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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

Rule by law, not rule of law. Once you understand the difference between these two concepts, you'll understand China a bit better.

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Rule of (arbitrary and capricious) man vs. rule of law is a similar distinction

That's not a particularly clear distinction, care to expand / unpack?

hazarding a guess, i expect he's saying rule by a privileged group using law as a tool, versus the (ideal) western conception of the rule of law, as a framework that everyone must operate within, equally subject and evenly applied

Thanks, that helps.

"Rule by law" is the use of law to control the people. You use laws as convenient to punish your enemies, but aren't particularly interested in enforcing laws fairly. It becomes more of the default whenever there is no independent judiciary to interpret the law, or an independent media to make sure the government stays honest.

"Rule of law" is the aspiration that we are used to in the west (fair application of the law, everyone is subject to the law, etc...). It isn't perfect, we often exist in between the two extremes, but our systems are set up to at least aspire to it, while the Chinese system self admittedly depends solely on the wisdom and benevolence of a singular ruling class (in this case, the top-down CPC).

With over a billion people in the country, the highest levels of leadership can't easily stop the kind of corruption that most businesses are victimized by: Extortion by local officials. It's like, they walk in to your factory, claim your fire extinguishers are not regulation, and demand that you buy a dozen of them from their friend and no one else, and it's going to cost you 50,000 RMB ($7k USD). And if you don't go and get them, right now, then they're taking the keys to your factory, kicking out all the employees (who you will still have to pay) and not letting anyone back in until you do. And it has to be cash. And no, you're not getting a receipt.

Or it will be things like, you order something, it's not delivered even close to spec, and the corrupt police make you pay for it anyway or else. Contracts are utterly meaningless. And of course this only starts happening when you start making money. And they'll know you're making money because the locals around you are definitely ratting you out and quite possibly in on it.

You need to have the right friends to avoid this, and those kind of friends cost money.

Our systems aren't perfect, but it's rare we have to put up with shit like that.

Still, I like it here. The cost of living is reasonable, the weather is good, it's a big city with lots of entertainment, and a lot of people are here doing stuff. Being right next to Hong Kong is also a big plus. Biggest downside is how bad the internet sucks.

Can I ask what you mean about the internet sucking? Is it censorship, quality of sites, or speed and reliability of service?

Everything is censored. You have to tunnel pretty much everything. Massive packet loss is par for the course. You can't have a routable address. You can't just fire up a VM in minutes, you can't even have a VM without a registered company with a license to run a web server.

Things we take for granted like attaching a 2mb file to an email or a simple Google search can take several minutes to accomplish.

Reddit, hackernews, quora aren't censored.

Correct. It's not everything, but it's a lot, and a lot of things that aren't censored load subresoures from things that are, so they're half broken without a VPN anyway.

And really.. having to wait 6 minutes just to attach an invoice to an email is infuriating, more so when it fails and you have to try again.

And don't even get me started on all the time wasted switching between various VPN endpoints and protocols to find the one that sucks the least in that moment.

I never bothered with vpns and just accepted that I could only use those sites at work on our corporate internet. Weird, I worked at MS and would use Bing at home, but I would use google at work because it was the only place I could use it (well, after it was blocked).

And actually, youku isn't that bad for video once figure out how to navigate it. Xiami for streaming music was also very effective. Still annoying, but I dealt.

This may or may not be true in some places in China at the moment you posted, who knows. But the internet in China is comprehensively sabotaged.

Oh, after living in china I know. Weird thing is, when I arrived in 2007 almost nothing was blocked. But after the 2008 olympics, they decided they didn't need to pretend to be open anymore. What's even weirder is that when I lived in china previously in 2002, CNN was blocked and nytimes wasn't. Now it's the other way around.

> Our systems aren't perfect, but it's rare we have to put up with shit like that.

I'd love to see a breakdown of the US economy, sketching which rules apply where. Including gray and black markets.

When a couple of Boston-NYC gray bus operators went legit, incumbent Greyhound fought them in various ways, including leveraging corruption in federal law enforcement. The sole battered survivor had to hire a DC lobbyist.

SpaceX is massively disrupting a large mature industry, while doing no defensive patenting at all. Apparently relying entirely on something like "you don't piss off US Senators and DoD".

There's a lot of fascinating texture to how the US economy is structured, but I've never seen a broadly scoped and roughly quantitative sketch.

SpaceX patenting ITAR-covered technology is a landmine of problems.

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