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Comment by not_a_moth | Hacker News Reader

Given that Jack Ma has been a member of the CCP since the 80s [1] I think his success has come a lot easier than Western entrepreneurs

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/27/alibabas-jack-ma-has-been-co...

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Does it really matters, i mean US industrial/tech giants all donate to the parties to get some advantage nationally and globally? Should we be questioning western CEO political affiliations and donations when talking about their companies?

> Should we be questioning western CEO political affiliations and donations when talking about their companies?

Absolutely. Political affiliations speak to the philosophy of the CEO and, by proxy, how they'll lead their company. E.g. Palantir is behaving exactly as expected given Peter Thiel's politics.

What's that actually mean? Does he even have a choice to not be a member? What are the chances this is rewritten history for PR?

I read in a book about China by New Yorker magazines China expert [1] and he said that up to a third of Chinese citizens are either party members, part of youth groups, or work directly for a CCP owned company.

So it’s not everyone but it’s a lot. The actual CCP membership itself is much lower though. It’s more like an octopus in their society.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Ambition-Chasing-Fortune-Truth/dp...

But I guess it's very different for people that have some power like CEOs. I doubt there is a CEO that is not in the CCP.

The article mentioned that Tencent and Baidu CEOs are not CCP party members. It's not a big deal, one way or the other. Journalist and internet pundits simply like to play it up. Most of us don't understand much of the workings of the CCP, partly due to deliberate intransparency partly due to the language barrier. So it's fertile ground for all kinds of baseless speculation.

Even without language barrier, I think most of it is just the nature of politics and holding positions of power. It's not like many of us have a very good understanding of the inner workings of the higher cadres in the (D) and (R) parties, or of the leadership teams / boardrooms of large companies either.

It doesn't mean much more than that some American CEO is a member of the (R) or (D) party. The CCP has 90 million members, it's not some hugely exclusionary club, though relatively speaking a bit more exclusionary than the (R) and (D) party in the US with respectively 33M and 45M members.

As mentioned in the article, the CEOs of the other tech giants Tencent and Baidu are not members. It's simply not a huge deal one way or the other.

Democrats and Republicans can't limit their membership at all.

Not only that, but there isn't even a singular party of democrats or repulicans. Every state has its own party for each.

People can decide which party they are in and the party itself has no say in the matter.

Being a party member was a pre-requisite for becoming a schoolteacher back then, and it seems China is well set to returns to this madness yet again.

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