it's amazing how people were able to delude themselves for so long, Tiananmen should have been enough to make people and governments realize things weren't going to change
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/east/09/18/china....
See Clinton's Mar 2000 speech:
> "By joining the W.T.O., China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products; it is agreeing to import one of democracy's most cherished values: economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say."
Of course it was all nonsense, Clinton and Bush were just listening to Wall Street interests who saw massive profits in moving US manufacturing overseas to cheap labor zones. (Importing cheap labor to do jobs that couldn't be outsourced, in agriculture, construction, etc. was the other side of that coin).
I'm not a fan of either Clinton or Bush, but this is unfair. There was far more going on.
At the time, there was a strong sense that democracy had won, and that it was inevitable. That empowering people economically would eventually, without fail, lead to democratic reform. Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man" is one of the most influential books of the period.
But, Fukuyama and people like him (Reagan, necons, Bush, Clinton, etc.) turned out to be fatally wrong. They created an incredibly unequal world that has eroded democracy to the point where we can seriously discuss a US that isn't a democracy anymore in our lifetimes.
You should read the book. It's an interesting case of someone who originally set out to help people, but who created a hellscape instead.
Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Net result was drastically increasing inequality, and a political system with cradle-to-grave capture of politicians by the 1% (or 10% or whatever), using their increased wealth to fund political campaigns, lobbying of those politicians while in office, and to provide cushy revolving door jobs and board memberships when politicians leave office.
Many politicans of one of the two major parties are denying the result of an election. Prominent members are calling for "Democrats" to be forbidden to vote when moving state (without protest from others). An let's not even talk about the whole constitutional convention movement. There are many politicians in the US who only pay lipservice to democracy.
> Could you elaborate? I find this too much of a stretch to think about and am not knowledgeable enough on the topic
Until the 1970s and 1980s we lived in a totally different world. Taxes on the rich were high. Productivity gains were shared with workers whose wages went up. After the 1980s (Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher, Fukuyama, and more broadly neocons) everything changed.
It's incredibly striking, you can see it even is basic graphs.
The share of wages as percentage of GDP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2KkM Until the 1970s it was pretty stable, then you have a steep downward trend. The capital class who owns things, now that they had many fewer regulations and didn't need to pay taxes, they decided to keep far more of the wealth for themselves.
This is also what gives rise to this famous graph https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/dropzone/2016/10/unn... The gap between labor productivity and labor compensation.
Or just look at a graph of who owns what https://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1415721490539/Wealth_line-chart... You can see it clearly, in the 80s the top 0.1% take off and the bottom 90% of people start to lose.
Even our language clearly shows what's going on. Look at when the term "Rust belt" became a thing: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Rust+belt&year...
Companies in 2022 spent nearly $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Those were illegal until 1982! That money would have gone to workers, instead, it's going to owners.
There's also been a huge shift in competition. Instead of competing with one another, companies now consolidate. This used to be a very rare event, now, in most industries we have only a few big players that absorb everyone else. That's a direct consequence of deregulation, not enforcing antitrust laws, and giving money to capital instead of people. https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-wyvntk8Krq0/WQdL-4X-WjI/AAAAAAAAI...
Guess why Trump talks about Making America Great Again? People have a collective memory of a time when wages were going up and when there was optimism about the American Dream.
The crisis we're seeing in the US today is all about these charts and this timing; it's really striking how the 80s are the focal point for all of the problems that people talk about today. People are hurting now, their wealth is sapped, their wages aren't going anywhere, they have little security left. They feel like they have no future and that their children't won't have a future. Not to mention that large parts of the country are deindustrialized.
It's really sad that instead of turning to organized labor, like we saw in the 19th century, these people are mostly turning to the exact people who marginalized them in the first place (conservatives, Republicans and large businesses).
I don't believe the conversion of the industrial manufacturing heartland of the United States to a region now called 'The Rust Belt' was accidental or unplanned. Nor was the destruction of much of the West Coast garment and electronics manufacturing industries.
This has been a deliberately planned policy with a known outcome by its architects, and it's been going on for about four decades. See for example:
https://www.epi.org/blog/nafta-twenty-years-disaster/
> "By any measure, NAFTA and its sequels has been a major contributor to the rising inequality of incomes and wealth that Barack Obama bemoans in his speeches. Yet today—channeling Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton—the president proposes two more such trade deals: the Trans-Pacific Partnership with eleven Pacific Rim countries and a free trade agreement with Europe."
From your link:
> The surplus with Mexico turned into a chronic deficit. And the economic dislocation in Mexico increased the the flow of undocumented workers into the United States.
So they're saying that jobs moving from the USA to Mexico increased the flow of Mexican workers to the USA? That makes no sense at all.
The neoliberal project in a nutshell involved the outsourcing of unionized well-paid domestic manufacturing jobs overseas, on one hand, and the import of cheap expat labor to fill jobs that couldn't be moved offshore, driving down labor costs and creating hundreds of new billionaires, who used their money to buy more politicians to lock in the programs and prevent any change.
I mean that did happen. It's just that it wasnt for seen that it could be snapped back so violently.
China is still definitely more liberalized than it was in, say, 1980, even if it apexed in 2016 (with a long way to go) and retrenched itself since then.
This wasn't autocracy, this was logical health policy: Do you overwhelm hospitals, potentially causing them to fail, or do you limit personal freedom? That's the question that they had to answer.
China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
Except, the choice was nowhere as binary as you present and/or perceive it. If you look across the world you will see many different responses to the very same problem, but with different answers based on political, cultural, etc. differences.
I kept and keep hearing the usual responses as to why the PRC had to respond in a highly authoritarian manner: the citizens can not handle freedom as they are morally weak. This may be true, but is it not awfully convenient that this always leads to the answer being politically empowering the CCP? Cui bono?
And you didn't see a "many different responses" -- you saw 1: Lockdowns. The whole world did them. Where they didn't do them, hospitals got trashed and lots of people died.
Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that you did. Merely that this is the usual response I hear from those supporting the PRC position.
> Lockdowns ended when vaccines began, China never got that option, because its population didn't take up any of the vaccines to a high enough percentage. Also, there was never enough mRNA vaccines available to supply the whole world + china, until recently (maybe still not even now).
So, why did the PRC population not vaccinate? Could the government not mandate vaccines? If so, why not? Could it not better educate the population? Was the path via Sinovac the only option? Fosun International in Shanghai [1] had a license to produce Comirnaty as early as 2020 [2] for example. These are just a few decisions that could have been made differently and yet were not.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosun_International
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer%E2%80%93BioNTech_COVID%...
I am not claiming to have answers here as for there being a better path through this chaos. However, I do want a healthy debate about the decisions and outcomes; I simply am not buying how you (and Beijing) are largely portraying the decisions as inevitable.
> It 100% was as binary as I present it. Italy, UK, Canada, US, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Korea... the list goes on: They all did lockdowns to some degree to slow spread, and help their hospitals. It had nothing to do with culture or politics... except in the US.
I strongly disagree. While I am not a scientist in this area, I am very familiar with the great differences between say the UK, Japanese, and Swedish responses for the people on the ground. Debating excess deaths, efficiency, economic impact etc. is something that I will leave for better scientists to iron out over the years to come, but it is inarguable that the responses (and outcomes) were far more nuanced than you describe them. This – to me – is enough to solidify my position that the whole “There was no other option”, which is commonplace for governments worldwide, is a load of hogwash in this case as much as it has always been.
Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
Okay…? How does this address my question about alternative vaccines? Including the fact that the PRC had a local company with an mRNA vaccine license? Was there scientific reasons for this? Lack of industrial ability and know-how? National pride?
Again, I do not have answers for these questions. But I keep being told that the government in Beijing is competent and that its actions were inevitable. To me, it stinks to high heaven and I believe mistakes were made (just like most governments did during the pandemic, like Boris Johnson stating that the NHS was well prepared in January 2020), but that there is an unwillingness to admit this and we get platitudes like “they had no choice”.
> Despite what you may have read Sweden also limited people’s movement and gathering and did localised lockdowns.
And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC? A cat and a lion both qualify as “cats” (felidae), but if you tell me I will share my room with a cat and I end up with a lion I think you will agree that I have both a right to complain and be somewhat surprised. Sweden to the best of my knowledge had government recommendations issued (at least I know that this was the case in Japan), with no criminal prosecution in the case of breaches. Are you really in good faith arguing that what we saw in the PRC was in any way comparable?
> What other technique do you think is available to stop a contagion spreading? You limit people’s proximity or their susceptibility … that’s it. That’s the whole tool belt, you don’t need to be an expert, just intuitively it’s easy to understand.
No, I do not believe that the set of tools is as limited as you seem to believe and nor do I believe that you have showed this to be the case. On the contrary, the range of approaches we saw across the world over the last three years speaks in my favour.
There is not enough of them. Even the local license doesn't mean china can suddenly manufacture 1 billion doses every 12 weeks.
> And were any of these actions even remotely like what we saw in the PRC?
Which country has remotely the kind of population and living density of china? India? Good example of what happens if you don't do what china did: Everyone gets sick, and hospitals fall over.
> No, I do not believe that the set of tools.
It was a question. What other tools do you think there were/are? Where did a country reduce burden on hospitals without either limiting human movement (lockdowns) or vaccinating the population (vaccines)?
This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
Hogwash! I and many others have repeatedly pointed out to you that there was a spectrum of measures with and without legal consequences. Recommendations, lockdowns, police patrols, enforcing mask wearing, not enforcing mask wearing, closed borders, open borders, work from home, not work from home, closing restaurants early, etc. The list goes on and on and on. If you go back and read what I have written and open your mind somewhat, you will see that what I am objecting to is the perspective that Beijing had no other choice than going with what was arguably the harshest policies we have seen across the globe.
I doubly know that your facts about the world are faulty as I stayed in Japan throughout the pandemic and Japan arguably weathered it without any legal mandate at all and “only” closed borders. Now, you can argue that the PRC is not in any way akin to Japan in terms of its readiness, culture, political structure, etc. and that they had to use the policies they did based on those conditions. This is fine and I wrote as much in my very first reply to you (go ahead, read it again). Yet you have never engaged with this idea and simply gone off on tangents about “everyone did the same…”, etc. Which to me is supremely lazy thinking.
> This whole thread is standard anti-China rhetoric. It refuses to acknowledge the facts of the situation and prefers to go with the narrative of CCP are dumb and evil.
Hogwash – again! How about reflecting on your own behaviour and that you now paint me (a person you know next to nothing about) as soaked in anti-PRC rhetoric? Is it not conceivable that you are talking to a fellow human being that is trying to remain objective, while you instead carry somewhat of a PRC persecution complex?
I have a reasonably deep personal relationship with a number of PRC nationals and I would like to believe that this gives some nuance to my perspective as I know of their experiences throughout the pandemic. Likewise, have I ever argued for “dumb” or “evil”? No, I have argued that mistakes likely were made and things could have been done differently. Again, go back and read what I wrote and try to imagine that I am not some sort of “Western agent”. My perspective is very simple. I think that Beijing messed up, just like every other government. However, I know of no other government that is currently being able to shield itself with “we had no other option” in the way that they are and I think that is a load of crap. The PRC citizens as fellow human beings deserve better than this and thus I am countering this silly rhetoric whenever I see it.
> I don’t assume bad faith, I assume a kind of indoctrination of western group think. To have Americans (a large portion of folks replying here) look down their nose at chinas response while their own country had one of the highest deaths/capita is brainwash territory to me.
Maybe your indoctrination assumption is wrong? Also – spoiler – I am not an American and likewise certainly not defending any government as having the high ground. You remind me of how perplexed PRC nationals are when they have conversations with me and nod along as I criticise the historical and current hypocrisy of “Western” governments, only to somehow be surprised when I have another salvo ready for Beijing. Seemingly the complexity of the world allows there to be far more than simple binary positions and national cheerleading – funny that…
But what you describe is still a lockdown, yes Japan could lower their spread without strict mandates. But it still told everyone to effectively stay inside.
This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
Maybe my indoctrination assumption is wrong. True, you’ve at least explained your own thinking. But it’s super clear others are just spouting crap. For instance anyone with any intellectual honesty would not refer to “Chinese Lockdowns” as a single things. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and their respective regions had massively different approaches to lockdowns. So when someone says “China did it wrong” - I know they are talking crap. It is equivalent saying “America did it wrong” as if Texas, New York and California all did exactly the same thing. So while you do want to take the high morale “fellow human being” ground… You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
Okay…? So you claim that you were unaware of these things prior to me stating them? Yet you argued that there was near global homogeneity in terms of responses? Grouping together Singapore, Japan, the UK, etc. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I expect people in a discussion to do their own homework for their own basic facts.
> This whole thread is anti China. You said yourself, all the countries mucked up in some way, I was pointing out they didn’t do anything that different to any other country. There was/is a harshness to some of the lockdowns in particular cities in China, but overall their response was not dissimilar to the rest of the world.
I am just going to have to disagree with you on this.
> You still grouped up China as if it is one homogeneous thing, run by a single homogeneous government… it’s not… if any of that is surprising to you, then maybe my indoctrination assumption is not that wrong.
Pardon my French, but sod off. That is a low blow and putting words in my mouth and ascribing thoughts to my brain. Your holiness did not mention any diversity in terms of PRC responses until this very response; speaking about the PRC (and US for that matter…) as a single entity yourself. If I see your username in the future and remember this discussion, I will refrain from wasting my time with someone that throws ad hominem like that. You disappoint me deeply on a human level.
You are right that there is plenty of anti-PRC propaganda going around and people parroting it: screw them. However, you seem to me to be either a PRC-apologist or a good old anti-“West” propagandist and frankly I care just as little for these delusions and flavour of propaganda as I do for the anti-PRC one.
You shouldn’t be disappointed in people challenging your ideas. It’s the ideas I’m challenging, I’m sure you’re a great person. Even if we disagree on some subjects.
So no it wasn't comparable.
You wouldn't be at an amusement park and all of a sudden be forced to stay for hours so that everyone could be tested before you could leave. That definitely didn't happen... except in China. Neither would be left to rot to death without food and yet still not be able to go to a local supermarket because of "lockdown". Not the same.
Melbourne, 100% did lock people in their apartments, they didn't used welders, just Police, Guns, and force. They also required mass PCR tests, and had Quarantine Camps (though they used hotels).
I said they had lockdowns, they did not have extended lockdowns.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
Edit: I also reframed for your last comment
> China had the added complication of not having a vaccinated population. Partly due to them having too many people, partly due to their population being skeptical of "Western Medicine".
But since you're defending it. People in China prefer paid western vaccines over free local ones. The CCP refused to allow western vaccines to be used in China for COVID.
Melbourne did lockdowns for effectively 4 months, longer than any single Chinese lockdown. So even on that point you are incorrect. This isn’t misinformation.
It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK (for a variety of reasons). There is not enough of them, that’s the problem.
You claimed Singapore and Taiwan has 'extended' lockdowns. I called you out. Now you're back peddling and trying to justify your statement with "but but but melbourne, you didn't mention melbourne and they had long lockdown!!!"
> It didn’t refuse vaccines, you can get them in HK, and Chinese are free to travel to HK.
It does refuse, and clearly you're not from China or you're just lying because China didn't recognize citizens who returned home with vaccines that were not Chinese.
Not everyone is allowed to travel to HK.
So your statement is completely false.
No, I'm not from China, but that has little to do with any point I've made. Vaccines were never an option for Chinese, they had a locally made one that didn't work well enough, and they could have never secured the number required of mRNA. If it refused them, then how did HK get them?
Which statement that I've made is false?
You claim Singapore / Taiwan had extended lockdowns > This is false.
You claim China could never secure mRNA vaccines > This is false.
You claim Chinese are free to travel to HK (to get the vaccine) > This is false.
Taiwan locked down very early in all cases taking spread to zero and then blocked anyone entering the country. Similar to New Zealand. You don’t call that a lockdown?
Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
Chinese are free to travel to hk. There are exceptions of course. But the majority can visit (assuming they had the means) - but that wouldn’t change the fact that HK only had a few million doses so couldn’t possibly help on the mRNA front
Your point? Let's look at the difference.
In China when in lockdown, you cannot leave your apartment, period. There's no food delivery. You rely on the government to delivery food packages to you, if they aren't dumping it. You have daily covid testing, if you test positive you get taken away.
Singapore lockdown, leave home to buy food or see doctor, if you have elderly who are dependent on you, you may go visit them or take supplies to them. If you work in the food industry you can continue to work, including delivery drivers.
Taiwan lockdown, same as Singapore.
> Show me where 6 billion doses of mRNA are being produced every 12 weeks? Then I’ll believe China could have procured them.
I don't understand what part you do not get.
China > Refused > To > Allow > Western > Vaccines > From > Being > Used > In > China.
China had the facilities and rights to produce the Pfizer vaccine in China. It was not allowed to produced and used in China because China did not approve the vaccines for use.
They opted for their own home grown vaccine instead of a western one.
How hard is this to understand?
> Chinese are free to travel to hk.
No they were not allowed to freely travel to HK. There were exceptions for /some/ people to travel to HK.
And it doesn't matter if they go to HK and got an mRNA vaccine as China DID NOT RECOGNIZE IT and REQUIRED you to get THEIR vaccine. Even people in Singapore who needed to travel to China were required to get sinovac to go to China as their moderna / pfizer vaccine certs were not recognized.
You are describing lockdowns in “China” when you really mean Wuhans first lockdown, and Shanghai’s last lockdown. Guangzhou for instance was just like Singapores almost identical.
China does not require people to get the vaccine, that depends on local government policy not central government. Unless you are talking about international/returning people.
China invested in its own vaccine which was quicker and easier to keep and distribute (no cold requirement) it also turned out to be a failure. To re-pivot and set up manufacturing of mRNA that late would have been costly and still taken too long，leaving them with Covid0 as their only choice. I have seen no evidence they could have produced the required doses (initially 2 billion, and then ongoing 1 billion/quarter). If they had of tried purchasing it would likely significantly effect their economy… hard to know without understanding the pricing Pfizer were offering them.
lets Get into the real differences though:
Taiwan is an Island. Singapore is an island. The options available to you when you can effectively shutdown/control your borders lets you control people movement in a massively more effective way.
Let’s compare, somewhat comparable geographies:
- China
- Australia
- United States
Australia is a big island. So it could do a Taiwan and stop flights. But it still suffered an internal problem of people travelling between states. So what did they have to do? Super strict lockdowns.
United States also stopped flights (eventually). But its domestic and historic politics didn’t allow it to perform lockdowns nation wide, so instead it did localised ones, and spread was essentially uncontained. Lots of people died.
China suffered all the same things as the US, but could mandate lockdowns nationally. Bear in mind these lockdowns were implemented differently in every city. It saved millions of people, if the US lost 1 million with its half-assed lockdown, China would have lost more than 5 million people… insane that people are frowning at China here given their numbers were nothing close to that bad.
Was India's lack of lockdown, hospitals failing, people dying in the streets on mass "better" than a Chinese lockdown?
Things can still change.
It’s why and how things change that is interesting. In China things have changed because Xi and the Chinese communist party have chosen to change them in particular ways. It’s these choices and the consequences of them that we are discussing.
But Xi seems to care about Xi.
Instead Jiang / Hu had their own agendas including moving vast amounts of capital outside and also for themselves e.g. some of the largest VCs there. Some of Xi's policies e.g. restricting movement of capital has to do with this.
I think people like that are the reasons why the world isn't at peace. China could've become the next japan. They could've probably overtaken the US that way too. But now, they've "alerted" the eagle, and the US will never let china become a superpower.
It already is. To the less degree than the US for now. Could go either way in the future. But if you think that the US could go on forever dictating what other countries allowed to do I think you are wrong.
That was a decision that never should have been taken, due to the terrible risk of how things would turn out if it failed, as it did. This was possibly the most disastrous strategic blunder in America’s history. Like yanking defeat from the jaws of victory in the Cold War.
Maybe eventually it will, would just take long time. There are always ups and downs.
The core belief of the communist party is will to power - getting and keeping power by any means necessary. There is no balance of power, separation of powers, checks and balances, independent court system, separation of military from political party, constitutional review or law, individual human rights, etc. Hence the term totalitarian - total control of people’s behavior, speech, and even thought.
All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power. It is too deeply ingrained, too sticky so to speak, in communist party psyche and identity. Unlike SK and Taiwan it was never going to liberalize and discard itself in favor of democracy, an ideology directly counter to its core beliefs.
So east Germany, Germany and Italy (fascism), the Baltics, Czech, Slovakia, Moldova, Georgia (where Stalin came from), Romania (ciaucescu) etc. Have no hope of ever being democratic?
If we could go back in time and not economically prop up communism in China, and let it collapse the same as the Soviet Union, then I would anticipate a similar outcome there too. But you have to let communism collapse and become totally discredited in order to achieve that outcome.
There’s very little evidence that Leninism and its derivatives are any stickier than any other authoritarian system, and essentially all authoritarianism (and most non-authoritarian systems of government, too) appeals to some ideology for its justification (often local nationalism), so your attempt to divide the world of dictatorships into ideological and non-ideological dictatorships is flawed from the start.
> All of communist ideology is an elaborate justification and sophisticated plan for getting and keeping absolute and unrestricted power.
It’s…not. In fact, the part of Leninism that serves that purpose (vanguardism) is its key departure from Marxism, and notionally an adaptation of Marxist Communism to bypass the need for capitalist development as a prerequisite to the socialist stage.
And I don't consider nationalism an ideology, since it's never as philosophically developed as say communism or US liberal democracy. It's just a useful, easy, naturally occurring fallback for dictators looking for way to rally their population against the "other".
And you can argue till the cows come home about what Leninsim, Marxism, and Maoism are supposed to be, but what they actually become in reality is clear. Totalitarian.
Eh, it could have worked. Not that hu jiantao is a saint or anything but it's pretty clear that he was unhappy with the direction that china is going down and blindsided by what xi has unexpectedly turned in to.