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No, I don't think Xi and his friends are scared at all. That's almost like saying the US government is keeping a dozen carriers because it's scared of Russia (

• belval 6y ago
  While I strongly dislike authoritarian regimes and wish the CCP would just disappear. You have to admit that China in the last 20 years has been an absolute growth machine. I often see it argued that it's "fake" because the party subsidizes a lot of economic ventures, but even then they are building one hell of a domestic market. Trying not to do the apology of a terrible regime, but I can see why Xi would see himself as "leading China into an age of unprecedented glory".
  • thefounder 6y ago
    For what is worth many dicators had "golden" years. The issue is that at some point you get a bad dictator(or the current one turns bad) and you have to live with him your entire life. Not to mention that even within the golden period you still have freedoms taken away but that's a different story/trade off.
    • H8crilA 6y ago
      China's political system is nothing that a good old style capitalistic bust can't take out in a decade or so. The USSR never recovered from the inflationary late 70s. Japan's state-induced credit boom economy never recovered from the early 90s deflationary bust. Dictatorships/state controlled economies are still economies. As Hyman Minsky would agree - there's only one way to handle volatility, take it in your face. You can't suppress it.
    • belval 6y ago
      FWIW I really hope that you are right, a somewhat democratic and more collaborative China would be such a great partner to have, developing advanced tech and stimulating the fight against climate change. It's only a dream, but it could be so beautiful.
      • justicezyx 6y ago
        That’s Chinese people’s dream in 80s then a lot of things happened...
    • rendang 6y ago
      China isn't ultimately ruled by a dictator but by a party. You seem to think that the party would allow an incompetent person to assume the top position and stay there, which I don't see evidence for.
      • addicted 6y ago
        That was true until Xi Jinping removed term limits and ran his corruption campaign that imprisoned and beheaded his competition.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • thefounder 6y ago
        It looks like you don't understand how one party systems work. Just look at Trump and GOP and consider this is a democracy. Once he got the power the whole party(with few exceptions/undesirables that would be eliminated if it were a one party system) got behind him regardless if they liked him or his policies. There was bone to chew and they didn't want to loose it. If things go south there are plenty to blame(i.e China, Russia, EU, rebels, etc). It is never the leader to blame. As the party leader controlls the police and the millitary there are really very few that would dare to consider a coup/leader change. Even North Korea's Kim is "officially" supported by his party members but we already know what happens when they question him.
  • gruez 6y ago
    >You have to admit that China in the last 20 years has been an absolute growth machine. I often see it argued that it's "fake" because the party subsidizes a lot of economic ventures, but even then they are building one hell of a domestic market. It's not so much "they're pumping the numbers by cooking the books", it's more of the regime being at the right place at the right time. Other east asian countries industrialized at the same time without the CCP, for instance.
    • bllguo 6y ago
      this is disingenuous, the scale is incomparable. why is india behind china then, if all it took was time?
  • gentleman11 6y ago
    It’s a weak third world economy that is modernizing. Of course the growth is tremendous. The west (and Japan/Korea) went through this in the 19th and 20th centuries, this will happen all over the world this century across Africa and Asia. You can’t give too much credit for growth in comparison to the rest of the world when the backdrop is being behind. There are over a billion smart people to draw from, it’s just inevitable and draws from the strength of Chinese culture before mao suppressed it with the cultural revolution when schools were destroyed. This is in spite of the authoritarianism, and based on Hong Kong and Taiwan, would have happened decades ago without it
    • bserge 6y ago
      Case in point: Putin. Authoritarian but he simply fucked the whole country with his isolationist, antagonistic decisions.
  • heavyset_go 6y ago
    You can use this logic with Stalin and Lenin, too. They went from a agrarian feudal society to a world superpower, helping defeat the Nazis and being the first in spaceflight. Of course, you'd have to be wearing rose-colored glasses to take that portrayal at face value, and you'd also have to ignore significant atrocities the leaders were responsible for.
  • redisman 6y ago
    Chinas growth is mostly due to the handiwork and frameworks set out by Deng Xiaoping. It’s easy to look successful coming in when the long-term investments his admin made starts to sprout.
  • addicted 6y ago
    Not a lot of that could be credited to dictator for life Xi though. In fact, by making himself basically dictator in life he has added the potential for tremendous instability in Chinese politics that did not exist before he took those actions.
• mhh__ 6y ago
  Xi could be declaring war on sparrows though. China (Russia can't even entertain the dream of it any more) doesn't have a dozen carriers, it's a totally different side of the geopolitical scales. > Maybe Xi is a bit paranoid, but you don't become a lifelong dictator of a billion people by doubting yourself. It's worth citing Nixon as an example of someone who while maybe not doubtful of themselves but was utterly paranoid and belligerent towards any and all dissent and opposition, but still made to the very top of the world.
  • sudosysgen 6y ago
    China's military strategy against the US doesn't include aircraft carriers. That point is irrelevant, it's a question of doctrine.
• jhedwards 6y ago
  There is a long history of massive uprisings against the establishment in China. Tiananmen is just the most well known example of something that happens every year. I doubt Xi is ignorant enough to _not_ be afraid, though I agree with you that he probably is very confident as well. > Xi is clamping down on religion because he can My source may be dated, but as of 1988 policy making in China was a protracted, incremental process involving negotiation among numerous different groups (central and provincial governments, bureaus and departments)[0]. Things may be more centralized now, but I think it's safe to say that if something is happening in China, it's because multiple government entities at different levels have agreed to it. Who knows what the reason is. [0] Policy Making in China, Lieberthal 1988
  • whimsicalism 6y ago
    a. There are not "massive uprisings" "every year" in China. b. China has substantially centralized post-2000. I would go so far as to say it is close-to-useless to cite a 1988 book on modern China unless to reference its history, that's how fast things have changed.
    • baybal2 6y ago
      There are hundred of riots happening in China every year without even "China watcher" media telling a thing about them. My own experience was seeing a huge commotion right in the city centre of Guangzhou, a megalopolis bigger than New York, without single mention in the media the next day besides some random youtube uploads.
      • alisonatwork 6y ago
        Do you know what the commotion was about? I can co-sign that there are often incidents of civil unrest in China that are not reported in the media. However, from what i can gather, these are not explicitly anti-establishment. Most of them appear to be localized labor disputes or middle class NIMBYs making a fuss about development that inconveniences them. For reporting on the former, you can check out China Labour Bulletin[0]. [0] https://clb.org.hk/ https://clb.org.hk/
• omgwtfbyobbq 6y ago
  No, I don't think Xi and his friends are scared at all. That's almost like saying the US government is keeping a dozen carriers because it's scared of Russia (or China). I agree that the US isn't scared of Russia or China, but I think the US is afraid of the idea of not having military dominance.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > If I have to guess, Xi is convinced that he's leading China into an age of unprecedented glory, and he's surrounded by people who talk the same and mostly think the same. For what it's worth given the ... disastrous state of the US, the deep rifts in the EU and the total retreat from anyone not China from Africa, that is a very valid, yet frightening, assessment of the future.
• goatinaboat 6y ago
  Xi is clamping down on religion because he can and ... A truly confident, powerful man would not fly into a blind rage if compared to Winnie The Pooh.
  • gentleman11 6y ago
    Seconded
• tehjoker 6y ago
  The OP comment posits Xi acts based on fear. This comment posits he acts based on zero fear. No where do they posit a rational basis for action or a concrete analysis of power relationships.
• specialist 6y ago
  I'd love to have some sinophiles explain Xi's strategy, what motivated him and his cohort to accelerate their time line. China has Hong Kong. Full assimilation, normalization would eventually happen. The local's were onboard and content. Why make a fuss now? Taiwan also wanted full normalization, eventually. So much upside. Wait another generation and few people alive would even remember what the fuss was about. Call it reunification, cousins remarrying, federation, whatever. China's subjugation of Tibet and the western provinces were fait accompli. The critics were completely impotent. Why prove them right, breath oxygen into their opposition? Harassing foreigners, thereby pushing them out of the country. My guess is Xi felt compelled to act aggressively now to head off upcoming crisises. Something the insiders see better than is yet publicly discernible. One or more things that will rock the legitimacy of the ruling party. (The upcoming demographic bust is even worse than expected. Public finances are terrible. To forestall any correction of official GDP measurements. Widespread accounting fraud and corruption. Environmental degradation leading to food shortages. Exodus of manufacturing to Vietnam, Malaysia, others is faster than admitted. Probably a dozen other credible threats.)
  • bigpumpkin 6y ago
    The characterization of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang and Tibet being content with Chinese Communist Party rule may be an exaggeration. Furthermore, Xi's hardline was a reaction to 1) rampant corruption of the communist party as a result of market liberalization. 2) democratic movements across the world, including the Arab Spring, the 2011 Chinese Jasmine Revolution, and the Umbrella movement. Basically Xi's nightmare is the disintegration of the Soviet Union and he's running the opposite playbook that Gorbachev used.
    • specialist 6y ago
      No contest. I'm just a westerner reading reports from other westerners. I'm relating my perception, as gleaned from western media. "The characterization of Hong Kong..." IIRC, I read there's a huge swing in the self identification of HK residents from "Chinese" to "Cantonese". Slim evidence, I know. But maybe directionally correct? "Xinjiang and Tibet..." I didn't say that. Western media has related that ethnic Tibetans and traditional Muslims have struggled, since I began reading the news in high school (80s).
• erdos4d 6y ago
  > No, I don't think Xi and his friends are scared at all. That's almost like saying the US government is keeping a dozen carriers because it's scared of Russia (or China). I'm sorry, but the US actually is scared of Russia and China and it's whole point in having a large Navy with carriers and such is to counter them. Those two countries are the only adversarial countries to have any meaningful naval presence, so there really wouldn't be any treason to maintain such a large carrier fleet unless they were scared of them.
  • 0xffff2 6y ago
    Or stated another way, the US isn't scared of Russia and/or China because it has those carriers.
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    No, we have carriers because they are costly. The point of the military-industrial complex, like any cancer, is to consume vast quantities. They admit to spending three times what China spends (the actual multiple is higher), and the last yearly increase was larger than Russia's total.
    • seizethecheese 6y ago
      There are several industrial complexes in the us. Healthcare, agriculture, military. They work because the public accepts and desires them.
      • jessaustin 6y ago
        For some idiosyncratic definition of "work", one supposes. (Some would argue that at least the "agriculture complex" puts something approaching food on the shelves.) I live in a blood-red state, and I'm kind of an asshole so I have political conversations with everyone. I haven't this year talked to a single person who thinks that any of the wars fought in my lifetime were good wars to fight, or who "desire" any more of them. (There are some dead-enders who still defend the idea of Vietnam; before my time.) The average citizen, however, may fall under your "accepts" criterion. It doesn't matter what nation I suggest, indeed I have made up nonexistent nations before, and most people will allow that, yes, given sufficient winding-up on the part of "news" organizations and politicians, they would accept bombing them to hell and back. In the long view of history, this will be why USA and Germany are discussed together in the same chapter. The public does not desire ruinous horrific ridiculous pointless endless war, but it does accept that, after enough gaslighting by MIC's paid employees in government and media. That's on us. I don't really like my team.
• paxys 6y ago
  Why exactly do you think the US has a dozen carriers?