“It is high time we stopped talking about the Chinese Government as if it were presiding over just “another way of doing things”. For all its economic progress, it is hell-bent on control, not just at home but abroad too. For decades, Hong Kong has been the exception to the rule. It is a hub that has plugged China into the world and the world into China. It was the place where Chinese intellectuals could publish books that couldn’t get through the mainland’s censors. It was the place readers went to buy books or use Facebook. It was where mainlanders went to buy formula milk that wouldn’t poison their babies when it turned out China’s most popular brand was tainted. It was the gateway through which Western capital flooded in to build factories and it is the escape hatch through which the Chinese try to get their wealth out, away from the CCP. But the Chinese Communist Party does not want its citizens to be plugged into the world. All it wants from the world is technology, money and obedience. The least we can do is refuse to grant the CCP any of them.”
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Samizdata quote of the dayJune 1st, 2020 |
 23 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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“It is high time we stopped talking about the Chinese Government as if it were presiding over just “another way of doing things”. For all its economic progress, it is hell-bent on control, not just at home but abroad too.‘
AND…
“It is high time we stopped talking about the EU Government as if it were presiding over just “another way of doing things”. For all its economic progress, it is hell-bent on control, not just at home but abroad too.’
AND…
“It is high time we stopped talking about the British Government as if it were presiding over just “another way of doing things”. For all its economic progress, it is hell-bent on control, not just at home but abroad too.
Given recent events in ‘free’ societies with ‘democratic’ governments, the difference between how China is ruled and those ‘free’ societies is vanishing small – they even borrowed authoritarian Chinese ways to ‘flatten the curve’, and law enforcement thugs behaved like their Chinese counterparts.
Time to put our own house back in order before pointing fingers: we are no longer the fine example we were and rather than they following our example, we are following theirs.
John B:
What.a.crock.of.sh*t.
I’m no lover of the EU, but there are no EU camps remotely resembling what the CCP has done in Xinjiang. There’s no equivalent of Tibet either.
If you think the difference between China and the UK is “vanishingly small”, I invite you to move to China and post the same comment there (but in reverse).
The UK police have not covered themselves in glory during the lockdown, but I’m not aware of any of them harvesting organs for profit.
“But the Chinese Communist Party does not want its citizens to be plugged into the world. All it wants from the world is technology, money and obedience. The least we can do is refuse to grant the CCP any of them.”
But do we want to refuse the same to the Chinese citizens?
I suspect what the CCP are most concerned about is a popular revolution, leading to chaos and fragmentation. They want to join the world, but as an economic superpower like the United States. Still unified. Still in control. Still an economy of 1.3 billion people, but with a US-level education, technology and economy. They see how the USA dominates the world, culturally, economically, and militarily, and they want some of that.
But suppose they allow democracy to flourish? It’s inevitable that people will arise who want to take their own bit of China in a different direction. It is inevitable that people will arise only interested in grabbing power and loot. It is invitable, they believe, that they will fall apart into a hundred tiny squabbling states with no global power and influence at all. They’d be more like the Baltic States than the United States.
And I think they were quite keen on Hong Kong having a bit more freedom so long as things were peaceful there. They were a good example, a demonstration of where they were going and what they aspired to. But the last year or so all the news from Hong Kong has been about the protests, all the publicity has been bad. They saw Hong Kong becoming a hotbed for dissent and revolution. When they tried to do something about that, the protests started. Once, they would have sent the tanks in, but they didn’t want to do that this time. When instead they backed off, but in a face-saving move not unambiguously, the protests got worse. And the protestors, sensing weakness, have started pushing for more.
It’s a dangerous game. On the one hand, you might be able to eke out some more concessions if the CCP still get what they need – a success story for economic freedom with China still peaceful and unified. On the other, you might get the dangerous notion that you’re negotiating the CCP’s implicit surrender, demand complete autonomy and seccession, and get the tanks instead.
The CCP are playing Jenga – trying to gradually dismantle the framework of Maoist state control while leaving the country intact. The dissidents and revolutionaries just want to smash apart Maoist state control, and have no patience.
The Western powers, understanding this, have to consider the long term effects, and the interests of the Chinese people trapped in the system. We can’t invade and liberate them by force – and if we did the nation-building exercise afterwards in such a vast country would not be as easy or over as quickly as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Trade wars and sanctions hurt the people we’re supposedly trying to help, and force the CCP to be more totalitarian to keep things under control. We could push for a revolution, and those tiny squabbling states, but that would result in a lot of bloodshed in the short term. Or we can play Jenga too, and continue with our policy of using juicy carrots rather than sharp sticks to tempt them out of their isolation.
China is not the CCP. China is 94% the CCP’s victims. Suppose you deny them technology, money, and obedience? What exactly do you expect to happen to the ordinary Chinese people next? What’s the long-term plan?
I’ve questioned this notion before, and the feedback I got from various Chinese* respondents was hardly monolithic. In fact, some of it was outraged that I could ask such a patronizing question. If 94% of 1.3 billion people considered themselves victims of a regime instead of citizens of a state, I suspect China would be a bit less stable and unified.
Seems like an easy way to avoid confrontation is to say “think of all the poor Chinese victims!” I don’t think 94% are victims.
(*Facially Chinese at least. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.)
John B: why are you an apologist for the CCP? Because that looks like what you are here.
The U.K. does indeed need to improve. That doesn’t mean it can’t take appropriate action against thugs.
“If 94% of 1.3 billion people considered themselves victims of a regime instead of citizens of a state, I suspect China would be a bit less stable and unified.”
Well, “are victims” and “consider themselves victims” are two different things, but I take your point. The Chinese are probably a lot like us. If life is tolerable and getting better, many are likely to keep their heads down, stay out of politics, and accept that the world is imperfect. Just as we do.
There are a fair number here who have been complaining about the “tyranny” of lockdown, and how all our politicians and elites are illiberal Socialist wanna-be totalitarians. I think that was John B’s idea, above. He’s just using the rhetoric used by others in every other thread about the lockdown, and inserted it into a thread about the Chinese Communist State. And of course, we rightly object that it looks ridiculous to compare our situation with theirs.
But the reverse observation applies, too. It’s just as ridiculous to compare the Chinese state today with the worst excesses of the Maoist Cultural Revolution, as if there was no difference. Plenty of Chinese can support China without necessarily liking their current crop of politicians (as we do), and plenty can support their leaders as “one of us” rather than “one of them” even without being Communist idealogues, just as we can support our own nation without necessarily agreeing with our society’s ruling Capitalist ideology. Most people in our society are perfectly happy with their non-libertarian government, their welfare state, and their security theatre. We’re not that different. It’s all relative.
Life is always more complicated than can be fitted into a finite number of words. But what I meant, using the vocabulary and mindset of the original quote, was that we don’t want to close “the gateway through which Western capital flooded in to build factories and […] the escape hatch through which the Chinese try to get their wealth out, away from the CCP.” Which is what denying China technology and money would do.
Not correct. Since Xi took the reins they have been keen to exercise more control over Hong Kong. The protests arose because of this, not the other way round. And the latest proposal to reduce HK’s autonomy would have come regardless of whether the city protested over the last one or not.
Wrong again. Since Xi took the top spot, the CCP has doubled down on ‘Maoist state control’. The relaxation of control post-Deng has been completely reversed: ‘re-education’ camps, the vile social credit system, disappearances and the dear leader’s thoughts immortalised in a little book. Although, despite the branding, it would be far more accurate to describe China as a fascist state, rather than a communist one.
We most certainly do want to close that gateway, primarily because the Chinese state has control over most the capital that leaves China and it is invested with at least half an eye on the state’s desires. In the short term, the West needs China’s manufacturing capacity, but in the longer term there is SE Asia and India which have potential to replace China. There is a lot of Asia which is developing, which is generating wealth and which is ripe for investment. China has had 30 years of the developed world turning a blind eye to its bad faith in trade, in competition, in international affairs.
There is also the chance that, if the current leadership’s ambitions can be blunted, the balance of power will shift in favour of reformers once again.
John B: “we are no longer the fine example we were and rather than they following our example, we are following theirs.”
It’s just following the pattern I’ve observed.
Any time a British politician stands up and says, such and such ‘ is the envy of the World’, or variations on that theme, it usually means that institution is in terminal decline.
After every terrorist outrage, blabbering politician comes to the podium to announce, ‘But let me make it clear today, as I have had cause to do before: any attempt to defeat those values through violence and terror is doomed to failure”.
Likely means the politician has no idea what ‘values’ she’s blathering about.
Your pathological desire to accord the best of intentions to anyone and everyone would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous. The Chinese Communist party is trying to dismantle the framework of state control? Really?
Well yea, they’re really going to dismantle the framework of state control then, aren’t they?
The instinct of every totalitarian regime in the face of political dissent is to tighten controls. The CCP is no different.
Anecdotal, based on living there for 1 or 2 months of every year for several years:
In big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and so on, life is…kinda like it is here.
You go to work, you stop by the store, you have dinner, go for a beer, go for a game of snooker or pool, or to a nightclub, buy an expensive handbag or whatever.
The everyday citizen isn’t oppressed in any meaningful sense. It’s not 1984, that’s just propaganda. Life there is not much different, on yer average Monday evening, than life here.
There are people who are anti-ccp. In my limited-but-more-than-most experience, they’re the ones who were educated outside of China, or who deal with non-Chinese companies.
NiV’s right – showing people the escape hatch is the way to go.
By what looked like a large majority, the people of Hong Kong did not interpret the extradition law as evidence of any CCP desire to dismantle state control. I can see why; it is a counter-intuitive interpretation of that action. They are closer than we are, have obvious advantages over us in understanding the CCP, and very real skin in the game – very evident reasons for interpreting CCP actions mildly if it is possible. So I have time for their point of view.
“Your pathological desire to accord the best of intentions to anyone and everyone would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous.”
And your pathological misreading of everything I say would be laughable if it wasn’t so irritating. 🙂
They held a revolution and set up a glorious Socialist state, and it didn’t work. Socialism doesn’t work. Totalitarianism doesn’t work. If they stick with it, they’re doomed to poverty, starvation, and endless purges and executions. They realised they screwed up, and now want what the West has got, but they can’t just let go. You can’t just shut down a totalitarian state – everyone knows they’ll be the first up against the wall. So the trick is to dismantle it without losing control, and that’s why they can’t tolerate dissent, seccession, and revolution.
It’s like conducting hostage negotiations. The hostage-taker is in deep, deep trouble and wants to escape (preferably with the loot). Nobody wants the situation to go to rats and for the hostages to die – the hostage-taker because then they’ve got no bargaining position, and the authorities because they don’t want a bloodbath. They do a deal – they de-escalate the situation, free hostages in return for survival/escape. To say that a hostage-taker would prefer to release rather than shoot the hostages is not “to accord the best of intentions” to them. The point is, the sort of idiot whose idea of hostage negotiations is to cut off the food and water, to threaten and bluster and act ‘tough’, to do everything they can to escalate the confrontation, isn’t going to get the hostages released alive, or treated any better. They’re probably going to get the hostages killed.
You’re ignoring the point. The quote at the top conflates the Chinese government with the Chinese people. The arguments presented for Hong Kong are all about helping and supporting the Chinese people. But the measures proposed – to cut off technology and money – hurt the people, not the government. If anything, they increase the level of dissent, requiring ever stricter totalitarian controls to keep a lid on it. That’s stupid! It’s the exact opposite of the outcome desired!
“The Chinese Communist party is trying to dismantle the framework of state control? Really?”
If they weren’t, they’d have already sent the army in to restore order. For that matter, they’d have sent in the army to take more direct control years ago. They would have done in the old days.
“Well yea, they’re really going to dismantle the framework of state control then, aren’t they? The instinct of every totalitarian regime in the face of political dissent is to tighten controls.”
Yes, that’s the problem. A prosperous and free Hong Kong *without* dissent is a good thing, from the Chinese government’s point of view. They want the prosperity that goes with freedom. If you can manage to spread economic freedom without that spilling over into rioters overthrowing the government, the government will cooperate. If you insist on encouraging overthrow of the government, they’ll crack down.
Dissent leads to a totalitarian crackdown. The more you resist, the more control they impose. Cooperation and acting like an adult leads eventually to a release of controls. It’s a lesson every stroppy teenager rebelling against parental authority has to learn.
Nullius in Verba
Well, “are victims” and “consider themselves victims” are two different things, but I take your point. The Chinese are probably a lot like us. If life is tolerable and getting better, many are likely to keep their heads down, stay out of politics, and accept that the world is imperfect. Just as we do.
Half of eligible American voters do not register, do not vote, do not care about the whole circus.
Chinese citizens could ask: “If democracy is such great prize, why half of the winners do not even bother to pick it up?”
How would you answer them?
neonsnake
Anecdotal, based on living there for 1 or 2 months of every year for several years:
In big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and so on, life is…kinda like it is here.
You go to work, you stop by the store, you have dinner, go for a beer, go for a game of snooker or pool, or to a nightclub, buy an expensive handbag or whatever.
And then they watch TV and see endless rioting, looting, burning and shooting in the most free and democratic country in the world.
Selling freedom and democracy to average Chinese citizen might get a bit more difficult, to put it mildly.
Yes, except the Capitalist West, the financiers and big corporate grease monkeys, have kept Communist China’s totalitarian system in business because they can exploit poor Chinese slave labour, low health and safety standards … yet keep all the grubby-ness at arms length. Plausible deniability.
This isn’t a revelation, it’s been known for fifty years*. The Chinese regime might quite possibly have collapsed in the ’90 but for the inward investment ( and national divestment ) the Western financiers gouged out of their own countries and poured into the Communist Chinese state.
Back in the Blair years, there was significant controversy about the Chinese state visit to the UK. We saw the way the deck was stacked then, any dissent in the UK was ruthlessly suppressed.
I’m not ‘misreading’ anything you say, I’ve read enough of your writings to draw reasonable, based, conclusions.
If there is a scenario where you could be on the right side of a dispute, through your cheeseparing argumentation, your deliberate obfuscation, false description of freedom and liberty, you invariably and deliberately choose the wrong side.
In fact if you do one good thing. It’s confirmed my suspicion that we have more enemies in our own camp that outside.
And if I’m irritating you. Then I’m doing one good thing.
NIV : you’re final sentence about people in a totalitarian society needing to behave like adults as a way to loosen controls is priceless. Do you do TV as well?
“If there is a scenario where you could be on the right side of a dispute, through your cheeseparing argumentation, your deliberate obfuscation, false description of freedom and liberty, you invariably and deliberately choose the wrong side.”
“you’re final sentence about people in a totalitarian society needing to behave like adults as a way to loosen controls is priceless”
Is that supposed to be a counter-argument?
“It is inevitable that people will arise only interested in grabbing power and loot.”
You mean like what the CCP has been doing?
“You mean like what the CCP has been doing?”
Yes.
Nobody on the good-guy side wants it (the hostage takers must signal indifference and can often do that convincingly) but what you reward you get more of, so this not wanting does not mean negotiating for real. Hostage-negotiations are often (I do not say ‘always’) part of modern PC folly: an imbecile attempt to avoid casualties that long-term only ensures there will be many more. By making it so very obvious that our chain can be thus yanked, we ensure that many a criminal, who in other cases would flee or surrender, will grab passers-by and be dangerous to them because we give them motive to do so – passers-by they would not waste a second threatening if they they knew we would not delay a second pursuing. There are exceptions, but generally grasping the nettle firmly is how to ensure you are least often stung.
I don’t suppose we will agree on that (and readers will likely have already formed their own views anyway). Nor, perhaps, need we try in this thread, since the analogy is not too close here. The “overwhelming force” option that is typically available to the good guys in hostage situations is sadly absent. Also absent is the feeling of panic urgency that can be present in the bad guys when hostages are taken to avoid arrest (because a crime plan has gone very abruptly and obviously wrong).
After Mao, the party opened up China. At first, this ensured popularity. People cringing to Mao took time to cringe less. His economy was so absurd that everything the party did accompanied a serious general increase in wealth. The inevitable price tag was the destruction of the party’s philosophical legitimacy. They took power to establish communism. So, ah, why are they still here? This is not a problem we can help them with even if it made an atom of practical or moral sense for us to try.
If Xi can be dealt with, he will return to honouring the 2049 transfer agreement. If he will not, it would be silly attempting to negotiate any fresh agreement, or any fresh price for his saying he will return to honouring the existing one. I see it as extraordinary good fortune for the anglo-sphere that Trump and (it would seem) newly-annoyed-by-Wuhan-flue Boris Johnson are less eager to try than their predecessors. Breaking one agreement is reason not to pursue another. (Of course, this is merely the latest and most revealing of many; we are behindhand in daring to let the CCP see that we see what they do.) The way to handle the CCP’s behaviour is to minimise its profitability to them. That ‘negotiation’ will not sort them out quickly – but I rate its chances above any other.
“By making it so very obvious that our chain can be thus yanked, we ensure that many a criminal, who in other cases would flee or surrender, will grab passers-by and be dangerous to them because we give them motive to do so – passers-by they would not waste a second threatening if they they knew we would not delay a second pursuing.”
Yes, that’s one approach. Declare war on China, overthrow the Communist Party, install our own puppet government, don’t care how many Chinese people we kill in the process.
I think they tried that with Vietnam.
My point was the contradiction between justifications based on defending the interests of the ordinary Chinese people like “It was the place where Chinese intellectuals could publish books that couldn’t get through the mainland’s censors. It was the place readers went to buy books or use Facebook. It was where mainlanders went to buy formula milk that wouldn’t poison their babies when it turned out China’s most popular brand was tainted. It was the gateway through which Western capital flooded in to build factories and it is the escape hatch through which the Chinese try to get their wealth out, away from the CCP.” and measures that do nothing to stop the tyrants but are sure to make it worse for the ordinary people. Do we care about the hostages or not? They can’t use Facebook without technology. They can’t be flooded with Western capital for their factories if you deny them money.
I’m all in favour of doing stuff to *actually* overthrow the CCP. I’d even accept that war and slaughter were a potentially justifiable price to pay for it, if there are no alternatives. But don’t virtue signal uselessly. Don’t do weak, easy stuff that achieves nothing but to hurt the people you claim to be supporting.
That’s what the UN did with Saddam Hussein. 12 years of sanctions that did nothing at all to hurt or threaten the rule of Saddam in his palaces, but caused huge harm to the ordinary Iraqis. Dictators laugh at sanctions.
What are you proposing to do that stands *any* chance of *actually* removing the CCP?
“They took power to establish communism. So, ah, why are they still here?”
Because they’re riding the tiger now and can’t get off.
“If Xi can be dealt with, he will return to honouring the 2049 transfer agreement.”
Depends what you mean by “dealt with”. If you mean “do a deal with”, then maybe. I expect there’s some high level diplomacy going on behind the scenes in that direction as we speak. But fundamentally, he can’t and won’t accept any deal that puts their regime at risk. If you have another meaning in mind, what exactly are you proposing to do that would “deal with” him?
“The way to handle the CCP’s behaviour is to minimise its profitability to them.”
And how do you isolate that loss of profitability to just the CCP?
Everyone puts survival ahead of profit. They won’t accept any solution that creates and protects an internal hotbed of revolution that threatens to overthrow them, or seccede from them. They’ll go back to Maoist poverty first. But they probably would do a deal that involved dropping the new laws in exchange for ending the protests.
Nullius in Verba (June 1, 2020 at 11:32 pm), here are some (hopefully clarifying) clarifications you requested. You appear to have interpreted my philosophical points (“… so uh, why are they still here?”) as actual questions, and missed my caveats (“the analogy is not too close here” et seq. could have saved you the need to consider Vietnam and war with China) but we can leave it to readers to balance “Niall’s unlear writing” against “Nullius’ superficial reading” as regards those points. But, hoping I have understood better when you were asking questions, here are attempts at answers to other issues.
I had no other meaning in mind; joint ventures, promises China will stop stealing copyright, etc. – the plausibility of these may reasonably be assessed by whether the HK agreement is restored or not. I think Trump understands deals well enough to see how self-defeating it would be for the west to look eager at this point. That is how he will ‘negotiate’ with Xi. Let the reality sink in – it will not be fast if it happens at all – that they have got themselves in a hole and must find the way out.
Since that would mean return to military weakness (especially in high tech), to loss of their eagerly-being-developed force projection capacity and to lacking money for belt and road bribes, I both greatly doubt that and see no reason why we in the west should fear it enough to change our strategy. I speculate the Chinese learned from Russia that economic communism cannot fight capitalism in a long-term conflict. They therefore changed to a strategy of parasitising it, plus that imitation that is the sincerest form of flattery,
You can’t “isolate that loss of profitability to just the CCP” any more than you can “isolate an offer of profitability to just the non-party Chinese”. and therefore (within the very constrained limits of the possible here) you don’t, any more that WWII blockade of Germany exempted those Germans who hated Hitler, or such trade limits as we had with Russia avoided affecting those Russians who hated communism.
The claim is that the corporate-PC west until recently has been putting profit ahead of survival, by eagerly selling the ChiComs not just the rope with which to hang them but also the rope factory, while strangling their home industry in greenie social-justice red tape.
Nor should we. I believe Trump and (thankfully now, it seems) Boris are thinking along exactly these lines as regards 5G, Confucius institutes and etc.
Removing Xi – replacing him with someone who would observe the 2049 agreement, for example – strikes me as a more feasible (though sadly not soon likely) goal than overthrowing the entire CCP. One may hope, of course, and such parties seem strong until they are abruptly gone, but I don’t think we should hope rashly. If Xi’s policies seem unhelpful then he may go, but internal CCP politics will control that. We in the west can do little beyond denying him the appearance of success. This denial we should do.
Nope, it is supposed to be an observation.
The bitter truth is that many Western “liberals” and “Progressives” SUPPORT the PRC tyranny and wish to see such things as the “Social Credit System” introduced into the West.
Nor is thus the “usual suspects” supporting tyranny, the schools, universities and “mainstream” media – it is much of Big Business as well.
Anyone who thinks that such mega corporations as Disney and Google (the latter busy rigging search results for the left to try and rig the American election – as they did the Congressional elections of 2018) do not support the imposition of PRC tyranny – does not know them.
Most of the large corporations are dominated by “educated” managers – who hate and despise the Principles of the Bill of Rights.
To them the First Amendment is “Hate Speech” (“Hate Speech” being what George Orwell called “Crime Think” by “Thought Criminals”).
To them the Second Amendment is a “Red Neck Wet Dream” – and the do not regard “Red Necks” as human beings.
And it goes on – the have nothing but hatred and contempt for the most fundamental liberties.
I repeat – they do not just want the Social Credit System in China, THEY WANT IT IN THE WEST AS WELL.