I don’t think that’s the correct assessment. Like you’ve said before, since the 80s and Deng’s era, the CCP has been working hard to secure prospects of 1st gen party members’ families. For the past 30 years, the CCP has been placing those family members to top positions. Most of them grew up in the cultural revolution, and like Xi, are hardly skilled in anything other than pidou and the inner workings of the party.
Both Russia and China indeed face a hostile US military presence close to their borders; what evidence do you have that US territory is likewise at risk of “encirclement”?
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The CCP at the top is a mix of technocrats and aristocrats. Intentionally it’s a combination of the very able and the loyal. If it was just the aristocrats running the show, it wouldn’t work.
Take Li Keqiang. He came from a modest background and then studied his bachelor’s, masters and PHD at Peking University. He was top in the whole of China for economics. His advisor for his PHD was the top economist in China. He then wrote a number of books on economic development and successfully led economic reform in a number of provinces.
He is a true genius. One of the most able people. Not having to go through elections means that Chinese politicians can rely on ability rather than charm, which in some ways is advantage of that system.
He is the premier under Party secretary,Xi Jinping. Who is an aristocrat meathead with average intelligence.
That’s kinda how it works.
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It’s weird - a couple of old friends in Nanjing (British guy and his Chinese wife) randomly contacted me on Facebook last night to see if everything was okay, saying:
there was news in China of them already bombing some military installation there
there were national announcements for all citizens to stock up on supplies and random shit like ropes and candles and all kinds of stuff. outbreak of potentially out of control situation
Seems like all of China knows or at least believes it’s happening
Had to google to make sure we hadn’t been bombed (yet). Quite odd, though…
I was intending to contact a few other foreign friends/acquaintances there out of curiosity to see what they’d heard, but it’s not something I want to ask about on WeChat.
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Yeah I don’t think that Russia will go to war for or with China. Maybe support them with logistics though
Quite. Russia has no interests in siding with China. If anything they are more worried about curtailing China, amid fears of the significant economic dominance of China in Siberia.
All the naval bases that come with the belt and road project and funding of the Taliban are efforts to cut off the US from those parts of the world.
Are you suggesting that someone like Li Keqiang would only be in key places in China? I don’t see why a country can’t be both democratic and technocratic. Tsai Ing-wen, her former vice-president Tân Kiàn-jîn are perfect examples of this. They were in key positions even before they were elected.
China’s current system is essentially the same as what Imperial China had. They just replaced the loyalty from an emperor to the party chairman. Like in the imperial past, when some technocrat’s ability outshines the nobility, and especially the leader, they get removed from power. That’s what’s happening to Li Keqiang.
No, my impression of the Chinese system, from my experience and being there are different from yours. There is definitely overlap between imperial China and the KMT system, but tbh, the party has done a pretty good job from the 90’s to the early 2010’s in terms of reform of governance. I dont really agree that the only reason China has succeeded is because of overseas investment. Its part of it, but they have made some pretty good decisions and decent governance.
And just because I say that they have been successful in areas, doesnt mean I like the party or want to replicate the system. I’m just trying to be objective. I’m often having conversations with Taiwanese and Expats in China, who have been there a while and take the other side. I dont see the point here of turning everything into a caricature.
Take for example the first/ second tier city governments. A lot of these are led by really young, innovative and forward thinking officials and are given a lot of freedom from the central government. A few years ago was speaking to a guy in a VC in Shenzhen(who happened to be a Taiwanese PHD) and he was saying that most of the governance in terms of tech/industrial policy is done from the bottom up. The government really listen to industry and academia and are willing to take risks to make Shenzhen the most innovative city in the world. He was comparing to Taiwan, where everything kinda happens from the top-down.
A Li Keqiang can get to the top in a democracy, but in the last twenty years the CCP have done a really good job at nurturing these people and getting them into the top positions. If there is one thing you can say that CCP post Tiananmen has been good at, its evaluating their mistakes and reforming quickly, at least in terms of economy and governance.
At the same time, I dont buy into the propaganda that I hear from China expats and others, about China being run by a meritocracy of technocrat geniuses, making cold rational decisions based on data. Its not true, there is plenty of nepotism and skullduggery in the system.
Also, it was Deng who presciently brought about these governance reforms and SOP. Jiang and Hu were pretty much also technocrats. Xi has managed to put a Kabosh on all of this and I believe that they are in a kind of stasis now and will struggle to make reforms going forward.
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Even if it were true, and of course it isn’t, that Chinese naval bases threaten to cut the US off from the region, that would have nothing to do with the US being threatened - as China and Russia are - with the “encirclement” of its own territory in North America.
Does anyone not sometimes feel a bit downcast with our democratic systems? Most of the political apparatus is based centuries old practices.
Like isnt there a way we can just get better people to vote for?
I dont have a political science background, so generally curious. Most people here come from countries with great education systems, but a lot of the time our leaders are a bunch of fuckwits. Can’t we update the system so its less reliant on charm and siphons out idiots?
Also can the whole process of choosing leaders just be quicker and cost less. Just a waste of time that every four years, our leaders devote most of their time to getting re-elected.
We are in a competition with China and I think we need more innovation in governance to make sure we stay ahead.
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‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
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Yeah I agree, but cant we just upgrade it a bit?
What would you suggest? We need to identify people who want to serve and find ways to ascertain their suitability, right?
I don’t know, I just think that we have more suitable people and the whole process could be quicker and cheaper. It all seems antiquated and inefficient.
I think it’s more complicated than you think.
Yeah, I dont have any answers. Just take the US, with the best educational institutions in the World and all the apparatus and think-tanks etc around Washington.
And then you end up with Donald Trump in power for four years. Whether you like Trump or not, everyone has to agree that there a probably more capable people around in terms of performance, than reality TV star.
And the whole process costs billions of dollars and takes months. Its definitely not optimal.
We all like democracy, but cant we improve it?
And this is in context of competing with China.
He was chosen in two discrete, fully democratic election processes, so no, you can’t improve that without somehow detracting from the overall structure of democracy. Then you’ll certainly be introducing other problems. He wanted the job, was able to contend for the job, and was deemed suitable for the job by the electorate. What could you change there? You could pay people a lot more to encourage them to want the job. But now people will be doing it for money and not necessarily the best interests of the electorate. You can’t make people do it. You could change financing laws. That is complicated. You can’t change the electorate. It’s a big important process, so it costs a lot of money. We should be able to afford it.
We don’t need to compete with China by becoming China. They’re the ones who need to worry about that, despite their blathering about it.
No I wasnt saying that.
But cant there be more tests/filters for suitability? Cant we take the money out of politics? Cant we make the whole thing quicker?
I’m not even talking about the US, im talking everywhere. Whats driving a lot of the problems right now is just a malaise with the system. Just a bunch of shit options every four years, driven by interest groups. If we were to start again from scratch, we wouldnt do things this way.
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I’m not so sure. Democracy is a test for suitability–that’s the point. Money counts in capitalist societies, can we really take it totally out of politics? Will quicker mean sloppier? What’s the rush anyway? I think we should always be looking to make improvements but a lot is going to end up looking the same in the end, more or less.