It’s not like this is some random citizen. He’s a CCP member and the head of Interpol. I would be surprised if China were the only country tracking his whereabouts 24/7.
Let's rephrase it. China and the US probably have very good guesses almost all of the time. So the Chinese government can probably provide a very small area to search for him, if they didn't apprehend him themselves.
... almost all the time [one is on the digital grid]
The more capability superpowers build into digital tracking, the easier it is to leave that behind.
If I took a bag of cash, left all digital devices and credit / banking cards on my table, and walked out of my house, I find it incredibly hard to believe the US government could reliably track me if I wasn't already marked for surveillance.
China, I might pop up on a camera, but there are ways around that.
So yes, agreed if people are connected and behaving "normally." (I.e. buying things, showing their id, etc)
If you stick to walking, why even bother to track you? You're not going very far from your house that way. If you board a plane, rent a car, etc, you get tracked.
That seems to be the point of the guy I'm replying to, given that he says he "laughs" at the idea of a disappearance. I'm just saying that, while it's quite plausible the government of China is detaining him, it's not outside the realm of possibility they have no idea where he is.
The point is I don’t believe China is telling the truth how can they say the disappearance is “alleged”. Its totally bullshit downvote that too I don’t care.
Based on the history of other people disappearing in China, I would speculate that he must rather have been caught on some anti-corruption/anti-tax evasion campaign of some sort.
I wish people would give more examples of what they're talking about or even citations before making sweeping blanket statements about the character of the Chinese state in discussions here. Many of their accusations may even be well founded, but how would I know?
I would not want to live under CCP rule, but it seems like skepticism goes out the window and people will believe anything if the story is about China.
Because it’s common knowledge China is a communist dictatorship that engages in censorship, kidnapping, torture, forced confessions of enemies of the party. Just look at the history of the last 100 years and the history of the CCP. Or talk to anyone who is Chinese and not brainwashed.
I’m going to assume you’re young and still learning about world history for the last 100 years, or a CCP shill/citizen whose been brainwashed with revisionist history.
If you actually don’t know, I suggest starting with the history of the cultural revolution:
You keep condescending to me without having understood, or at least engaged with, my argument (and I'll say that reading about the civil war makes it very hard to see it as a morality play where the virtuous Nationalists are defeated by the evil Communists; Chiang Kai Shek does not have a lot to recommend him as a defender of liberty or human rights). It doesn't matter if they're Satan Incarnate. Skepticism is much more important with American rivals, because the US media leans so much on US government sources who have an agenda (especially now when they want to set the stage for increased military tension with China) and because our "cartoon villain" conceptions of their leaders makes us throw common sense out the window.
The parent remembers "history", but strangely in singling out China forgot than one might also happen to know or remember the Philippine war, the Mexican War, the Korean War, Vietnam War, colonial occupation of 2/3rd of the world (including China), countless "third worlders" murdered fighting for their freedom, extinction of native populations, and countless other times those criticizing China were doing the same or worse (and in which ways they still do it) just a little before.
Those are "old"? Well, and the Cultural Revolution isn't?
Besides it was an era of internal conflict and civil war, when a country of more than a billion people changed regime. Europe had tons of wars (and started and fought 2 world wars) when its old feudal provinces turned into nations, and as its later colonial powers and empires broke down.
China went through that much later, and after 2 deeply humiliating periods of Western and Japanese occupation and imperialism. And they did quite well despite the toll to turn the tides around from a mostly agrarian dirt poor nation in 1900 to the worlds 2nd economy today.
The cultural revolution had a huge toll from the fractions fighting for power and idiotic decisions that led to famines etc (90% of what's count as its toll is that), but it left the country not decimated, but more populous and prosperous -- from ~650million in 1960 to 1 billion in 1980, and more democratic.
I agree; I considered making this comparison (especially with reference to "extrajudicial activities" China engages in) but I thought it might sidetrack the discussion. What I think is important here is that none of us would take this long rap-sheet as an excuse to believe, uncritically, everything someone said about the US, whether or not there was any evidence.
Nuanced about what? The entire world knows China engages in extrajudicial activities like kidnapping, jailing people, or forced confessions for speaking against the party. The only people who deny this is China.
>extrajudicial activities like kidnapping, jailing people, or forced confessions for speaking against the party
So, like Guantanamo, kidnapping, secret sites [1],[2], [3] and so on?
Or routine police shootings, Judge Dread style?
Or having an out-of-all proportions inhumane incarceration system, with 25% of the world's prisoners for only 4% of the world's population? (a statistic many ignore, and I like to emphasize).
Or like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but not having been snatched in the last 150 years out of nowhere, but actually like Tibet having centuries of being part of China in the past?
So, like those bad things, but restricted to their own citizens? And with no bombings and military invasions in 3-4 different countries just in the past 20 years?
Where do the rest of the world signs up so that other countries restrict those activities to their own citizens too?
If you expect a nuanced discussion about the US, you should expect a nuanced one about China.
(Not to mention being the greatest trading partner with China, token statements aside the US have more actual business interests in common with them than even with Britain)
coldtea this is blatant whataboutism and I'm sure you can mount a better argument than that. (And I'm the one getting into trouble for wanting Americans to acknowledge their institional racism. And using all caps.)
The parent isn't arguing that Americans are angels, but that it is well established that the Chinese state (which is a glove on the CCP) is responsible for pretty brutal and systematic repression (of Uyghurs in particular), but also dissidents.
And despite the regular injustices America dishes out through love of greed, people are not disappeared because they have incorrect thought. >10k people were massacred in 1989. Millions were killed by famine during the cultural revolution. These are only contested in the same way that climate change is contested.
One could argue that the 2003 invasion of iraq body count outweighs these sins, and ascribe malice to the US versus high intentions to the Party. But it doesn't change the fact that China is now, and has long been, an authoritarian state. In fact, it is now pre-eminent, the poster-child for post-capitalist autocracy.
(But there is one one demonstrably wrong part of the grand-parent's post: calling China 'Communist'.)
"In Japan, the criminal justice system has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%, including guilty plea cases. This has been attributed to low prosecutorial budgets impelling understaffed prosecutors to bring only the most obviously guilty defendants to trial."
"In Canada, the national conviction rate is about 97%. This does not include cases in which the charges are dropped, which comprise about one-third of criminal cases. Absent Quebec, the province with the lowest conviction rate, the figure is 99%."
"In China, the justice system has a Conviction rate of about 99.9%. This has been attributed to the use of torture and other coercive measures to extract confessions and pressure on courts and prosecutors."
You forgot quotes around the “anti” definitions. Tax evasion in China is often the equivalent of “counter-revolutionary activities” under Stalin: the blanket accusation to frame whoever has fallen from favour and has to be purged.
I don't know if I'd say that. For instance, the Fan Bingbing case made a splash, but there's little doubt she was actually evading her taxes. The only reason people are surprised is that "everyone" is evading taxes and has been able to get away with it.
Is there anyone who the Chinese government punished for tax evasion who turned out to be not cheating on their taxes? Selective enforcement is one thing. Fabricating charges is worse.
Potato, potato. In the USSR, anything you said could be interpreted as anti-revolutionary if it criticised the boss in any way; and plenty of people were privately criticising, but it was brought up only against the ones who had to be purged.
Similarly, in China today, everyone who is anyone in the apparatus is cheating taxes in some way, but it's brought up only if they become a problem for the leadership for some other reason.
And here in the US, people routinely violate rules about registering as a foreign agent and have for a long time, but suddenly it's an issue and we lock up Maria Butina for what seem like mostly political reasons. Our tax fraud cases are also, I'd suspect, getting only a fraction of the tax cheats.
Not having firsthand experience as a person who is someone in the Chinese government apparatus, it sounds like it should be possible to just pay the tax you owe. But hey, maybe that kind of thinking is why I have no political power.
Depending on what you did, you can go to jail for cheating on your taxes in the US too. Which is as it should be -- if the penalty is just that you have to pay what you owed then the expected value of fraud is positive and it's only logical to just always cheat and then only pay when you get caught.
Not much information in the article. Interpol has issued a Red Corner notice, but ultimately it's the French and Chinese governments that have to find what happened.
Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared.
What do the flight manifests say?
How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff.
For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say?
It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media.
I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.
He didn't disappear in the middle. It was confirmed by the French that he arrived safely in China -
"The French official said Meng did arrive in China. There was no further word on Meng’s schedule in China or what prompted his wife to wait until now to report his absence."
The article says they can issue one for a certain purpose, and it's not clear to me that this situation fits that purpose; it doesn't say that they have issued one.
Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person.
But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals, nor issue arrest warrants.
These high-profile disappearances have become normal in China[1]:
> Chinese mega star Fan Bingbing has been fined around 883 million yuan ($129m; £98.9m) for tax evasion and other offences, authorities said Wednesday. The star, who disappeared in July, posted a long apology on social media.
Held in "secret detention" and posting a full apology including praise for the government. It sounds like the Chinese government is in full tyranny mode.
I suppose, if you want to argue on explicitly racist grounds, that you might do that. I wouldn't because the states where those things happened don't even exist anymore.
What’s racist about it? The Chinese state has a very long and well documented history of brutal authoritarianism spanning many emperors and dynasties. Mao didn’t change that and neither did Xi. If you think I meant anything about Chinese individuals maybe you should re-examine my words and your conclusions...
I think you're a bit confused about the nature and continuity of the "Chinese state." How do you account, for instance, for warlords ruling the country in the early 20th C., if it's just a series of emperors ruling a unified country for thousands of years? Given the fractured continuity, it seems to me that you could only argue for the unchanging cruelty of Chinese rule by arguing that there's something cruel about Chinese people or their culture.
Wew lad, that’s an awful lot of words you’re putting into my mouth.
If I had argued similarly that the American state has a history of brutality, which it does (Native American genocide, slavery, colonialism, for-profit prison labor, etc) am I subsequently arguing that Americans themselves are cruel? Of course not. Self-centered, detached, unaware of their constitutional privileges to change things or unwilling to use them, perhaps. But certainly not cruel.
I would welcome a discussion about the nuances of Chinese dynasties, individual emperors, interdynastic states of affairs, and so on, but come on, but let’s at least have a conversation in good faith, ok?
Perhaps a point to start with: individuals with very little power compared to the state have little to no say in the state’s affairs. If the state is brutal and cruel, how much of that is their responsibility? Could they be blamed for political inactivity if it only brings suffering on their household? Are they complicit in th activities of the state if they merely want to make money and live a comfortable life with their friends and families, given that they pay taxes which are used for wars and state suppression?
America is a poor example because it has only existed for a few hundred years with essentially continuous government. My objection to what you're saying is that you want to lump together every various dynasty that's ruled China with every modern government, when there is little basis for doing so besides ethnic ones. Would you appeal to the cruelty of the Merovingians to say France has always been cruel? I'd guess the thought wouldn't even occur to you.
I think there is a flaw in your line of reasoning.
Many bureaucratic structures, such as the general structure of government and military, withstood the test of time throughout dynasties and interdynastic periods. For a state that governed huge areas with significant diversity in ethnicities and languages, that is very impressive! If it aint broke don’t fix it, you know?
But those same structures were very much top-down methods of management, with little room for dissent. It’s not as if all Chinese (which is a very broad definition because there are many many millions of Chinese citizens who are not Han) got to sit down together every few years or decades and decide what kind of state and society they wanted to live in.
The vast majority of all of humanity largely had the structure of their societies decided for them by the ghosts of the past and the structures that survived. We are always swimming through the inertia of our pasts.
Anyway, I hope that is more instructive of the point I am trying to make. Ethnicity doesn’t just poof into a structure of government, in a China or anywhere or anywhen else.
Edit: funny you mention France after your edit, because I was considering saying that Europe as a whole before 1945 was no picnic either. That’s why my ancestors - from four different countries, no less - got up and left for America. Nevertheless, the period of time between WWII and now is the longest Western Europe has gone without a war since the time of Rome. That’s of course not to say that Western Europeans are inherently warlike. Peasants don’t get to choose the wars their lords and kings send them off to fight. It’s quite remarkable how quickly things can change sometimes.
> Self-centered, detached, unaware of their constitutional privileges to change things or unwilling to use them, perhaps. But certainly not cruel.
It's every bit as ignorant to say that "perhaps" hundreds of millions of Americans are unaware, detached, etc. as it is to proclaim that they're cruel. Making such broad sweeping judgments about such a vast number of people, is universally a very poor approach to discussion.
There is only so much that people can do to change their world around them, even in a democracy.
Being an American, I have license to make generalizations about the people I have lived my whole life around. I certainly couldn’t say the same for, say, Chinese individuals, and my other comments in this thread read as much. I draw my conclusions about my fellow Americans from my own experiences and interactions.
It's not ignorant to say that because just looking at voter turnouts can tell you a lot about Americans' relationship with their government. At least the detached/unaware part, I can't speak to the rest of the statement.
Sure, but for this argument I think the most recent Chinese Civil war to present (1927- ) will suffice. I don't give the KMT a free pass either just because they were buddy-buddy with the "West". Different sides of the same autocratic coin if you ask me.
edit: And before this devolves any further, no I don't give the "West" a pass for its tyrannical tendencies either...
Why censor illegal contents is tyranny? How come we have no power to delete those contents? Your country has your law, and our has ours. Our Chinese people have the right to delete what we think are illegal contents!
for a while after Mao's death China functioned more as an authoritarian oligarchy than a totalitarian dictatorship. Not a liberal democracy by any means but clearly less bad. This has been reversing somewhat under Xi Jinping.
China was never really a totalitarian dictatorship under Mao either, he mostly got forced out of power by the rest of the communist party in 1959 after his great leap forward reforms resulted in millions dying. He never really regained power except in a sort of spiritual sense. There is a lot of complex political history in communist China.
Its most certainly incorrect to compare Mao with Xi.
> Totalitarianism is a political concept that defines a mode of government, which prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life
He was unabashedly and indisputably, totalitarian. The fact that he lost power eventually, is irrelevant. Every type of leader, eventually, loses power.
SCMP says the Chinese government knows where he is: he's under investigation [0].
"The 64-year-old official, who is also a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Public Security, was “taken away” for questioning by discipline authorities “as soon as he landed in China” last week, according to the source."
One could ask the same question about things like United Nations Human Rights Council. The answer is that money, and representation of all governments is what counts. It leads to rather absurd outcomes.
Friends close, enemies closer. The UN has a long history of trying to promote human rights through engagement because it is generally more successful than the alternatives. Trying to overlay interpersonal morality onto geopolitics leads to some pretty dark places.
An international body that shuts out China can't really claim legitimately to represent "international" consensus, can it? Globally, one in five people is Chinese.
You have no right to force us to accept your human rights! We Chinese people believe if there is poverty, if you have nothing to eat, you absolutely have no human right. So our government has lifted 700 million people out of poverty, and this is real HUMAN RIGHT!
I predict that the Chinese style of governance will eventually succeed and will be improved upon by others. They seem to be able to get away with everything. Chinese style data oriented micromanagement of populations is likely to be the norm for the future. You cannot escape algorithms judging you and placing you in a category. The "category" that will define your experience of the world from then on. Western tech companies are complicit in all of this.
As people in the field, we need to resist this at every turn but the money is just too great of a lure for now.
People just have to be told what direction we can head in.
I like the way Yanis Varoufakis frames the matter - do you want a Matrix style future where the machines control you or a Star Trek kind of future where the machines take care of all the mundane BS and we get to go places we haven't gone before.
I don't think there is a big debate about what people will choose. We just have to get the mindlessly ambitious minority of the population with god emperor delusions to behave themselves.
We need a way to get there from here. We will never reach Star Trek style society if we just continue as we are. I think we need to transition to socialist democracy. But how to start?
November elections are going to be very interesting. I think Bernie and the next generation of Bernie's who manage to also connect with some part of the rural votebase can take us in the right direction. Fingers crossed.
You might be right, but a sci-fi novelette published X years ago with this storyline could very well be on HN's first page, and bring a great discussion, any day.
Just because it's real doesn't mean is less interesting, for some readers.
I agree. Discussions here are often very good.
But how will you - or moderators - guess that a story will generate such quality ?
Problem is, the disappearing of an Interpol chief IS striking news. So it gets upvotes and stays on the front.
Now you, I, and many others have to filter more submissions to get to a real "HACKER" piece of news.
One of my professors at GaTech was detained while leading a study abroad course in China. After he was released, he said it probably was because they didn't like a book he wrote.
119 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadhttp://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-...
The more capability superpowers build into digital tracking, the easier it is to leave that behind.
If I took a bag of cash, left all digital devices and credit / banking cards on my table, and walked out of my house, I find it incredibly hard to believe the US government could reliably track me if I wasn't already marked for surveillance.
China, I might pop up on a camera, but there are ways around that.
So yes, agreed if people are connected and behaving "normally." (I.e. buying things, showing their id, etc)
Public transit within a city? I don't think you get tracked for that.
His wife filed a missing person report.
I would not want to live under CCP rule, but it seems like skepticism goes out the window and people will believe anything if the story is about China.
Just like it’s common knowledge the USA is a democracy, not a one party dictatorship. The Chinese communist revolution is relatively recent history.
Or talk to any Chinese exiles/dissidents living in the US. Or any Taiwanese person.
If you actually don’t know, I suggest starting with the history of the cultural revolution:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_dissidents
Those are "old"? Well, and the Cultural Revolution isn't?
Besides it was an era of internal conflict and civil war, when a country of more than a billion people changed regime. Europe had tons of wars (and started and fought 2 world wars) when its old feudal provinces turned into nations, and as its later colonial powers and empires broke down.
China went through that much later, and after 2 deeply humiliating periods of Western and Japanese occupation and imperialism. And they did quite well despite the toll to turn the tides around from a mostly agrarian dirt poor nation in 1900 to the worlds 2nd economy today.
The cultural revolution had a huge toll from the fractions fighting for power and idiotic decisions that led to famines etc (90% of what's count as its toll is that), but it left the country not decimated, but more populous and prosperous -- from ~650million in 1960 to 1 billion in 1980, and more democratic.
Nationalistic flamewar in particular will get you banned here, so please avoid grandiose hostile generalizations about any country.
In the US maybe. In the rest of the world it will be a much more nuanced discussion.
So, like Guantanamo, kidnapping, secret sites [1],[2], [3] and so on?
Or routine police shootings, Judge Dread style?
Or having an out-of-all proportions inhumane incarceration system, with 25% of the world's prisoners for only 4% of the world's population? (a statistic many ignore, and I like to emphasize).
Or like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but not having been snatched in the last 150 years out of nowhere, but actually like Tibet having centuries of being part of China in the past?
So, like those bad things, but restricted to their own citizens? And with no bombings and military invasions in 3-4 different countries just in the past 20 years?
Where do the rest of the world signs up so that other countries restrict those activities to their own citizens too?
If you expect a nuanced discussion about the US, you should expect a nuanced one about China.
(Not to mention being the greatest trading partner with China, token statements aside the US have more actual business interests in common with them than even with Britain)
https://www.businessinsider.com/at-least-54-countries-helped...
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/fact-sheets/investiga...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
The parent isn't arguing that Americans are angels, but that it is well established that the Chinese state (which is a glove on the CCP) is responsible for pretty brutal and systematic repression (of Uyghurs in particular), but also dissidents.
And despite the regular injustices America dishes out through love of greed, people are not disappeared because they have incorrect thought. >10k people were massacred in 1989. Millions were killed by famine during the cultural revolution. These are only contested in the same way that climate change is contested.
One could argue that the 2003 invasion of iraq body count outweighs these sins, and ascribe malice to the US versus high intentions to the Party. But it doesn't change the fact that China is now, and has long been, an authoritarian state. In fact, it is now pre-eminent, the poster-child for post-capitalist autocracy.
(But there is one one demonstrably wrong part of the grand-parent's post: calling China 'Communist'.)
So while it may trend autocratic, it seems inaccurate to simply call it an autocracy.
Just because communist power struggles happen out of sight doesn't mean they don't happen.
http://shanghaiist.com/2016/03/16/china_conviction_rate_near...
"In Canada, the national conviction rate is about 97%. This does not include cases in which the charges are dropped, which comprise about one-third of criminal cases. Absent Quebec, the province with the lowest conviction rate, the figure is 99%."
"In China, the justice system has a Conviction rate of about 99.9%. This has been attributed to the use of torture and other coercive measures to extract confessions and pressure on courts and prosecutors."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate
Either their justice system has incredibly low false positives (99% of people charged are provably guilty), or it's rigged.
Or their prosecution standards are much higher before the cases come to courts...
Although I'd still question the fundamental ability of any bureaucracy to be correct 99%+ of the time.
Given correlations that high, one almost suspects the courts and government aren't independent.
https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/advisories/china/criminal-la...
Highlights:
- 1-7 days arrest and detention without a formal arrest filed (up to 37 days in some cases)
- Up to 13.5 months detention without formal charges filed
This is contrast to the US 72-hour rule & writ of habeas corpus avenue.
Objectively, I feel it's merited to say the Chinese judicial system is inefficient, unjust, and inhumane... at best.
Similarly, in China today, everyone who is anyone in the apparatus is cheating taxes in some way, but it's brought up only if they become a problem for the leadership for some other reason.
Jailing after trial and due public process is one thing, "disappearing" people is another.
Hong Kong Booksellers are a great example[0]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...
Now let me get this straight. He was traveling from France to China, somewhere in the middle he disappeared.
What do the flight manifests say?
How about the security cameras at Airports, especially in China, where we have often heard what they allegedly doing with real time facial recognition and stuff.
For someone this high profile, there must have been security, staff etc. What do they have to say?
It's been two weeks since he disappeared. No alarm bells till now, at least the media.
I find this article to be very slim on details. There are some very simple questions not covered in the article. I guess they were in a hurry to publish this.
"The French official said Meng did arrive in China. There was no further word on Meng’s schedule in China or what prompted his wife to wait until now to report his absence."
https://apnews.com/af741e061cfe40f9b80a252a2bfc0a46
The article says they can issue one for a certain purpose, and it's not clear to me that this situation fits that purpose; it doesn't say that they have issued one.
Interpol can issue a red notice - an international alert - for a wanted person.
But it does not have the power to send officers into countries to arrest individuals, nor issue arrest warrants.
> Chinese mega star Fan Bingbing has been fined around 883 million yuan ($129m; £98.9m) for tax evasion and other offences, authorities said Wednesday. The star, who disappeared in July, posted a long apology on social media.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45728459
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Death_toll
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China#T...
etc, etc...
If I had argued similarly that the American state has a history of brutality, which it does (Native American genocide, slavery, colonialism, for-profit prison labor, etc) am I subsequently arguing that Americans themselves are cruel? Of course not. Self-centered, detached, unaware of their constitutional privileges to change things or unwilling to use them, perhaps. But certainly not cruel.
I would welcome a discussion about the nuances of Chinese dynasties, individual emperors, interdynastic states of affairs, and so on, but come on, but let’s at least have a conversation in good faith, ok?
Perhaps a point to start with: individuals with very little power compared to the state have little to no say in the state’s affairs. If the state is brutal and cruel, how much of that is their responsibility? Could they be blamed for political inactivity if it only brings suffering on their household? Are they complicit in th activities of the state if they merely want to make money and live a comfortable life with their friends and families, given that they pay taxes which are used for wars and state suppression?
Many bureaucratic structures, such as the general structure of government and military, withstood the test of time throughout dynasties and interdynastic periods. For a state that governed huge areas with significant diversity in ethnicities and languages, that is very impressive! If it aint broke don’t fix it, you know?
But those same structures were very much top-down methods of management, with little room for dissent. It’s not as if all Chinese (which is a very broad definition because there are many many millions of Chinese citizens who are not Han) got to sit down together every few years or decades and decide what kind of state and society they wanted to live in.
The vast majority of all of humanity largely had the structure of their societies decided for them by the ghosts of the past and the structures that survived. We are always swimming through the inertia of our pasts.
Anyway, I hope that is more instructive of the point I am trying to make. Ethnicity doesn’t just poof into a structure of government, in a China or anywhere or anywhen else.
Edit: funny you mention France after your edit, because I was considering saying that Europe as a whole before 1945 was no picnic either. That’s why my ancestors - from four different countries, no less - got up and left for America. Nevertheless, the period of time between WWII and now is the longest Western Europe has gone without a war since the time of Rome. That’s of course not to say that Western Europeans are inherently warlike. Peasants don’t get to choose the wars their lords and kings send them off to fight. It’s quite remarkable how quickly things can change sometimes.
In either direction. Something we would all do well to bear in mind these days in the West.
It's every bit as ignorant to say that "perhaps" hundreds of millions of Americans are unaware, detached, etc. as it is to proclaim that they're cruel. Making such broad sweeping judgments about such a vast number of people, is universally a very poor approach to discussion.
There is only so much that people can do to change their world around them, even in a democracy.
Being an American, I have license to make generalizations about the people I have lived my whole life around. I certainly couldn’t say the same for, say, Chinese individuals, and my other comments in this thread read as much. I draw my conclusions about my fellow Americans from my own experiences and interactions.
I think this is very accurate.
edit: And before this devolves any further, no I don't give the "West" a pass for its tyrannical tendencies either...
Its most certainly incorrect to compare Mao with Xi.
He was unabashedly and indisputably, totalitarian. The fact that he lost power eventually, is irrelevant. Every type of leader, eventually, loses power.
You don't need a dictatorship for horrific things to occur.
Those both still sound like tyranny to me.
"The 64-year-old official, who is also a vice-minister at China’s Ministry of Public Security, was “taken away” for questioning by discipline authorities “as soon as he landed in China” last week, according to the source."
[0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/2167213/fr...
edit: President is elected by the General Assembly [1]
[1] https://www.interpol.int/About-INTERPOL/Structure-and-govern...
He didn't vanish, that's something he signed up for. Just the Party decided to execute call in the contract at this time.
As people in the field, we need to resist this at every turn but the money is just too great of a lure for now.
I like the way Yanis Varoufakis frames the matter - do you want a Matrix style future where the machines control you or a Star Trek kind of future where the machines take care of all the mundane BS and we get to go places we haven't gone before.
I don't think there is a big debate about what people will choose. We just have to get the mindlessly ambitious minority of the population with god emperor delusions to behave themselves.
Please don't turn this beloved site into a news aggregator.
From the guidelines : "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...]"
Just because it's real doesn't mean is less interesting, for some readers.
Now you, I, and many others have to filter more submissions to get to a real "HACKER" piece of news.
I kindly meant that it's good to have a somewhat specialized site towards intellectual curiosity.
It takes more time to visually filter submissions if they are interspersed with world news in general.
Literally makes me want to move to Mars as soon as possible.