. To say it was a "blip" betrays a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about the events.
Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now.
UK offered a rather simple pathway to immigrating to the UK for most Hong Kong residents [1]. But the choice between the stagnant UK and the booming mainland China was not obvious for everyone in late the 1990s, when China seemed to be democratizing more and more (despite the Tiananmen massacre), and growing richer by the day.
They had multiple pathways. The top three destinations were Canada, the USA, and Australia. These locations offered a major benefit over the UK - they were on trade routes along which people from Hong Kong were already doing business.
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...
I would argue that the immigrant behaving reasonably "for how they were used to driving" is itself unreasonable. When you move to foreign country you have to adjust some things about your behavior. Driving behaviors and anything else with such a strong public safety component should be the most obvious thing to adjust for an adult, without needing to be told.
Question, have you been an immigrant? Do you know any immigrants?
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.
As an immigrant (I immigrated to Hong Kong)，I disagree when It comes to road safety. I believe that it's the responsibility of every driver to learn the differences when driving and until then practice safe defensive driving.
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.
How many of those aggressive drivers do you think would agree with your reasoning? The standard reasoning is something like, "I'm fine as long as I don't hit anything." If you have that attitude, you will feel that you are safe in another country. Shifting this attitude takes time.
I haven't been a permanent immigrant, but I have lived for over a year each in India, China and South Korea, driving in India and South Korea (I'm from the US). I made a lot of social faux pas, but you can bet I did my best to adapt to the rules of the road before I even got behind the wheel.
> Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
I am an immigrant and find this line of thinking to be a cheap rhetorical trick, a thought-terminating cliché. Yes, people who are not immigrants can share their opinion on the behaviors of immigrants. Maybe we can all learn a little from each other instead of gatekeeping anybody who has had a different lived experience.
I lost both a classmate and an uncle due to car accidents. I nearly lost my brother.
The problem here is not what you know that you don't know. It is what you don't know that you don't know. You can believe yourself safe, when you aren't.
It sounds like they got freaked out on the road, swerved and hit a car next to them, and now have concocted a story where it’s actually the fault of immigrants.
The theory "Canadians made this up to explain their own bad driving" requires an explanation of why there was also a large enough rise in accidents that car insurance rates needed to double.
The theory "it happened like they said it" explains why the rise in accidents happened, and fits with normal driving habits in Hong Kong.
It was a far cry from the full Portuguese citizenship offered for Macau, both in the latter's lack of conditions on acquisition (beyond being over age 15 at the handover), and in passing it on to descendants.
BN(O) is/was not a simple pathway to UK residence. As the wikipedia article says
> 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.
I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex, but we are 30 years after the handover, 40 years after the negotiation, so surely China bears some if not pretty much all the responsibility here.
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.
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability [sic] for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
I don't think I'm being superficial here. There are a few distinct events during the 20th century which can be attributed to the British. The handover of Hong Kong, Suez Crisis and the Balfour Declaration stand out the most.
> 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.
The leased territories are Chinese territory. Full stop. Hong Kong island and the ceded land could not survive alone. All of the water processing happens in the New Territories. It would have been impossible to either break up HK or defend it.
China has not rolled back any reforms that happened before negotiations began [0]. They did rollback the last-ditch efforts of Chris Patten [1] because at that point it was seen a malicious attempt to undermine the handover.
The mechanisms for China to take control were largely left in place by the British so they bare some responsibility, but it is the PRC asserting this control and there's an argument to be made that most of HK supports the PRC and it's their right to do what they wish with their own territory.
> Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what is kept. China's experimenting already in Hainan. They could structure Hong Kong in a similar fashion.
[0] The PRC did introduce PR with the idea that it would reduce the risk of majorities forming but the system is arguably more democratic than FPTP.
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
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.
nitpick:
I would argue that it is more accurate to attribute cause and effect to certain groups of citizens within the country rather than the entire country.
The Holocaust, for example, is, in my opinion, more accurately described as being the fault of the Nazi party of Germany, which is a subset of the German population that was politically active in the early-mid 20th century, rather than just being "Germany's" fault.
The war crimes committed by the Empire of Japan during WWII are similarly the fault of a subset of the politically active population during that time, not "Japan".
I believe this method of attribution has the added advantage of noting that certain citizens, or groups of citizens can make mistakes, and using them as an example of what NOT to do, for other citizens to learn from, rather than tarring everyone with the same bad brush, which I think can have negative psychological consequences - people should be held accountable for their actions, rather than stigmatized for belonging to a specific group by no fault of their own (it's not your fault you were born with citizenship in X country, but it is your fault if you start killing people).
The Chinese absolutely bear responsibility for how they've governed the last 30 years, just as the British bear responsibility for how they governed the prior 150.
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.
I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to ignore the trend direction.
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.
Wasn't meaning to ignore the trend, the PRC bears full responsibility for their actions. Just saying that complaints from the British in particular are a little rich.
Also they appear to be arresting more people for speech in total and per-capita than HK:
That is not even remote comparable. There is a huge difference between arrest and conviction, and whether people are given a proper hearing or not, between legal process and things like disappearances, and between laws that punish criticism of the authorities and hate speech laws.
I do not like the UK's hate speech laws at all, but the fact is that I can criticise them, from the UK, without fear, and I can criticise the government. Could I do that in China? Of course not.
I'm not disagreeing too hard with you, we probably feel similarly about both cases. I just don't like how western media takes a "we're the good guys and they're a dystopia" approach to reporting it.
They've charged like 250 people in 5 years under this law[1], I don't like any one of those cases, I'm also against it, but it gets characterized like nobody ever catches a bullshit charge in the West.
Or surely PRC should get all the praise for diffusing geopolitical traps UK like to leave whenever they lose a colony. Patton threw a curve ball right before handover to last minute liberalize HK a little to hold onto influence, something they didn't do under UK rule. Of course it was geopolitical trap to make PRC look bad if they ever decide take away from HK what UK never provided, but PRC managed to do it anyway and most of world, i.e. global south got example that it is possible to excise legacy colonial tumors from declining empires who choose not to pass gracefully.
I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that liberalization (giving ever so slightly more freedom) would increase foreign UK influence post handover.
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.
TBH UK never had the chance because PRC saw through their games. TLDR UK wanted to maintain influence post handover for their investments, but like most other colonies on the fading empire they had no leverage, i.e. negotiate to turn HK into self administered territory (like Singapore)... along with UN decolonization rules meant engineering pathway for HK independence. PRC keked and said fuck off and promptly removed HK from UN list of non-self governing territories. There's a reason UK/Patton had to jam in HK liberalisation efforts last minute to increase UK influence post handover and not before... because if they did it before, i.e. pre 90s there would be so much anti colonial and pro CCP sympathies that political freedom in HK could be contrary to British interests. HK was just another Suez, symptom of UK weakness, not any one man.
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
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.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization. Businesses always just follow the money, but for a long time American policy makers had made it difficult to invest in China, from regulatory uncertainty to restrictions on dual use technology exports to high tariffs.
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
> Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization.
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.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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.
I'd totally believe they would have lobbied for it, but even absent lobbying I think policymakers would look at historical trends and conclude that deeper western economic times would ultimately benefit the West strategically as well. Lobbying could have further incentivized and accelerated it though.
True, but both SK and Taiwan had always wanted to be more aligned with the West as they needed to be under the US defense umbrella. The liberalization could only come after gaining stability.
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.
You’re confusing the faction leading the country with the people themselves.
South Korea and Taiwan as countries don’t have an inherent will to align with the West. The countries are made up people with different beliefs, some are more aligned to democracy (what you call the West) and some aren’t. Even today Taiwan has a political party that is pro-CCP.
The logic is not that the CCP will suddenly want to align with the West, it’s that the people will become more pro-Democratic as they become more developed (both economically and politically).
In our current system, which is, without a doubt, a corpocracy, it's easy to forget that before the 1970s, corporations didn't have that much power at all, and they were regularly overruled by other organizations - labor unions, government social welfare programs, religious institutions, grassroots movements, etc. Allowing corporations to maintain access to the US market while outsourcing jobs to countries with slave labor is the exploit/loophole that allowed corporations to amass wealth and MADE corporations as powerful as they are today.
This does sound radical (and it is), but the lack of capital controls is essentially what's created the ability for corporations to engage in massive, massive labour arbitrage to the detriment of many citizens in the West (I personally, and my family have benefited from this, but that doesn't make it right).
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
Not the businesses. Governments and their advisors that encouraged it thought that. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" bullshit was widely believed, and even now retains some influence.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
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.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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
There was definitely a broad (not universal) triumphalist belief on the part of both elites and the broader population in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration in the 90s that capitalism and democracy were intertwined and the triumph of both was inevitable.
This widespread belief doesn't have to be true to help contribute to explaining why decisions were made to allow broad economic integration with and technology transfer to China, in a ways that never really happened with the Soviet Union, and only happened in very limited ways with China prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
People who burnt witches generally believed that witches existed. That belief doesn't have to be true to be useful in contributing to explain the behavior.
I mean, yes, you are right, I lived through all that, and I remember it well.
But to me, even at the time, this was at best, magical-thinking bullshit. But what does a teenager know..? I just write the things my teachers tell me to and get graded on them.
The massive backslide in Russia throughout the 90s and 00s towards autocracy at the same time as it was turning into a capitalist country... Wasn't exactly a state secret.
Warsaw pact states tying themselves to a democratic union in an effort to get as far as they could from Russia was, I think, the larger reason most of them didn't go down the same road.
>Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
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.)
"Lai is a victim of this miscalculation."; I don't think Lai miscalculated, he knew what was coming and fought it anyway.
"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?
It’s hard to see Jimmy Lai purely as a victim. Much of his “martyr” narrative appears to be constructed by Western media as part of an ideological battle. From what I remember in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai had a rather shady reputation. His media outlet was widely known for publishing paid-for stories, spreading misinformation, harassing news sources, and sensationalising sex scandals.
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 weird thing is China is absolutely jam packed with small companies. Go to a trade show and you'll find dozens of companies selling basically the same products with minor variations. It's absolutely cutthroat.
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.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms
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.
> 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.
I mean sure, unless you happen to be Jack Ma and are about to IPO your financial institution.
The West failed in its goals but the flip side is they unintentionally made it possible to pull 750 million people out of poverty. Probably the greatest western foreign policy victory ever.
Nixon went to China because he thought he could use the PRC as a wedge against the USSR. Then China opened up in 1979 and a lot of people believed it will be a new market for goods. It was until it wasn't.
Miscalculation on what level? I think you are right concerning the methods as during the “last-stand” at hk poly technic, tanks were assembling in Futian Shenzhen (sat images.. what was this site again)
I think that laypeople in the US were willing to see more investments in China with the rationalization that it could lead to more human rights. If you had polled random Americans in 1995 with a question like, "Should the US government and American companies invest in the People's Republic of China in an effort to increase human rights and liberalization there?", most people would have responded "yes".
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.
I think it started out that way before Xi. But they soon realized they can actually overtake the US if they play it right. At least until the Chinese demand higher wages relative to the world, it’s going to be nearly impossible to compete against China in manufacturing. Likely at least another 15-20 years.
I don't think it was a miscalculation, it was big business interests winning over geopolitical considerations. Of course, with some added hubris when it came to opinions on the ability of third world countries to develop into competitors and willful ignorance of the direction things were going over the years. But I do think it was all quite calculated, specifically to make the line go up for the shareholders.
So far you're right but the tide can always turn. China has massively overbuilt housing supply, which is the kind of mistake that a freer economy couldn't make. China's failed birth policies (1 child until 2015!) are another example.
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.
It depends though, whom you are asking about failed or successful policies. For example I have seen a normal flat of a friend in China in a capitol of a province, who lives alone in this 4 room apartment. I asked how much rent they had to pay and then asked them what they think, how much they would have to pay for that in Berlin. When I told them they would probably have to pay some 2k EUR rent, they thought for a moment, then just said: "That's insane!". The rent they paid was maybe 1/8 to 1/6 of that. And that apartment was not somewhere far out. It is well within the city and has good public transport connection. People can afford to rent. People can move. Single people. Over here not so much. This is also a result of the state having built houses and apartments.
i don't know much about the rental market in china, but living there, always renting, i had the impression that rents do not cover the cost of the apartment. it is as if most people rent out their apartment because it would otherwise stay empty. when we finally bought an apartment, the mortgage payments were twice as high as what we would have paid for the same apartment in rent. we had a 15 year mortgage i think, so that means it takes 30 years in rent to just cover the cost of the apartment. is that profitable? i don't know. in germany rent has to be profitable.
Yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in capitalism anymore, we live in feudalism. The feudal lords just so happen to wear the skin of formerly capitalist corporations. That's how we get the opposite but identical kind of failure, where basically any desirable city gets almost no housing buildout (because any idiot with a billion dollars can make it arbitrarily expensive to do) and families can't afford to even have one child.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
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.
> 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.
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.
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
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.
> capitalism is everyone working to maximize profit
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.
> completely ignores the coercive law of competition
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.
`Not a forcing function unless you’re levered`; but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life. Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors. But for the overwhelming majority there is a life long struggle to afford to live a suitable life.
> but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life
This is not leverage.
> Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors
By your definition, no, they too are born in entropic deficit, it's just satisfied immediately by their parents. (This is how humans work.)
Out-competing yields rewards for effort, that doesn't make it necessary. All that's necessary is maintaining. Many small businesses coast by for 30 years with no aspiration to do more.
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 are reading something that doesnt exist. Scott is 100% a capitalist and this piece has nothing to do with capitalism and does not does make any claim that capitalism requires non stop growth. It does talk about how people are greedy but that has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism works because it embraces greed and uses it to make society at large better off. That doesnt mean non stop growth is a requirement, it is a goal of people that needs to be balanced with other goals.
China is still moving millions of people from rural to urban areas every year. The overbuilt housing is a complete non issue that will naturally solve itself in under a decade. Meanwhile in the west there is a massive housing affordability crisis because the government lets special interests make new housing illegal. I am not a fan of the chinese government but their housing policy is one spot where they are obviously better than western policy.
1) Years ago for work, I went deep investigating these; some of the team actually flew to China to see it all first-hand and verify the data. This is not a bunk narrative.
2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.
Housing prices have dropped 30% so far, and the market hasn’t hit bottom. It’s creating a huge drag on people’s savings and the economy as a whole. Not to mention inflating government debt as local governments can’t sell land anymore to developers to fund local spending.
Ghost cities of tofu dredge buildings are real. In some cases, the local government moved there offices into those places in a desperate bid to turn the tide.
Given China’s falling demographics and geopolitical events, the provinces built too much housing.
They prebuild 10 years of housing runway but still have another 10 years, aka 100m+ housing shortage for urbanization goals. They realize they got overzealous and was venturing in bubble and and intervened during boom vs after collapse. AKA preplanning and prematurely fixing something, which is the kind of intervention a freer economy can't do.
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.
Yes, some cohorts are more useful than others for nation building, that's just reality, especially if excess mouths are net drains relative to national resource available. Too much excess and not just useless but actively detrimental to development. It's not saying time to purge, but excess demographics can dilute development resources too thin, double bad if above domestic carry capacity, i.e. getting import dependant trapped.
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.
A wide range of countries got rich, while China's policies were unique, in addition to being abhorrent. Why should anyone believe that the only other option for China was "being Nigeria"?
The PRC is getting older faster than they are getting rich. As a graying middle income country, they are worse off than Japan or Taiwan or Korea, places that that actually managed to become broadly developed and wealthy before needing to navigate population aging.
Sure, China received some temporary benefits from having an artificially low dependency ratio. That is over, the demographic payday loan is coming due.
India's low dependency rate positions them well for the next 50 years, as China flails in a demographic crisis caused by the CCP.
Going to enjoy holidays after one effort post. Only 1 of 2 extremely large country has gotten reasonably developed while starting from same level, hint: it's not India. Nigeria useful measure, because Nigerian income level is comparable to the few 100m left behind in PRC, that's the human develop cost of not concentrating resources and being stuck in informal economy. In terms of actual development, PRC not unique, just generic competent authoritarian directed export led growth. It was fact the only viable modern growth model, for small/large countries, PRC simply had to execute much better because they don't have luxury of only mastering a few sectors but all of them due to scale, and even now mastering almost everything, PRC still has too many people than high skilled opportunities. There is no other proven/repeated development model for no resource states, well except more authoritarian colonial exploitation, which you know is worse.
>old before rich
PRC can inflate RMB a few % and instantly be high income AKA rich as defined by world bank, ultimately the old before rich is retarded single dimension analysis. PRC is young/rich, old/poor society, which is much better setup than JP/TW/SKR for the simple reason PRC old (who also has 95%+ home ownership and high savings) are disproportionately poor and therefore cheap to caretake by the increasingly affluent young. It's more optimized vs advanced economies where welfware costs is uniformly unsustainably expensive to maintain. For reference bottom 2/5 of PRC, i.e. 500m constitutes 5% of GDP, every new skilled worker with multiple times more productivity to take care of multiple subsistent farmers and informal workers who are fucking poor and have little expectation to begin with. Also helps that PRC is... actually incredibly rich, in terms of manufacturing abundance, aka material richness. PRC old/poor, young/rich is one of the greatest caretake arbitrage opportunities, they wouldn't have been double fucked if they were old/rich, young/rich. BTW old before rich projection, PRC demographers already anticipated it, hence the family planning and zerg rushing for mass manufacturing and high end industries. One more thing to consider, every old/poor that drags down per capita average that dies (and they die first) will move per capita towards young/rich, i.e. for PRC to be statistically rich per capita in a few years, all they have to do is nothing but wait for old/poor to die.
>coming due
After you and I are dead. Their payday loan is the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, with actual system to capitalize on talent. They're going to have roughly OCED combined in just STEM in next 20 years, that workforce going to stick around until 2060s/70s+, aka they have basically 50 years to build dominance, and 30-40 years to figure out demographics. And btw this reality is based off PRC having effective 800m pop (again 500m are functionally Nigeria useless), they can afford to shed 500m useless mouths and still maintain advantage. BTW PRC 2100 demographics is ~2nd largest country, i.e. they will still have have massive human capita advantages, assuming they don't fix TFR, which of all countries with proven family planning systems, they're most likely to succeed.
>India's low dependency
Low demographic dependency doesn't matter if young/poor can't handle old/poor. NVM Indian TFR in most developed regions also crashing below TFR. Remember that stat PRC, despite being magnitude more successful at development than India still left with 500m surplus poor people, i.e. 40% of population. India is going to have 1000m-1200m out of 1700m, if they're lucky - that 30% stunting, 20% wasting is going to toast a lot of workforce. Most likely they're even more fucked because they couldn't capitalize on mass manufacturing now that labour saving tech is proliferating and AI is eating service. So you're looking at country where future profile is 7 Nigeria's and 1 Japan. Forget old ate dependency ratio, their young is going to be poor, underemployed, and restless. AKA the exact scenario PRC family planning was trying to avoid on a very condensed timeline. Again it's not like Indian didn't try to cap population via own sterilization / family planning policy. They simply failed and now they're heading into PRC demographer doomsday scenario, old/poor and young/poor. That's India's position. There will still be pockets of Indian rich but when demographic payday comes due PRC will be mostly rich taking care of poor vs India mostly poor/old/young vs few rich. Having mostly poor will also fuck a lot of other development goals, i.e. don't expect India to fix their air pollution anytime soon. Just like PRC old/poor, young/rich was locked decades ago, Indian old/poor, young/poor is more or less locked in due to their development velocity (lack of) and tfr trends.
Meanwhile most of advanced economies will struggle to fund social welfare nets where young/rich eat shit in inverted social contract to caretake old/rich(er) at their expense, i.e. new gen will be materially worse off than old gen. Ultimately PRC can on paper afford to caretake for old/poor, vs advanced economies on paper cannot afford to caretake for old/rich. India crashing TFR is old/poor + young/poor double shit sandwich. Everyone be flailing but guess who'll flail least. The flailing China is going suffer is old poor retiring in abundance they never dreamed of while everyone else likely regress vs past.
China hasn't become a Western capitalist democracy, but it has changed enormously for the better from the genocidal tyranny of the Mao era, and my guess is that it will keep changing.
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.
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.
Calling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power. Economic liberalization (which had quite an effect) while holding the political reins tightly is very much like the Chinese communists acted during Deng Xiaoping's tenure. The Chinese managed to bring somehow wiser people to top though, it seems.
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.
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.
> While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
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.
> 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.
This year, I knit a scarf for a friend as a Christmas gift. He already owns several scarves, unlike some other people who own none, but might need one more than he does. How is that collective ownership supposed to work here? Are you going to take that scarf away from me and "assign" it to someone you deem more deserving? I'll resist and you'll have to take it from me by force. And if you do, I'll stop knitting altogether, because why bother if I never get the chance to gift it to my friend. What are you going to do when you need the next scarf, force me to work?
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.
Communism doesn't entail owning nothing or being able to produce nothing. It often even has a concept of money to trade for goods and services.
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.
If my scarves become so popular that even strangers begin offering money for them, I won't be interested in working for the state for basic necessities while the state takes the rest.
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?
> I won't be interested in working for the state for basic necessities while the state takes the rest.
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.
> 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.
How? Where does the state take scarves and tomatoes from if we only produce as much as we need within our own circle and exchange them solely among friends?
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.
This really gets at the core problems with communism as I see it.
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.
“Private property” in the socialist sense is property which is used for production (note that socialist countries - Laos, Vietnam, USSR before the destruction of socialism - typically have 80%+ rates of home ownership). Collective control of factories, land used for commodity & social (i.e. feeding people) production.
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.
Lived in the USSR; it is best explored through small business and personal ownership instead of large words and manifestos. The thing is, work is hard. People need an incentive to put in the hours.
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
Actually, less than 10%. Homes were owned by a government housing department. When you finished school, you were assigned a workplace and given an apartment. Often it was just a room in a shared apartment (kommunalka). You could live there as long as you kept the job. If you were transferred elsewhere, you had to pack your things and move. The quality of housing was comparable to the homes of methheads in West Virginia. The temporary and impersonal nature of the arrangement bred crime and other social problems. In short, the USSR was one huge "company town" that you could never leave.
> For the communist model to work, the state has to own 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.
> "state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society
Within a realistic geopolitical framework, it’s really not.
What Marx have you read? It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to throw out quips like 'now I know you don't know what communism means' and then spout a faulty internet meme of an idea one is trying to relate to.
Engels is the one who wrote about it, not Marx, which you'd know if you knew what communism means. While Marx agreed with Engels words, he doesn't explicitly talk about it:
> State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.
I suggest you give Anti-Dühring a read, it's not that dense and has some valuable insight into society even if you don't agree with Marxism or communism.
That's so naive. Economic central planning is a fool's errand. Regardless of how good the computers are, it can never work because it's impossible to gather accurate demand data. Only free market economics can ever work at scale over the long term.
Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.
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.
Free market economics is working great for the vast majority of people. Median living standards in capitalism countries are higher than ever. Regardless of ideology the data is quite clear on this point.
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.
All land in China is state owned, what in the world are you talking about? I can't tell if you don't know about China's state-capitalism or if you're trying to do purity politics about economic governance. Literally no one would describe china as "not centrally planned"
As I stated above, economic central planning can never work over the long term. The USSR didn't last very long, and it turns out that most of their economic statistics were fake anyway. Communists always lie about everything.
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.
Literally no expert believes the USSR fell because of economic central planning. It is truly absurd to look at a 60 historic industrialization and urbanization and see "failure" in the long term.
> China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs.
Communism as such has never existed and will never exist because it ignores human nature. Private property rights are a fundamental tenet of human psychology.
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.
Anthropologically speaking these statements about human fundamentals (or "human nature") end up falling flat.
There have been plenty of societies organized in ways such that private property was irrelevant when existing at all.
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.
> Private property rights are a fundamental tenet of human psychology.
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.
Safety-nets for big companies so they can't fail, shared ownership for rich shareholders. Dog-eat-dog market forces, rugged individualism and bootstraps for the poor. Don't you think it's weird that the things communist Americans want, are the things Wealthy Capitalist Americans get, while telling the poor "those things don't work"? Central Planning sounds like a stupid idea, but why are all the big companies planned from a central HQ if everyone agrees that local planning is better?
> "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?
For the record, I'm not a communist. I'd probably say my values are pretty close to socialist-capitalist. And that is a form of government that many nations have adopted and are successfully running.
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.
No OP. But if it’s similar to what I believe in, it’s free-market capitalism for business (with provisions for market failure, e.g. antitrust and utility regulation), redistribution of wealth for individuals, strong individual investor and consumer rights, and the state providing the bare basics through the market (housing voucher, food voucher, public education or an education voucher, electricity voucher, water voucher, internet voucher, and public healthcare).
> 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?
> 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.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that regulating capitalism is necessary, but I also think the "where it's needed" portion of your thesis is a real sticking point.
I would be interested to know what industries you have in mind where the US should take ownership, and in what form.
- 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.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms...
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.
“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.
> American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us
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].
I think that it's both a rewriting of history and a rationalization of the investment on some people's parts.
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.
> but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe
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.
Interesting point and pardon my naïveté but I’m curious, by “the west began investing” do you mean public sector investments? Or are you including people like jim rodgers long time China bull? I think private sector investment wouldn’t be done for anything other than profit. It seems like trade liberalism is an ideological thing that people seem to believe in above and beyond geopolitical concerns. Those who believe in trade liberalization (globalization) are sort of religious in their belief that it leads to liberalism in all spheres, not just the economic. I’m thinking of classic liberals, economists, Ayn Rand fanboys, etc.
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.
I’ve read the first 4 of those links and they don’t point to financial investment per se. They do cover liberalization in the diplomatic sense, and sale (not purchase) of US military tech, all of which is obvious given their location and the time period (peak Cold War), but I am curious about specifically financial investment in China, which is what the parent was discussing. I mean we weren’t buying their planes or submarines or anything. We were cozying up to them because that’s what was demanded by the defensive realities of the Cold War. That seems like a different thing than investing in China in the sense of financial investment during the post Cold War period of the late 90s onward. Again, sorry if I’m asking stupid questions but you seem to have a lot of knowledge and I want to learn more myself.
I am afraid that the same thing is happening in South Korea right now. This is a cry for help.
"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.
When I see the Hong Kong story, I can't help but feel worried for South Korea right now. It's like seeing Hong Kong starting all over again. Only saving grace is that the Korean peninsula has far too much of a strategic value to US military but ultimately its worrying that a Korean president will arrest/sue Korean citizens for criticizing China but not America.
No, you’ve got it wrong. That kind of situation doesn’t exist. They only said that, in areas heavily visited by Chinese tourists, you can’t use loudspeakers to shout racist things at tourists within a certain radius of tourist sites.
And why would you think you can’t insult the U.S. or China, or any other country? Even 10 minutes ago, I opened my window and yelled “F* C*,” and nothing happened.
As a native Chinese, the recent years of US politics definitely made me more unsympathetic for people like Jimmy Lai and the (for lack of better words) campaigns related to them, and, at least from my personal experience, my sentiment (that such people and campaigns are inconsequential at best) is shared amongst a significant portion of Chinese.
I have to emphasise that this is all my personal feeling and experience: I used to think these people and their actions actually mean something, and could lead to a different future. I was uncertain of this future, but willing to try.
Seeing recent US politics makes me reconsider: if this is democracy, or at least what it could very well turn out to be, is it really something I would want in my own country? I know my answer would be no.
Honestly, nowadays, if given the choice of "one person one vote" for the head of state tomorrow, I would strongly oppose such an idea and prefer the status quo.
Given such sentiment, I really don't care about these people and their campaigns anymore.
I mean, we went after Assange and Snowden who are in a gray area. Jimmy Lai actually went to top US officials and advocated military assistance to coup the government. No nation would ever go easy on that and it's scary to see all these comments on HN are mindlessly chanting without actually more research
Hong Kongers would very much like to choose their own leadership. I understand that you're arguing from a mainland Chinese perspective, but in so doing you're ignoring the people who ought to have the most to say.
I used to have your viewpoint, but after reading Lee Kuan Yew, and after several hours of cross referencing various interviews with the pro-rioters/hk democracy, and pro-engagement/neutral hongkongers, I conclude that most of the pro-rioters like Joshua Wong/Jimmy Lai at large fail to articulate anything of value other than "I want to turn the system upside-down" , while pro-engagement/neutral people know they want upward social mobility and more government involvement in fixing the housing and employment crisis.
Good for you. But I didn't refer to any specific pro-democracy figure. I am advocating for free and open elections where everyone, pro-mainland or localist, can choose the direction of the city.
America doesn't speak for Hong Kong and many people don't want America sticking its nose deep into their business especially through someone breaking the law by acting as a pseudo-foreign agent.
The irony is that Trump getting involved in pressuring for the release of Jimmy Lai just makes him look even more like an American asset.
You claimed he urged top US officials to give military assistance to a coup. This video is just him pleading to the US public "They'll listen to you because you're as powerful as they are".
India had poverty. But India also had democracy. And today India is doing alright. Why did the China need communism to get ahead. There's no moral compass in communism. Just state totality.
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.
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.
1Country2Systems is still in place, just the version that was always meant to be, not the lie western propaganda sold.
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.
There is no or ever has been a national security issue in one of the safest cities in the world. You could leave it in the doldrums for 50 more years and it wouldn't make a difference.
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.
If by head-canon you mean political/legal reality under pre/post NSL. Anomalously large 1000+ employee consulate scale for city of 7m is you know... intelligence node. Of course the point is to clamp down on figures Beijing doesn't like, something they didn't get to hammer with full legal prejudice before and now can by explicitly using NSL instrument. How many bold compradors are shaking hands with State Department now vs pre NSL? How many libtard parties disbanded pre and post? Actual legal cannon > your head-canon.
> 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.
>Of course the point is to clamp down on figures Beijing doesn't like
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.
Tldr, comprehensive house cleaning to excise 20 years of built up treason tumor. Why didn't Beijing concentration camped Jimmy Lai and Legoco compradors pre NSL? Why did they wait for them to push HK sanctions (no real threat amirite) before pushing NSL and burying them. Whose handshaking out of sight? As if surveillance state like PRC has out of sight? BTW NSL outlawed shaking hands aka foreign collusion, something HKers got to engage with impunity before. Post NSL 250 arrests and 100% conviction rates vs before where it was political struggle to even hammer some book sellers.
>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.
That's a whole lots of words to say that the people of HK don't get any say in how their lives are run, and that it's justified to force them into a situation they don't want. That's a crock of shit, and I suspect you know it.
>(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.
>But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
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.
> 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 was not "unpersoned", whatever that means, but sanctioned for being a professional Kremlin troll and for spreading lies such as claiming that the Bucha massacre was committed by British and Ukrainian secret services, that the war actually started a week earlier with a Ukrainian offensive that the entire world has suppressed, and so on. This is not even a matter of viewpoint, but a malicious flood of obvious lies.[1] Such superspreaders of lies are exactly the kind of people who should be sanctioned.
Reminds me of the recent Nobel "Peace" Prize winner, Corina Machado, who begged America and Israel to bomb her own country (Venezuela). If these people are supposed to be our heroes then I'll go with the villians.
It's a good thing that the anti-comprador discourse has find its way on this forum, too, out here in Eastern Europe they (the compradors, that is) occupy almost all positions of power, it's really tiring.
Back to the article, it only took me one click to find this info about its author [1]:
> Prior to his career in journalism, Binion worked as a contractor at NATO,
They're not even trying to hide it anymore, like in the good old days of the Paris Review.
a capitalist is a martyr for capitalism when they knowingly break laws in the country they live in? i'm no fan of authoritarianism but come on. this article is such typical Reason dreck.
>The dissident was convicted in Hong Kong earlier this week of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces
>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.
Nvidia has become an incredibly important strategic and economic American asset. If it ever seemed that the CEO of such an asset was colluding with a foreign nation (especially China), you can bet things wouldn't end too well. People have been done for far less, just look at what happened to Suchir Balaji which got covered up.
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.
Snarkiness is not appreciated here. Well, at least officially.
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 will likely die in prison, either from old age, poor conditions or shenanigans. He could have fled, but chose not to. Calling him a martyr isn't too much of a stretch.
This man will spend the rest of his (possibly short?) life in prison for the crime of publishing ideas that the government didn't like. He chose to stay in hong kong defending the principles that mattered to him instead of abandoning his principles and fleeing to the UK, which was on option entirely open to him.
Jimmy Lai is more courageous and principled than anyone you've probably ever met in your life. He'll die in prison for his belief that speech should be free in Hong Kong.
I will not called Jimmy Lai as principled based on how he run his news outlet. You can just simply check on wikipedia his reputationa and his news outlet reputation.
This is one from Jimmy Lai
https://hongkongfp.com/2020/11/02/explainer-apple-dailys-jim...
It isn't an appeal to emotion. Jimmy Lai stood up for free speech in Hong Kong, factually and it paying with his life. I'm simply pointing out that you have probably never seen real courage or conviction in your life and aren't in a good position to judge Jimmy Lai.
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.
I don't think he died for so‑called freedom; to me he is a traitor. When someone in your country uses the banner of liberating freedom to collude with foreign powers and attempts to split the country, do you still consider him some noble martyr who died for freedom?
And to most Hong Kongers (at least judging by the last local election after the 2019 protests), anone who collaborated with pro-mainland forces to kill one-country-two-systems and stifle the free speech guaranteed under the handover could be considered traitors. You know what would settle Hong Kong's status once and for all? Free and fair elections. Then the people could choose to align with the mainland, or not. But I have a hunch you wouldn't be so keen on that.
> It demands people ask: Do you prefer Hong Kong's past? Or its future?
Such a formulation is either sheer ignorance or worse, full-on deliberate cynicism.
Hong Kong's "past" was a typical colony where the governor was appointed by the British government with no local input whatsoever, and where any assembly of more than 6 people was deemed illegal and brutally suppressed. The type of thing that people like Gandhi (who are apparently heroes in contemporary narratives) fought against throughout their lives.
The British government only started changing the laws and handing locals more political freedom and freedom of speech once they knew that Hong Kong was returning to China no matter what (surprise, surprise).
In all such propaganda you see now, they try to construct a "past" that never existed, and apparently a lot of the young generation who never experienced the old days fell for it. But the older generation would tell them outright that "Hong Kong's past" is far less rosy than what's made out to be.
It's just astonishing when you see the amount of people waving British and American flags on the streets during the protests. What kind of "fight for freedom and independence" is that? Just imagine the reaction to protesters in a US territory or a European region (Catalonia etc.) waving Russian or Chinese flags.
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.
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.
There was also quite a lot of cooperation for many years between the relevant organisations.
The prosperity in the 80-90s numbed people’ minds
If anything it's the opposite. Many in HK in the 60s and 70s were much in favor of uniting with China, there were protests and movements about that. Took lots of British propaganda and a lot of clampdown to change the minds of the younger more inexperienced generations.
China can trade directly with the rest of the world through Shanghai- it no longer needs the middleman.
That prosperity was based on a system that no longer exists. Hong Kong is a normal Chinese city now.
> there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
Look into 2019 protests
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.
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.
Officially no deaths caused by police.
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
I checked Chan Yi Lam’s Wikipedia page. It was ruled a suicide. The conspiracy theories surrounding this case are absurd and out of control. People even challenged her mother’s identity, forcing a DNA test to be done, and yet the crowd still continued to harass her mother.
Minor blip?
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.
Minor blip? First one million people marching. Then a week later nearly two. Street battles between police and protesters supported by many thousands of people. I saw a video of a guy being shoved out of a high-rise window. No doubt that was ruled "suicide" too, but it never broke out as a news story. A protester was shot but not killed by police. It's a miracle more lives weren't lost. To say it was a "blip" betrays a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about the events.
Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-ab...
UK offered a rather simple pathway to immigrating to the UK for most Hong Kong residents [1]. But the choice between the stagnant UK and the booming mainland China was not obvious for everyone in late the 1990s, when China seemed to be democratizing more and more (despite the Tiananmen massacre), and growing richer by the day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_(Overseas)
They had multiple pathways. The top three destinations were Canada, the USA, and Australia. These locations offered a major benefit over the UK - they were on trade routes along which people from Hong Kong were already doing business.
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...
I would argue that the immigrant behaving reasonably "for how they were used to driving" is itself unreasonable. When you move to foreign country you have to adjust some things about your behavior. Driving behaviors and anything else with such a strong public safety component should be the most obvious thing to adjust for an adult, without needing to be told.
Question, have you been an immigrant? Do you know any immigrants?
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.
As an immigrant (I immigrated to Hong Kong)，I disagree when It comes to road safety. I believe that it's the responsibility of every driver to learn the differences when driving and until then practice safe defensive driving.
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.
How many of those aggressive drivers do you think would agree with your reasoning? The standard reasoning is something like, "I'm fine as long as I don't hit anything." If you have that attitude, you will feel that you are safe in another country. Shifting this attitude takes time.
I was an immigrant to a new country. I made an effort to learn the new rules. The immigrant adapts, not the country.
I haven't been a permanent immigrant, but I have lived for over a year each in India, China and South Korea, driving in India and South Korea (I'm from the US). I made a lot of social faux pas, but you can bet I did my best to adapt to the rules of the road before I even got behind the wheel.
As an immigrant myself, this criticism on driving is valid. What you said should apply to more social contextes like table, public manners.
> Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
I am an immigrant and find this line of thinking to be a cheap rhetorical trick, a thought-terminating cliché. Yes, people who are not immigrants can share their opinion on the behaviors of immigrants. Maybe we can all learn a little from each other instead of gatekeeping anybody who has had a different lived experience.
I'm sorry but that not acceptable when you're putting people's lives at risk.
Can I ask if you've ever lost someone you love because of a mistake made by a driver?
I'm sorry to have to say this so bluntly to you but migration status is not an excuse.
You should get lessons if you're unsure how to drive correctly and if you can't follow the local rules of the road you shouldn't be driving at all.
I lost both a classmate and an uncle due to car accidents. I nearly lost my brother.
The problem here is not what you know that you don't know. It is what you don't know that you don't know. You can believe yourself safe, when you aren't.
Related: Vancouver has, in my opinion, the best southern Chinese food in North America.
A rather bizarre digression...
It sounds like they got freaked out on the road, swerved and hit a car next to them, and now have concocted a story where it’s actually the fault of immigrants.
The theory "Canadians made this up to explain their own bad driving" requires an explanation of why there was also a large enough rise in accidents that car insurance rates needed to double.
The theory "it happened like they said it" explains why the rise in accidents happened, and fits with normal driving habits in Hong Kong.
It was a far cry from the full Portuguese citizenship offered for Macau, both in the latter's lack of conditions on acquisition (beyond being over age 15 at the handover), and in passing it on to descendants.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Portugal-give-full-citizenship...
BN(O) is/was not a simple pathway to UK residence. As the wikipedia article says
> 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.
I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex, but we are 30 years after the handover, 40 years after the negotiation, so surely China bears some if not pretty much all the responsibility here.
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.
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability [sic] for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
I don't think I'm being superficial here. There are a few distinct events during the 20th century which can be attributed to the British. The handover of Hong Kong, Suez Crisis and the Balfour Declaration stand out the most.
> 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.
The leased territories are Chinese territory. Full stop. Hong Kong island and the ceded land could not survive alone. All of the water processing happens in the New Territories. It would have been impossible to either break up HK or defend it.
https://i.redd.it/zghghoib1k1a1.png
China has not rolled back any reforms that happened before negotiations began [0]. They did rollback the last-ditch efforts of Chris Patten [1] because at that point it was seen a malicious attempt to undermine the handover.
The mechanisms for China to take control were largely left in place by the British so they bare some responsibility, but it is the PRC asserting this control and there's an argument to be made that most of HK supports the PRC and it's their right to do what they wish with their own territory.
> Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what is kept. China's experimenting already in Hainan. They could structure Hong Kong in a similar fashion.
[0] The PRC did introduce PR with the idea that it would reduce the risk of majorities forming but the system is arguably more democratic than FPTP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Hong_Kong_electoral_refor...
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
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.
How many years does it take for that influence to expire? In 40 years many/most of the people involved in the old system aren’t even alive anymore.
That would be like blaming me for the Gulf War when I was in diapers.
We can attribute cause and effect to countries without implicating any individual citizen.
nitpick: I would argue that it is more accurate to attribute cause and effect to certain groups of citizens within the country rather than the entire country.
The Holocaust, for example, is, in my opinion, more accurately described as being the fault of the Nazi party of Germany, which is a subset of the German population that was politically active in the early-mid 20th century, rather than just being "Germany's" fault.
The war crimes committed by the Empire of Japan during WWII are similarly the fault of a subset of the politically active population during that time, not "Japan".
I believe this method of attribution has the added advantage of noting that certain citizens, or groups of citizens can make mistakes, and using them as an example of what NOT to do, for other citizens to learn from, rather than tarring everyone with the same bad brush, which I think can have negative psychological consequences - people should be held accountable for their actions, rather than stigmatized for belonging to a specific group by no fault of their own (it's not your fault you were born with citizenship in X country, but it is your fault if you start killing people).
I agree your characterization is more accurate.
The Chinese absolutely bear responsibility for how they've governed the last 30 years, just as the British bear responsibility for how they governed the prior 150.
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.
I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to ignore the trend direction.
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.
Wasn't meaning to ignore the trend, the PRC bears full responsibility for their actions. Just saying that complaints from the British in particular are a little rich.
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...
That is not even remote comparable. There is a huge difference between arrest and conviction, and whether people are given a proper hearing or not, between legal process and things like disappearances, and between laws that punish criticism of the authorities and hate speech laws.
I do not like the UK's hate speech laws at all, but the fact is that I can criticise them, from the UK, without fear, and I can criticise the government. Could I do that in China? Of course not.
I'm not disagreeing too hard with you, we probably feel similarly about both cases. I just don't like how western media takes a "we're the good guys and they're a dystopia" approach to reporting it.
They've charged like 250 people in 5 years under this law[1], I don't like any one of those cases, I'm also against it, but it gets characterized like nobody ever catches a bullshit charge in the West.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/06/hong-kong-nat...
I don’t see any discussion about complaints from the British in this thread.
You can't even accuse people of sex crimes or threaten to murder them without getting arrested any more! What is the world coming to?
[dead]
Or surely PRC should get all the praise for diffusing geopolitical traps UK like to leave whenever they lose a colony. Patton threw a curve ball right before handover to last minute liberalize HK a little to hold onto influence, something they didn't do under UK rule. Of course it was geopolitical trap to make PRC look bad if they ever decide take away from HK what UK never provided, but PRC managed to do it anyway and most of world, i.e. global south got example that it is possible to excise legacy colonial tumors from declining empires who choose not to pass gracefully.
I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that liberalization (giving ever so slightly more freedom) would increase foreign UK influence post handover.
>I have no idea
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.
> Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover
How would it have made a difference when the Chinese military invaded?
TBH UK never had the chance because PRC saw through their games. TLDR UK wanted to maintain influence post handover for their investments, but like most other colonies on the fading empire they had no leverage, i.e. negotiate to turn HK into self administered territory (like Singapore)... along with UN decolonization rules meant engineering pathway for HK independence. PRC keked and said fuck off and promptly removed HK from UN list of non-self governing territories. There's a reason UK/Patton had to jam in HK liberalisation efforts last minute to increase UK influence post handover and not before... because if they did it before, i.e. pre 90s there would be so much anti colonial and pro CCP sympathies that political freedom in HK could be contrary to British interests. HK was just another Suez, symptom of UK weakness, not any one man.
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
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.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization. Businesses always just follow the money, but for a long time American policy makers had made it difficult to invest in China, from regulatory uncertainty to restrictions on dual use technology exports to high tariffs.
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
> Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization.
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.
I think China also made it difficult to invest in China.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Western policymakers sold that story to the public on behalf of the companies that bought, er, lobbied them.
I'd totally believe they would have lobbied for it, but even absent lobbying I think policymakers would look at historical trends and conclude that deeper western economic times would ultimately benefit the West strategically as well. Lobbying could have further incentivized and accelerated it though.
> South Korea
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.
Right. They liberalized as they became more wealthy.
As did Taiwan.
True, but both SK and Taiwan had always wanted to be more aligned with the West as they needed to be under the US defense umbrella. The liberalization could only come after gaining stability.
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.
You’re confusing the faction leading the country with the people themselves.
South Korea and Taiwan as countries don’t have an inherent will to align with the West. The countries are made up people with different beliefs, some are more aligned to democracy (what you call the West) and some aren’t. Even today Taiwan has a political party that is pro-CCP.
The logic is not that the CCP will suddenly want to align with the West, it’s that the people will become more pro-Democratic as they become more developed (both economically and politically).
In our current system, which is, without a doubt, a corpocracy, it's easy to forget that before the 1970s, corporations didn't have that much power at all, and they were regularly overruled by other organizations - labor unions, government social welfare programs, religious institutions, grassroots movements, etc. Allowing corporations to maintain access to the US market while outsourcing jobs to countries with slave labor is the exploit/loophole that allowed corporations to amass wealth and MADE corporations as powerful as they are today.
Bring back capital controls!
This does sound radical (and it is), but the lack of capital controls is essentially what's created the ability for corporations to engage in massive, massive labour arbitrage to the detriment of many citizens in the West (I personally, and my family have benefited from this, but that doesn't make it right).
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
Not the businesses. Governments and their advisors that encouraged it thought that. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" bullshit was widely believed, and even now retains some influence.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
I think the OP would frame this as the Western governments allowing Western businesses to invest in China.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
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.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
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
SK was a capitalist dictatorship for almost as long as has been a capitalist democracy.
There's literally nothing about democracy that capitalism finds necessary or even particularly attractive.
Yeah, so what?
There was definitely a broad (not universal) triumphalist belief on the part of both elites and the broader population in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration in the 90s that capitalism and democracy were intertwined and the triumph of both was inevitable.
This widespread belief doesn't have to be true to help contribute to explaining why decisions were made to allow broad economic integration with and technology transfer to China, in a ways that never really happened with the Soviet Union, and only happened in very limited ways with China prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
People who burnt witches generally believed that witches existed. That belief doesn't have to be true to be useful in contributing to explain the behavior.
I mean, yes, you are right, I lived through all that, and I remember it well.
But to me, even at the time, this was at best, magical-thinking bullshit. But what does a teenager know..? I just write the things my teachers tell me to and get graded on them.
The massive backslide in Russia throughout the 90s and 00s towards autocracy at the same time as it was turning into a capitalist country... Wasn't exactly a state secret.
Warsaw pact states tying themselves to a democratic union in an effort to get as far as they could from Russia was, I think, the larger reason most of them didn't go down the same road.
>Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
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.)
"Lai is a victim of this miscalculation."; I don't think Lai miscalculated, he knew what was coming and fought it anyway.
"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?
It’s hard to see Jimmy Lai purely as a victim. Much of his “martyr” narrative appears to be constructed by Western media as part of an ideological battle. From what I remember in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai had a rather shady reputation. His media outlet was widely known for publishing paid-for stories, spreading misinformation, harassing news sources, and sensationalising sex scandals.
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 weird thing is China is absolutely jam packed with small companies. Go to a trade show and you'll find dozens of companies selling basically the same products with minor variations. It's absolutely cutthroat.
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.
> It's absolutely cutthroat.
Meanwhile in the land of the free, it's consolidation galore with very little competition.
I think your perspective is biasing you.
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.
China isnt a command economy, its state capitalism.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms
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.
> 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.
I mean sure, unless you happen to be Jack Ma and are about to IPO your financial institution.
I was under the impression that he got got for the very political reason for his company being used to circumvent capital controls.
The West failed in its goals but the flip side is they unintentionally made it possible to pull 750 million people out of poverty. Probably the greatest western foreign policy victory ever.
Nixon went to China because he thought he could use the PRC as a wedge against the USSR. Then China opened up in 1979 and a lot of people believed it will be a new market for goods. It was until it wasn't.
Miscalculation on what level? I think you are right concerning the methods as during the “last-stand” at hk poly technic, tanks were assembling in Futian Shenzhen (sat images.. what was this site again)
I think that laypeople in the US were willing to see more investments in China with the rationalization that it could lead to more human rights. If you had polled random Americans in 1995 with a question like, "Should the US government and American companies invest in the People's Republic of China in an effort to increase human rights and liberalization there?", most people would have responded "yes".
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.
I think it started out that way before Xi. But they soon realized they can actually overtake the US if they play it right. At least until the Chinese demand higher wages relative to the world, it’s going to be nearly impossible to compete against China in manufacturing. Likely at least another 15-20 years.
I don't think it was a miscalculation, it was big business interests winning over geopolitical considerations. Of course, with some added hubris when it came to opinions on the ability of third world countries to develop into competitors and willful ignorance of the direction things were going over the years. But I do think it was all quite calculated, specifically to make the line go up for the shareholders.
So far you're right but the tide can always turn. China has massively overbuilt housing supply, which is the kind of mistake that a freer economy couldn't make. China's failed birth policies (1 child until 2015!) are another example.
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.
It depends though, whom you are asking about failed or successful policies. For example I have seen a normal flat of a friend in China in a capitol of a province, who lives alone in this 4 room apartment. I asked how much rent they had to pay and then asked them what they think, how much they would have to pay for that in Berlin. When I told them they would probably have to pay some 2k EUR rent, they thought for a moment, then just said: "That's insane!". The rent they paid was maybe 1/8 to 1/6 of that. And that apartment was not somewhere far out. It is well within the city and has good public transport connection. People can afford to rent. People can move. Single people. Over here not so much. This is also a result of the state having built houses and apartments.
i don't know much about the rental market in china, but living there, always renting, i had the impression that rents do not cover the cost of the apartment. it is as if most people rent out their apartment because it would otherwise stay empty. when we finally bought an apartment, the mortgage payments were twice as high as what we would have paid for the same apartment in rent. we had a 15 year mortgage i think, so that means it takes 30 years in rent to just cover the cost of the apartment. is that profitable? i don't know. in germany rent has to be profitable.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
Sure they can. Just make it unaffordable to do anything else.
Yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in capitalism anymore, we live in feudalism. The feudal lords just so happen to wear the skin of formerly capitalist corporations. That's how we get the opposite but identical kind of failure, where basically any desirable city gets almost no housing buildout (because any idiot with a billion dollars can make it arbitrarily expensive to do) and families can't afford to even have one child.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
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.
> 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.
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.
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
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.
> capitalism is everyone working to maximize profit
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.
That completely ignores the coercive law of competition.
"Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
> completely ignores the coercive law of competition
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.
`Not a forcing function unless you’re levered`; but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life. Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors. But for the overwhelming majority there is a life long struggle to afford to live a suitable life.
> but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life
This is not leverage.
> Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors
By your definition, no, they too are born in entropic deficit, it's just satisfied immediately by their parents. (This is how humans work.)
Out-competing yields rewards for effort, that doesn't make it necessary. All that's necessary is maintaining. Many small businesses coast by for 30 years with no aspiration to do more.
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.
>This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
You may find this marvelous piece enlightening:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
You are reading something that doesnt exist. Scott is 100% a capitalist and this piece has nothing to do with capitalism and does not does make any claim that capitalism requires non stop growth. It does talk about how people are greedy but that has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism works because it embraces greed and uses it to make society at large better off. That doesnt mean non stop growth is a requirement, it is a goal of people that needs to be balanced with other goals.
China is still moving millions of people from rural to urban areas every year. The overbuilt housing is a complete non issue that will naturally solve itself in under a decade. Meanwhile in the west there is a massive housing affordability crisis because the government lets special interests make new housing illegal. I am not a fan of the chinese government but their housing policy is one spot where they are obviously better than western policy.
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1) Years ago for work, I went deep investigating these; some of the team actually flew to China to see it all first-hand and verify the data. This is not a bunk narrative.
2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.
This take is bunk. I travel to China every year and in each major city, for each filled skyscraper, there is another that is half built and empty.
Bunk? A Chinese government official admitted there were way more homes than people in China.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/even-chinas-14-bln-popul...
Housing prices have dropped 30% so far, and the market hasn’t hit bottom. It’s creating a huge drag on people’s savings and the economy as a whole. Not to mention inflating government debt as local governments can’t sell land anymore to developers to fund local spending.
Ghost cities of tofu dredge buildings are real. In some cases, the local government moved there offices into those places in a desperate bid to turn the tide.
Given China’s falling demographics and geopolitical events, the provinces built too much housing.
They prebuild 10 years of housing runway but still have another 10 years, aka 100m+ housing shortage for urbanization goals. They realize they got overzealous and was venturing in bubble and and intervened during boom vs after collapse. AKA preplanning and prematurely fixing something, which is the kind of intervention a freer economy can't do.
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.
Useless mouths? Christ.
Yes, some cohorts are more useful than others for nation building, that's just reality, especially if excess mouths are net drains relative to national resource available. Too much excess and not just useless but actively detrimental to development. It's not saying time to purge, but excess demographics can dilute development resources too thin, double bad if above domestic carry capacity, i.e. getting import dependant trapped.
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.
A wide range of countries got rich, while China's policies were unique, in addition to being abhorrent. Why should anyone believe that the only other option for China was "being Nigeria"?
The PRC is getting older faster than they are getting rich. As a graying middle income country, they are worse off than Japan or Taiwan or Korea, places that that actually managed to become broadly developed and wealthy before needing to navigate population aging.
Sure, China received some temporary benefits from having an artificially low dependency ratio. That is over, the demographic payday loan is coming due.
India's low dependency rate positions them well for the next 50 years, as China flails in a demographic crisis caused by the CCP.
Going to enjoy holidays after one effort post. Only 1 of 2 extremely large country has gotten reasonably developed while starting from same level, hint: it's not India. Nigeria useful measure, because Nigerian income level is comparable to the few 100m left behind in PRC, that's the human develop cost of not concentrating resources and being stuck in informal economy. In terms of actual development, PRC not unique, just generic competent authoritarian directed export led growth. It was fact the only viable modern growth model, for small/large countries, PRC simply had to execute much better because they don't have luxury of only mastering a few sectors but all of them due to scale, and even now mastering almost everything, PRC still has too many people than high skilled opportunities. There is no other proven/repeated development model for no resource states, well except more authoritarian colonial exploitation, which you know is worse.
>old before rich
PRC can inflate RMB a few % and instantly be high income AKA rich as defined by world bank, ultimately the old before rich is retarded single dimension analysis. PRC is young/rich, old/poor society, which is much better setup than JP/TW/SKR for the simple reason PRC old (who also has 95%+ home ownership and high savings) are disproportionately poor and therefore cheap to caretake by the increasingly affluent young. It's more optimized vs advanced economies where welfware costs is uniformly unsustainably expensive to maintain. For reference bottom 2/5 of PRC, i.e. 500m constitutes 5% of GDP, every new skilled worker with multiple times more productivity to take care of multiple subsistent farmers and informal workers who are fucking poor and have little expectation to begin with. Also helps that PRC is... actually incredibly rich, in terms of manufacturing abundance, aka material richness. PRC old/poor, young/rich is one of the greatest caretake arbitrage opportunities, they wouldn't have been double fucked if they were old/rich, young/rich. BTW old before rich projection, PRC demographers already anticipated it, hence the family planning and zerg rushing for mass manufacturing and high end industries. One more thing to consider, every old/poor that drags down per capita average that dies (and they die first) will move per capita towards young/rich, i.e. for PRC to be statistically rich per capita in a few years, all they have to do is nothing but wait for old/poor to die.
>coming due
After you and I are dead. Their payday loan is the greatest high skill demographic dividend in human history, with actual system to capitalize on talent. They're going to have roughly OCED combined in just STEM in next 20 years, that workforce going to stick around until 2060s/70s+, aka they have basically 50 years to build dominance, and 30-40 years to figure out demographics. And btw this reality is based off PRC having effective 800m pop (again 500m are functionally Nigeria useless), they can afford to shed 500m useless mouths and still maintain advantage. BTW PRC 2100 demographics is ~2nd largest country, i.e. they will still have have massive human capita advantages, assuming they don't fix TFR, which of all countries with proven family planning systems, they're most likely to succeed.
>India's low dependency
Low demographic dependency doesn't matter if young/poor can't handle old/poor. NVM Indian TFR in most developed regions also crashing below TFR. Remember that stat PRC, despite being magnitude more successful at development than India still left with 500m surplus poor people, i.e. 40% of population. India is going to have 1000m-1200m out of 1700m, if they're lucky - that 30% stunting, 20% wasting is going to toast a lot of workforce. Most likely they're even more fucked because they couldn't capitalize on mass manufacturing now that labour saving tech is proliferating and AI is eating service. So you're looking at country where future profile is 7 Nigeria's and 1 Japan. Forget old ate dependency ratio, their young is going to be poor, underemployed, and restless. AKA the exact scenario PRC family planning was trying to avoid on a very condensed timeline. Again it's not like Indian didn't try to cap population via own sterilization / family planning policy. They simply failed and now they're heading into PRC demographer doomsday scenario, old/poor and young/poor. That's India's position. There will still be pockets of Indian rich but when demographic payday comes due PRC will be mostly rich taking care of poor vs India mostly poor/old/young vs few rich. Having mostly poor will also fuck a lot of other development goals, i.e. don't expect India to fix their air pollution anytime soon. Just like PRC old/poor, young/rich was locked decades ago, Indian old/poor, young/poor is more or less locked in due to their development velocity (lack of) and tfr trends.
Meanwhile most of advanced economies will struggle to fund social welfare nets where young/rich eat shit in inverted social contract to caretake old/rich(er) at their expense, i.e. new gen will be materially worse off than old gen. Ultimately PRC can on paper afford to caretake for old/poor, vs advanced economies on paper cannot afford to caretake for old/rich. India crashing TFR is old/poor + young/poor double shit sandwich. Everyone be flailing but guess who'll flail least. The flailing China is going suffer is old poor retiring in abundance they never dreamed of while everyone else likely regress vs past.
China hasn't become a Western capitalist democracy, but it has changed enormously for the better from the genocidal tyranny of the Mao era, and my guess is that it will keep changing.
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.
> Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
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.
> seems not possible in Russia.
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.
Calling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power. Economic liberalization (which had quite an effect) while holding the political reins tightly is very much like the Chinese communists acted during Deng Xiaoping's tenure. The Chinese managed to bring somehow wiser people to top though, it seems.
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.
> The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power.
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 key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power.
The US helped with that.
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> While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
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.
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.
Communism doesn't entail owning nothing or being able to produce nothing. It often even has a concept of money to trade for goods and services.
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.
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?
> I won't be interested in working for the state for basic necessities while the state takes the rest.
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.
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.
This really gets at the core problems with communism as I see it.
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.
“Private property” in the socialist sense is property which is used for production (note that socialist countries - Laos, Vietnam, USSR before the destruction of socialism - typically have 80%+ rates of home ownership). Collective control of factories, land used for commodity & social (i.e. feeding people) production.
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.
Lived in the USSR; it is best explored through small business and personal ownership instead of large words and manifestos. The thing is, work is hard. People need an incentive to put in the hours.
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.
Actually, less than 10%. Homes were owned by a government housing department. When you finished school, you were assigned a workplace and given an apartment. Often it was just a room in a shared apartment (kommunalka). You could live there as long as you kept the job. If you were transferred elsewhere, you had to pack your things and move. The quality of housing was comparable to the homes of methheads in West Virginia. The temporary and impersonal nature of the arrangement bred crime and other social problems. In short, the USSR was one huge "company town" that you could never leave.> a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything
Everyone owns the world oceans (“common heritage of humanity”). How is that going for its fisheries and sea bottoms.
Yeah man I don't think co-op fisheries are the problem here.
> don't think co-op fisheries are the problem here
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.
> For the communist model to work, the state has to own 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.
> "state has to own anything" is an extremely funny idea for a stateless society
Within a realistic geopolitical framework, it’s really not.
What Marx have you read? It's one thing to be ignorant. It's another to throw out quips like 'now I know you don't know what communism means' and then spout a faulty internet meme of an idea one is trying to relate to.
Engels is the one who wrote about it, not Marx, which you'd know if you knew what communism means. While Marx agreed with Engels words, he doesn't explicitly talk about it:
> State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not "abolished". It dies out.
I suggest you give Anti-Dühring a read, it's not that dense and has some valuable insight into society even if you don't agree with Marxism or communism.
We could finally try finish the experiment Allende started before the CIA couped away a democratically elected president.
Do something like project Cybersyn [0], but give all decision making to a digital planning engine.
No humans, no apparatchiks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
That's so naive. Economic central planning is a fool's errand. Regardless of how good the computers are, it can never work because it's impossible to gather accurate demand data. Only free market economics can ever work at scale over the long term.
That is nothing but an ideological statement without any evidence, one that is being disproven as we speak.
Free market economics haven't worked out great for the vast majority of people.
Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.
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.
Free market economics is working great for the vast majority of people. Median living standards in capitalism countries are higher than ever. Regardless of ideology the data is quite clear on this point.
Where are you getting this data? Does it include the USSR and China? I bet it does.
> Economic central planning is a fool's errand.
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.
If you think China is centrally planned, I think you are talking past each other. China has a deep market economy.
All land in China is state owned, what in the world are you talking about? I can't tell if you don't know about China's state-capitalism or if you're trying to do purity politics about economic governance. Literally no one would describe china as "not centrally planned"
As I stated above, economic central planning can never work over the long term. The USSR didn't last very long, and it turns out that most of their economic statistics were fake anyway. Communists always lie about everything.
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.
Literally no expert believes the USSR fell because of economic central planning. It is truly absurd to look at a 60 historic industrialization and urbanization and see "failure" in the long term.
> China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs.
So true, king.
Communism as such has never existed and will never exist because it ignores human nature. Private property rights are a fundamental tenet of human psychology.
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.
Anthropologically speaking these statements about human fundamentals (or "human nature") end up falling flat. There have been plenty of societies organized in ways such that private property was irrelevant when existing at all.
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.
private property has only been a fundamental right or guarantee in very recent societies. like in the last couple hundred years
True communism has of course existed and likely still exists, but it's limited to small self-selected communities, like monastic retreats.
Communism indeed is highly unlikely to works as a political state system, due to human nature.
> Private property rights are a fundamental tenet of human psychology.
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.
Safety-nets for big companies so they can't fail, shared ownership for rich shareholders. Dog-eat-dog market forces, rugged individualism and bootstraps for the poor. Don't you think it's weird that the things communist Americans want, are the things Wealthy Capitalist Americans get, while telling the poor "those things don't work"? Central Planning sounds like a stupid idea, but why are all the big companies planned from a central HQ if everyone agrees that local planning is better?
> "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...
For the record, I'm not a communist. I'd probably say my values are pretty close to socialist-capitalist. And that is a form of government that many nations have adopted and are successfully running.
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.
> socialist-capitalist
What is this? Are the existing examples you mentioned considered examples of democratic socialism, or are you referring to something else?
No OP. But if it’s similar to what I believe in, it’s free-market capitalism for business (with provisions for market failure, e.g. antitrust and utility regulation), redistribution of wealth for individuals, strong individual investor and consumer rights, and the state providing the bare basics through the market (housing voucher, food voucher, public education or an education voucher, electricity voucher, water voucher, internet voucher, and public healthcare).
It doesn't sound all that similar on the surface to OP's response based on my initial read of both.
It seems like you're proposing a regulated free market in parallel with a highly regulated UBI?
> 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.)
> No UBI. Just basics for survival guaranteed.
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?
> 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.)
Basically this [1]
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
Thanks for the reply. I agree that regulating capitalism is necessary, but I also think the "where it's needed" portion of your thesis is a real sticking point.
I would be interested to know what industries you have in mind where the US should take ownership, and in what form.
It'll obviously be industry dependent.
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.
It does, thanks. I'm not sure how much I agree with your premise, but I'll think about it.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms...
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...
> That's a rewriting of history
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.
> American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us
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...
> Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2
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.
I think that it's both a rewriting of history and a rationalization of the investment on some people's parts.
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.
> but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe
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...
Interesting point and pardon my naïveté but I’m curious, by “the west began investing” do you mean public sector investments? Or are you including people like jim rodgers long time China bull? I think private sector investment wouldn’t be done for anything other than profit. It seems like trade liberalism is an ideological thing that people seem to believe in above and beyond geopolitical concerns. Those who believe in trade liberalization (globalization) are sort of religious in their belief that it leads to liberalism in all spheres, not just the economic. I’m thinking of classic liberals, economists, Ayn Rand fanboys, etc.
> public sector investments
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.
I’ve read the first 4 of those links and they don’t point to financial investment per se. They do cover liberalization in the diplomatic sense, and sale (not purchase) of US military tech, all of which is obvious given their location and the time period (peak Cold War), but I am curious about specifically financial investment in China, which is what the parent was discussing. I mean we weren’t buying their planes or submarines or anything. We were cozying up to them because that’s what was demanded by the defensive realities of the Cold War. That seems like a different thing than investing in China in the sense of financial investment during the post Cold War period of the late 90s onward. Again, sorry if I’m asking stupid questions but you seem to have a lot of knowledge and I want to learn more myself.
I am afraid that the same thing is happening in South Korea right now. This is a cry for help.
"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.
When I see the Hong Kong story, I can't help but feel worried for South Korea right now. It's like seeing Hong Kong starting all over again. Only saving grace is that the Korean peninsula has far too much of a strategic value to US military but ultimately its worrying that a Korean president will arrest/sue Korean citizens for criticizing China but not America.
No, you’ve got it wrong. That kind of situation doesn’t exist. They only said that, in areas heavily visited by Chinese tourists, you can’t use loudspeakers to shout racist things at tourists within a certain radius of tourist sites. And why would you think you can’t insult the U.S. or China, or any other country? Even 10 minutes ago, I opened my window and yelled “F* C*,” and nothing happened.
No, you've got it wrong. The law has not passed just yet. It will happen amid Christmas-eve when everyone is busy celebrating.
You can F with America all you want. You absolutely cannot F with China.
As a native Chinese, the recent years of US politics definitely made me more unsympathetic for people like Jimmy Lai and the (for lack of better words) campaigns related to them, and, at least from my personal experience, my sentiment (that such people and campaigns are inconsequential at best) is shared amongst a significant portion of Chinese.
Can you elaborate on why you say that? What is it about US politics that has influenced your views on Lai and others like him?
I have to emphasise that this is all my personal feeling and experience: I used to think these people and their actions actually mean something, and could lead to a different future. I was uncertain of this future, but willing to try.
Seeing recent US politics makes me reconsider: if this is democracy, or at least what it could very well turn out to be, is it really something I would want in my own country? I know my answer would be no.
Honestly, nowadays, if given the choice of "one person one vote" for the head of state tomorrow, I would strongly oppose such an idea and prefer the status quo.
Given such sentiment, I really don't care about these people and their campaigns anymore.
I mean, we went after Assange and Snowden who are in a gray area. Jimmy Lai actually went to top US officials and advocated military assistance to coup the government. No nation would ever go easy on that and it's scary to see all these comments on HN are mindlessly chanting without actually more research
Hong Kongers would very much like to choose their own leadership. I understand that you're arguing from a mainland Chinese perspective, but in so doing you're ignoring the people who ought to have the most to say.
I used to have your viewpoint, but after reading Lee Kuan Yew, and after several hours of cross referencing various interviews with the pro-rioters/hk democracy, and pro-engagement/neutral hongkongers, I conclude that most of the pro-rioters like Joshua Wong/Jimmy Lai at large fail to articulate anything of value other than "I want to turn the system upside-down" , while pro-engagement/neutral people know they want upward social mobility and more government involvement in fixing the housing and employment crisis.
Good for you. But I didn't refer to any specific pro-democracy figure. I am advocating for free and open elections where everyone, pro-mainland or localist, can choose the direction of the city.
America doesn't speak for Hong Kong and many people don't want America sticking its nose deep into their business especially through someone breaking the law by acting as a pseudo-foreign agent.
The irony is that Trump getting involved in pressuring for the release of Jimmy Lai just makes him look even more like an American asset.
That's the tragedy of Hong Kong. They never got the sympathy of the mainland.
And I cannot escape the feeling that a lot of Americans believe that a democratic China would be friends with the US...
Who exactly is "friends" with the US at the moment? Maybe Israel?
In Trumps world it mostly seems you are either an asset or a liability. They do no want a multipolar world.
Who brought up America?
> advocated military assistance to coup the government
Is there source evidence for this? I keep hearing various different things Jimmy supposedly advocated or asked for, but very little actual source.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hong_Kong/comments/u8692j/jimmy_lai...
Sidenote: The riots went too out of control and one of em threw a brick which hit an old street cleaners head.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Hong_Kong/comments/dwmc76/rioters_t...
You claimed he urged top US officials to give military assistance to a coup. This video is just him pleading to the US public "They'll listen to you because you're as powerful as they are".
Never give up speech.
India had poverty. But India also had democracy. And today India is doing alright. Why did the China need communism to get ahead. There's no moral compass in communism. Just state totality.
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.
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.
1Country2Systems is still in place, just the version that was always meant to be, not the lie western propaganda sold.
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.
There is no or ever has been a national security issue in one of the safest cities in the world. You could leave it in the doldrums for 50 more years and it wouldn't make a difference.
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.
> safest cities in the world
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.
>the western intelligence hub into PRC
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.
If by head-canon you mean political/legal reality under pre/post NSL. Anomalously large 1000+ employee consulate scale for city of 7m is you know... intelligence node. Of course the point is to clamp down on figures Beijing doesn't like, something they didn't get to hammer with full legal prejudice before and now can by explicitly using NSL instrument. How many bold compradors are shaking hands with State Department now vs pre NSL? How many libtard parties disbanded pre and post? Actual legal cannon > your head-canon.
> 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.
>Of course the point is to clamp down on figures Beijing doesn't like
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.
Tldr, comprehensive house cleaning to excise 20 years of built up treason tumor. Why didn't Beijing concentration camped Jimmy Lai and Legoco compradors pre NSL? Why did they wait for them to push HK sanctions (no real threat amirite) before pushing NSL and burying them. Whose handshaking out of sight? As if surveillance state like PRC has out of sight? BTW NSL outlawed shaking hands aka foreign collusion, something HKers got to engage with impunity before. Post NSL 250 arrests and 100% conviction rates vs before where it was political struggle to even hammer some book sellers.
>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.
That's a whole lots of words to say that the people of HK don't get any say in how their lives are run, and that it's justified to force them into a situation they don't want. That's a crock of shit, and I suspect you know it.
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dead comment from @wibby:
>(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.
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>But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
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.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
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Context? RFA?
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Reminds me of the recent Nobel "Peace" Prize winner, Corina Machado, who begged America and Israel to bomb her own country (Venezuela). If these people are supposed to be our heroes then I'll go with the villians.
It's a good thing that the anti-comprador discourse has find its way on this forum, too, out here in Eastern Europe they (the compradors, that is) occupy almost all positions of power, it's really tiring.
Back to the article, it only took me one click to find this info about its author [1]:
> Prior to his career in journalism, Binion worked as a contractor at NATO,
They're not even trying to hide it anymore, like in the good old days of the Paris Review.
[1] https://reason.com/people/billy-binion/
a capitalist is a martyr for capitalism when they knowingly break laws in the country they live in? i'm no fan of authoritarianism but come on. this article is such typical Reason dreck.
He's not being imprisoned for being a capitalist, engaging in capitalism, or anything of the like. This is a pretty lame take.
>The dissident was convicted in Hong Kong earlier this week of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces
>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.
Imagine if Jensen Huang started meeting Xi Jinping.
Nothing would happen to Mr. Huang, he's free to talk to anyone.
Nvidia has become an incredibly important strategic and economic American asset. If it ever seemed that the CEO of such an asset was colluding with a foreign nation (especially China), you can bet things wouldn't end too well. People have been done for far less, just look at what happened to Suchir Balaji which got covered up.
Too bad Mr. Lai was not
He wouldn't be meeting Xi, as it's not a state visit, but he did meet the Vice Premier, He Lifeng. Elon also met Li Qiang.
Imagine if Jensen Huang started meeting Xi Jinping to seek help for carrying out political change in the US.
What then?
No need, he has already convinced Trump to sell chips to China unabated. Why meet at this point?
Doesn't martyrdom imply, um, death?
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.
Not necessarily:
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
Would you be you happier with "soon-to-be-martyr" or "martyr-in-the-making" ?
Snarkiness is not appreciated here. Well, at least officially.
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 will likely die in prison, either from old age, poor conditions or shenanigans. He could have fled, but chose not to. Calling him a martyr isn't too much of a stretch.
Headline seems overstated.
From the article:
“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.
It seems accurate and unsensational here
I think perhaps we've lionized the term martyr to mean too many things, but his actions seem in line with the dictionary definition
This man will spend the rest of his (possibly short?) life in prison for the crime of publishing ideas that the government didn't like. He chose to stay in hong kong defending the principles that mattered to him instead of abandoning his principles and fleeing to the UK, which was on option entirely open to him.
Explain why you think it's overstated.
Jimmy Lai is more courageous and principled than anyone you've probably ever met in your life. He'll die in prison for his belief that speech should be free in Hong Kong.
I will not called Jimmy Lai as principled based on how he run his news outlet. You can just simply check on wikipedia his reputationa and his news outlet reputation. This is one from Jimmy Lai https://hongkongfp.com/2020/11/02/explainer-apple-dailys-jim...
Appeals to emotions won't get you anywhere. What else is next, "We NEED to reelect Trump to restore Christendom in the West!!!"?
It isn't an appeal to emotion. Jimmy Lai stood up for free speech in Hong Kong, factually and it paying with his life. I'm simply pointing out that you have probably never seen real courage or conviction in your life and aren't in a good position to judge Jimmy Lai.
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.
I don't think he died for so‑called freedom; to me he is a traitor. When someone in your country uses the banner of liberating freedom to collude with foreign powers and attempts to split the country, do you still consider him some noble martyr who died for freedom?
And to most Hong Kongers (at least judging by the last local election after the 2019 protests), anone who collaborated with pro-mainland forces to kill one-country-two-systems and stifle the free speech guaranteed under the handover could be considered traitors. You know what would settle Hong Kong's status once and for all? Free and fair elections. Then the people could choose to align with the mainland, or not. But I have a hunch you wouldn't be so keen on that.
> It demands people ask: Do you prefer Hong Kong's past? Or its future?
Such a formulation is either sheer ignorance or worse, full-on deliberate cynicism.
Hong Kong's "past" was a typical colony where the governor was appointed by the British government with no local input whatsoever, and where any assembly of more than 6 people was deemed illegal and brutally suppressed. The type of thing that people like Gandhi (who are apparently heroes in contemporary narratives) fought against throughout their lives.
The British government only started changing the laws and handing locals more political freedom and freedom of speech once they knew that Hong Kong was returning to China no matter what (surprise, surprise).
In all such propaganda you see now, they try to construct a "past" that never existed, and apparently a lot of the young generation who never experienced the old days fell for it. But the older generation would tell them outright that "Hong Kong's past" is far less rosy than what's made out to be.
It's just astonishing when you see the amount of people waving British and American flags on the streets during the protests. What kind of "fight for freedom and independence" is that? Just imagine the reaction to protesters in a US territory or a European region (Catalonia etc.) waving Russian or Chinese flags.
>But the older generation would tell them outright that "Hong Kong's past" is far less rosy than what's made out to be.
Define older Generation. Because there are plenty of people who lived through 60s to 90s to tell you otherwise.
Those are the people who survived and worked with the colonial government.
Many who protested were killed.
The simple fact is that during the 60s, native Hongkongers were second class citizens.