8 ms·

Does anyone have any book recommendations for non-chinese people to understand CCP power structures? I'm completely lost in all of this Jack Ma stuff.

wllchng 6y ago
The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (2012)
- loceng 6y ago
  I wonder if the 2021 version would have much different; were there known "re-education" camps then, etc?
  - pototo666 6y ago
    It is definitely different. Back in 2012 the party is controled by a group of elder guys, though there is someone at the top. Now it is dictated by Xi, who has already changed many things, like Chairman should only serve two terms. Luckily, he has no son.
  - yorwba 6y ago
    Yes. For example, here's a commentary, published in 2012 by Xinhua, arguing that the time was ripe to reform the "reeducation through labor" system http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-10-12/152725346359.shtml http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-10-12/152725346359.shtml (in Chinese, of course) The reform did happen, replacing e.g. labor camps for drug addicts by forced detox camps, but those were mostly the same, still using hard labor as their main method to "rehabilitate" addicts. So not much changed in practice. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef%bb%bf-forced-detox-camps-reeducation-through-labour-and-the-contradictions-of-chinas-war-on-drugs/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... (this one is in English) You may wonder why you haven't heard about this before. The answer is, I think, that most groups subjected to "reeducation through labor" are not organized and scarcely have any international contacts, so they have a hard time getting mainstream international media to report on them.
secretcombos 6y ago
Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy (2019) by Bill Gertz is an excellent starting point: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50927537-deceiving-the-sky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50927537-deceiving-the-s...
- prox 6y ago
  I wonder why you’re being downvoted. Is it because it’s so accurate that it hurts or because it’s not?
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't break the site guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - prox 6y ago
      Ah sorry dang! Will take heed in future.
      - dang 6y ago
        Actually I think I read the second sentence as a snarky political jab, when on a closer look it seems to have been a neutral question, or at least that's a plausible interpretation. "So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
        prox 6y ago
        Yes it was meant as an inquiry, but I could have phrased it differently, looking back and after your moderation comments.
    - loceng 6y ago
      Honestly though, don't you think that's a valid question - asking for qualitative responses? Notice how the user responded to you, as an authority, I hope you're aware of that power dynamic as well. I've also thought I'd love to see a Netflix style documentary of "a day in dang's life" to help us get to know you, to humanize you more + would be good marketing for HN and YCombinator. You're often very poetic in your responses, I think a documentary focused on you could be quite good.
austhrow743 6y ago
Not a book but a talk given at an internal government seminar by a China policy advisor to the Australian government and recommended by Bill Bishop, one of the bigger names in China related news. Talk given in 2017. https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in
- austhrow743 6y ago
  I should have wrote transcript of a talk.
permarad 6y ago
The problem of China - Bertrand Russell. Published in 1922. It's not recent but is an incredible insight for the era and forward thinking piece. It is incredibly relevant today.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  A book from 1922? That's back during the Republican era, pre-civil war. I think any resource from before 30 years ago is totally irrelevant in today's setting, except maybe to explain how Chinese modern history developed.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - simonh 6y ago
    It's shocking how accurate his predictions were, and I think it's really important to understand that these weren't lucky guesses. They were the product of a deep and insightful analysis of Chinese culture and society that is still very much relevant today. The personalities have changed, but in many ways China is still China.
    - FooBarWidget 6y ago
      Do you have an example of something that you think was a very good prediction that has panned out?
      - simonh 6y ago
        He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant joke.
FooBarWidget 6y ago
I heard that The Governance of China is a good book. https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Language/dp/1602204098 https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Languag... Another book that may help is "Has China Won?" by Kishore Mahbubani.
marekmroz 6y ago
If you like fiction and satire, China Dream by Ma Jiang is good.
dmix 6y ago
Surprised no one has mentioned “Red Capitalism (2012)” which specifically covers the finance industry in China (pre-AliPay but post reform in the modern era) which gives a clear insight into the sort of banking system Ma tried to shake up and their big role in China’s rise. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Capitalism-Financial-Foundation-Extraordinary/dp/1118255100 https://www.amazon.com/Red-Capitalism-Financial-Foundation-E... The author is an excellent China Watcher who works at an Australian think tank and basically covers this topic for a living. His blog post on the matter is a good starting point, which was before the IPO was cancelled, and many before that were prescient. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/many-trails-ant-group https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/many-trails-an...
idownvoted 6y ago
„China in ten words“ by Yu Hua, of course banned in China „The awakening of China“ - by Sun Yat Sen. Old but informative least but not last becauseit was the only book heralded by both Chinas (PRC and Taiwan) and even allowed during Mao‘s heydays of Terror (in which the official amount of allowed books was in the single digits, and most of those were authored by Mao).
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  you should mention that Mao is also responsible for the largest & most successful literacy program in history. Also, the west still does this shit but I know HN doesn't care about these types of incidents happening on the right https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/03/02/bill-introduced-to-ban-howard-zinn-books-from-arkansas-public-schools https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/03/02/bill-introduce...
bane 6y ago
The Chinese government is highly structured and in general features most of the things one might expect in a modern nation-state (an executive, a legislature, a court system, etc.) The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army. Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history. This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point. However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.
- kqr 6y ago
  Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship. On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause? Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.
rodolphoarruda 6y ago
Not strictly related to CCP, but a long text about how China has evolved in the past couple of decades from a cultural perspective. https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/ https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-l...
Symmetry 6y ago
Age of Ambition for how people outside navigate it. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap has some very good stuff on incentive structures inside the CCP.
john4532452 6y ago
Also how the 10 year term was removed. Seems like this is a core principle in the CCP party, but what events caused this to change. Was this planned from a long time or it the circumstances were right and it was grabbed.

wllchng 6y ago

The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (2012)

loceng 6y ago
I wonder if the 2021 version would have much different; were there known "re-education" camps then, etc?
- pototo666 6y ago
  It is definitely different. Back in 2012 the party is controled by a group of elder guys, though there is someone at the top. Now it is dictated by Xi, who has already changed many things, like Chairman should only serve two terms. Luckily, he has no son.
- yorwba 6y ago
  Yes. For example, here's a commentary, published in 2012 by Xinhua, arguing that the time was ripe to reform the "reeducation through labor" system http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-10-12/152725346359.shtml http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2012-10-12/152725346359.shtml (in Chinese, of course) The reform did happen, replacing e.g. labor camps for drug addicts by forced detox camps, but those were mostly the same, still using hard labor as their main method to "rehabilitate" addicts. So not much changed in practice. https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef%bb%bf-forced-detox-camps-reeducation-through-labour-and-the-contradictions-of-chinas-war-on-drugs/ https://madeinchinajournal.com/2019/10/25/punish-and-cure%ef... (this one is in English) You may wonder why you haven't heard about this before. The answer is, I think, that most groups subjected to "reeducation through labor" are not organized and scarcely have any international contacts, so they have a hard time getting mainstream international media to report on them.

secretcombos 6y ago

Deceiving the Sky: Inside Communist China's Drive for Global Supremacy (2019) by Bill Gertz is an excellent starting point: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50927537-deceiving-the-sky https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50927537-deceiving-the-s...

prox 6y ago
I wonder why you’re being downvoted. Is it because it’s so accurate that it hurts or because it’s not?
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - prox 6y ago
    Ah sorry dang! Will take heed in future.
    - dang 6y ago
      Actually I think I read the second sentence as a snarky political jab, when on a closer look it seems to have been a neutral question, or at least that's a plausible interpretation. "So accurate that it hurts" is the sort of thing that political trolls say, and it probably triggered the pattern matching machine in my head—which sometimes misses things, especially at speed. Sorry!
      - prox 6y ago
        Yes it was meant as an inquiry, but I could have phrased it differently, looking back and after your moderation comments.
  - loceng 6y ago
    Honestly though, don't you think that's a valid question - asking for qualitative responses? Notice how the user responded to you, as an authority, I hope you're aware of that power dynamic as well. I've also thought I'd love to see a Netflix style documentary of "a day in dang's life" to help us get to know you, to humanize you more + would be good marketing for HN and YCombinator. You're often very poetic in your responses, I think a documentary focused on you could be quite good.

austhrow743 6y ago

Not a book but a talk given at an internal government seminar by a China policy advisor to the Australian government and recommended by Bill Bishop, one of the bigger names in China related news. Talk given in 2017. https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in https://sinocism.com/p/engineers-of-the-soul-ideology-in

austhrow743 6y ago
I should have wrote transcript of a talk.

permarad 6y ago

The problem of China - Bertrand Russell. Published in 1922. It's not recent but is an incredible insight for the era and forward thinking piece. It is incredibly relevant today.

FooBarWidget 6y ago
A book from 1922? That's back during the Republican era, pre-civil war. I think any resource from before 30 years ago is totally irrelevant in today's setting, except maybe to explain how Chinese modern history developed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 6y ago
  It's shocking how accurate his predictions were, and I think it's really important to understand that these weren't lucky guesses. They were the product of a deep and insightful analysis of Chinese culture and society that is still very much relevant today. The personalities have changed, but in many ways China is still China.
  - FooBarWidget 6y ago
    Do you have an example of something that you think was a very good prediction that has panned out?
    - simonh 6y ago
      He warned that their society is prone to endemic corruption, that merging the worst aspects of Chinese culture with Capitalism would be a very dangerous combination. He said that China could become an economic and military rival only exceeded by the united States over the next few centuries, so he was explicitly thinking long term. This was at a time when most Westerners thought of China as an archaic, irrelevant joke.

FooBarWidget 6y ago

I heard that The Governance of China is a good book. https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Language/dp/1602204098 https://www.amazon.com/Xi-Jinping-Governance-English-Languag... Another book that may help is "Has China Won?" by Kishore Mahbubani.

marekmroz 6y ago

If you like fiction and satire, China Dream by Ma Jiang is good.

dmix 6y ago

Surprised no one has mentioned “Red Capitalism (2012)” which specifically covers the finance industry in China (pre-AliPay but post reform in the modern era) which gives a clear insight into the sort of banking system Ma tried to shake up and their big role in China’s rise. https://www.amazon.com/Red-Capitalism-Financial-Foundation-Extraordinary/dp/1118255100 https://www.amazon.com/Red-Capitalism-Financial-Foundation-E... The author is an excellent China Watcher who works at an Australian think tank and basically covers this topic for a living. His blog post on the matter is a good starting point, which was before the IPO was cancelled, and many before that were prescient. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/many-trails-ant-group https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/many-trails-an...

idownvoted 6y ago

„China in ten words“ by Yu Hua, of course banned in China „The awakening of China“ - by Sun Yat Sen. Old but informative least but not last becauseit was the only book heralded by both Chinas (PRC and Taiwan) and even allowed during Mao‘s heydays of Terror (in which the official amount of allowed books was in the single digits, and most of those were authored by Mao).

toiletfuneral 6y ago
you should mention that Mao is also responsible for the largest & most successful literacy program in history. Also, the west still does this shit but I know HN doesn't care about these types of incidents happening on the right https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/03/02/bill-introduced-to-ban-howard-zinn-books-from-arkansas-public-schools https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2017/03/02/bill-introduce...

bane 6y ago

The Chinese government is highly structured and in general features most of the things one might expect in a modern nation-state (an executive, a legislature, a court system, etc.) The exception, and what makes it hard to understand for outsiders, is that one of the political parties (Chinese Communist Party) is also an extra, supervisory, branch of government and sits on-top of and permeates all the regular bureaucratic structures. There are other political parties but since they cannot surmount the CCP in this structure they remain relegated to very minor roles. The military (PLA) is also a branch of government, but is also an element of the CCP. One way of thinking of it is that the government of China is not allowed to have a military, and the ruling political party's own security forces have assumed that role -- with subbranches of that force filling in for traditional military branches such as a Navy and an Air Force - which are all separate "forces" under the Army. Within the CCP there are factions, or different wings, and the kinds of fairly expected politics in any such organization play out as people jostle for position within the party. These factions can have a number of quite profound disagreements, and may sound more like different parties in some ways, but are united by common core beliefs and history. This structure creates as many problems as it solves, with no external checks to the current CCP policies - but there are internal processes and checks that are supposed to help maintain legitimacy of the party in this structure. On the flip side, establishing such a system also makes it easier to consolidate power over the major power structures. The current head of China, Xi Jinping, is the head of the party, the head of the executive branch and the head of the military, giving him no real outside checks on authority as he has both the supervisory power and the military power to overwhelm opposition - the presidency is more or a ceremonial role within the government at this point. However, there are analogues, the U.S. President, for example, is also the head of their respective party, the head of the executive branch, and the head of the military. The difference is that there are built in exit ramps and external checks on power (other parties, other branches of government) that are designed to frustrate the accumulation of power and political parties hold no official and a subservient role to the government apparatus. The military in addition, is not a branch of government whereas it is in the Chinese system.

kqr 6y ago
Since you did not mention it specifically, I'll mention that term limits are suspected to be an important part of keeping a reasonable concentration of power and not having a democracy devolve into a dictatorship. On the one hand, term limits are deliberately eroded by long-running despots (primarily in some African countries so far, and increasingly elsewhere in the world lately.) On the other hand, Germany's chansellorship does not, IIRC, have term limits and that seems to work fine for them. So maybe being able to remove term limits is a symptom more than a cause? Either way, questions like these are discussed in the book How Democracies Die, which has been recommended to me and is on my re-read list, but which I haven't gotten to yet.

rodolphoarruda 6y ago

Not strictly related to CCP, but a long text about how China has evolved in the past couple of decades from a cultural perspective. https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-literary-genre/ https://lithub.com/modern-china-is-so-crazy-it-needs-a-new-l...

Symmetry 6y ago

Age of Ambition for how people outside navigate it. How China Escaped the Poverty Trap has some very good stuff on incentive structures inside the CCP.

john4532452 6y ago

Also how the 10 year term was removed. Seems like this is a core principle in the CCP party, but what events caused this to change. Was this planned from a long time or it the circumstances were right and it was grabbed.