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Singapore has few perks for ministers, members of parliament, and senior civil servants. I think the Prime Minister and DPM get drivers, but they still have to live in their own house. Houses are expensive in Singapore - can't stay in the suburbs, there aren't any. Nobody else gets even travel allowances. That partly justifies the higher pay. The corruption is a problem, though. Singapore's anticorruption law and practice are even tougher than Hong Kong's; Singapore's can freeze the assets of you and your entirely family on suspicion of corruption, and that of anybody who tries to delay the seizure, in a wholly private-sector investigation. Doesn't even need to be state related. And there is a presumption of guilt, not innocence, and the prosecution doesn't have to prove that any favours were granted, only that an unexplained gift was received by the defendant. It's a very "nuke everything" approach to the problem of guanxi, but Lee Kuan Yew could rely on the British to back him up against the local patronage networks. Hong Kong could import police officers from London. A bit harder for Beijing. ronya fucked around with this message at 09:20 on Feb 28, 2013 |
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Feb 28, 2013 08:32
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caberham posted:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_MacLehose,_Baron_MacLehose_of_Beoch Same: the CPIB reports to the Singapore Prime Minister's Office. Also the same "no gifts at all" standard. e: thanks, fixed
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Feb 28, 2013 09:20
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Codification is what separates mere entrenched inequality from corruption, or Singapore and Luxembourg would be considered fantastically corrupt.
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Mar 1, 2013 08:53
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both Singapore and Hong Kong inherited the midcentury colonial legacy switch from 999/perpetual freehold to granting only 99 (or fewer) year leases on more recent plots one peculiarity that seems to have erupted since the 2010s that that Singapore has doubled down on telling landowners: yes your 60 year leases granted in the 1960s are going to expire soon and no there will be no extensions or compensation when it reverts to the state. Baby give it up give it up baby give it up. That is, the government is intent on recapturing the underlying value of land - "no compensation" is the keyword and Hong Kong seems to have moved in the opposite direction of assuring 2047 leaseholders that actually it's perpetual - the battle seems instead over whether the two-systems government can credibly bind the post-2047 government to such a promise, the concept of "no additional premium" lease extensions seems to be the prevailing one hence even though Hong Kong theoretically has a stronger state claim to the underlying land than Singapore (HK has few perpetual/999 lots compared to Singapore), it doesn't seem that HK is willing to use it ronya fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Aug 20, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 07:38
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it's not that complicated - the thirty second summary is that the CPC considers that it is a vanguard party of the proletariat that has, by valour and collective struggle, come to govern the country before it has even passed through the capitalist stage of development. So, it must govern through the period whilst ensuring that it remains in power to the distant future when it will eventually usher the country into the final stage of communism, rather than being diverted to bourgeois liberal democracy along the way many communisms agree on the existence of a prior capitalist stage; the devil is in the details... Andrew Batson had a translation of a key Xi speech from some years back which I think captures the driver of the party's totalizing attitude toward history and national identity, whilst also succinctly capturing the main anxieties: quote:For our Party leading the people in building socialism, there are two historical periods: before “reform and opening” and after “reform and opening.” These are two interrelated periods that also have major differences, but the essence of both periods is that our Party was leading the people in the exploration and practice of building socialism. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics” was created in the new historical period of “reform and opening,” but it was created on the basis of New China having already established the basic socialist system and carried out more than twenty years of work. A correct understanding of this problem requires grasping three points.
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Oct 11, 2019 09:05
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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-xi/chinas-xi-warns-attempts-to-divide-china-will-end-in-shuttered-bones-idUSKBN1WS07Wquote:“Anyone attempting to split China in any part of the country will end in crushed bodies and shattered bones,” he told Nepal’s Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli in a meeting on Sunday, according to China’s state broadcaster CCTV. Well, it's nice to dispel any illusions.
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Oct 13, 2019 18:11
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quote:任何人企图在中国任何地区搞分裂，结果只能是粉身碎骨；任何支持分裂中国的外部势力，只能被中国人民视为痴心妄想 putting on my translation hat, it would be: if anyone within China engages in secessionism, the outcome can only be gruesome violence; if any foreign forces support secessionists, these foreign forces will be considered delusionary by the people of China the passive voice is an ambiguity - it doesn't say who kills or who is killed. The Chinese govt persective of serenely floating above amorphous mobs, to whom it regretfully brings order, even allows for the answer to be "neither" this being said, neglecting to correct Reuters is definitely a way to pitch a more peaceful intent for domestic audiences than for outsiders ronya fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Oct 14, 2019 |
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Oct 14, 2019 06:22
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current ideology has some parallels to the 1990s 'Asian Values' wave popular across much of Southeast Asia - in the oppositional sense that China practices 'whole-process democracy' 全过程民主 as opposed to 'Western democracy' 西方民主, where there is supposedly some deep ideological difference (that in practice varies by speaker) 全过程民主 is essentially consultative democracy (协商民主) plus rule of law/process; it's different from Maoist New Democracy in its emphasis on deriving legitimacy from mass process rather than centralist revolutionary leadership quote:http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/leaders/2019-11/03/c_1125186412.htm What '科学决策、民主决策' (scientific and democratic decisionmaking) means is that civil service experts will identify the legitimate factfinding and the public will be permitted to give feedback Aside from the emphasis on process (which Maoism held in contempt), this is not really that different from how previous generations of socialist theory has envisioned democracy after the revolution. At its best, it is not all that different from actually-existing Western liberal democracy imposing consultation requirements on local statutory planning (and all of these are mainly requirements on local government). Chinese theoreticians are quite willing to highlight how 协商民主 parallels the Western development of deliberative democracy in the 1980s (the public consultation turn in the West itself coincides with the neoliberal turn; plenty of ink has been spilled on its hopes and failings, I won't go into it here). At its worst, it is a requirement that all local-democratic input be exclusively practiced in a way where the local government conveniently knows who is objecting and where they live, rather than anything that might involve a secret ballot - and where any participation in the consultation at all must be through organized civil-social representative groups that can then be obliged to endorse whatever decisionmaking outcomes. This is not a system that sits well with openly adversarial societal disputes (which don't have to be culture wars - land use disputes are as common in China as they have been historically in the West) or with a fluid civil society (where groups representing a collective interest undergo rapid appearance and dissolution, as they have in the West since the 1960s and its new social movement politics)
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Apr 1, 2021 05:44
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you don't have to link it to neo-Confucianism to argue that it's a very pre-Fanon, pre-New-Left left-wing view of the appeal (or lack thereof) of an independent civil society and cultural self-realization it's an intensely communitarian, corporatist political culture that places a massive premium on deferential disagreement. Political action is permissible but must be couched in a form that acknowledges the moral and ideological supremacy of the system. Petitioning (信访) remains the dominant form of non-institutional political change, rather than protest that rejects a legitimate mandate outright (especially under Xi relative to Hu), and responsiveness to petitions and local dissatisfactions is a key metric the center focuses on to discipline regional governments (e.g. the USSR only wished for glasnost but Hu and Xi have made Freedom of Information requests endure as a bureaucratic process). Conversely, non-endorsed protest and pamphlet distribution efforts, even those nominally aligned with goals embraced by ongoing official campaigns, are still ostentatiously repressed (e.g. anti-sexual harassment campaigners). Again, it's not necessarily about what one disagrees with but how that disagreement is pursued. the USSR was never a great fan of an independent civil society but ideologically committed themselves to not repressing open and organized dissidence, at least in principle, with the Helsinki Accords in 1975. Contemporary official theoretical thought, on the other hand, tends to explicitly highlight the shift as a mistake that doomed the USSR into failing to put down liberal reformers with sufficient enthusiasm, and instead reverts to the traditionally Marxist suspicion of a civil society, separated from party and state, as a vehicle for bourgeois or foreign subversion (caveats: I am no China specialist; my focus is on left-wing strains of thought as a topic) ronya fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Apr 1, 2021 |
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Apr 1, 2021 12:42
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couple of points, not aimed at any poster in particular: - Chinese abandonment of multiculturalism and embrace of assimilation is official policy - it's 民族交往交流交融, which is the exact slogan that pops up in party speeches (sometimes just 民族交融) - Domestic debate is aware of the tensions, even if they come down solidly in favour of assimilation, e.g., from a PKU prof quote:三十多年来社会主义市场经济的发展使我国经济领域各种生产要素加快跨地域流动，这种流动无论规模还是速度都是空前的。这一趋势使各民族交往交流交融更加容易，各民族关系更加密切。比如，各民族群众更多更广泛地混居，少数民族群众更加乐意学习国家通用语文。我们的政策取向应当是顺应这个趋势，深化这个趋势，使之不可逆转，使“三个离不开”不仅是一种愿望和倡导，更是一种现实的经济、政治、文化关系。从我国当前民族分布的现实出发，国家对少数民族地区的支持中，民族因素和地域因素的考虑仍将在相当长一个时期内并存，但随着民族混居程度的加深，随着少数民族群众生活和文化水平的提高，要有意识地向强调地域因素的方向引导。也就是说，经济支持要更多强调以自然环境艰苦、群众生活贫困等地域因素为标准，更多强调对贫困地区、对生活在那里的所有民族群众的支持，比如“西部大开发”、“兴边富民计划”，而不是过分强调对特定民族的支持。以地域因素为主要着眼点，国家大部分支持仍然会落实到少数民族群众，但是其社会政治导向作用却是不一样的。... (that whole essay is interesting, really) - despite the casual equivalence being drawn by the good professor here, the 中华民族 is 90% Han (and <1% Hui Muslim); this level of relative homogeneity is comparable to countries like Britain and Germany rather than the US perhaps. Of course China is a very big place. - a number of Xinjiang state govt initiatives make sense in the frame of a bureaucrat committee running down a list of Muslim cultural practices and producing answers one by one. e.g.: Uighurs extremely reluctant to marry outside the community: OK, give Han-Uighur marriages material incentives like a lump sum of cash, housing priority, govt job priority, etc. Uighurs extremely reluctant to interact socially with Han people: OK, have a programme assign a randomly-identified Han and Uighur family by some socioeconomic criteria to be acquaintances (the 民族团结一家亲 programme - that's the actually-existing Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, folks: where you can have your very own centrally-planned Minority Friend for the state media to parade). Where this kind of optimistic human-improvement-through-bureaucracy gets prickly is with religious considerations: halal food, Friday prayers, religious sensitivities to women marrying outside the faith. It's not that these are ideologically problematic in themselves - Hui people, who are also Muslim, don't get quite the same attention - but that the bureaucracy doesn't particularly care to be sensitive when sensitivity would slow down its ambitious mandate to compel assimilation. - it strikes me as obvious that if you put hundreds of thousands of people in camps, under the gentle hand of centrally-appointed regional governments that don't really have any reason to deeply care about their welfare, there's going to be a lot of abuse and that's not really shocking? It would be surprising if there wasn't abuse. Note that China does not deny that there are camps, but maintains that these are vocational and training camps to encourage these western Chinese minorities embracing a way of life familiar to the eastern Chinese coasts: stay in school ("real" school, not a madrassah), move to the cities, and find urban employment there. Anything at home is to be for the tourists. - Chinese pro-govt writers will readily point out that this is what Western Europe did to almost all its numerous insular regional communities, albeit during the long 19th century rather than in the span of two decades. Here, have Graham Robb describing language policy in the French Third Republic: quote:Many parents were reluctant to send their sons and daughters to school when they needed them for the harvest. Inspectors often found that girls were kept out of school to work as seamstresses in filthy sweatshops where they spent the day with relatives and neighbors, learning the local traditions and values that their mothers considered to be a proper education. Above all, many parents were afraid that once they learned to speak and write French like Parisians, their children would leave for the city and never come home. This brutal assimilation only abruptly halted once it had eliminated almost all of France's regional variation and only then was France very sorry about all that washing out mouths with soap. But by then those insufficiently assimilated were so few as to no longer seriously threaten its cohesion as a nation. ... on the flip side, of course, one would readily highlight again that China is already 90% Han etc. - on a regional note in general, the principal foreign power China is worried about in Xinjiang (also sometimes called East Turkestan) is almost certainly Pakistan, whose export of radical Islam has been a regional constant for a century at least. Its chief foreign policy concern is the 1b1r initiative insofar as its supports the domestic policy concern of the Western Development Strategy - China wants a prosperous western China, but with an unalloyed loyalty to China. So, the religious radicalism which China genially tolerated and even encouraged as late as the 1980s - remember, Soviets in Afghanistan right next door; China used to sponsor promising Uighur youth to finish their educations in Islamabad madrassahs - all abruptly have to go. It's enough to give any society metaphorical whiplash. ronya fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 19:22
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Rabelais D posted:I think this was an interesting post but I thought that China very vocally did deny the existence of camps until it could do so no longer, then the narrative switched to yes, there are camps, but actually they are the good kind of camp (that you cannot leave of your own volition). that is my rough understanding as well - external pressure in 2018 forced the central govt to tone down the eliminationist rhetoric and to compel the Xinjiang regional govt to give the campaign an image more palatable to foreign audiences rather than domestic audiences I'm not particularly invested in terms of posting  to die on that hill however. I will settle for noting that it is the Chinese government position now so the camp-existence or camp-magnitude denial that was once popular ITT is moot
ronya fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Apr 5, 2021 |
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Apr 5, 2021 07:17
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ThomasPaine posted:Occam's razor suggests that we're seeing an inflexible authoritarian bureaucratic state acting like an inflexible authoritarian bureaucratic state because of a perceived secessionist threat directly intertwined with the growth of CCP-hostile radical Islamic ideology within the region in question. This is a blunt hammer approach that is almost certainly going to do a lot of damage (and is probably counterproductive in the long term), and its crude inflexibility means all local Muslims become objects of suspicion. Nonetheless, its not the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group - China has hundreds of non-Han ethnic groups and tons of non-Uyghur Muslims. There is literally no reason whatsoever that Xi would wake up one morning and decide to embark on an eradication campaign against this one particular group just because he felt like it... whynotboth.jpg China does have a concrete reason to brutally suppress breakaway nationalist identities on its borders: official and party intellectual speeches repeatedly cite the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a warning on tolerating border nationalism Hui people in the northwest are not breaking away, but Uighur nationalists are, so their identification as a separate national people (as opposed to just one of 55 ethnicities with <1% representation each) must be destroyed
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Apr 5, 2021 15:15
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Intentionality is integral because that is what underpins genocide in international law, which then impacts the subsequent questions. ThomasPaine posted:I suppose the go-to comparison should be less the Holocaust and more Turkish policy towards Kurdish separatism, in that sense. It's a continuum spanning forced assimilation (which is the Chinese official position) to the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, one supposes. Albeit the Chinese are not simultaneously fighting a losing war and are therefore not in a hurry.
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Apr 5, 2021 16:02
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Daduzi posted:I'm kind of operating on the assumption that international law is not going to be invoked to a meaningful degree, barring a complete collapse of the Chinese state. Probably something more akin to pressuring the Chinese central government to imposing more oversight on the provincial government and giving it some legal basis and accountability to the center, rather than none at all These things do have material impacts on how bureaucracies function on the ground the Xi administration isn't going to leave off a conviction that Xinjiang is a timebomb that must be defused ASAP, but it would probably do so more gently if it felt that any other course is too embarrassing
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Apr 5, 2021 16:23
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ThomasPaine posted:This all does beg the question of why exactly China does care so much about holding on Xinjiang. Is it particularly important to them economically? Would they stop being the power they are without it? Looking at a map I highly doubt it. Or is it the precedent that it would set towards other regions they worry may be getting ideas? I certainly wonder whether it may have been more savvy for them to give it a huge amount of autonomy and full religious/cultural freedoms (including or just short of formal independence) while retaining it firmly within Beijing's sphere of influence. The Hong Kong/Macau approach, maybe. how'd you get that from a map? Xinjiang is its gateway to Central Asia and a route for oil that doesn't behoove it to Russia or the US Seventh Fleet. In a fit of terrible historical irony, it is now its turn to be the only one oil-dependent whilst both of the other two turn into net oil exporters. China is fully aware that nationalist rebellions reduced the base of the mighty Soviet Baltic fleet to an exclave surrounded by soon-NATO powers and then cut off its Black Sea ports for good measure ronya fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 19:07
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'Genocide' in 1948 genocide convention doesn't mean "bad stuff" generically, but specifically requires an intent to destroy a protected group. This distinguishes it from other forms of brutality and ethnic cleansing more generally. e.g., an unfortunately real example within living memory, a passage from the 2005 UN Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur: quote:513. Was there a genocidal intent? Some elements emerging from the facts including the scale of atrocities and the systematic nature of the attacks, killing, displacement and rape, as well as racially motivated statements by perpetrators that have targeted members of the African tribes only, could be indicative of the genocidal intent. However, there are other more indicative elements that show the lack of genocidal intent. The fact that in a number of villages attacked and burned by both militias and Government forces the attackers refrained from exterminating the whole population that had not fled, but instead selectively killed groups of young men, is an important element. A telling example is the attack of 22 January 2004 on Wadi Saleh, a group of 25 villages inhabited by about 11 000 Fur. According to credible accounts of eye witnesses questioned by the Commission, after occupying the villages the Government Commissioner and the leader of the Arab militias that had participated in the attack and burning, gathered all those who had survived or had not managed to escape into a large area. Using a microphone they selected 15 persons (whose name they read from a written list), as well as 7 omdas, and executed them on the spot. They then sent all elderly men, all boys, many men and all women to a nearby village, where they held them for some time, whereas they executed 205 young villagers, who they asserted were rebels (Torabora). According to male witnesses interviewed by the Commission and who were among the survivors, about 800 persons were not killed (most young men of those spared by the attackers were detained for some time in the Mukjar prison). (I picked this example as an illustration. Note that a different forum - the ICC - did subsequently argue that Omar al-Bashir did have genocidal intent to destroy. The point here is to illustrate the criteria in use) This is of course a contested concept (there has been criticism of this line of argument since genocide was defined) but it does reflect, I think, the dominant interpretation. As I remarked in the other thread, this means that being industrially thorough in scope is heavily weighted in defining genocide. This reflects the unique historical horror (of the industrially thorough Holocaust) that so provoked the recognition of genocide as a crime deserving of special recognition to begin with.
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Jun 16, 2021 13:07
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How well do you remember the 1990s? Do you remember the duet of Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the late Lee Kuan Yew on Asian values? I'm sure you do. Anyway, this establishment take on guided democracy strikes a familiar note: quote:The story of Chinese politics is often more convincing when told through the narrative of cultural traditions. Revealing the deep cultural heritage behind China's political choices will help us better establish the "four matters of confidence," which is an attitude urgently needed to tell China’s political story well. This also confirms General Secretary Xi Jinping's statement that cultural confidence is "a more fundamental, broader, and deeper confidence.” I am not hot on my transliterated lingo, but to my knowledge 'substantive democracy' 即实质民主 is the traditionally Marxist phrase (implying that other democratic theories, in that bourgeois-committee way, are insubstantial; this being also how Soviet-period official positions on Soviet democracy were translated even up to the late Cold War) whilst the Hu Jintao-period 'consultative/deliberative democracy' 协商民主, sometimes qualified with 'socialist consultative democracy' as the preferred translation, is the official modern take (invoking deliberative-democracy theories popular in the West since the 1980s), albeit steadily being squeezed out by Xi's 'whole-process democracy' 全过程民主 ronya fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Jul 4, 2021 |
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Jul 4, 2021 07:12
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re: water to lay out some context - for an actually useful US comparison, the North China plain is a lot like California: it's a big, arable area enabled by industrial agriculture but is dependent on a depleting supply of groundwater or on imported water. Like California, suppress agricultural usage and suddenly the water problems diminish greatly. Like California, that's not really realistic either. - groundwater does recharge; this is not fossil water. Between groundwater, mega-aqueduct projects, and desalination/reverse osmosis, I don't think existential fear for the capital region is at all justified. Desalination already supplies a chunk of residential tapwater - the biggest challenges, as is often the case, are political. First, people have to pay more for water, or pay for water-efficiency measures. That's basically unpopular everywhere. Second, mega-aqueducts and desalination are both pretty expensive so people have to pay even more for water, or pay for water-efficiency measures (ditto). Third, there's the usual thicket of institutional legacies and inter-township or inter-provincial water claims to navigate. These are not impossibilities to manage though - for now, the most visible impact is that water tariffs in the relevant areas will go up. This is what is happening already, so. to be clear China is not new to the concept of paying for water - industrial, agricultural, and residential users all already do, these are not the Bolivian highlands
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Jul 4, 2021 19:03
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Kavros posted:Authoritarianism tracking to purer forms of dictatorship, a concept obviously so foreign to the west that the west certainly installed no such regimes abroad. to be clear, the CCP is enthusiastically committed to the concept of a state constitutionally bound to be governed by the communist party and that no other party is entitled to govern; Zhang is not setting out a one-party system as a bad thing that could be offset by better things achieved elsewhere. Zhang is saying that this is the better thing. the real peculiarity here is that Zhang (and really a lot of contemporary Chinese theory) bases this nominally on Marxism-Leninism but mentions exactly zero of the traditional second-world official reasons like e.g. that multi-party systems can only reflect class struggle, that the vanguard leadership of the communist party is a basic precondition for progress to dictatorship of the proletariat beyond which lies the true democratic freedom unlike the false democracy under capitalism, etc., but instead invokes quite sundry appeals to multi-party systems pursuing '民粹主义、短视主义、法条主义' - populism, short-sighted policy, and legislative judo. It's just the superior governance of one-party rule, underpinned by the supposed idiosyncrasies of the Chinese warlord-era experience. (which is why I noted the resemblance to the Asian values debate of the 1990s) ronya fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Jul 4, 2021 |
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Jul 4, 2021 19:27
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Kavros posted:Not to discount or crudely summarize your details, but what it mostly comes down to is that the CCP is enthusiastically committed to the CCP, and whoever rules the CCP will follow the boring and predictable future track of their own autocracy. the vested ruling class who inevitably consolidate power vertically within their own structures and broadly constrain the limits of acceptable dissent basically guarantee this. I think professed reasons matter; the Soviet Union signing up to Helsinki laid the groundwork for its dissidents to articulate their opposition (Zhang here is certainly betting very heavily that the CCP maintains a solid domestic reputation for competence, decisiveness, and far-sightedness, even as takeoff growth eases off - certainly this view of itself doesn't allow the CCP to plead, as the CPSU did during the Brezhnev stagnation, temporary difficulties)
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Jul 4, 2021 20:01
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daily-life spoken fluency is relatively easy; written fluency is relatively difficult; you're not alone in holding that opinion one point I'll add is that it's possible to be speak and write a language in daily life but still be utterly unable to communicate ideas - being able to make small talk or follow a variety show does not accumulate to being able to talk contemporary politics or technology. Generic immersion is not sufficient; you have to immerse in the specific thing - you have regularly consume media discussing these topics. This is not unique to Mandarin of course
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Jul 14, 2021 08:00
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Unrelated: I know many folks ITT liked the America against America thread, so this translation posted today of a 2012 essay by Wang Huning may be interesting: https://www.readingthechinadream.com/wang-huning-the-culture-revolution-and-reform-of-chinas-political-system.html an excerpt: quote:I would like to raise a question: Who leads the Party Committee? Some people say the Party Secretary. If this strikes you as ostentatiously American, it's probably not a coincidence. quote:Soviet Russia’s anti-constitutional practices endured for more than seventy years, but have finally met with universal anger and resentment. Finally, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, led by former Soviet Vice President Gennady Yanayev (1937-2010) and other high-ranking officials, staged a coup d'état on August 19, 1991, in an attempt to save the critical situation. However, the people, fearing a return to the horrors of one-party dictatorship, the scorn for human life, the rigged elections, and the stifling of press freedom, did not support the August 19 coup, which failed within three days. calling out a certain brand of Chinese thinker. Also, warning that the world's second-largest mass party obviously contains a lot of people not all that attached to the party's enduring existence The constitutional notion is quite specific. What Huning is advocating here is: - the party should have separation of powers, checks and balances, free internal debate, all that stuff - so that the party remains effective - the national legislatures and executives however should be subject to 'openness' (公开化, glasnost, which is not mentioned in the Party context; conversely, checks and balances, free debate, etc. is not mentioned in the national context. Note that openness in contemporary China is interpreted in a more FOIA sense, not the freedom-of-speech sense in Gorbachev-period USSR; it's for civil-social groups with a constructive relationship with the Party to be able to file amicus curiae, so to speak, whilst still entitling the party to discipline activists with a more combative or adversarial outlook) ronya fucked around with this message at 14:00 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 13:47
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theorists have been arguing over whether capitalism has developed any post-Marxian social classes besides the proletariat/bourgeois dichotomy since forever. James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941. In the four score years since, you can find any number of critiques or defences of managers-as-a-distinct-social-strata from any number of perspectives: liberal, Christian-democratic, conservative, Marxian (analytic? postmodern?) etc. a typical intro text will regularly introduce not even one more class, but several - at least a Fordist mode and one or more post-Fordist modes, for example I'm not sure this really belongs in the China thread however ronya fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 19:13
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China has a more severe aging cliff than Japan does because China's Total Fertility Rate (TFR) crash was more rapid. (despite popular wisdom, it wasn't the One Child Policy as such; the drop in TFR preceded the start of the policy by a decade. The policy did however exacerbate the problem thereafter) The problem is aggravated by China being much poorer. China's real GDP per capita is not close to where Japan's was twenty years ago (which was about 3x wealthier). Its aging pyramid is, however. A Japan today that is as old but only 1/3 as productive would be in a very strained situation, but that is about where China is projected to be. China will be doing well if it manages to avoid a middle-income slowdown (China today is not rich, although parts of it are. It's a big country! On a per capita basis, however, think Mexico and Thailand, not S Korea). It is already the case that low-income manufacturing is moving to Vietnam and low-income textiles is moving to Bangladesh. Chinese manufacturing employment peaked in the 2010s. None of this is shocking or really surprising - as the East Asian Tigers already experienced themselves once - but the wave is just that much larger in magnitude.
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Sep 5, 2021 09:20
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MiddleOne posted:Nothing really points towards China stagnating at this juncture though, its economy is still growing like there is no future. This makes sense since it still has many unrealized easy development opportunities within its territories. Demographics are bad for Japan, but they're not the sole (or perhaps, even dominant) reason Japan started stagnating and I think it'd be a mistake to put so much weight to it. Yes, but the problem with those unrealized opportunities is that they're hitched to the same national policy considerations that have to also consider the interests of its already-rich regions... (see also: all the other BRICs! All share a phenomenon of deeply unequal internal development, I don't think that's accidental) The PRD wants to spend its thirty-glorious-years on its own domestic consumption, not capital investment in Northern or Western China - https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1311305376348987393 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1311755238748160000 https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1311758291060563975 I agree that the extent of the demographic question is unclear but: 1) insofar as we put any weight on it, the headwinds are even stronger for China, and 2) it certainly does seem that Chinese policymakers are taking the point seriously, albeit not so seriously enough that I think any of their policies announced so far will move the TFR needle. e: accidentally a word ronya fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Sep 5, 2021 |
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Sep 5, 2021 10:01
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China has both a dramatic housing crunch in T1 cities and a dramatic oversupply in minor towns, that's not really different from a problem now familiar to the reverse-gentrifying first world except in scale. Here's a summary: https://archive.is/OJC3bquote:What are the main causes for the high housing prices in China’s core cities? (property taxes - as opposed to land sales which have led smaller regional state banks/state govts being complicit in backing overly ambitious projects in the wrong places. Land sales provide a large share of local govt revenue in China) Anyway the Evergrande saga will be an interesting one. Chinese media repeatedly assured investors earlier this year that the great deleveraging campaign would not drive developers into inoperability - a smooth landing rather than a bank run. e: nothing that sounds good quote:But there are few willing takers. Evergrande’s latest settlement offer to investors in its wealth management projects showed us why: Its inventory quality is really poor. To redeem its investors, apartments were offered at 28% discount to their market value, and parking lots were given away at a 52% discount, according to Caixin, the influential local financial media outlet. ronya fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Sep 15, 2021 |
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Sep 15, 2021 17:29
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I linked to tweets earlier highlighting the sharp slowdown in growth in the inland provinces earlier This ties in to the housing bubble - if those provinces had grown as fast as indeed most thought they would grow, there could plausibly have been an outcome where more of these projects paid off Since that didn't happen, investments that assumed that Lanzhou (capital of Gansu - industrial metropolitan area in a strategic location, albeit in one of China's poorest provinces) would inevitably soon become like Shenyang (capital of Liaoning - industrial metropolitan area in a strategic location, core of China's rust belt) now have to assume that Lanzhou will be... Lanzhou for the foreseeable future. The wrong kinds of houses, in the wrong places. A national focus on deleveraging goes hand-in-hand with a recognition that future growth potential will be unable to justify such taking out such debt in the present; it's not wholly about bringing shadow banking into the light
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Sep 16, 2021 15:31
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no hay camino posted:If China wanted to be properly socialist they would remove housing from being considered private property altogether; if that led to more investment in foreign real estate by Chinese citizens well that'd be the capitalist countries' problem to deal with. for Beijing, the politics of really enforcing a 70 year lease on residential land turned out to be too much years ago: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/china_law_prof_blog/2017/04/full-private-land-ownership-returns-to-chinas-cities.html Hong Kong also blinked - in 2006 it conceded that it would not really enforce the 70-year leases after all, with the renewal of Pokfulam Gardens (notably, Singapore did not and doubled down on the notion that the land will return to the state) ronya fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 16, 2021 16:02
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Damned if you do, damned if you don't:quote:Analysts expect more local governments in the third and fourth tier cities to also intervene and stop the discount gimmicks. why yes, Mr. Li, that would be the point.
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Sep 22, 2021 11:28
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it seems silly to divorce the restrictions with the simultaneous campaign to purge video game content of 'wrong values' it's not a campaign pursued in isolation, any more than the Soviet war on stilyagi culture was really about alcoholism it is early to draw definitive conclusions - like many Chinese campaigns, the details will be in the execution and it is heavily devolved to the departments and provinces to interpret the center's will. Invariably a couple will overstep, be nudged back, and only then will we actually learn what the intent has been
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Sep 23, 2021 13:44
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apropos of nothing, a narrative I found fascinating:quote:China: Walking The Tight Rope (the rest of the essay is interesting also, but maybe more commonly put forth)
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Sep 23, 2021 17:53
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There's plenty of precedent for socialism(s) across the twentieth century to wage moral betterment campaigns amongst the public. 1920s New Soviet Man/Woman campaigns are an endless font of hilarity  (Boym's Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, pp35-36. This was before the Great Purge and its breathless sycophancy set in. Komsomol Truth was the official paper of the CPSU's youth movement) Prohibitionisms on jazz, coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, being fat, being dirty, being unwashed, etc. Every prejudice of a turn-of-the-century progressive intellectual readily recast as actually anti-bourgeois and anti-elitist revolutionary self-improvement - good for you, and good for Socialism! and then there's the postwar 50s-70s reaction against the new decadently bourgeois exports of counterculture, rock music, jeans, etc. or likewise the pointless consumerisms of washing machines, new cars, etc. Contemporary CCP agonizings about the moral decay of easy household debt would hardly look out of place in an old Bevanite Labour pamphlet out of the 1950s (I feel that there's a tendency of modern Very Online left-wing discourse to whitewash past leftisms into formulations that our left-wing politics a century later would approve of - cherrypicking irrelevant tendencies or intelligentsia experiments as predecessors of an teleological triumph of the New Left, and then the New New Left of today, in a line of unbroken intellectual descent. Which is really too bad, and we can see why in this thread - folks struggle to locate what is (in historic comparison) a relatively light-touch campaign on a new medium of mass-media cultural content - as Phigs says, merely one of an ebb and flow that has gone on for decades; not merely in post-revolutionary China but in every socialist discourse. Contemporary Western socialist discourse is inveterately neoliberalized and inherits its priorities on cultural engineering but that is hardly a universal.)
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Sep 26, 2021 08:46
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Guavanaut posted:And yet very prescient on the matter of funko pops. 
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Sep 26, 2021 10:11
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:I think the CCP also just prefers modernism. The whole mode of expression feels very modernist. Honestly, PLA military propaganda feels like the Allies in World War II. I think this can seem really strange or "backwards" or conservative (although it might be that) though from the perspective of a very postmodern online left in Europe or North America. If you read old copies of the Daily Worker in the 1920s, they would begin an article about Bela Kun describing him as the "heroic champion of the proletariat." Honestly, the only people in America that seem to embody this spirit today are some Black Lives Matter activists chanting "we have a duty to fight for our freedom," because who else is talking about duty? I feel that conflates some distinctions of degree... the heroic style in Soviet reporting receded from fashion post-destalinization - IIRC one can compare late Soviet Chernobyl-era reporting for a more somber style even despite a similar "rally around the flag" national mood absent that (relatively extreme) degree of exhortation, some level of state-organized celebrations of military and civic accomplishments can arguably be put down to domestic tradition. A hypothetical liberal China would probably still put on some military parades. For example, here is India: https://twitter.com/prodefgau/status/1353211432146501632 (I love that coronavirus vaccine float) or Taiwan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O9HyaHZucE or France:  FWIW, that said, I fully agree that there is a change in the aesthetic of the Western left as it transitioned from the vanguardist (old) left to the New Left. Modernism against post-modernism, as you say. Not necessarily around parades and mass symbology as such, but over the concept of political decisions to shape popular and civic culture in "rational" directions, which the old left enthusiastically partook in but the new left regarded with more than a little suspicion. The twists of history being what they are, for whatever reason said very online Western left discourse has circled all the way back to feeling obliged to debate the CCP line in particular: we feel obliged to seriously weigh whether its cultural campaigns have some respectable left-wing basis. We don't extend this to any number of other notionally left-wing, developing-world parties! But: it's whether that basis is consistent with our own postmodernized, and additionally neoliberalized, notions of the good (e.g., notice the debate upthread pitches in terms of whether corporate influence is mitigated - we tacitly assume that, absent corporate influence, states shouldn't/wouldn't actively engage in cultural production, or at least we would politely collectively pretend that all of it is spontaneous grassroots acclamations - obviously this is not the tenor of the domestic debate in the pages of Xinhua. Would any major Chinese firm be consciously or even proudly non-Party and non-national? Hardly so). This is not the political context of the CCP, it's our reflection of our own political anxieties. ronya fucked around with this message at 08:18 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 07:07
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non-story there I think - english-language summary: http://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202109/27/content_WS61516ea9c6d0df57f98e0f0f.html - it's the announcement of the new ten year plan on women's policies and children's policies the full programme is here: http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/content/2021-09/27/content_5639412.htm quote:6．提高妇女生殖健康水平。普及生殖道感染、性传播疾病等疾病防控知识。在学校教育不同阶段以多种形式开展科学、实用的健康教育，促进学生掌握生殖健康知识，提高自我保护能力。增强男女两性性道德、性健康、性安全意识，倡导共担避孕责任。将生殖健康服务融入妇女健康管理全过程，保障妇女享有避孕节育知情自主选择权。落实基本避孕服务项目，加强产后和流产后避孕节育服务，提高服务可及性，预防非意愿妊娠。推进婚前医学检查、孕前优生健康检查、增补叶酸等婚前孕前保健服务更加公平可及。减少非医学需要的人工流产。加强对女性健康安全用品产品的质量保障。规范不孕不育症诊疗服务。规范人类辅助生殖技术应用。 gtranslate quote:6. Improve women's reproductive health. Popularize knowledge on the prevention and control of diseases such as reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases. Carry out scientific and practical health education in various forms at different stages of school education to promote students to master the knowledge of reproductive health and improve their self-protection ability. Enhance the awareness of sexual ethics, sexual health, and safety of both men and women, and advocate shared responsibility for contraception. Integrate reproductive health services into the whole process of women’s health management to ensure that women enjoy the informed and independent right to choose contraception and birth control. Implement basic contraceptive service projects, strengthen postpartum and post-abortion contraception and birth control services, improve service accessibility, and prevent unwanted pregnancy. The promotion of pre-marital medical examinations, pre-pregnancy health check-ups, and supplementation of folic acid, such as pre-marital pre-pregnancy health care services, will be more fair and accessible. Reduce non-medical abortion. Strengthen the quality assurance of women's health and safety products. Standardize infertility diagnosis and treatment services. Standardize the application of human assisted reproductive technology. but every ten year plan has likewise pledged to reduce the rate of induced abortions; that's not new. You can go back to the 2011 plan and the 2001 plans and see exactly the same thing there are new elements relating to ideological blather - e.g. now every item 1 on each list is related to Xi Jinping Thought on the New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and the technocratic quantitative targets are demoted to item five or six (this is concretely what commentators are referring to when they say that Xi is newly ideological). I'm not kidding here, item 1 on Women's Education is now political education, item 1 on Family Development is socialist core values, item 1 on Environmental Pollution is also socialist core values, etc. But from a quick scan through I don't see any specifically abortion related hot buttons (probably someone more familiar with contemporary debates in Chinese feminism could pick out some of the subtleties - but I certainly couldn't) ronya fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 16:41
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for comparison, the 2011 programme: http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2011-08/08/content_1920457.htm
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Sep 27, 2021 18:07
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I suppose we will know when documents from provincial health departments invariably leak. This news coverage seems consistent with that concern of a mood shifting against male contraception though speaking of leaks: this is making the internet rounds https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/671510.html quote:Editor’s note: This document was widely circulated on the Internet today by screenshots. It is said to be from the Beijing game industry content management training course. Described). Among them, the main speech of Chen Zhenyu, a review expert of the General Administration (also said to be a senior industry insider), involved a large number of game review case studies, revealing many transparent/opaque operating standards for game review in China. Against the background that the official previously referred to online games/mobile games as "mental opium" and introduced the most stringent "anti-addiction regulations" in history, the document also revealed the prospects for China's increasingly stringent game review. ... the document does suggest a stridently anti-lgbt-content position as the foreseeable future still, rumours, take with salt ronya fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Sep 30, 2021 |
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Sep 30, 2021 20:09
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中国共产党 is literally 中国 China 共产 Communist 党 Party in that order exactly, fwiw. So English-language sources tend to use "CCP". Second world practice dating back to the internationals is "CPC" however. It's true that Chinese government and party publications can found using either abbreviation there's a funny similarity here to the ancient acrimony over whether Parti Communiste Français should be abbreviated in English as PCF (generally preferred by those friendlier or neutral to the party), or as CPF (preferred by those wishing to imply comradely loyalty to international communism/blind obedience to Stalinism, take your pick). My sense is that the CCP/CPC itself doesn't have a strong view
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Oct 3, 2021 06:40
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so how about that Fantasia default huh the PRC seems to be in a relatively historically unprecedented situation of 1) having a lot of problematic dollar-denominated debt, but 2) it's not a foreign exchange crisis, and 3) it's not foreign debt either but overwhelmingly domestic holders of dollar-denominated debt. So whatever Blinken says, the prospect of selective default on foreign bondholders is not really on the table either
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Oct 7, 2021 06:34
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USDCNY has remained basically stable since the start of 2021, I don't know if you have something else in mind anyway PRC domestic investors are mostly domestic state governments and state banks so certainly the PRC government has to care! insofar as the tide of real estate investment was predicated on growth that is now acknowledged to not materialize in the future, someone is going to have to eat losses; the only question is who https://twitter.com/EliDFriedman/status/1444038030449332226?s=20 ronya fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 07:13
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