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The thing that worries me most about the autocracy in China is that all of these Orwellian measures would actually work and then would be pointed out as an exam

• seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  China doesn’t have a very powerful central state, local governments have lots of power and often act out of sight from Beijing. This actually leads to more abuses of the system, however.
  • MrLeap 9y ago
    More decentralization leads to more abuses, yes -- but they tend to be of lower magnitude per event. Positions of power tend to attract abusers. Human nature seems to favor consolidation of hierarchies. China is just on a different part of the power cycle than the US. We're at the egalitarian everyone-is-the-same period of the cycle, and people abuse this state of affairs via a variety of ways. China is at the we-must-stymie-abusers stage, and abusers use that to abuse and stymie innocent people. Notice how both systems fail to stop abuse, they just move the dial between magnitude and frequency? What allows abuse is bad actors cloaking their activities behind the information asynchrony of a system. Transparency and holding leadership to account seems to be the best way to slow down the corruption of any system. That's why it should be easier for Americans indict police officers, and harder for a Chinese PM term limits. Those aren't the only issues in either country, but they should be pretty obviously problems to most people. It's interesting how every wedge issue seems to follow the same pattern. Take a binary choice that society should probably make -- and draw your trench diagonally from top left to bottom right so that both sides make both decisions just in different magnitudes. Leaves people angry, ideologically confused and nothing is ever resolved.
    • tsbertalan 9y ago
      Could you elaborate on your top-left/bottom-right portrait please?
      • MrLeap 9y ago
        I'll sure try! Here's a picture of what I was visualizing, but explaining why it matters will take some words: https://imgur.com/a/MggDJ https://imgur.com/a/MggDJ I chose weird colors deliberately. The diagonal line represents policy, or the wedge. In reality it's not always a straight line. Stymieing bad people is what happens in the left square, empowering good people in the right square. (This left / right correlation with real world political parties is a coincidence. Liberals are often arguing positions to empower good people when conservatives opposition hinges on a claim that they're stymieing bad people, just for different policies (gay rights, abortion and marijuana come to mind). But for a real world example, The Stoneman Douglas school shooting occurs: Side1: Restrict gun purchases. Side2: Give teachers guns. Here's how I look at this in the context of the portrait. Pink represents keeping guns from bad people, the orange side represents good people having access to have guns. Right down the middle is an aspirational fantasy world where bad people have zero guns and all good people can have all the guns they want. A vertical line on the far right side represents everyone having unrestricted access to every kind of weapon, a vertical line on the far left side represents no one having any weapons at all. Both sides of the wedge, as it is today, prevents some good people from having access to some weapons and allow a some bad people to have access to some weapons. Flatly restricting guns marginally will marginally reduce the access to guns for both good and bad people. Giving teachers guns will give guns to both good and bad people (some bad people are teachers!). That in particular is a horrible idea, I bet we'd go < 5 years before a teacher shoots a student. Just stupid. The fact is, finding out who among us is evil is a battle that we've waged for all of human history. We get better at it and they get better at hiding among us. Evil people, undetected, can do evil with any policy on the graph. If society were to engage in a "moon shot" for advancing our ability to suss out the evil among us, an evil person would almost inevitably misclassify innocent people. It's a really tough problem, but we should probably keep at it. Responding to the school shooting directly: Appeals to authorities were ignored. Are there enough spurious reports to authorities to justify this? School resource officers were hired to mitigate this situation after columbine, here that mitigation failed completely. Do they need more training, better access to intel? (IE: real time info on shooter movement inside schools, etc.) Those kinds of questions might be asked, but it's all too easy to derail information gathering and honest discussion by tacking on Side1 or Side2's reactions to it with glue of "and that's why we need to". What marks a good wedge issue is one where both sides blatantly ignore nuance, and whose solutions have broad collateral damage. The collatoral damage to each opinion should be abhorrent to the other side, and uncomfortable but ignorable to your side. Another interesting thing that really flummoxes American society are gradients that get transformed into binary policy arguments. Arguments over abortion, healthcare, capital punishment, social security, welfare, civil rights and unions represent the neural network of human society trying to figure out "How much is a human life worth?" The societal instinct is to say "priceless!" and smartly so, because to admit otherwise IMMEDIATELY creates very bizarre side effects. The abortion debate is basically arguing whether (m1 * mother > m2 * child). We try to argue about what m1 is and what m2 (life begins at ?!?!), and pretend that mother and child are both weighted to infinity. Going to stop ranting before I accidentally write a book. Hopefully you found this interesting.
• lainga 9y ago
  I'd say it's more an extreme reading into the Confucian ideals of social harmony and fraternity: the State (or Emperor) is the head of the country, and its families, as a father is the head of his own family. Although I may be finding too many parallels with prewar Japan.
• woolvalley 9y ago
  You can also bring up japan as a counter-example. It's even safer and cleaner & it's still a democracy!
  • moufestaphio 9y ago
    Japan has a pretty long history of autocratic rulership.. And has only really had once party in power throughout the history of its democracy (like 3 years or so without): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japa... Not sure its the best counter example
    • nothis 9y ago
      > Japan has a pretty long history of autocratic rulership.. So has all of Europe, though.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    • glenstein 9y ago
      >Japan has a pretty long history of autocratic rulership.. What does any of that have to do with Japan as of 2018? Unless you are arguing that their clean streets and robust infrastructure was some sort of lingering effect of an emperor from 2000 years ago, and not due to post WW2 liberal democratic reforms, this has nothing to do with anything.
  • mrhappyunhappy 9y ago
    It's why I live here.
• jrs95 9y ago
  It's a much bigger risk that the developing world will look to the Chinese model as an inspiration IMO
  • pishpash 9y ago
    A way of life worthy of living is not afraid of an alternative's existence.
    • jrs95 9y ago
      This isn't even an argument, it's more like an inspirational quote my grandma would share on Facebook
• hosh 9y ago
  Political systems were deeply integrated with philosophical and religious streams, all braided together for at least several thousand years. As I mentioned elsewhere, this system is not new or novel in concept. Confucian ideals see people as animals on their way to being human. The cultivation of the "superior person" requires education and much socialization. This isn't what people in America should be concerned about. China was at several point, a dominant power. I think a lot of people forget this. It was in the middle of the Ming dynasty, for various reasons, started turning inwards -- making major extensions of the Great Wall, recalling expedition fleets ... much like America is doing today. The West may remember China as a third-world country or a target too weak to resist colonization, but the Chinese remember when various regions such as modern-day Vietnam, Okinawa and Korea were vassal states (have you ever seen any Korean historical drama? So much resentment related to that). Chinese as a whole don't feel themselves to be culturally inferior, yet the Western views of China seem to subconsciously think of the Chinese culture that way. This blind spot seems to miss something that China is doing right now: the Chinese are making a bid to be the next superpower, either as America's peer, or supplanting America in that role. This includes things anywhere from adding Chinese-flavored events to the Olympics; Extending funds and industrialization to Africa; building a rail net that not only ties China internally together, but also extend reach and influence across the Asian and European continents; heavy investment into technologies such as AI, quantum tunneling, in-house chip designs, life sciences, much through luring back Western-educated people with advanced degrees whose student visas have expired; developing military capabilities -- traditional force multipliers such as refurbishing an old Soviet-era aircraft carrier to increasing asymmetric capabilities such as developing drone carriers (the Chinese produced a Sun-Tzu, after all); attempts to break American influence on oil by creating a new reserve currency for trading crude. Much of this is being funded by the money being spent by American consumers. (And the Chinese had already learned the lesson of becoming insular). The Chinese don't come across as complacent, though I often get that sense of complacency from the Western perspective. It is this culture that is making a bid as a superpower to influence the rest of the world into doing things the "Chinese Way".
  • pm90 9y ago
    > The Chinese don't come across as complacent, though I often get that sense of complacency from the Western perspective. No they aren't, by any means. The autocracy seems to be a serious problem, but just the rate of growth and the clear determination and dedication to progress is breathtaking. There is also something refreshing about a culture that isn't mired in stupid questions about abortion, contraception, vaccination and climate change. i.e. a culture that actually believes in the scientific method (or at least appears to be from its actions). I don't know if this is a consequence of state censorship or what though.
• zxcb1 9y ago
  Also, consider the possibility that the underlying trade off is between societal coordination and efficiency vs liberties and wellbeing. Adding to “safe” also economic incentives to erode democracy with its less efficient liberties. In a similar way, corporations are more efficient than governments.
• posterboy 9y ago
  yet I recently read that corruption is rampant in some parts of the huge country. It's hardly centralized nor evenly distributed.