The Chinese government is highly structured and in general features most of the things one might expect in a modern nation-state (an executive, a legislature, a court system, etc.)
The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.
Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history.
This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point.
However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.
Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship.
On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause?
Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.
> On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not [...] habe term limits
In fact, there is a limit: A German citizen might hold the office of Chancellor ("Kanzler", or "Kanzlerin" for female form) four times, or sixteen years in total.
And 4 times 4 is quite long actually. That is 16 long years and the current chancellor, Angela Merkel, is actually the 'brain child' of previous 16 year chancellor Helmut Kohl, with just a brief intermittence of Gerhard Schroder in between. For non-observers of the German political parties, Kohl and Merkel are from the 'regular' conservative party (CDU), while Schroder was from the SPD, the regular left or 'working people's party'. Of course after being chancellor he became an advisor for Russian Gazprom... A lot of Germany heats with (Russian) natural gas.
Merkel: 22 November 2005 - whenever Corona ends I suppose. Thuringia already postponed their state elections from April to September because of Corona.
Contributing factors also include, I suspect, more independence for individual subdivisions, e.g. states in the US or Bundesländer in Germany unless I'm mistaken.
>One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.
This is very similar in concept to the SA/SS (Nazi Germany) or the Red Army (USSR). All were paramilitary wings of political parties before their rise to power.
Most of what you described is generally true for autrocracies. The real interesting part of China is that usually autrocracies perform poorly as the leaders put power in front of technological advancement.
Chinese leaders though try really hard to allow tech advancements to happen, and perform quite well on the market.
> with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army.
The Chinese Navy is called "People's Liberation Army Navy"
> One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is
> not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political
> party's own security forces have assumed that role
Not dissimilar to the Lebanese situation in practice, then?
I think this is more the rule than the exception. The idea that states exist to serve the individual would be laughed at for most of human history. Be it God or the state, man exists to serve. Conscripting and killing young men for the sake of the state/God/glory has been one of humanities favorite pastimes.
I've always been kind of interested in why autocratic regimes or dictators engage in seemingly unnecessary benevolent or constructive activities. At some point I decided to better understand how the Chinese government functions since for a long time it's been both autocratic and surprisingly benevolent in certain areas. So basically some combination of youtube, wikipedia and a few other places till I more or less came to a high-level understanding.
There are also some English language Chinese government produced youtube videos that also do a pretty good job at giving basic civics lessons on how their government works if you can look past all the self-congratulations. It's definitely "complicated" and is not just Xi Jinping barking his every desire and whim as it tends to get reduced to.
Surprised no one has mentioned “Red Capitalism (2012)” which specifically covers the finance industry in China (pre-AliPay but post reform in the modern era) which gives a clear insight into the sort of banking system Ma tried to shake up and their big role in China’s rise.
Not a book but a talk given at an internal government seminar by a China policy advisor to the Australian government and recommended by Bill Bishop, one of the bigger names in China related news. Talk given in 2017.
„China in ten words“ by Yu Hua, of course banned in China
„The awakening of China“ - by Sun Yat Sen. Old but informative least but not last becauseit was the only book heralded by both Chinas (PRC and Taiwan) and even allowed during Mao‘s heydays of Terror (in which the official amount of allowed books was in the single digits, and most of those were authored by Mao).
The problem of China - Bertrand Russell. Published in 1922. It's not recent but is an incredible insight for the era and forward thinking piece. It is incredibly relevant today.
A book from 1922? That's back during the Republican era, pre-civil war. I think any resource from before 30 years ago is totally irrelevant in today's setting, except maybe to explain how Chinese modern history developed.
It's shocking how accurate his predictions were, and I think it's really important to understand that these weren't lucky guesses. They were the product of a deep and insightful analysis of Chinese culture and society that is still very much relevant today. The personalities have changed, but in many ways China is still China.
He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant joke.
"In fact, [the west] have quite as much to learn from [China] as they from us, but there is far less chance of our learning it."
"[There's] a great eagerness to acquire Western learning, not simply in order to acquire national strength and be able to resist Western aggression, but because a very large number of people consider learning a good thing in itself"
But is there something specific to Chinese culture that he argued made them more corrupt? Because it seems to me like basically all poor countries are corrupt, that they tend to get less corrupt as they get richer (or rather, they get richer as they get less corrupt) and China in 1922 was very poor indeed.
Honestly it's very hard to tell. It's quite short. My wife is Chinese and I've spent a bit of time over there. It's hard for me to tell which aspects of cultural behaviour over there are a product of several generations of communist rule and which date back earlier. What I can say is the business environment over there is bare naked ruthless. It's always possible to make a deal, right up to the moment it isn't and then you're done. As for social order, the Chinese believe in the rule of authority, not law.
> most Chinese don't even understand how CCP works
That's on purpose, the first test of getting power to work for you is an intelligence and ambition check: can you focus enough ability for long enough to sniff out where the networks of power are ?
It works because a large part of it is based not just on Chinese culture, but on human nature.
Its the reason that the Ten Commandments are still relevant today, because as Paul Mooney said, "It puts its foot in man's ass", or in other words, because many of the stories in the Bible were written by people with an understanding of human nature.
The same reason so much of the Constitution of the United States of America still works. Its written to humanity's nature, not current events of 1776.
Yes. For example, here's a commentary, published in 2012 by Xinhua, arguing that the time was ripe to reform the "reeducation through labor" system http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-10-12/152725346359.shtml (in Chinese, of course)
The reform did happen, replacing e.g. labor camps for drug addicts by forced detox camps, but those were mostly the same, still using hard labor as their main method to "rehabilitate" addicts. So not much changed in practice. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... (this one is in English)
You may wonder why you haven't heard about this before. The answer is, I think, that most groups subjected to "reeducation through labor" are not organized and scarcely have any international contacts, so they have a hard time getting mainstream international media to report on them.
Also how the 10 year term was removed. Seems like this is a core principle in the CCP party, but what events caused this to change. Was this planned from a long time or it the circumstances were right and it was grabbed.
Age of Ambition for how people outside navigate it. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap has some very good stuff on incentive structures inside the CCP.
Bill Gertz (the Author) is a very divisive figure in US politics, with a long history of anti China bias. His writings are much more polemic screeds and less balanced academic analysis. He sees the US-China situation very much as battle between good and evil (with the Democrats being complicit on the side of evil), has zero nuance and very little sourcing in his books. All of this makes his books rather controversial.
All that being said. None of this is evidence for his books actually being wrong.
Actually I think I read the second sentence as a snarky political jab, when on a closer look it seems to have been a neutral question, or at least that's a plausible interpretation.
"So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
Honestly though, don't you think that's a valid question - asking for qualitative responses? Notice how the user responded to you, as an authority, I hope you're aware of that power dynamic as well.
I've also thought I'd love to see a Netflix style documentary of "a day in dang's life" to help us get to know you, to humanize you more + would be good marketing for HN and YCombinator. You're often very poetic in your responses, I think a documentary focused on you could be quite good.
Well written article, I learned a lot. I wasn't a huge fan of how little they espoused the actual positive side of the site, what continues to bring me and many of you back. The flaming and dramatic views of some are noise to me, the great insight and lively polite debate is what I see.
Dang, should there be a single meta-thread - monthly or quarterly -- where you hold a grand durbar and folks can vent their grievances, and you get some feedback from different segments?
If we were to have a seperate thread, then folks should absolutely not post these things in regular threads, thus leaving them cleaner and with a better tone.
they are free to reference this incident on the grievance thread. There, different downvote rules should apply of course.
There might be others who feel the same way, and therefore might upvote it. So, this way, you can get a sense of how many/deeply feel about a particular issue, and then address it suitably.
Once this particular case is addressed, then we create a link of sorts, and the next month someone brings this up, we just point to it.
I am thinking - maybe once a quarter -- to start with, and vary frequency as needed.
I understand the appeal, but users wouldn't abide by such a restriction on normal threads. The more one tried to force it, the more energy one would provoke to get around it or overcome it.
It would be a lost cause because it goes against human nature. People feel what they feel when they feel it; you can't stop them from expressing it, and trying to stop them would only multiply it.
How appropriate, people being told to shut up on a post about people being made to shut up.
Dammit dang, downvote abuse is a real issue.
The very fact that people keep bringing this up should clue you in. Once or twice, okay maybe it's the complainer's perception that's wrong, but again and again, for over a year? Then your damn system has a problem.
The least you could do to address it is not let downvotes instantly affect a comment's visibility. Fucking delay it for a few hours to allow everyone at least a chance to be seen.
Why is that so painfully hard for you to do? Did you lose the source code or can't find another Malbolge maintainer to take over?
This is not a one year problem. And it will stay that way because, as you know, HN is a corporation. Not a public forum.
Maintaining these rules allow dang@co to maintain the position of control over what happen in HN. The corollary is that changing them will dilute their control. They found a local maximum of discourse level and they keep it that way.
The justification that the discourse on HN is maintained at a high level by not talking about the rules is at least condescending to the participants.
It doesn't matter to them if they lose you on these grounds since talking about the rules appears only on extremes which are shallow in a normal distribution. They will lose the few participants that care enough about that while maintaining those in the middle. (Of course, cutting of the extremes will grow newer ones in the empty space but I digress...).
What happens with time is that people adjust their discourse to the middle ground making it void of any new or interesting information. Thus, HN becomes an echo chamber of mainstream ideas and people will leave when they got bored enough of the same thing. We're already there and @dang is more vocal now because he knows it.
I only partly agree with your view. It might be so, but there is a genuine reason behind not discussing the rules: they're always off-topic. For people like me who come to HN to read an interesting discussion about tech issues, anything mentioning downvoting is almost automatically useless in the sense that it doesn't bring any new information, it's not interesting, it doesn't affect me in any way.
Yes, if I were in charge of HN I would solve certain issues differently, and so would you, but it's a private forum run by someone else, so we have to obey in order to participate, whether we like it or not. The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.
> The very fact that we're even having this discussion now means we prefer this place to any other in this moment. So you can't say these rules don't work.
Oh fucking boy, no. What even is that logic
We have a bunch of tabs open on a bunch of other social sites and forums. We don’t prefer HN to any other place, we just think something about it sucks badly enough to express our disdain of it.
Theres a lot I don't know about the Soviet Union but the "Enemies of the People" were the leaders of the Constitutional Democratic Party, not supporters of the party.
I agree that people like Giuliani and even people like Ted Cruz who indirectly bolstered the attack on the capitol building should be prosecuted but going after Trump Supporters themselves is dumb and these comments shouldn't even be made in jest as they are quite dangerous. Most of them are victims of predatory media companies. You sound like the gestapo.
Its pretty crazy how no one is talking about how only 18% of the stimulus bill is going to individuals. I'm by no means rich but I made 80k passively this year so I don't know which side of the wealth transfer I'm on.
or the value of the dollar has dropped, which makes demand for equities higher (causing their price to rise).
You didn't create more wealth - the equities didn't become more productive (cept may be the tech companies did more this year and thus have a deserved rise in price).
True capitalists do not applaud the crony capitalism common throughout the entire world. Japan’s government now owns sizable percentages or even outright majorities of all major corporations. The endless appetite for debt-fueled stimulus has led to crazy malinvestment that will be an extremely difficult pill to swallow when the bill finally comes due.
Why even tax us anymore? If it’s so easy to print new money just sum all the money necessary for the budget and print it fresh. Basically the same thing at this point.
Very negative. It allows for zombie companies to survive for far longer than they ideally should have. So many companies in Japan that should have gone bankrupt years ago but are still surviving. Also makes everyone complacent and uncompetitive at global scale, which has been the theme for Japan for past few decades.
The government is not good at creating and sustaining businesses despite their nearly unlimited resources and centuries of attempts. When the government owns large stakes in businesses then the business operations become political, as the government is elected and the government owns the business, so the business is now answerable to voters. The business will be encouraged to make malinvestments in politically important projects and regions, allow unproductive employees to remain, and lead to general stagnation.
Some socialists have openly stated that the end goal of democratically run companies can be attained by funneling government money directly into buying equity stakes in businesses, growing over time. This would be an extremely terrible outcome for anyone that likes productivity and efficiency.
If there is no way to work, there must be no way to provide value to others. Correct? If there is no way to provide value to another then there is no inequity.
Maslow put "employment" in his hierarchy of needs. As a trust fund kid I've never had to worry about living in the streets but found that without the purpose of work I felt pretty worthless. If you live in the first world you basically have food water and shelter taken care of for you if you're resourceful. The rest seems to be climbing status hierarchies and opulence.
The people who are on this forum are cogs in a machine that, over the next 40 years, will displace millions of American workers. It seems where we are headed into a bifurcated society part overeducated technocrats part gig economy task rabbits.
Seeing the former group beginning to consider the effects of their work is dystopian.
Where did you get your number for AGI? An adjusted gross income of $2060 seems extremely low (very far below average).
It's not dystopian to consider the possible effects of one's work. If you don't consider them, then how can you make adjustments/improvements? It would be dystopian to maximize the negative impacts. We are doing the opposite - questioning what the best course of action might be.
They also estimated we would have flying cars 20 years ago. These sort of estimates are highly inaccurate. Even then, do we just ignore the average people for the next 40 (your median) years?
"They also estimated we would have flying cars 20 years ago."
My number comes from a collection of AI researchers from the future of life institute so I can't imagine a better "they" to defer to. That said, we are bad at predicting the future so who knows?
I never said we should forget about the average people or normal people as Yang calls them in his book "The War on Normal People."
Even if we don't have AGI we will have narrow AI such as self driving/factory stuff/textiles which will displace millions. I'm all for UBI or some sort of equivalent social safety net (I'm not an economist so I don't want to be prescriptive here as I have heard some drawbacks to UBI).
The technocrats have already created platforms that are tearing our social fabric apart by promulgating conspiracies and radicalizing our youth while reducing long-form literacy an increasing anxiety and depression.
What we need is some sort of social revolution that in my opinion could only be obtained by an authoritarian government that protects people from themselves and the exploitive tech corporations. Ban facebook to reduce conspiracy promulgation. Ban tiktok and ever increasingly addictive video games to prevent our youth from becoming dopamine junkees. Ban drugs so the listless and ever-growing welfare class remain mostly docile.
None of these changes are feasible in a country whose identity revolves around personal freedom/choice.
"obtained by an authoritarian government that protects people from themselves"
Why fight nature? Government shouldn't protect citizens from themselves. Let it take its course. The stupid people should reduce through natural attrition. It's controversial, but it's the way the natural world works.
We can definitely make systemic changes that help people make better "decisions." I don't believe in free will and you clearly do so we're kinda approaching this problem from fundamentally different frameworks. Stupid people shouldn't be culled but rather shepherded. Governments are artificial constructs so asking them to act "naturally" doesn't make sense to me as they have no natural state.
Also reducing human suffering seems to be a pretty good thing to do and your natural system doesn't seem to do that.
I never said they should be culled. I'm saying let the problem take care of itself.
The actions you were proposing weren't things to help people make better decisions (if they were, it would still be free will). They were to make laws to outlaw activities. If you don't believe in free will, why do you propose helping people make better decisions? Do you really think imposing someone else's will over others is more benign? The government imposes its will through force or threat thereof (causing human suffering).
Government and politics is not really artificial. They form naturally whenever there are groups of people - similar leadership and power dynamics exist in the natural world too (look at bees, ants, wolves, etc).
The government imposes its will all the time. It prevents you from shooting me or overthrowing the government. Surely this imposition is just? Surely this is more benign then letting you shoot me or letting you overthrow the government.
Why? Because it reduces human suffering.
Also surely with better technology we will be able to transform prisons into rehabilitation centers and thus reduce our countries prison populations and thus become a FREER country, albeit one with less rights?
I think comparing our government to a beehive or a pack of wolves is ridiculous I guess you can call governments "natural." Even if we consider this government natural, surely it doesn't have a natural state. What is the "natural state" of a government of 350 million people?
You're being very presumptuous and not using linear premises in your logic. You assume that government reduces human suffering and that people would be running wild without one. There's a lot more to society than government.
For example, why would I shoot you? I have no motive to do that regardless of what the laws may be. There is nothing the government has done to make it impossible for someone to shoot you. It's just that if some one does and gets caught, they go to prison.
On the subject of dissolving the government, you are completely wrong. There is nothing stopping me from non-violently overthrowing the government. The Constitution even states that if the people want to dissolve the government, they can. So I could try to convince people to elect myself and others who would change or even dissolve it.
"Also surely with better technology we will be able to transform prisons into rehabilitation centers and thus reduce our countries prison populations and thus become a FREER country, albeit one with less rights?"
This is completely nonsensical. Technology isn't holding back prison reform - social and political powers are the main drivers. Why would the number of rights be reduced? You've laid out no premise to connect nor support that statement.
This is a pretty first world-centric perspective. There are slightly higher rates of dissatisfaction and hopelessness but quality of life is drastically improving in the second and third world. More efficient production results in better and more stuff even if the stuff isn't distributed perfectly.
