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Even China realises that brute state control carries a cost Well, maybe this is a sign of the times. A Communist dictatorship, which has gone after pesky entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma and many smaller firms, realises that this is bad for business. Who would have imagined that? It is a bit like Lenin realising, in around 1921, that shooting and jailing entrepreneurial people was not smart, so we had the New Economic Policy for a few years until Stalin turned the repression back on to full power.
The question I have, however, is whether this is a temporary change, and bad habits will resume:
China is cracking down on behaviours from law enforcement seen as detrimental to the ordinary function of private businesses, a crucial step in restoring confidence as the country embarks on a whole-of-government effort to ensure a steady, sustainable economic recovery.
– The South China Morning Post ($).
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It is a ratchet, sometimes it is over tightened and loosened but it is always tightening. It’s the same all over the world and China just happens to be out in front but the West is catching up fast. We stopped making decent laws centuries ago. All new laws are just a tightening of the ratchet, increasing taxes and punishments for non compliance.
So China will loosen some of the strain but the trend is inevitable especially when our politicians, spit, actually look to them for guidance.
Did you British types get the Peanuts cartoons, in which Lucy kept pulling the football away from Charlie Brown’s foot after promising not to?
Seems apt.
I’d be curious to hear reports of this actually happening. I’d be surprised because it seems to me that Xi’s policy from Day One was to crack down on Chinese freedoms.
And, Bobby, we did indeed get the Peanuts cartoons.
It’s like the story of the scorpion and the frog. Communism cannot change, it’s in its nature.
Marxists like the words “contradiction” and “contradictions” – but they do not like these words applied to THEM.
The People’s Republic of China and its dictator Xi, is caught in a contradiction – the Chinese economy is now semi capitalist (not free enterprise – but then neither is our economy free enterprise, we are light years from free enterprise in Britain, the United States and so on), but their political system is Marxist – that is a contradiction, a massive contradiction.
And Dictator Xi can not resolve this contradiction by abandoning Marxism – getting rid of the pictures of Mao and declaring himself, Xi, Emperor – I suspect that this is what he would LIKE to do, but he CAN NOT do it, he can not do it because then the Communist Party (millions of people) would have no function – and, dictator or not, they would tear him to pieces if he tried to get rid of them – the Communist Party in China is a rather different beast to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the start of the 1990s.
So what can Dictator Xi do?
Wait for his puppets Harris and Walz to take office in the United States?
Start a war by invading Taiwan – to distract attention from domestic problems?
What to do?
One irony is that I suspect that Dictator Xi would not have been a bad Emperor – he is hard working, intelligent, ruthless (not a bad thing in an Emperor), and has got rid of some of the insane policies of his predecessors – such as the “One Child Policy”.
But Xi is NOT Emperor – he is head of the Marxist Chinese Communist Party, that is his claim to power, and Marxism is nonsense – and he knows it is nonsense.
A difficult position to be in – admit that Marxism is nonsense, and you lose the justification for being in power, but cling to a Marxist political system and those “Contradictions” will keep growing.
Still our own economic contradictions are at least as bad as those of China – Dictator Xi may outlast us, only to then fall himself.
Xi can not resolve this contradiction by abandoning Marxism – getting rid of the pictures of Mao and declaring himself, Xi, Emperor
The Kim dynasty in North Korea seems to have managed something close to the second part. Xi would need a cult of personality, so start with replacing some of the Mao pictures with pictures of himself. As for abandoning Marxism, perhaps some minor tweaks – such as making it easier to join the Party if a parent is already a member – could begin the crucial process of turning it from a doctrinaire organisation into a hereditary nobility. It would take a while, and would probably never include using (the Chinese for) the word Emperor, but it might be doable.
If Xi has realised this, it seems the Democrats in the USA have not. See their war on Elon Musk.
I suspect it’s the real deal.
The Chinese Communist Party came to power on the back of a peasants’ revolt, and is aware that another one could turf it out of power. So it is counting on rising general prosperity to mute opposition to government repression. After all, people complain less when they are well-off, because they have too much to lose.
Speaking of contradictions, if you divide the population into wealth producers and wealth consumers, which should be running the economy? Wealth producers you say? Well, that would be capitalism. Under communism, wealth consumers control the economy, which is why it doesn’t work.
@Barbarus
The Kim dynasty in North Korea seems to have managed something close to the second part. Xi would need a cult of personality, so start with replacing some of the Mao pictures with pictures of himself.
I think you need a multi generational personality cult to do what is done in North Korea. I remember watching a video of an eye doctor who regularly went to North Korea to help people with cataract surgery. It was a sad tale. It seems that a lot of young people have cataracts early and for young women they are considered unmarriageable, effectively excess trash. GirlPower!! is not a thing in North Korea.
So this guy comes and performs the surgeries gratis, and in a moment these young women (and others) have their lives utterly transformed. However, the scene that really sticks out to me in the movie is one in which all the patients are sitting in a room with their eye covered with a bandage. One by one to doctor removes the bandage and the patient realizes that they can see again. Often, understandably, they start to cry, but what is not understandable is that they get up and kneel down at the picture of Kim Jong Un and weep and praise the name of the Holy Leader who saved them. Just to the clear, the doctor who actually saved them is literally in the same room and the patient does not say a word to him.
That sort of brainwashing is multi-generational in nature. I think Xi’s growing oppression of the Chinese is a sign of weakness and fear, not of strength. The mortgage and investment fraud crisis there has potential to blow up the whole show.
@Fraser
they get up and kneel down at the picture of Kim Jong Un
Makes you think, doesn’t it; about the way emperors in the past got away with claiming to be actual gods, why certain groups seem determined to overturn the Enlightenment, and where the pseudo-religious cults of Woke and Climate might be going.
Barbarus and Fraser Orr interesting points – yes perhaps if Dictator Xi had the time he could make himself Emperor (without using the word) and turn the Communist Party into an hereditary gentry and nobility – but he is 70 years old, and although he looks younger (some chaps have all the luck), I do not think he has enough time left – and he has no son.
Rour le Jour – wealth creators do not run society under capitalism, other than in the sense of producing goods and services for others – the customer is in charge. Unless the business enterprises get political influence and get lots of government contracts and impose regulations to undermine competition – but that is not capitalism it is corporatism (basically what we have in the modern West) and, of course, fiat money to make economic life corrupt – something that both the West and China have in common.
In both the modern West and China “money” is created from nothing and dished out to the politically connected – anyone who thinks Western banking (or the monetary and financial system in general) is capitalist is deeply mistaken – and China is much the same.
As for the “Woke” (Frankfurt School) stuff and the Climate cult – Xi spends a lot of Chinese money pushing all that in-the-West.
Anyone who tried to push ethnic-racial rights in China, or Third Wave feminism, or “Trans rights” for children, would be vivisected.
All this Herbert Marcuse (and so on) stuff is a weapon to be used to destroy the West – it is not a social system, it is means of destroying society (as both Xi and Putin know only too well – they both had a Marxist education, they know the various sects, and how the Frankfurt School was never intended to be a social system, an actual society, it is more like acid to melt society with).
Marxist tricks work on gullible Western liberals – but to people educated in Marxism the tricks are rather obvious.
Full disclosure – I have a, partly, Marxist family background. Indeed one of my flaws is that I sometimes assume that other people “must” be able to see the tricks – because they are so obvious. But most people have not been educated in Marxism from their early childhood. To many people the “obvious” tricks may not be obvious at all.
Paul,
You miss my point. I’m saying wealth producers should control wealth production, not control society. Capitalists create wealth because they are the people who know how to create wealth, their customers do not. In a hunter gatherer society, you don’t tell the hunters how and where to hunt if you want to be eating meat tonight, which what communism attempts to do.
You’re watching this, which means they had a camera trained on them at the time. Danged right they’d be kowtowing to Kim!
Roue le Jour – I apologise for misunderstanding you Sir.
Of course, even Mr Putin and Mr Xi would accept that Collective control of production, farming, manufacturing, and so on – does not work.
And if you replied “well then you are not a Marxist!” – Mr Putin would agree that although educated in Marxism he is no longer a Marxist, and Mr Xi would also, quietly, agree with you that he is not a Marxist – but would then have you killed as his power depends on pretending to be a Marxist.
China has not been Marxist since the economic reforms starting in 1978 – but the regime pretends to be Marxist, this is a massive “contradiction”.
Of course, China is not a free market capitalist country either – but neither are Western countries.