Main difference between death penalty in US and China, is in US police officers easily sentence subjects to death and the courts do it with great difficulty. In China the inverse.
Interesting story. This guy was actually airport director at the airport in Little Rock, AR. He used to buy and sell a bunch of guns and was an avid collector. He was killed when ATF agents raided his home and he responded with gunfire. The controversy seems to circle around the fact that:
* the ATF decided not to raid his home when he was out of town but early in the morning when he was at home
* the ATF gave him 28 seconds to comply with their announcement after which they battered the door down
Given the fact that the agents weren't wearing body cameras, the guy had a normal day job that he'd go to, and that 28 seconds is certainly too short to dispose of firearms it does seem a lot like execution served by way of search warrant. Certainly, I wouldn't be able to let anyone in 28 s after waking up to pounding on my door.
Willingly and with aforethought engineering a situation that is practically guaranteed provoke an asleep person with ~no notice in the early morning to "unlawfully" defend themselves and wife against unknown people breaking into their home in order to lawfully "defend" one's self is execution in my book.
I can understand if there's some imminent threat but there was none. He was going to wake up, and report to a secure airport full of cops and federal agents. But they couldn't resist engineering a situation that ended up with him dead, doing what anyone would do to protect their wife when given ~zero time to distinguish threats entering their home at night.
Now you can argue maybe it wasn't an execution, and only their acts were indistinguishable from what those doing an execution would do.
If you violently bust into someone's home in the United States, you're liable to, and absolutely deserve to, get shot. I do not care if you have a badge. If you want to execute a lawful search warrant, the best time to do it is when nobodies home. The second best time is during the day, when you can clearly state your legal mandate to be there, and allow the homeowner to comply.
The ATF in this instance (and frankly most instances) chose the most violent option available to them, because good people don't join the ATF. Violent thugs who get off on shooting dogs join the ATF. And when they get tired of shooting dogs, they decide to manufacture a scenario where they get to kill a more dangerous game.
I don't really understand the mentality of people who do this sort of criminal activity. If he'd stopped after, say, $5m and just retired he'd probably have managed to get away with it. Continuing to such a ridiculous degree through sheer greed led him to a death sentence. That's just plain stupid.
$325M is probably a gross figure that netted out to something much less. He wasn't unilaterally in charge of the city, which means that he had to use a big chunk of that money to bribe other officials.
To address the mentality – you probably assume there are lindy effects to bribery, especially if you're 10-25 years in and your network of corruption grows. It's difficult to imagine yourself as the sole actor being pinched.
I think your logic makes sense, if this was both logical and about the money. But it seems to be more about greed, discontentment, and "more". There is no limit to "more".
This kind of crime means you develop a network around you that won't stop having expectations of you just because you think you have enough for your eventual retirement.
They'll basically be your friends, partners and coworkers. Making a sudden change in how you associate with each other can have rather negative consequences, ranging from anxiety to them trying to murder you.
death penalty for only $325M - such a bad country.
Why are they violating human rights, look at Trump for example:
* involved in Epstein files, most probably also had sex with minor
* scam crypto coins
* handing over contracts based on who contributed to his campaign
* got airplane from Qatar
* got money for his election to later support Israel
* most probably involved in insider trading (there were oil related sales 10-15mins before Trump announcements)
And nothing is happening. China should learn how to treat humans properly
I sometimes see people "celebrate" this, with the rationale that China is cracking down on white-collar crimes and handing out sentences unheard of in the west.
But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
Killing people in any context is barbaric because it is not possible to bring someone back from the dead.
I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence, which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world as far as I can understand.
So harsher punishment means people with less power will get shafted harder
The problem with putting a dollar number on it is it's devoid of context. Lunch from McDonald's is going to cost me $15 in the US, so $6 is not enough to live off of here. But the actual number is irrelevant. Is it enough to get food for the day or the week. How about housing? $6 doesn't sound like a lot, but if lunch is $0.50 and a roof over your head is $1.00 for the night, $6 goes a lot further!
So what is the alternative punishment for folks like this who have destroyed the lives of countless people ? Hard labour for life in a mine until death ?
I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
> Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence
I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.
> I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
Let's say that some new evidence comes out that exonerates the person. You can indeed reverse the "no longer hold office" punishment. You can't bring someone back from the dead.
Le sigh. Fine, the punishment was you forfeit your chickens to your neighbor. Should those chickens be inedible by the new legal owner? What if they have to return them later if new evidence comes to light?
Chickens are basically fungible and interchangeable with money.
You can't select some random person and do a bit of bureaucracy and then tell a family whose member you killed that this rando is now part of their family as restitution for your mistake. You can give them money but in general it is considered somewhat distasteful to put an immediate pecuniary value on human life.
Just to be clear - you can't really "reverse" most things. The arrow of time only moves in one direction. People who are jailed and then exonerated do not have their lives "reversed". Their future circumstances are changed. Maybe they are compensated. But they still suffered in jail. You cannot erase that part of their reality anymore than you can raise the dead. This is not to discount your point that making amends while someone is still alive is seen as preferable.
Of course, attempts are made to "reverse" even after someone had been put to death. Posthumous pardons are a thing. It may not bring anything to the person who has passed, but it could give somewhat similar benefits to living descendants.
It's just to say we shouldn't undermine how impactful something like incarceration is on the theory that it is "reversible". Evidence suggests such experiences mess people up in pretty severe ways. Lets also remember thinking of death in these distinct terms may be very cultural. Few penal systems escape barbarity. There are worse things than death. There are many instances or societies were it is preferable or expected people kill themselves rather than go through something like the ignominy of incarceration.
As to the last line, I'm also not sure. Brutal societies have a way of turning on themselves. Nations that accord more protections to their people are generally a better place for their rulers, even if the reverse is not always true. Personally I would love a legal system that baked into its norms higher punishments for people with more power. I think these have existed in the pass, even if enforced through less modern mechanisms.
It is also the case that people in power do things that people with less power are incapable of. Getting rid of notions of executive privilege or qualified immunity would be a good start. The way the law is written currently, people in power won't simply not be punished - they won't even be charged. Take George Bush. Did he ever even just have to testify under oath about the rationale for the Iraq War once? Would the United States really descend into a banana republic if he had been charged for perjury or war crimes? It seems like the push in that direction can instead trace its genesis to the fact that in America, we evidently make our leaders untouchable.
I think they are meaning "the measure seems meaningless as it would imply Russia is even tougher on corruption" rather than "Russian leadership cares deeply about corruption".
It's a risky play to try to communicate over the internet to a bunch of us literalist nerds :p.
I'm not saying that those guys weren't corrupt, but that's a classic authoritarian pattern. Purging anybody who might potentially in the future be a threat to your rule is step two in any authoritarian playbook. Were they perchance replaced with unambitious yes men?
To be clear that was 5 of the top 7 in the military not the CCP as a whole. Leaves just Xi and the anti corruption officer.
But yes agreed. It’s very hard to parse what is going on from the outside.
My very uninformed read is that the people who were purged seemed already loyal allies to Xi but had more clout to disagree with him, while the new guys know they are replaceable. The PLA is notoriously corrupt as well so hard to say which of those purges were political control vs corruption based.
I kinda doubt the new guys are unambiguous though you need to be ambitious and risk taking to rise like that in the CCP.
>Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing
no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.
The Zhou Yongkang incident happened over a decade ago, it happened in roughly the first year of Xi Jinping's tenure, Zhou Yongkang was a supporter of the also-purged Bo Xilai, and while he was still in power he ran the department responsible for internal security. I don't doubt the guy was corrupt but this is exactly the sort of target you go after if you want to maintain your own grip on power.
> Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
The west is inundated with simplistic anti-chinese propaganda, so you would never perceive it as such, the way it would be presented to you in the west is as the evil dictator Xi Jingping purging his opposition, for instance:
Correct, so long as there is a state controlled media and no independent media and we can only speculate on where people who have “disappeared” from public view are, this is exactly the position everyone should hold.
This is single party autocracy, no matter how much people cry about propaganda.
It's a complex system of layers of representatives being elected on the local level, various institutions and levels of governance that you know literally nothing about and yet has been incredibly successful at uplifting it's people. In the simple mind of the western chauvinist this rich five thousand year old culture and complex society with good and bad, gets flattened into antagonistic slogans like "single party autocracy".
You don't understand how calling you a victim of propaganda is me being charitable, I could've also called you a typical western ignorant sinophobe.
Probably not but it's hard to really pin this down. On the one hand, China's rise has in the recent past has been phenomenal but that kind of rapid cleanup has always been accompanied by repression and destruction of political rivals. So. perhaps a bit of both.
I think the way to determine how real this is: is the corruption allowed to damage the real economy? Most of the problems of Africa and South America are linked to that answer being "yes".
Xi Jinping rose to power on a message of anti-corruption, and part of the reason he remains in power on an indefinite term is by presenting himself as the "only trusted" person to maintain anti-corruption amongst all the factions.
While I'm sure he doesn't catch all corruption and the CCP overall has selective enforcement, the reason they do have measures like this is in large part because of Xi Jinping's specific reputation and positioning.
Or in authoritarian regimes it often means "stole from the party". As long as you only steal from the poor and give the proper bribes up the chain you are in no danger in most corrupt societies. Except possibly in the rare occasion where your corruption causes a disaster that embarrasses the people above you in the hierarchy.
Far too often when you see stories about how someone was persecuted for corruption it boils down to "he stole from rich people".
This is true in any power structure ever. Kings, mafia, pick-your-dictatorship, many democracies. Hurt or steal from the poor, not other rich or elite, and always make sure to kick some up to the big guys.
All presidents rise to power on a message of anti-corruption, they all clean house when they start in office but usually it falls off until the next president takes over. The problem Xi has is that now that he is now president for life, the house isn't getting cleaned in the usual way every 10 years; he has to do a corruption purge every so often or things will get grimey.
I'm just talking about China, we were only talking about China right? We don't really have a lot of data points to go by since there have been only three presidents so far with supreme power (after it was combined with General Secretary and military chair head, before that president was more of a ceremonial role).
Xi has shown repeatedly that he’s serious about corruption. As others have noted, some of the highest civilian and military officials have been removed for it. Some sentenced to death.
He sees it as a challenge to his legitimacy and China’s power, which, as you’d expect are the most important things to him; even if you take the most cynical view.
Another timely example, because it is the World Cup, is the Chinese football programs. They’ve been decimated because of corruption prosecutions, both executives and players. It’s a major reason why China isn’t competitive on the global stage, which much smaller countries with significantly smaller budgets can compete. And, yes, Xi does care about competing in the World Cup. Prestige is very important to his concept of China’s honor and global standing.
>He sees it as a challenge to his legitimacy and China’s power
This right here is why “corruption” should be looked on with great skepticism. In an authoritarian government basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption. You know, like having a say in how people are governed. This is a high crime in a state with 1 party that cannot be replaced.
In that way, “corruption” can mean “not being loyal to the dictator.”
>And he did this as a public servant for over 30 years.
and it was discovered just now? May it be that he played exactly by the rules, the real rules, of the regime - corruption being among the foundational rules of it - and thus it was going for 30 years? And right now he just got his turn like it usually happens in totalitarian regimes.
>Violating the public trust should be extremely harsh.
definitely. The only question why the comrade Xi is still not executed?
> and it was discovered just now? May it be that he played exactly by the rules, the real rules, of the regime - corruption being among the foundational rules of it - and thus it was going for 30 years? And right now he just got his turn like it usually happens in totalitarian regimes. The regime will for show find an excuse to execute you if you got your turn, corruption is just the easiest one.
Yeah, that would be wild if any of that completely unsubstantiated conjecture, bordering on fan-fiction, was what actually happened.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught. They get complacent. They get messy. Each round of embezzlement leads to a larger body of evidence that exists somewhere that becomes more and more damning as time goes on.
> The regime wouldn't want to create impression of political disunity among the officials.
In this thread we have dozens of examples of political officials being prosecuted. I'd strongly suggest you park your McCarthyism, take a break, perhaps go for a nice walk.
You really don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t you? You’re from a Western country, right?
>White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught.
You’ve definitely never seen the castles and fleets of exotic cars that government officials in those countries manage to get on their meager government salaries. Yet you post such an authoritative comments …
If you have evidence as to any of the wild conjecture you're posting, you're more than free to provide it instead of just lobbing out accusations as though they change anything substantive about the arguments being made.
Yep, this is the usual common response from Americans. Its just Sinophobic whataboutism.
China has laws especially regarding significant financial crimes like embezzlement, theft, money laundering. And most governments also have rules against breaching public trust, corruption by favoritism, bribery, and more.
This guy was in multiple public servant roles, and exfiltrated $325M. This isn't a 'possible smell of impropriety ' in taking a supper with a potential vendor. This is basically highly illegal anywhere in the world.
But the Americans go back to their 'but communist China!' howls. The punishment's harsh, sure. But I think its a great standard to hold leaders and public servants to.
I like how you are unable to separate actual crimes from government policies you disagree with.
>> corruption is an institution
>> Or for example, how has IP theft policy changed?
Another country may decide to have no IP protections, that’s not a crime.
Furthermore Intellectual property is legal fiction, some people and countries don’t believe in it.
Apparently Anthropic don’t believe in IP either, they are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, but cry wolf when someone does it to them. And they are asking for legal immunity on IP theft.
I'm not being unable to separate crime from policy, you're the one trying to dilute both as showing a signal to policy change.
If this was just a political action to take down just another corrupt official enabled by the government, how is this a good thing?
Well for a lot of countries protecting inventions with patents were a major trigger for improvement, so much so it became a cornerstone and you can even say an institution. So of course it would be viewed as corruption by any country with such institutions.
And it's not like China says it would never abide by IP, else they would have never got the investment that made them into what they are today.
But look further from IP theft, what about seizing assets from companies, or whole companies?
> So of course it would be viewed as corruption by any country with such institutions
It’s not viewed as corruption. US gov made numerous public statements condemning IP theft, and never even once classified it as corruption - it’s simply a different crime.
Furthermore, you suggested a benchmark is: “How wealthy are the ruling elites”
Well let’s see - the richest man in the world is American, 70% of 100 richest people are American, American has higher inequality than China.
By what robust quantitative measurement does this effort look less genuine than American one?
Are you accessing any objective facts or you simply are unable to accept that a country you are opposed to is making genuine progress?
Go look up the history of the USA and creation of copyright/patent/trademark was done, and how we dis-recognized all European claims. They were howling similarly.
Go look at how extreme patent law perverted and kept airplanes locked to the Wright brothers, and held down an industry, while other countries (many European as well) were at the forefront of avionics. Patents held the USA back until the US GOV eminent domained the patent freeing it for WW1 armament.
Or go look up why Hollywood was a thing. Again, patent laws on cameras, and eacaping to California was all about screwing over patrnt holders over royalties.
And sure, China didnt recognize our copyrights. Ok. And? We dont recognize theirs either.
As Stalin demonstrated even when you're totally loyal, you're still frequently made victim of the terror.
The point of totalitarian regime is that nobody should feel safe, nobody should have an agency. In particular the people shouldn't be able to obtain themselves safety even by the way of being totally loyal.
These are just weird fantasies that you're writing out, with absolutely no reference to any events that have happened in China. You seem to just be writing fiction, and assigning it to the Chinese. The Chinese are actually people, though, they're real. If you want to accuse them of unremitting evil, you should be able to talk about something they did in detail.
That does not mean that you should google "China bad" and paste a bunch of random urls in a reply, though.
What Cold War propaganda did to Western brains is tragic.
>> basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption
Like insider trading by congress?
Jokes aside, this is not how dictatorships normally deal with democratic activists? I don’t see how you can come to this conclusion u less you believe that corporations are people, election spending is a form of legally protected free speech, and corporations should vote in elections:
> In an authoritarian government basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption
Could you list some of those basic liberties? Are they the sort of liberties whose exercise involves taking half a billion in bribes?
---
Generally, basic liberties like showing up to a protest aren't considered corruption, they get called terrorism, or somesuch. A Texas judge just sentenced a dozen people to 30-70 years in prison for exercising them, by the way. Some of the people given 30 weren't even at the protest.
For anyone else curious as to what OP is talking about, I had to look this up:
> The protest was a late-night/noise demonstration (involving fireworks) against immigration detention policies. It turned violent when a shooting injured a police officer. Prosecutors described it as an "act of terrorism" linked to an alleged antifa cell; defendants and supporters denied organized antifa ties and framed it as protected protest activity
It sounds like they arrived in tactical gear, started destroying property, and when cops arrived opened fire.
This seems like a bad example on your part, as the people opposing ICE are some of the most misaligned people in the country. That said, we have a right to protest in traditional public forms, you don't have a right to shoot up an ICE facility.
Bringing guns to shoot people you disagree with, then shooting them and injuring them for doing their job is not a harmless demonstration. It's terrorism, and they deserve what they got.
Only one person brought a gun (singular). The rest didn't shoot anyone, nor was there any evidence that they planned to do so. They were convicted for being at a protest where one asshole brought and shot a gun.
He could have had the book thrown at him. As for the rest, if you seriously think that getting 70 years for being at a protest where one person shot a gun is appropriate, you have a lot in common with a Stalin-era Soviet judge.
>Some of the people given 30 weren't even at the protest.
That by itself isn't a convincing argument. You can't plan a bank heist and be waiting at your safe house and say, "I'm not guilty of anything, because I wasn't in the bank!". The mafia guy doesn't get to say, "I didn't actually whack the victim, I just nodded to Joey, and he did the whacking".
...maybe this is mostly a thing in common law jurisdictions? Maybe there is a lawyer here who can point us to a interesting history of conspiracy in common law vs civil law jurisdictions? Also of interest might be things like:
Thank you for giving a front-page example of the CCP's logic when it comes to dealing with protests and dissenters. Find one who did something illegal, hang the rest for conspiracy.
tbh my take as someone who follows sports heavily: China is just not good at team sports. If we consider the most relevant ones (part of the Olympics games):
- volleyball. Probably their best team sport. Men's team have nothing to show but the women's team won the competition 3 times (1984, 2004, 2016) and the World Cup twice (1982, 1986)
- basketball. Women's team are usually there at the Olympic games and they won a silver medal in 1992 and a bronze in 1984 but nothing ever since. They were the runner ups in the last World Cup final (2022) against the US. Men's team have 0 results.
- football, irrelevant. Men's team only qualified to the World Cup once in 2002. Women's team is slightly better being the runner up once in 1999, and they also won silver medal in the 1996 Olympic games. But that was a one generation thing, nothing to show ever since.
- water polo, irrelevant. Women's team is slightly better usually qualifying for the Olympic games but 0 results. Same at the World Cup.
China will probably be a contender in like 20 years for basketball. Basketball is incredibly popular, and the average male height has grown significantly as they embraced Capitalism.
Youth Soccer is popular, but at least in my experience, most of the top athletes in school will leave soccer for the big 3 as a focus sport Football/Basketball/Baseball. If they are very good, those are much more likely to give scholarships as well. Soccer is much more popular with the middle to upper middle class suburbia kids, who might also be playing other sports, but are not treating it as a career. Maybe theyll play soccer in college, but their Major is still Finance.
I don't agree with OP, and I'm willing to hear why you're correct in that assessment, but can you elaborate?
To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.
Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?
There is a strong theme of "Chinese people are drones" when you hear about whatever the west's current propaganda issue is. I'm not sure if the poster was explicitly trying to hint at that, or just repeating derived ideas from those that really think it.
Lots of posts about how the CPC isn't really doing the will of the people, they are just following and the people are too docile or subdued to resist. Chinese people are bad at team sports where an individual contribution can play a big part. They are only good at the ones where they all do the same thing.
It ties in with the western ideology that we are unique, dynamic, flawed but able to push ahead in a way collectives aren't.
I will also posit the downplaying and discrediting of Chinese tech and industry is also related with this mindset.
It's 100% social. The biggest difference is Americans generally believe immigrants and minorities can become American, and diversity is good. Whereas Chinese people believe you are born Chinese. Recently China is trying to change that and create a larger, more diverse, Chinese identity.
As a Chinese-American, I feel rather ambivalent about it - dare I say even positive emotion at the West's current propaganda. Due to the quote - "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", with the only caveat that West doesn't laugh but rather "coddle you as the savior".
Not sure when we will see this but when we have the Century of Africa, I'd love to see the spin on the front-page of NYT then. I predict something similar to the shade like "Nationalism/Hinduism by Modhi" when he won't play ball with the West on Russian sanction.
One thing we know is important for a country to be globally competitive in team athletics is having pervasive grass roots youth leagues developing talent from an early age. My sense is the Chinese have a structured selection system where they try out kids in key sports and select the best for special development.
Compare this with Western democracies where kids of most skills levels are generally able to keep playing club sports through high school as long as they have an interest and any aptitude at all. In America, pee wee football, girl's soccer leagues, etc are part of the social fabric of communities. It's considered worthwhile to let kids practice, play and develop even when it's clear they don't have professional or collegiate potential.
The deep reach and years of development of kids with no clear aptitude matter because it's about identifying outliers. I suspect it comes down to chaotic but pervasive casual development beating central planning.
It's like you're so close to getting it. Xi is serious about "corruption" alright. It's just that in an authoritarian state "corruption" is really just used as a euphemism for illoyality.
If having corruption as an euphemism for "illoyality" means we get the same kind of public investment in infrastructure in the west as China does, then I'm all for it. Seems like here we only have the corruption part, except they call it lobbying and rub it in our faces.
But there is also tons of actual corruption especially in the military [1] which is maybe by design so you never know if a purge is political or legitimate or both.
> to his concept of China’s honor and global standing.
Or his sinocentricity and even racism (as in superiority of chinese people). There's been a long standing view in China about their own superiority of others, including all the way into the way they view their national pride as extending back further than any other civilization, even though external historians might view it more like several disjoint civilizations in a similar region... Kinda like how we don't call American history as starting when previous groups from contemporary russian crossed ice bridges to the Americas... We say it started in 1776 because it was a new major iteration of the regime.
I don't think this makes any sense, what you argue would imply that the external historians would say that Japanese history starts in 1945 or that French history starts in 1958, but I'm not sure if they would agree with that.
The point is, there's a lot more to history than political organization. A continuous culture and language is a big part of that.
And he still isn't a billionaire. There's no credible evidence to suggest he's even 8-9 digit millionaire outside of FLG spam or US intelligence / DNI copium that he's hiding $$$ via extended family, who leveraged their princeling/read family stature to get rich well before Xi. Like all signs comports with wikileak CIA profile that Xi is incorruptible by money / not $$$pilled. See bloomberg investigation 10 years ago (that got them booted from country) into Xi/Peng finance and found them squeeky clean which relative to 10 years ago, would be outlier for for their status. Not not saying Xi acetic, his wife famous to never need to worry about money on her own right, but there's nothing suggest Xi not fine with being merely very financially secure vs three comma club.
There is credible evidence his family controls billions of dollars of assets. Those assets accumulated in direct correlation with his power. Chinese state media disagrees, and if that's your cup of tea for Chinese leaders' corruption, I guess sure, Trump's also clean as a whistle.
>his family controls billions of dollars of assets
None sequitur / who cares? Xi personally doesn't have obscene wealth/assets according to relevant evidence which is what matters.
Many CCP red family nepo babies/princelings influence peddled their way to wealth in last 50 years, they get are first dibs aristocracy class and their wealth should logically snowball with PRC moving from billion to trillion $ economy.
But Xi himself specifically has been outlier in how squeaky clean, even by western investigations. Nothing has been tied to him, hence lame "but his family manages his wealth" cope. Like the bro married Chinese 80s Taylor Swift and all signs point to him being fine what he has, which is not nothing, but also not extravagant, which makes trying to associate him to stupendous graft levels corruption he is trying to fix impossible.
Of course broader PRC leadership class has lots of corruption from development, it should be expected that Xi's sister/husband, both from red families to be wealthy from PRC development, but timeline of Xi's sister/husband wealth predates Xi - i.e. early real estate / rare earth investments. Difference between Xi and Trump is Xi himself has been historically clean, and in office made his family divest/liquidate 100ms in assets vs Trump is is historically unclean and family uses his influence to accumulate.
So no, all signs point to Xi is clean as a whistle while Trump isn't, and its ridiculous to equate the two just because both families are wealthy.
And to circle to original claim, there is no evidence that Xi is fantastically corrupt, only evidence to the contrary, that he is outlier in how uniquely uncorrupt relative to prestige, access, opportunities.
Absolutely love it. The West could take some notes. And to those who would jump to downvote, ask yourself why one country is on the rise, and the other is in a drain spiral.
> Xi has shown repeatedly that he’s serious about corruption.
that's BS
cracking down on corruption has been a common tactic for decades to get rid of people who are a threat to the top dog at the CCP, and Xi has employed this perhaps better than anyone since Mao
are those people being purged corrupt? probably most are. but plenty of people who are corrupt aren't purged, it's a highly selective process.
Xi started this a few years after coming into power -- and it was obviously to the educated class was it was (I was living in Beijing at the time), but "mei banfa" (or emigrate, as many people with the $/ability to do so, did).
Xi in particular seems to be personally offended by small scale corruption like business lunches. Huge crackdown on it for probably a negative political benefit.
there have always been ongoing crackdown on small scale corruption ("flies"); it's taking down the big "tigers", who all just happened to be from other CCP factions, that made Xi stand out among his predecessors.
CCDI hit like 7m+ people by now, that's hardly selective. You can say it was intelligently staged for power consolidation component, purging corrupt rival/cliques (who should be purged) first before cleaning own house, i.e. Xi's faction wasn't spared, it just happened later, because that's smart sequencing. Beijing educated class from 2012s aren't as baizuo shitlibs as Shanghai but their opinions are comparably useless, and it's been 10+ years, we now know scale + duration of anticorruption program. Like you don't discipline millions of flies, and 1000s of tigers because they're all rivals, you do it because you want to reduce corruption. Ask what kind of people had $ to immigrate in 2010s and buy up those million dollar mansions when PRC per capita GDP was was like $7000, hint the corrupt, which frequently overlaps with the educated.
>Xi has shown repeatedly that he’s serious about corruption. As others have >noted, some of the highest civilian and military officials have been removed for >it. Some sentenced to death.
Honest question to anyone who may be from China - the perception I've been fed in the US is that almost every bureaucrat is on the take. They certainly were in the USSR, you had to "know someone" to get anything done or just eat.
Not everything that Chinese leadership does is perfect, they have made mistakes, but overall, leadership that is openly like "we need to maintain a tight control over the population for stability" is generally more trustworthy than that campaigns on freedom and small government only to get in power and make themselves richer.
You can’t squeeze blood from a brick. At a certain point, you need to tolerate a little messiness to optimize societal growth.
Think of it as a dial you can turn clockwise or counterclockwise:
Security <——> Freedom
A healthy society would have good feedback mechanisms that allow it to change the dial of the government in power, to adjust to the current situation. Obviously, there’s no one optimal position; to use a historical example: Churchill was great for Britain during WW2, and immediately elected out afterwards.
This often gets missed. Of course, it can be repulsive. But I sort of appreciate how honest other societies are about their social problems. In the United States there is a lot of doublespeak. The current president is actually quite refreshing in this regard, or at least was for a time.
The way the mainstream media freaked out about him asking Bill O'Reilly, "what, you think our country is so innocent?" is a good example. Or saying we're in Venezuela for oil at the outset. Or talking about how they killed so many Iranians they don't even know who they are negotiating with anymore. I mean at least we didn't have to suffer through fumbling Bushisms about freedom. If the day ever comes when presidents are held to the same standards as the people, then ironically in many regards we will have to at least give him some points for honesty... it is quite sad how he is the only person to succeed to such an extent on such an "outsider", really anticorruption message ("drain the swamp"), then turn around and do the same thing. I think it is probably related to the core problem of American society - the doublespeak, the dual consciousness, the resistance to self reflection. People don't want honest answers - including to their own complicity (who elected these people anyway?). They want slogans. The results are sad, but predictable. A society that elects (and then worse, reelects) someone like Trump to end corruption is clearly a society that cannot look itself in the mirror. The same goes for the other side of the aisle. The "democracy" party that has no primaries and says it's either "fascism" or geriatric grandpa. We take this election very seriously that is why we have nominated a corpse. Don't mention it or you're a fascist. No you don't get another choice. Vote for us or democracy dies...
Sad... maybe if politics was a venue where people weren't punished for being honest we wouldn't have such low quality politicians. Brings to mind the George Carlin line:
That would be a nice realistic campaign slogan for somebody: 'The public sucks. Elect me.'"
These are mainly political purges dressed up as “anti corruption drives”. Not ideal, but at least someone high up is getting punished compared to slaps on the wrist in the West.
It's fascinating to see the effects of anti-China propaganda. There are plenty of stories about China cracking down on corruptiojn yet people need to do contortions to make this anti-China somehow.
There's no evidence that Xi Jinping is like Putin (who has enriched himself to abe unknown but expectedly high dgree), no evidence the military generals have enriched themselves with corruption (again, like Russia) or really anything else. Instead there's evidence that the likes of Jack Ma, a billionaire, are brought to heel, China has cracked down on so-called yin-yang contracts, sentenced to death people who messed with the baby formula supply chain and so on.
People really should reflect on why they're so willing to seek confirmation bias and why they have that bias at all.
Here's a tip: if you take anything China says or does at face value you will be more correct than 95% of the China "experts" that have entrenched themselves in the media and Western policy circles.
Is reflection really necessary? On why they're so willing to seek confirmation bias on a self appointed dictator for life and why they have that bias towards a self appointed dictator for life? Isn't it self evident?
Even if it's politically motivated, it's still punishment for a real and serious crime. Compare to prosecuting someone for touching a pool that the president happens to really care about for no good reason.
Inner circle members of the CCP are the first to fall because their competitors wouldn't dare not use it against them. The whole Bo Xilai mess a decade and a half ago is a good example of that.
Selective prosecution and tough punishment can still be a net positive vs no punishment. (I am not saying it necessarily is nor that I would celebrate this.)
The CCP derives a significant part of its legitimacy from improving quality of life and living standards for the common Han Chinese. Waste and fraud that harms consumers is a drag on this progress; the incentives somewhat align. Real economic harm often causes real political harm.
Your american KGB knows nearly everything about me, as well as about any other person with internet access (and also those without), without any "warrants", "judges", etc
"american KGB"? pray tell, who would that be? FBI? NSA? ICE? Even with their tooling, they are still struggling to legally acquire information, and even more so to act on it. There's even considerations of abolishing these agencies.
Try suggesting the abolition of the MSS as a mainland Chinese national and see what happens.
"Fbi, nsa,.." - I dont care much about their acronyms or the organizational structure
"Still struggling to legally acquire information.."
I dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest. Now whether it was acquired "legally" i dont know, but when they choose people to murder abroad, I dont think that matters much.
> I dont care much about their acronyms or the organizational structure
So I call bullshit on your point.
> dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest.
I do. Perhaps I am there. I'm not going to deny USA's alphabet boys abilities, but I'm not going to glaze them either. Nor I'm going to ignore that I might also be on the PRC's databases as well. They might not bombing people yet, but foreign policy can change easily.
Just because i call them collectively KGB - since the essence is precisely that - you "call bullshit on my argument"?
Though you are right I guess in what regards the legal apparatus of PRC.
But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative (though this is eventually what you become when your mouth is being consistently shut with a big fat lap).
As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
> Just because i call them collectively KGB - since the essence is precisely that - you "call bullshit on my argument"?
Yes, because it means you don't have a good idea of the claims being presented. Perhaps there's a point in there, but you should think it through rather than just allowing it to remain nebulous as suggested in "I dont care much about their [...] organizational structure". Organizational structures matter, they make certain corporate actions easier and others more expensive.
> But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative
I appreciate the change in tone, but I have to ask whether that's really the case, as you're being ambiguous with the suppression methodology. There's quite a gap between "flagged into oblivion in a site" and "arrested for a year for posting anti-government opinions". Given the initial comments on your profile, you haven't done any favors in keeping downvotes and flags away. Not just provocations, but also gratuitous accusations. I try to avoid those because all they do is give ammo to the enemy.
> As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
That's a oversimplified view about privacy. Every piece of information about a person, when enough is collected, can be used to identidy them. Collecting said information, specially when the infrastructure for that is not trivially available (as is the case in the USA in comparison to the PRC) is easier than done. When was the last time someone got identified by law enforcement in the US via their internet traffic? You are better off worrying about GDID in Windows.
A similar story goes for Tor. For starters, it was developed by US Navy, not the intelligence/law enforcement agencies. Second, the protocol is open and publicly being developed, so even if the NSA added a backdoor, it can be caught and removed. Finally, Tor is not the only option, see I2P for an example.
"That said, it is undeniable that USA would have more issues pulling that off domestically, and, arguably, even internationally."
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.
Now try doing that in mainland China. Ask yourself why there isn't a strong active anarchist presence in the PRC despite their population in comparison to the US. If the actions you do actually are enough to cause the US domestic forces to go after you, rest assured, PRC domestic ones would already have got you.
It's true that the US may be more of a immediate threat to those in its territories, but to compare it to KGB is to either massively oversell US domestic forces abilities or undersell KGB's. Even in the closest cases of political executions, extrajudicial murders through abuses of force and qualified immunity, as seen in the recent ICE shootings, they still caused a lot of national instability, even within the right wing. Similar happenings in the USSR didn't come close in reactions.
Xi's been anticorruption for 10+ years, CCDI has prosecuted MILLIONs, including his own faction/clique i.e. even Xi doesn't have that much enemies. Westoids just can't fathom it's simply a systematic, competent drain the swamp program designed to change culture an work through the huge backlog of illict behavior form 30+ years of under regulated development.
> Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing
Almost certainly. But it's not simple to understand because four things are simultaneously true:
1. Corruption is a serious problem Xi is genuinely focused on reducing through high-profile prosecutions with extreme sentences.
2. Xi and his party lieutenants have certainly used corruption charges to eliminate central party 'Titans' because they got too powerful, got too greedy, or were deemed insufficiently 'loyal'.
3. Corruption is pervasive at almost every level and there's no way most of it can be eliminated anytime soon. In fact, the system relies on it to function as well as it does. The purpose of these high-profile prosecutions is only to reduce the size and frequency of corruption. It reminds officials that stealing half the money half the time can be bad for their health. So they stick closer to taking 10-20% only 10-20% of the time.
4. The sub-1% of corrupt officials who are prosecuted, likely end up being busted because they got 'too greedy' and were made a sacrificial lamb by their corrupt peers to fill the system's need for a few high-profile examples. The 'too greedy' isn't from taking too much, it's usually from not greasing enough palms with enough money (including the provincial corruption investigators themselves). When there's tens of millions of dollars of illicit money at stake, the dynamics become like de facto organized crime mobs and there's always competition between factions. This guy probably knows exactly which rival played the game better and beat him.
I never understood why you can't just take any random European country where ones company also has a presence and stick to the (government mandated) vacation time there, usually 5-6 weeks p.a. - is this considered unacceptable in the U.S.A.?
The key is understanding that accounting is driving the policy. 'Unlimited PTO' really means 'uncounted PTO' because for most public companies in the U.S., once PTO is counted, the salary value of each vacation day becomes another liability which must be reported and carried on the balance sheet. It's no different from a payable debt like a bank loan, except the debt becomes immediately due in cash the moment the employee ceases employment for any reason (quits, retires, laid-off, fired). It's also a debt that cannot be delayed, negotiated or discharged even in bankruptcy.
In a competitive employment market, paid time off is just another part of the cash value of any compensation package. Employees compare the overall packages, so companies need to offer 'competitive' PTO. In the past decade, FAANG-ish valley companies have had to offer 4-6 (or more) weeks of PTO. I know people who took two weeks every year and 'banked' four weeks. They retired early after 12 years with an extra YEAR of cash salary paid in full the day they left. When 5-10% of a company's debt is owed to their own employees and could become immediately due at any moment - that's a cash flow and liability issue for companies.
By 'not counting' the PTO, any PTO you don't take in the year you earn it doesn't go on the balance sheet as debt - meaning employees can't 'bank it'. It becomes 'use it or lose it'. The result was more employees took more PTO each year (which is net good) and the company's stopped accruing a weird balance sheet debt. Note: I'm only familiar with the dynamics in the U.S. but I believe they also apply elsewhere but regulations and financial reporting requirements differ per country.
I've spent a lot of time in the EU working with tech companies, have a lot of friends there in tech companies and am on the board of a Swiss company at the moment. While it's true the average corporate worker generally has more protected rights in the EU, in my experience that additional government regulation doesn't usually pay off in ways that really matter that much to most employees most of the time.
As a thought experiment, if offered a tech job in, say, downtown Zurich, how much extra money would be required for an avg EU tech worker to happily accept that same job under Bay Area employment law, protections and standards (at-will employment, non-banked PTO, etc) than under EU employment law, protections and standards? In other words, apples-to-apples what are those extra protections actually worth in cash value? I suspect the answer would be, at most, around $25K to $50K/year. But when you look at the total comp packages (salary, benefits, equity, 401k, etc) between Bay Area and Zurich tech workers, the delta is far greater than that. In effect, the bay area tech worker 'sold' that extra protection for a big chunk of cash and is using some of it to self-insure against the potentially increased volatility. I think a lot of EU tech workers would be delighted to take the same trade.
This might surprise you but the reality is, many of the potential employment abuses you may be concerned about are vanishingly unlikely to occur in practice. The point is, you can end up paying a lot for expensive 'tiger insurance' you probably won't ever use and don't really need. While you can feel good knowing you have extra protection from tigers, on a purely economic basis I averaged over $500k/yr over my multi-decade career in bay area tech. In good years, the equity could take it over a million. My own admin (with no college degree) averaged over $200k a year in total comp. The highest paid admin at the Zurich company I'm on the board of makes closer to 50k CHF (and living in downtown Zurich isn't much less than SF). So, the "US tech employment deal" may seem weird and perhaps less fair, but the extra half million dollars my admin earned over several years put a lot of 'social safety net' in the bank that she can spend whenever and however she wants - and she still works there for my old boss, still loves her job and has never had to use any protections or social safety net yet (she's probably over a million in extra total comp banked by now). In short, it's a different deal, not necessarily a worse deal.
As opposed to the US where even if white collar criminals are caught and punished they get pardoned by Biden or Trump, Obama, etc... Every US president has pardoned white collar criminals
China executes their criminals, in the US criminals get pardoned
All of these white collar criminals were pardoned by Biden
Nina Simona Allen (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud financial institutions.
Duran Arthur Brown (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a mortgage fraud scheme.
Ravidath Ragbir (January 2025): Convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Jerry Donald Manning (December 2024): Convicted of two counts of mail fraud.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey (January 2025 - Posthumous): Convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Alex Nain Saab Moran (December 2023): Convicted of money laundering conspiracy (released as part of a U.S.–Venezuela prisoner swap).
Abraham W. Bolden Sr. (April 2022): Former Secret Service agent convicted of bribery attempts, fraud, and obstruction.
Kim Douglas Haman (December 2024): Convicted of making false claims against the government.
Vadim Konoshchenok (July 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., smuggling goods, and export control law violations (released as part of a multi-national prisoner swap).
Paul John Garcia (December 2024): Convicted of signing false documents with intent to deceive and theft/sale of government property while serving in the Navy.
Hunter Biden (December 2024): Convicted of federal tax offenses (alongside separate firearm charges). The pardon broadly covers any federal offenses committed or taken part in between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024.
Gerald Glenn Lundergan (January 2025): Convicted of unlawful campaign contributions, making false statements, and falsifying documents.
Ernest William Cromartie (January 2025): Convicted of attempting to evade or defeat tax, as well as structuring financial transactions to evade reporting requirements.
I see it as being sort of like how every 6 months someone is made an example of by the media and they need their retribution. It is a means of keeping people at ease and that the narrative of the system works, 'the bad person' will be punished, just like in the movies. All is well.
Admittedly, in a lot of the western world one side of the conversation has seen Trump take this place, only without any sort of completion of the narrative arc. Good for business, bad for emotional strength for some people. Will be interesting to see what comes after him.
While other commenters take the lesson that Xi goes after corruption, I would restate it:
* he goes after corrupt officials, in both minor roles and very public big cases; and
* he also accused inconvenient people (mostly potential contenders) of corruption to get rid of them (see the list of party leaders purged since Xi came to power, with some even led off stage at the main CCP Congress in a show of power).
* How many corrupt officials are not persecuted due to political favouritism is by definition impossible to know from the outside.
If we actually punished corrupt officials and we had some kind of truth serum that forced people to admit yes/no as to whether they are corrupt, I would not be surprised if the majority of officials in the federal government would be culled. Its practically a breeding ground for corruption.
This is a lie. Joseph Biden pardoned Francis W. Biden, James B. Biden, Sara Jones Biden, John T. Owens and Valerie Biden Owens among many, many other dubious choices.
I'd imagine because of the talk from the then-incoming administration talking about how he'll go after their families unless his personal ongoing charges were dropped [0]. I would do the exact same thing if a vindictive POS was about to gain power.
I'm not the liar here -- none of those family pardons are for "white collar crimes", they were to protect them from retribution by Trump.
Again, Trump pardons people for a fee, and the motto of his pardons office is "no MAGA left behind". The fraud that he has pardoned amounts to about $2 billion to date.
Classic whataboutism and both sides are the same in a single sentence? wow thats a new record!
Trump's pardons far exceed what Biden did in terms of scope and corruption. Trump's literally collecting bribes for pardons. There has been multiple confirmed, documented cases of someone donating to his reelection fund or buying trump coins, and then receiving a pardon in short order.
This is blatant misrepresentation to try and justify the unprecedented corruption by the current administration. He will be documented as the most corrupt president ever, even surpassing U.S.Grant for the title.
Hang on. City level officials pay an incredibly important role in China. While Nanjing is not in the same tier as Shanghai, Beijing, or Shenzhen, it is in the tier just below them. It is the provincial capital of one of China's most important provinces -- GDP similar to Texas. Much of China's economy is actually municipality. Many large Chinese companies are often tied to specific cities -- they get grants and subsidies via the city they are located in.
This guy did it over 30 years so it is feasible.
Scapegoat isn't the right term but I think it is very possible he is being executed to essentially send a message. I think your bigger point that there are way more corrupt officials than just this guy involved seems very plausible.
That's not how this works. It really depends on how close you are to a position, where people might want to bribe you. Low provincial officials with direct ties to local land development might e.g. be able to take many more bribes than a highly ranked official in an office that is far removed from economic activity.
What happens to the money in these cases? I could imagine the official taking solace knowing the money he amassed over the years would eventually go his family.
The topic comment at the time I’m writing this is asking fair questions, in my opinion.
- Many people feel the death penalty is wrong in every case.
- Some have a general familiarity with high-level politics of elites and wonder about selective enforcement.
These don’t feel like they’re in bad faith. The merits are difficult to know from the outside, so there will always be speculation based on someone’s lived experience and perceptions. Better to have those aired with a chance to respond, in my opinion.
Especially for China, since it is a global power that operates differently from others. In my own country (United States), for example, we have brazenly open corruption with no consequences.
Society cannot work with too many corrupt civil servants. Yes, "autocrats", "civil liberties", and yet - the guy slurped up $325M to put his finger on the scale, not to change the model of governance.
I wish we in the west took corruption more seriously, but I suppose we're more interested in cage fights on the lawn these days.
The US is very good if you're very rich or extremely poor. It's bad for everyone else. China appears to be somewhat bad or critical of the superrich, which is why they want to come to the US, but good if you're middle class or poor.
The antifreeze toothpaste people didn’t get away with it, nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant that was one of the largest industrial catastrophes in the world let alone China.
If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face.
You might as well go jump off a building or a bridge cause you’re done for.
> If any of those people were politically connected
Connection works both ways. You can be your superior's lapdog on Monday and jailed for being so cordial that he thinks you are trying to take over his position — I mean, taking bribes — by Wednesday.
Given how this man stayed out of trouble for 30 straight years before finally being apprehended, I feel this could be exactly what happened. He probably had some political leverage to keep the prosecutors looking the other way. And the moment he lost his leverage — maybe his superiors changed their minds about him, maybe he stepped on the toes of someone, who knows — they went after him.
What happens in countries with no rule of law is rule of the governing hierarchies. A regional party boss would have his trusted deputes running things, who have their underlings, they underlings have their preferred business partners (police chiefs, businessmen, prosecutors, control authorities) and so on. A bribe at any level is always redistributed upwards.
Sometimes the big guy falls out of favor with bigger guys, and then the whole structure is up for grabs. The whole vertical is massacred (sometimes figuratively) while new people take over from the top down. Often what's visible happens a few degrees removed from the actual cause.
There's understanding among the ruling class and much of the populace that just's How The Things are Done. But moments like that give you public trials with executions that make some naïve Westerners clap.
? Everyone in the party is incolved in similar crimes. The only thing they are guilty off in addition is a lack of loyalty to emperor xi. Incompetence and criminal corruption, that you can edit out of history, but intrigue is unforgivable.
Are you sure?
Do you have an example of substantial disaster or scandal that resulted in loss of life and loss of face for China, but perpetuators got away?
For UK I have: Grenfell tower scandal (over 100 dead, no one in prison), infected blood scandal (thousands dead, no one in prison), postmaster scandal (thousands falsely imprisoned , no perpetrator in prison), etc.
I wish there was an investigation but the CCP blockaded any inquiries, going so far as removing the computers and not cooperating with international authorities. /s
They ran a rolling internment program for a few years, holding people against their will in mandatory patriotism camp for months at a time.
That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.
You're omitting so much, such as torture and ethnic cleansing and massive levels of abuse. Any genocidal concentration camp could be called 'an internment camp'. Anyone reading this, just look up coverage in credible sources.
It's never meant only that, but that's not the argument. We decided that a long time ago.
Genocide refers to a People (race, kind, tribe, family, etc.), not individual people. The group is a concept, and 'killing' it doesn't have to involve the biological death of the group members. That's part of what the linked resolution is trying to say.
For example, you could go sterilize every member of an ethnic group, without killing - causing the biological death of - any of them. None of them will be able to have children, and as they die of old age, the group disappears. That's genocide.
Another example would be to forcibly separate all the members of the group and prevent them from engaging in the lifestyle associated with membership in the group (e.g. style of dress, music, food, language, worship, etc.). Over time, perhaps generations, the people basically give up trying to do any of these things if they even remember what they were. They have no group cohesion, so the group has essentially disappeared. No need to directly cause any biological death. The argument is that this is also genocide.
Genocide as a concept is about ending the group, not specifically the individual members. It's definitely true that you can end a group by killing all its members, though.
Ok but none of those things came even close to happening in this case. The arguments are all, like, it was in pursuit of genocide, because I say so, so if one guy died in detention then it's a genocide.
Well there are allegations of mass detentions, forced labor, destruction of religious sites, suppression of language, separation of children into Chinese-controlled boarding schools, coercive birth control, and sterilization.
You agreed with me that genocide is more expansive than "we're directly killing people". For the sake of argument, let's assume the allegations are true: what would you call that?
But the allegations aren't true for the most part. Some are partially true, like if you have too many kids they sterilize you, that was true for decades and going away now. But then the limit on kids for minorities was HIGHER than it was for Han Chinese until recently. So were they self genociding?
Was, yes. That policy ended in 2017 I think, which I don't know if I call that recent. Post-2017 some evidence pieced together by a journalist suggested that IUDs and forced sterilizations were higher in Xinjiang than the rest of the country, and went up when the rest of the country went down. But you're right, their population has not evaporated.
My point about the assumption was to get you to agree that if these things are happening, we know that it constitutes genocide. At this point I don't care if you agree or not.
They stopped being higher because the limit was raised from 2-3 for Han, not because it went down for minorities.
And it's very easy for me to believe that rates of childbirth and hence violations are higher for subsistence farmer populations than urban workers, because that's true everywhere. Uyghur population grew a ton between 2010-2020.
Lastly, no, there's no such thing as a "technical" genocide on a points system without some massive crimes against humanity that would drop anyone's jaw, and those things are hard to hide. It's not like you make a couple of technical errors and, oops, genocide even though the population is substantially fine.
So beeing unable to keep up, because your culture holds you back that is a genocide? Like somebody develops machines, that marginalize your existence until you fade away, that is a genocide?
No I believe it requires intent (possibly systemic in nature) on the part of the perpetrator. If the quakers end up disappearing and it turns out to be primarily due to their refusal to adopt modern technology that's not genocide as I understand it so long as everyone else was at worst indifferent to their plight.
It doesn't cheapen the word. If discrimination is intentional and has the effect of minimizing and eventually eliminating the target ethnic group, then you have the same result as if you lined up everyone in that group and shot them.
The word is attached to the intended outcome, not the specific actions taken to achieve it.
Except there was no intent to destroy, literally all other points 2.X that follows is irrelevant. There's reason plurality of UN takes PRC position that they indented to deradicalize / reeducate, aka not genocide. Which is obvious except to useful idiots on Pompeo propaganda because reducing PRC minorities by 1 is bad for Xi's hagiography. Now the gets to bask in the glory of speed running histories most successful war on terror with minimal bloodshed by sinicizing restive frontier region. Basically Obama should hand over his Nobel Peace Prize to Xi.
No, it would be "cultural genocide", which bluntly is empty label - there's a reason no international framework exits for something prosaic like enforcing common language and culture on minorities - because it's nation building 101. And regardless that's not even what PRC did, they didn't turn Uyghurs into non Muslims, they Sinicized them back to traditional Uyghur + state Islam and excised strains of extremist Wahhabism which was recent import. You know how western minorities mostly speak the dominant language, aka melting pot, that's what PRC minority policy is moving towards, away from soviet autonomous multicultural oblast model which was too hands off leading to minorities getting to restive/handsy with terrorism/separatism.
It would be like if German Jews who spoke only Yiddish and stuck in their minority enclaves, carried out 100s of terrorist attacks, got reeducated to speak both German, and Yiddish, reform religion to be less extremist, and doing it in <10 years, i.e. single generation. Not only would it have not been genocide, it would have been exemplar model to emulate. Which is broadly what XJ securitization is, the most successful deradicalization and integration program in human history.
Well but the point was, that these are wiped from the internet. Sure it’s convenient, but I wouldn’t put it past the Chinese government - I’m sure they have erased quite a bit of uncomfortable facts.
You're assuming that this guy was actually being prosecuted for crimes or that this guy lacked loyalty to Xi Jinping. A tremendous number of top generals and leadership has been wiped out in a short time and not necessarily refilled, and it's not because China has a huge disloyalty problem.
> it's not because China has a huge disloyalty problem.
Why not? Dictators often purge anyone who is a threat, often because they form a possibly competitive power structure (regardless of their intent), and often because of paranoid perceived disloyalty, and for actual disloyalty.
And corruption is the cover story they commonly use - it's vague, general, the public sees enough gov't corruption to believe it and to hate it. Trials are not needed. Off the top of my head, Putin in Russia, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, ...
> You're assuming that this guy was actually being prosecuted for crimes or that this guy lacked loyalty to Xi Jinping
That's not an "or" question, imo. If you threaten the king by having too much power, too many allies, or too keen a mind, you get moved off the board. Disloyalty and risk of disloyalty are both abhorrent to autocrats.
Given that they've already carried out a Stalinist purge within the military ranks, I'm leaning towards the former. Xi might very well be positioning for a Taiwanese invasion.
> nor did the 3000 pigs in the river people, and nor did that one group of executives who were in charge of a fertilizer/chemical plant
What about the bridge falling down people, or the overpromised scam apartment people, or the tunnel that flooded people, or the police officers that blocked view of the flowers left for the folks who died in the tunnel that flooded people, or the opened the dam to flood the farmers during the rainy season people, or the fake drains people, or the fake fire hydrants people, or the lead paint in the kids school food people, or the covered up the lead paint in the kids school food doctors, or the apartments with styrofoam instead of concrete that collapsed in venezuela earthquake people...?
I haven't heard of many of these but the ones I have were state actors covering up things the state itself did or enabled. that's a different category from private executives getting punished when they embarrass Beijing.
While I am all for holding especially c corp and politicians accountable, similar sentences are a tragedy for me because there is no legal system I would trust, and I don't believe in death sentences as a crime punishment.
> If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance.
LOL. Bribery is basically required in China for anyone with a medium sized business. Otherwise, you'll be indefinitely blocked by a bureaucrat who has no incentive to help you. Departments in municipal governments are often underfunded and bribery makes up for a significant portion of their effective payroll.
Facilitation payment are usually considered the less egregious kinds of bribery, some may be considered acceptable in a culture, and there can be a whole etiquette to it.
In some countries, doctors or surgeons are severely underpaid and it would be customary for a well off citizen to bring them a gift or a cash summ before an important surgery.
That’s quite different from Kickbacks (rampant in UK leaseholds by the way), etc.
Just because it's considered acceptable doesn't mean that you can't get in trouble for it down the line if you get the wrong people upset. "Acceptable" bribery goes far beyond giving a gift to your underpaid doctor. What I meant by funding payroll is that it's pretty common to basically "donate" to a hospital and then afterwards your kid magically has a job there.
What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.
I am just saying that it would be good if we could have more precise discussion about corruption because different types of it are not equal, and we have more precise terminology.
In the 90s and 00s when I was a kid, being a crook had real consequences here too. Not the death penalty per second, but the die in prison penalty left and right.
When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal.
President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing.
Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside.
Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too.
When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out.
Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves.
Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.
This comes and goes in seasons. At the turn of the last century the broligarchs of the time (they called them robber barons then) had the game stitched up worse than today. They owned the state legislatures (who elected the senators at that time) lock, stock, and barrel. They bought laws as they pleased.
The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it.
Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone.
But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him.
This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression.
if trump ordered someone to be shot for accepting bribes we would find this idea a lot less appealing
anyone who spent a lot of time in that part of the world will tell you this stuff can basically be made up
the western method to do this is to plant csa material on a person and then publicly announce they've been caught with it. not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car
your entire family and social network will immediately cut you off and very few consider these things can be fabricated
not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car
That's because that's not how the laws worked in the U.S., nor have the laws ever worked that way. If that was actually how the laws worked, a lot of enemies of each administration would get tarred with this, instead of literally none of them.
"If you get caught". Do the math on how many get caught per capita. Its like worrying about a random coconut falling on your head.
Fighting corruption in unequal societies is not possible because ambitious people born without wealth and status, and constantly bombarded with signals from birth that wealth and status is a sign of success, will do whatever it takea to get it.
The Law doesnt reduce corruption. Its just a story like Religion that allows people to cope with a reality they dont control.
Only if the CCP doesn't like you or decides that it doesn't like you because you are more valuable as an enemy. Otherwise it's no big deal because politics in a communist country does not get done without bribes in one form or another. Honest players are not to be found in a communist country. Government is like open source. The more open you are, the less likely there is going to be shenanigans.
I’ve lived in 2 out of 3 of those countries and I can assure you people get away with fraud and corruption all the time.
If you’re well connected (or making the right people rich) they are happy to overlook it. But if you bite off too much and they need a head to roll they will find one (usually someone lower level).
I mean look at the number of military leader simply dismissed in China for massive corruption. They get a fat pension and go away quietly and the small guy pays with his life.
Not sure I’d be expounding the greatness of that system.
China is as corrupt or more corrupt as anywhere else. You can absolutely buy your way out, or otherwise wrangle something. Zero tolerance death penalty for this sort of thing is a sign of extreme desperation - the fact that there are any such scandals despite the penalty is telling.
Anyone who think this demonstrates the CCP's epicbacon commitment to anti corruption needs to ask themselves how did this man take so much bribe over 30 years and is only sentenced now.
Is he dumb? Surely he is smart enough to know he committed a capital crime and yet he kept doing it. Perhaps he only kept doing it because he believed he could somehow get away with it? Perhaps he saw others pull off the same stunt? Or perhaps he had the political capital to keep himself out of trouble and is now facing justice because he rubbed someone higher up the wrong way?
Is the prosecution dumb? 300 million is no small money are they really so incompetent that over the course of 30 years they could not find anything wrong with this guy? Perhaps they had a reason to keep him around? Perhaps he had them in his pocket? Perhaps he had the connection to fuck up anyone who dares investigating him? Perhaps they never meant to care about corruption anyway and only went after him because someone somewhere issued an order and they are just charging him for corruption because the true reason is less convenient?
China has invested a lot in whitewashing its public image these days. Every young left leaning westerner is salivating at the idea of a Chinese century because they somehow convinced themselves that the Chinese has the solution to everything that went wrong in the west. It's sad to see it spreading even to this website.
generally an allusion to the sophomoric takes of enthusiastic ignorance found on places like Reddit (where The Oatmeal and Cards Against Humanity were popular)
> he was described as the most corrupt official in Chinese history... Heshen is remembered as one of the richest men in history... His total property was... reputed to be equivalent to the imperial revenue of the Qing government for 12 years.
does punishing corruption with a death sentence - look excessive ? Yes!
is it prone to abuse by those who yield power - Yes!
however - the alternative - where corruption goes unchecked is even worse!! if you come from a poor country e.g in Africa - you would've experienced the effects of corruption.
American are now experiencing it now - & the country is already worse off. though before corruption in American was used as an incentive mechanism - now it's just pure grift.
so yeah sentencing one or two people to death explicitly is the humane outcome vs sentencing thousands to death implicitly.
Death sentence is excessive. But many people here will be comparing it to the USA where the current punishment for corruption is nothing. Literally nothing. You just get away with it in plain sight
We don't need death sentence, we just need, like, any regular sentence
The alternative is 4 years of house arrest, just until the next administration can issue a pardon. There is no sentence between 4 years and capital punishment.
In your opinion, which specific criminal acts have American executives committed in the last 20 years?
Holmes et co have been charged and incarcerated, SBF is also sitting in prison, other executives at smaller companies have also been prosecuted and faced imprisonment. I think there is a lot of fraud in various industries, but some of it is prosecuted, and some of it is legal enough that there is only a fine to pay. There is some accountability, and as much as i can criticize what corps do, i don't think of them as "legally responsible" for every misuse of their tools. Today it seems that if someone cuts their own leg off with a power saw it is a lawsuit against the tool company.
Insider trading - Using knowledge of impending policy decisions and military operations to massively profit from the stock market.
Further than this, one could argue that those policy decisions were made, or at least timed, in order to deliberately short stocks in order to reap profit. The timing of a lot of the Iran war announcements followed very suspect patterns.
Using the highest office in the land to promote personal businesses.
Awarding military contracts to companies linked with family members of the administration over other more suitable options.
We'll likely never see any accountability for the literal billions being illicitly gained by the current administration after they've left office.
Will it happen here to the most corrupt a-hole? I don't think so. He'd chant - they hate me, or i'm part of a witch hunt, or 'i'm politically prosecuted.
I wish India did something like this. A crackdown on corruption and enforcement of existing laws would fix 90% of India’s problems. Obviously I don’t think folks should get the death penalty but something harsh like long jail sentences and tearing down of whatever kingdoms they have built.
349 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 74.8 ms ] thread* the ATF decided not to raid his home when he was out of town but early in the morning when he was at home
* the ATF gave him 28 seconds to comply with their announcement after which they battered the door down
Given the fact that the agents weren't wearing body cameras, the guy had a normal day job that he'd go to, and that 28 seconds is certainly too short to dispose of firearms it does seem a lot like execution served by way of search warrant. Certainly, I wouldn't be able to let anyone in 28 s after waking up to pounding on my door.
He was shot after opening fire, unprovoked, on federal agents performing a search of his home under a lawfully obtained warrant.
I can understand if there's some imminent threat but there was none. He was going to wake up, and report to a secure airport full of cops and federal agents. But they couldn't resist engineering a situation that ended up with him dead, doing what anyone would do to protect their wife when given ~zero time to distinguish threats entering their home at night.
Now you can argue maybe it wasn't an execution, and only their acts were indistinguishable from what those doing an execution would do.
The ATF in this instance (and frankly most instances) chose the most violent option available to them, because good people don't join the ATF. Violent thugs who get off on shooting dogs join the ATF. And when they get tired of shooting dogs, they decide to manufacture a scenario where they get to kill a more dangerous game.
To address the mentality – you probably assume there are lindy effects to bribery, especially if you're 10-25 years in and your network of corruption grows. It's difficult to imagine yourself as the sole actor being pinched.
They'll basically be your friends, partners and coworkers. Making a sudden change in how you associate with each other can have rather negative consequences, ranging from anxiety to them trying to murder you.
Why are they violating human rights, look at Trump for example:
And nothing is happening. China should learn how to treat humans properlyIf Trump were involved into this kind of punitive system, they'd use one of his underlings as the fall guy.
But, are these sort of things just examples of selective prosecution? Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing, if they were to be caught doing the same?
I’m not a law expert but it seems pretty basic that there shouldn’t be irreversible punishment.
Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence, which doesn’t happen anywhere in the world as far as I can understand.
So harsher punishment means people with less power will get shafted harder
I agree with you, but we also can't reverse entropy.
I am not convinced. "You can no longer hold office" is a permanent punishment. Why should that not be allowed?
> Also there should be equity which means everyone that does the same crime should face the same consequence
I am also unconvinced. I don't think it is fair to treat a child like an adult and I think those in power should have more stringent standards and larger consequences for violating them.
Let's say that some new evidence comes out that exonerates the person. You can indeed reverse the "no longer hold office" punishment. You can't bring someone back from the dead.
You can't select some random person and do a bit of bureaucracy and then tell a family whose member you killed that this rando is now part of their family as restitution for your mistake. You can give them money but in general it is considered somewhat distasteful to put an immediate pecuniary value on human life.
Of course, attempts are made to "reverse" even after someone had been put to death. Posthumous pardons are a thing. It may not bring anything to the person who has passed, but it could give somewhat similar benefits to living descendants.
It's just to say we shouldn't undermine how impactful something like incarceration is on the theory that it is "reversible". Evidence suggests such experiences mess people up in pretty severe ways. Lets also remember thinking of death in these distinct terms may be very cultural. Few penal systems escape barbarity. There are worse things than death. There are many instances or societies were it is preferable or expected people kill themselves rather than go through something like the ignominy of incarceration.
As to the last line, I'm also not sure. Brutal societies have a way of turning on themselves. Nations that accord more protections to their people are generally a better place for their rulers, even if the reverse is not always true. Personally I would love a legal system that baked into its norms higher punishments for people with more power. I think these have existed in the pass, even if enforced through less modern mechanisms.
It is also the case that people in power do things that people with less power are incapable of. Getting rid of notions of executive privilege or qualified immunity would be a good start. The way the law is written currently, people in power won't simply not be punished - they won't even be charged. Take George Bush. Did he ever even just have to testify under oath about the rationale for the Iraq War once? Would the United States really descend into a banana republic if he had been charged for perjury or war crimes? It seems like the push in that direction can instead trace its genesis to the fact that in America, we evidently make our leaders untouchable.
It’s not totally clear what the consequences were for those purged or if their crimes were legit but seems like they are all in prison.
[1]. https://www.afpc.org/publications/articles/the-inevitability...
It's a risky play to try to communicate over the internet to a bunch of us literalist nerds :p.
But yes agreed. It’s very hard to parse what is going on from the outside.
My very uninformed read is that the people who were purged seemed already loyal allies to Xi but had more clout to disagree with him, while the new guys know they are replaceable. The PLA is notoriously corrupt as well so hard to say which of those purges were political control vs corruption based.
I kinda doubt the new guys are unambiguous though you need to be ambitious and risk taking to rise like that in the CCP.
no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.
Are we really heralding purging political opponents as anti corruption? Imagine if Trump won and put Harris in jail.
The west is inundated with simplistic anti-chinese propaganda, so you would never perceive it as such, the way it would be presented to you in the west is as the evil dictator Xi Jingping purging his opposition, for instance:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-41670162
This is single party autocracy, no matter how much people cry about propaganda.
You don't understand how calling you a victim of propaganda is me being charitable, I could've also called you a typical western ignorant sinophobe.
Taiwan is Chinese, they don’t have this system. So spare me the crocodile tears.
Single party rule and state controlled media with one of the most sophisticated censorship infrastructure in the world has exactly one simple goal.
While I'm sure he doesn't catch all corruption and the CCP overall has selective enforcement, the reason they do have measures like this is in large part because of Xi Jinping's specific reputation and positioning.
"Similarly, Xi’s siblings, nieces, and nephews held assets worth over $1 billion in business investments and real estate"
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ODNI-Un...
Far too often when you see stories about how someone was persecuted for corruption it boils down to "he stole from rich people".
You mean in China specifically? Because there are some pretty significant counterexamples in other places right now.
Just like Trump and Modi
He sees it as a challenge to his legitimacy and China’s power, which, as you’d expect are the most important things to him; even if you take the most cynical view.
Another timely example, because it is the World Cup, is the Chinese football programs. They’ve been decimated because of corruption prosecutions, both executives and players. It’s a major reason why China isn’t competitive on the global stage, which much smaller countries with significantly smaller budgets can compete. And, yes, Xi does care about competing in the World Cup. Prestige is very important to his concept of China’s honor and global standing.
This right here is why “corruption” should be looked on with great skepticism. In an authoritarian government basic liberties we take for granted in the West are considered corruption. You know, like having a say in how people are governed. This is a high crime in a state with 1 party that cannot be replaced.
In that way, “corruption” can mean “not being loyal to the dictator.”
This guy took $325M in bribes, embezzlement, abuse of power, and money laundering. And he did this as a public servant for over 30 years.
I say good on China for attacking such brazen corruption so directly. Violating the public trust should be extremely harsh.
and it was discovered just now? May it be that he played exactly by the rules, the real rules, of the regime - corruption being among the foundational rules of it - and thus it was going for 30 years? And right now he just got his turn like it usually happens in totalitarian regimes.
>Violating the public trust should be extremely harsh.
definitely. The only question why the comrade Xi is still not executed?
Yeah, that would be wild if any of that completely unsubstantiated conjecture, bordering on fan-fiction, was what actually happened.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught. They get complacent. They get messy. Each round of embezzlement leads to a larger body of evidence that exists somewhere that becomes more and more damning as time goes on.
> The regime wouldn't want to create impression of political disunity among the officials.
In this thread we have dozens of examples of political officials being prosecuted. I'd strongly suggest you park your McCarthyism, take a break, perhaps go for a nice walk.
>White collar criminals often get caught later in their "careers" precisely because they do it for years and years and years without being caught.
You’ve definitely never seen the castles and fleets of exotic cars that government officials in those countries manage to get on their meager government salaries. Yet you post such an authoritative comments …
China has laws especially regarding significant financial crimes like embezzlement, theft, money laundering. And most governments also have rules against breaching public trust, corruption by favoritism, bribery, and more.
This guy was in multiple public servant roles, and exfiltrated $325M. This isn't a 'possible smell of impropriety ' in taking a supper with a potential vendor. This is basically highly illegal anywhere in the world.
But the Americans go back to their 'but communist China!' howls. The punishment's harsh, sure. But I think its a great standard to hold leaders and public servants to.
For example, you're making an effort to try legitimize the regime by framing a factual gross illegal conduct as a overarching policy.
But is it like that when you observe the whole structure?
How wealthy are the political elites? Or for example, how has IP theft policy changed?
Or we can reframe this: how do we tell the difference between a genuine tackle on corruption, from a weed out of the system with a public display?
You have plenty of cases in other corrupt regimes when they want to seize assets from someone the regime wants to push away: it's corruption.
Which again, they could be very well be corrupt, but they are corrupt because they're part of the regime.
You'll probably say: "Oh but the USS!!!" Yes, there's some level of systemic corruption there, just not an institution - yet!
>> corruption is an institution
>> Or for example, how has IP theft policy changed?
Another country may decide to have no IP protections, that’s not a crime.
Furthermore Intellectual property is legal fiction, some people and countries don’t believe in it.
Apparently Anthropic don’t believe in IP either, they are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, but cry wolf when someone does it to them. And they are asking for legal immunity on IP theft.
If this was just a political action to take down just another corrupt official enabled by the government, how is this a good thing?
Well for a lot of countries protecting inventions with patents were a major trigger for improvement, so much so it became a cornerstone and you can even say an institution. So of course it would be viewed as corruption by any country with such institutions.
And it's not like China says it would never abide by IP, else they would have never got the investment that made them into what they are today.
But look further from IP theft, what about seizing assets from companies, or whole companies?
It’s not viewed as corruption. US gov made numerous public statements condemning IP theft, and never even once classified it as corruption - it’s simply a different crime.
Furthermore, you suggested a benchmark is: “How wealthy are the ruling elites”
Well let’s see - the richest man in the world is American, 70% of 100 richest people are American, American has higher inequality than China.
By what robust quantitative measurement does this effort look less genuine than American one?
Are you accessing any objective facts or you simply are unable to accept that a country you are opposed to is making genuine progress?
Go look up the history of the USA and creation of copyright/patent/trademark was done, and how we dis-recognized all European claims. They were howling similarly.
Go look at how extreme patent law perverted and kept airplanes locked to the Wright brothers, and held down an industry, while other countries (many European as well) were at the forefront of avionics. Patents held the USA back until the US GOV eminent domained the patent freeing it for WW1 armament.
Or go look up why Hollywood was a thing. Again, patent laws on cameras, and eacaping to California was all about screwing over patrnt holders over royalties.
And sure, China didnt recognize our copyrights. Ok. And? We dont recognize theirs either.
The point of totalitarian regime is that nobody should feel safe, nobody should have an agency. In particular the people shouldn't be able to obtain themselves safety even by the way of being totally loyal.
That does not mean that you should google "China bad" and paste a bunch of random urls in a reply, though.
What Cold War propaganda did to Western brains is tragic.
Like insider trading by congress?
Jokes aside, this is not how dictatorships normally deal with democratic activists? I don’t see how you can come to this conclusion u less you believe that corporations are people, election spending is a form of legally protected free speech, and corporations should vote in elections:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/delaware-court-upho...
No. Like Kushner and Witkoff and Trump (and probably Hunter Biden) literally peddling influence for money.
Could you list some of those basic liberties? Are they the sort of liberties whose exercise involves taking half a billion in bribes?
---
Generally, basic liberties like showing up to a protest aren't considered corruption, they get called terrorism, or somesuch. A Texas judge just sentenced a dozen people to 30-70 years in prison for exercising them, by the way. Some of the people given 30 weren't even at the protest.
> The protest was a late-night/noise demonstration (involving fireworks) against immigration detention policies. It turned violent when a shooting injured a police officer. Prosecutors described it as an "act of terrorism" linked to an alleged antifa cell; defendants and supporters denied organized antifa ties and framed it as protected protest activity
https://x.com/i/grok/share/87352ef0ac4b454aba924157c44f476f
It sounds like they arrived in tactical gear, started destroying property, and when cops arrived opened fire.
This seems like a bad example on your part, as the people opposing ICE are some of the most misaligned people in the country. That said, we have a right to protest in traditional public forms, you don't have a right to shoot up an ICE facility.
He could have had the book thrown at him. As for the rest, if you seriously think that getting 70 years for being at a protest where one person shot a gun is appropriate, you have a lot in common with a Stalin-era Soviet judge.
That by itself isn't a convincing argument. You can't plan a bank heist and be waiting at your safe house and say, "I'm not guilty of anything, because I wasn't in the bank!". The mafia guy doesn't get to say, "I didn't actually whack the victim, I just nodded to Joey, and he did the whacking".
You might be interested in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_conspiracy
...maybe this is mostly a thing in common law jurisdictions? Maybe there is a lawyer here who can point us to a interesting history of conspiracy in common law vs civil law jurisdictions? Also of interest might be things like:
https://www.justia.com/criminal/offenses/homicide/felony-mur...
- volleyball. Probably their best team sport. Men's team have nothing to show but the women's team won the competition 3 times (1984, 2004, 2016) and the World Cup twice (1982, 1986)
- basketball. Women's team are usually there at the Olympic games and they won a silver medal in 1992 and a bronze in 1984 but nothing ever since. They were the runner ups in the last World Cup final (2022) against the US. Men's team have 0 results.
- football, irrelevant. Men's team only qualified to the World Cup once in 2002. Women's team is slightly better being the runner up once in 1999, and they also won silver medal in the 1996 Olympic games. But that was a one generation thing, nothing to show ever since.
- water polo, irrelevant. Women's team is slightly better usually qualifying for the Olympic games but 0 results. Same at the World Cup.
- baseball/softball, irrelevant.
- field hockey, irrelevant.
- handball, irrelevant.
- rugby sevens, irrelevant.
To be explicit about each other's assumptions, I think Race (however ill-defined or specific construct as it may or may not be), is not the same thing as Country, Political System, Culture, Religion, etc.
Understanding racists these days mostly use euphemisms and codewords, and it's a devil's work sometimes to figure it out, in the "Principle of Charity" sense, I read that post as being a critique of China's political and cultural systems in general, and their sport-league / development in particular, leading to specific societal outcomes. I could be extremely naive though but I'm willing to learn if you may provide more backing/thought for that?
Lots of posts about how the CPC isn't really doing the will of the people, they are just following and the people are too docile or subdued to resist. Chinese people are bad at team sports where an individual contribution can play a big part. They are only good at the ones where they all do the same thing.
It ties in with the western ideology that we are unique, dynamic, flawed but able to push ahead in a way collectives aren't.
I will also posit the downplaying and discrediting of Chinese tech and industry is also related with this mindset.
Not sure when we will see this but when we have the Century of Africa, I'd love to see the spin on the front-page of NYT then. I predict something similar to the shade like "Nationalism/Hinduism by Modhi" when he won't play ball with the West on Russian sanction.
One thing we know is important for a country to be globally competitive in team athletics is having pervasive grass roots youth leagues developing talent from an early age. My sense is the Chinese have a structured selection system where they try out kids in key sports and select the best for special development.
Compare this with Western democracies where kids of most skills levels are generally able to keep playing club sports through high school as long as they have an interest and any aptitude at all. In America, pee wee football, girl's soccer leagues, etc are part of the social fabric of communities. It's considered worthwhile to let kids practice, play and develop even when it's clear they don't have professional or collegiate potential.
The deep reach and years of development of kids with no clear aptitude matter because it's about identifying outliers. I suspect it comes down to chaotic but pervasive casual development beating central planning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855
[1]. https://www.businessinsider.com/china-corruption-rocket-forc...
This is a person who invites war criminals to his country and rolls out the red carpet...then again...
Or his sinocentricity and even racism (as in superiority of chinese people). There's been a long standing view in China about their own superiority of others, including all the way into the way they view their national pride as extending back further than any other civilization, even though external historians might view it more like several disjoint civilizations in a similar region... Kinda like how we don't call American history as starting when previous groups from contemporary russian crossed ice bridges to the Americas... We say it started in 1776 because it was a new major iteration of the regime.
The point is, there's a lot more to history than political organization. A continuous culture and language is a big part of that.
Xi is also fantastically corrupt. He wasn’t born a billionaire.
There is credible evidence his family controls billions of dollars of assets. Those assets accumulated in direct correlation with his power. Chinese state media disagrees, and if that's your cup of tea for Chinese leaders' corruption, I guess sure, Trump's also clean as a whistle.
None sequitur / who cares? Xi personally doesn't have obscene wealth/assets according to relevant evidence which is what matters.
Many CCP red family nepo babies/princelings influence peddled their way to wealth in last 50 years, they get are first dibs aristocracy class and their wealth should logically snowball with PRC moving from billion to trillion $ economy.
But Xi himself specifically has been outlier in how squeaky clean, even by western investigations. Nothing has been tied to him, hence lame "but his family manages his wealth" cope. Like the bro married Chinese 80s Taylor Swift and all signs point to him being fine what he has, which is not nothing, but also not extravagant, which makes trying to associate him to stupendous graft levels corruption he is trying to fix impossible.
Of course broader PRC leadership class has lots of corruption from development, it should be expected that Xi's sister/husband, both from red families to be wealthy from PRC development, but timeline of Xi's sister/husband wealth predates Xi - i.e. early real estate / rare earth investments. Difference between Xi and Trump is Xi himself has been historically clean, and in office made his family divest/liquidate 100ms in assets vs Trump is is historically unclean and family uses his influence to accumulate.
So no, all signs point to Xi is clean as a whistle while Trump isn't, and its ridiculous to equate the two just because both families are wealthy.
And to circle to original claim, there is no evidence that Xi is fantastically corrupt, only evidence to the contrary, that he is outlier in how uniquely uncorrupt relative to prestige, access, opportunities.
that's BS
cracking down on corruption has been a common tactic for decades to get rid of people who are a threat to the top dog at the CCP, and Xi has employed this perhaps better than anyone since Mao
are those people being purged corrupt? probably most are. but plenty of people who are corrupt aren't purged, it's a highly selective process.
Xi started this a few years after coming into power -- and it was obviously to the educated class was it was (I was living in Beijing at the time), but "mei banfa" (or emigrate, as many people with the $/ability to do so, did).
This sounds really interesting, do you have any examples?
Honest question to anyone who may be from China - the perception I've been fed in the US is that almost every bureaucrat is on the take. They certainly were in the USSR, you had to "know someone" to get anything done or just eat.
Perhaps it's just a RIF.
You can’t squeeze blood from a brick. At a certain point, you need to tolerate a little messiness to optimize societal growth.
Think of it as a dial you can turn clockwise or counterclockwise:
Security <——> Freedom
A healthy society would have good feedback mechanisms that allow it to change the dial of the government in power, to adjust to the current situation. Obviously, there’s no one optimal position; to use a historical example: Churchill was great for Britain during WW2, and immediately elected out afterwards.
The problem is, if they dont like their governance they cant trade it back for their freedom.
The way the mainstream media freaked out about him asking Bill O'Reilly, "what, you think our country is so innocent?" is a good example. Or saying we're in Venezuela for oil at the outset. Or talking about how they killed so many Iranians they don't even know who they are negotiating with anymore. I mean at least we didn't have to suffer through fumbling Bushisms about freedom. If the day ever comes when presidents are held to the same standards as the people, then ironically in many regards we will have to at least give him some points for honesty... it is quite sad how he is the only person to succeed to such an extent on such an "outsider", really anticorruption message ("drain the swamp"), then turn around and do the same thing. I think it is probably related to the core problem of American society - the doublespeak, the dual consciousness, the resistance to self reflection. People don't want honest answers - including to their own complicity (who elected these people anyway?). They want slogans. The results are sad, but predictable. A society that elects (and then worse, reelects) someone like Trump to end corruption is clearly a society that cannot look itself in the mirror. The same goes for the other side of the aisle. The "democracy" party that has no primaries and says it's either "fascism" or geriatric grandpa. We take this election very seriously that is why we have nominated a corpse. Don't mention it or you're a fascist. No you don't get another choice. Vote for us or democracy dies...
Sad... maybe if politics was a venue where people weren't punished for being honest we wouldn't have such low quality politicians. Brings to mind the George Carlin line:
That would be a nice realistic campaign slogan for somebody: 'The public sucks. Elect me.'"
There's no evidence that Xi Jinping is like Putin (who has enriched himself to abe unknown but expectedly high dgree), no evidence the military generals have enriched themselves with corruption (again, like Russia) or really anything else. Instead there's evidence that the likes of Jack Ma, a billionaire, are brought to heel, China has cracked down on so-called yin-yang contracts, sentenced to death people who messed with the baby formula supply chain and so on.
People really should reflect on why they're so willing to seek confirmation bias and why they have that bias at all.
Here's a tip: if you take anything China says or does at face value you will be more correct than 95% of the China "experts" that have entrenched themselves in the media and Western policy circles.
Everyone in China knows how dynasties end.
Maybe, but they hit the rich. All the selective prosecution in the US hits those least able to resist.
The CCP derives a significant part of its legitimacy from improving quality of life and living standards for the common Han Chinese. Waste and fraud that harms consumers is a drag on this progress; the incentives somewhat align. Real economic harm often causes real political harm.
In Iran, Gaza, Russia (no no, it is not you, it is.. "Ukraine").
You are much worse than them, actually. Though believing yourself to be the light of civilization, soulless robots..
Your american KGB knows nearly everything about me, as well as about any other person with internet access (and also those without), without any "warrants", "judges", etc
Never even imagined in Soviet Union.
You are the ultimate horror.
"american KGB"? pray tell, who would that be? FBI? NSA? ICE? Even with their tooling, they are still struggling to legally acquire information, and even more so to act on it. There's even considerations of abolishing these agencies.
Try suggesting the abolition of the MSS as a mainland Chinese national and see what happens.
"Still struggling to legally acquire information.."
I dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest. Now whether it was acquired "legally" i dont know, but when they choose people to murder abroad, I dont think that matters much.
So I call bullshit on your point.
> dont doubt for a single moment, and I dont think you should, that you are right there in their database, with your identity, psychological profile, and all the rest.
I do. Perhaps I am there. I'm not going to deny USA's alphabet boys abilities, but I'm not going to glaze them either. Nor I'm going to ignore that I might also be on the PRC's databases as well. They might not bombing people yet, but foreign policy can change easily.
Though you are right I guess in what regards the legal apparatus of PRC.
But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative (though this is eventually what you become when your mouth is being consistently shut with a big fat lap).
As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
Yes, because it means you don't have a good idea of the claims being presented. Perhaps there's a point in there, but you should think it through rather than just allowing it to remain nebulous as suggested in "I dont care much about their [...] organizational structure". Organizational structures matter, they make certain corporate actions easier and others more expensive.
> But look, here in the free west my speech is suppressed without any need for "legal apparatus".. and it is not because I was provocative
I appreciate the change in tone, but I have to ask whether that's really the case, as you're being ambiguous with the suppression methodology. There's quite a gap between "flagged into oblivion in a site" and "arrested for a year for posting anti-government opinions". Given the initial comments on your profile, you haven't done any favors in keeping downvotes and flags away. Not just provocations, but also gratuitous accusations. I try to avoid those because all they do is give ammo to the enemy.
> As regards to your efforts to ptotect privacy, your identity can be deduced without much difficulty just from the sites you visit.. and Tor's origin you should know, and here I would stop.
That's a oversimplified view about privacy. Every piece of information about a person, when enough is collected, can be used to identidy them. Collecting said information, specially when the infrastructure for that is not trivially available (as is the case in the USA in comparison to the PRC) is easier than done. When was the last time someone got identified by law enforcement in the US via their internet traffic? You are better off worrying about GDID in Windows.
A similar story goes for Tor. For starters, it was developed by US Navy, not the intelligence/law enforcement agencies. Second, the protocol is open and publicly being developed, so even if the NSA added a backdoor, it can be caught and removed. Finally, Tor is not the only option, see I2P for an example.
You think so?
I spend a lot of time working with (actual) anarchists in the US, and most of us are far more worried about the US gov putting us in jail (or murdering us outright) for our signal chats, protests, and "actions" than literally anything that the PRC might consider doing to us.
It's true that the US may be more of a immediate threat to those in its territories, but to compare it to KGB is to either massively oversell US domestic forces abilities or undersell KGB's. Even in the closest cases of political executions, extrajudicial murders through abuses of force and qualified immunity, as seen in the recent ICE shootings, they still caused a lot of national instability, even within the right wing. Similar happenings in the USSR didn't come close in reactions.
Almost certainly. But it's not simple to understand because four things are simultaneously true:
1. Corruption is a serious problem Xi is genuinely focused on reducing through high-profile prosecutions with extreme sentences.
2. Xi and his party lieutenants have certainly used corruption charges to eliminate central party 'Titans' because they got too powerful, got too greedy, or were deemed insufficiently 'loyal'.
3. Corruption is pervasive at almost every level and there's no way most of it can be eliminated anytime soon. In fact, the system relies on it to function as well as it does. The purpose of these high-profile prosecutions is only to reduce the size and frequency of corruption. It reminds officials that stealing half the money half the time can be bad for their health. So they stick closer to taking 10-20% only 10-20% of the time.
4. The sub-1% of corrupt officials who are prosecuted, likely end up being busted because they got 'too greedy' and were made a sacrificial lamb by their corrupt peers to fill the system's need for a few high-profile examples. The 'too greedy' isn't from taking too much, it's usually from not greasing enough palms with enough money (including the provincial corruption investigators themselves). When there's tens of millions of dollars of illicit money at stake, the dynamics become like de facto organized crime mobs and there's always competition between factions. This guy probably knows exactly which rival played the game better and beat him.
In a competitive employment market, paid time off is just another part of the cash value of any compensation package. Employees compare the overall packages, so companies need to offer 'competitive' PTO. In the past decade, FAANG-ish valley companies have had to offer 4-6 (or more) weeks of PTO. I know people who took two weeks every year and 'banked' four weeks. They retired early after 12 years with an extra YEAR of cash salary paid in full the day they left. When 5-10% of a company's debt is owed to their own employees and could become immediately due at any moment - that's a cash flow and liability issue for companies.
By 'not counting' the PTO, any PTO you don't take in the year you earn it doesn't go on the balance sheet as debt - meaning employees can't 'bank it'. It becomes 'use it or lose it'. The result was more employees took more PTO each year (which is net good) and the company's stopped accruing a weird balance sheet debt. Note: I'm only familiar with the dynamics in the U.S. but I believe they also apply elsewhere but regulations and financial reporting requirements differ per country.
Worker protection rights in the U.S.A. truly are seen as a joke.
As a thought experiment, if offered a tech job in, say, downtown Zurich, how much extra money would be required for an avg EU tech worker to happily accept that same job under Bay Area employment law, protections and standards (at-will employment, non-banked PTO, etc) than under EU employment law, protections and standards? In other words, apples-to-apples what are those extra protections actually worth in cash value? I suspect the answer would be, at most, around $25K to $50K/year. But when you look at the total comp packages (salary, benefits, equity, 401k, etc) between Bay Area and Zurich tech workers, the delta is far greater than that. In effect, the bay area tech worker 'sold' that extra protection for a big chunk of cash and is using some of it to self-insure against the potentially increased volatility. I think a lot of EU tech workers would be delighted to take the same trade.
This might surprise you but the reality is, many of the potential employment abuses you may be concerned about are vanishingly unlikely to occur in practice. The point is, you can end up paying a lot for expensive 'tiger insurance' you probably won't ever use and don't really need. While you can feel good knowing you have extra protection from tigers, on a purely economic basis I averaged over $500k/yr over my multi-decade career in bay area tech. In good years, the equity could take it over a million. My own admin (with no college degree) averaged over $200k a year in total comp. The highest paid admin at the Zurich company I'm on the board of makes closer to 50k CHF (and living in downtown Zurich isn't much less than SF). So, the "US tech employment deal" may seem weird and perhaps less fair, but the extra half million dollars my admin earned over several years put a lot of 'social safety net' in the bank that she can spend whenever and however she wants - and she still works there for my old boss, still loves her job and has never had to use any protections or social safety net yet (she's probably over a million in extra total comp banked by now). In short, it's a different deal, not necessarily a worse deal.
All of these white collar criminals were pardoned by Biden
Nina Simona Allen (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud financial institutions.
Duran Arthur Brown (December 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a mortgage fraud scheme.
Ravidath Ragbir (January 2025): Convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
Jerry Donald Manning (December 2024): Convicted of two counts of mail fraud.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey (January 2025 - Posthumous): Convicted of mail fraud in 1923.
Alex Nain Saab Moran (December 2023): Convicted of money laundering conspiracy (released as part of a U.S.–Venezuela prisoner swap).
Abraham W. Bolden Sr. (April 2022): Former Secret Service agent convicted of bribery attempts, fraud, and obstruction.
Kim Douglas Haman (December 2024): Convicted of making false claims against the government.
Vadim Konoshchenok (July 2024): Convicted of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., smuggling goods, and export control law violations (released as part of a multi-national prisoner swap).
Paul John Garcia (December 2024): Convicted of signing false documents with intent to deceive and theft/sale of government property while serving in the Navy.
Hunter Biden (December 2024): Convicted of federal tax offenses (alongside separate firearm charges). The pardon broadly covers any federal offenses committed or taken part in between January 1, 2014, and December 1, 2024.
Gerald Glenn Lundergan (January 2025): Convicted of unlawful campaign contributions, making false statements, and falsifying documents.
Ernest William Cromartie (January 2025): Convicted of attempting to evade or defeat tax, as well as structuring financial transactions to evade reporting requirements.
Admittedly, in a lot of the western world one side of the conversation has seen Trump take this place, only without any sort of completion of the narrative arc. Good for business, bad for emotional strength for some people. Will be interesting to see what comes after him.
* he goes after corrupt officials, in both minor roles and very public big cases; and * he also accused inconvenient people (mostly potential contenders) of corruption to get rid of them (see the list of party leaders purged since Xi came to power, with some even led off stage at the main CCP Congress in a show of power). * How many corrupt officials are not persecuted due to political favouritism is by definition impossible to know from the outside.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
The high-level appointees? Yeah, I'd believe it if most of them had to go. And good riddance to them if they did.
One thing that China does should be adopted in the West.
The U.S.A. is the embodiment of crony capitalism.
https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-jos...
[0]: "Trump threatens to prosecute Bidens if he’s re-elected unless he gets immunity" https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/30/trump-second...
Again, Trump pardons people for a fee, and the motto of his pardons office is "no MAGA left behind". The fraud that he has pardoned amounts to about $2 billion to date.
Trump's pardons far exceed what Biden did in terms of scope and corruption. Trump's literally collecting bribes for pardons. There has been multiple confirmed, documented cases of someone donating to his reelection fund or buying trump coins, and then receiving a pardon in short order.
This is blatant misrepresentation to try and justify the unprecedented corruption by the current administration. He will be documented as the most corrupt president ever, even surpassing U.S.Grant for the title.
Both pardoned criminals, yes Trump pardoned more criminals
Know how many criminals China has pardoned? zero they get the death penalty
This guy did it over 30 years so it is feasible.
Scapegoat isn't the right term but I think it is very possible he is being executed to essentially send a message. I think your bigger point that there are way more corrupt officials than just this guy involved seems very plausible.
The GDP of the city was 278.9 billion USD in 2025.
Tariffs on all things Chinese is pretty much an open admission that the West can't compete.
I mean, live that way on $325 million. But yeah.
1. strong defensive positions float to the top... which could be astroturfing.
2. the merits of the concept aren't discussed; the convo falls back to whataboutism.
maybe it's all fair, but on a site where everyone's ~anonymous, it's hard to take the discussion at face value.
- Many people feel the death penalty is wrong in every case.
- Some have a general familiarity with high-level politics of elites and wonder about selective enforcement.
These don’t feel like they’re in bad faith. The merits are difficult to know from the outside, so there will always be speculation based on someone’s lived experience and perceptions. Better to have those aired with a chance to respond, in my opinion.
Especially for China, since it is a global power that operates differently from others. In my own country (United States), for example, we have brazenly open corruption with no consequences.
then, re-read my comment:
> the merits of the concept aren't discussed; the convo falls back to whataboutism.
…juxtaposed to your conclusion:
> In my own country (United States), for example, we have brazenly open corruption with no consequences.
fwiw, i too feel that the death penalty is wrong. but, that's answering an off topic survey question.
Society cannot work with too many corrupt civil servants. Yes, "autocrats", "civil liberties", and yet - the guy slurped up $325M to put his finger on the scale, not to change the model of governance.
I wish we in the west took corruption more seriously, but I suppose we're more interested in cage fights on the lawn these days.
If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance. You can’t buy your way out if you do something so spectacular that you cause the government to lose face.
You might as well go jump off a building or a bridge cause you’re done for.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/china-executes-ex...
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/uvm7oy/i...
If any of those people were politically connected, they probably just got a new identity and shoved off to somewhere else in the country.
Connection works both ways. You can be your superior's lapdog on Monday and jailed for being so cordial that he thinks you are trying to take over his position — I mean, taking bribes — by Wednesday.
Given how this man stayed out of trouble for 30 straight years before finally being apprehended, I feel this could be exactly what happened. He probably had some political leverage to keep the prosecutors looking the other way. And the moment he lost his leverage — maybe his superiors changed their minds about him, maybe he stepped on the toes of someone, who knows — they went after him.
Sometimes the big guy falls out of favor with bigger guys, and then the whole structure is up for grabs. The whole vertical is massacred (sometimes figuratively) while new people take over from the top down. Often what's visible happens a few degrees removed from the actual cause.
There's understanding among the ruling class and much of the populace that just's How The Things are Done. But moments like that give you public trials with executions that make some naïve Westerners clap.
It's great that you provided evidence of that ... no hypocrite you.
FTFY
I think this is more about punishing political grafting than white-collar crime.
They may not have a higher IQ, but in fact it may be more like the ones who have more self control and discipline. It probably has not been studied.
"Why have criminals who have not been caught not been studied?" is an exercise for the reader.
For UK I have: Grenfell tower scandal (over 100 dead, no one in prison), infected blood scandal (thousands dead, no one in prison), postmaster scandal (thousands falsely imprisoned , no perpetrator in prison), etc.
So.. Biden?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
That's bad and wrong but you need to be killing people to call it genocide. It's been a master class in propaganda, look up the name Adrian Zenz and see how often he gets uncritically quoted.
No, you don't.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
See Article 2.
Genocide refers to a People (race, kind, tribe, family, etc.), not individual people. The group is a concept, and 'killing' it doesn't have to involve the biological death of the group members. That's part of what the linked resolution is trying to say.
For example, you could go sterilize every member of an ethnic group, without killing - causing the biological death of - any of them. None of them will be able to have children, and as they die of old age, the group disappears. That's genocide.
Another example would be to forcibly separate all the members of the group and prevent them from engaging in the lifestyle associated with membership in the group (e.g. style of dress, music, food, language, worship, etc.). Over time, perhaps generations, the people basically give up trying to do any of these things if they even remember what they were. They have no group cohesion, so the group has essentially disappeared. No need to directly cause any biological death. The argument is that this is also genocide.
Genocide as a concept is about ending the group, not specifically the individual members. It's definitely true that you can end a group by killing all its members, though.
You agreed with me that genocide is more expansive than "we're directly killing people". For the sake of argument, let's assume the allegations are true: what would you call that?
My point about the assumption was to get you to agree that if these things are happening, we know that it constitutes genocide. At this point I don't care if you agree or not.
And it's very easy for me to believe that rates of childbirth and hence violations are higher for subsistence farmer populations than urban workers, because that's true everywhere. Uyghur population grew a ton between 2010-2020.
Lastly, no, there's no such thing as a "technical" genocide on a points system without some massive crimes against humanity that would drop anyone's jaw, and those things are hard to hide. It's not like you make a couple of technical errors and, oops, genocide even though the population is substantially fine.
The only thing this does is cheapen the word. In the past genocide was something serious. But now it includes activities that are simply upsetting.
The word is attached to the intended outcome, not the specific actions taken to achieve it.
Using your example, if some ethnic group changed how they dressed it would be genocide.
That cheapens the word. Change in dress is not as severe an outcome as buried in a ditch with a bullet in your head.
Article II of the Genocide Convention contains a narrow definition of the crime of genocide, which includes two main elements:
1. A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and
2. A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
2.1 Killing members of the group
2.2 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
2.3 Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
2.4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
2.5 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocide-prevention/definition
Except there was no intent to destroy, literally all other points 2.X that follows is irrelevant. There's reason plurality of UN takes PRC position that they indented to deradicalize / reeducate, aka not genocide. Which is obvious except to useful idiots on Pompeo propaganda because reducing PRC minorities by 1 is bad for Xi's hagiography. Now the gets to bask in the glory of speed running histories most successful war on terror with minimal bloodshed by sinicizing restive frontier region. Basically Obama should hand over his Nobel Peace Prize to Xi.
It would be like if German Jews who spoke only Yiddish and stuck in their minority enclaves, carried out 100s of terrorist attacks, got reeducated to speak both German, and Yiddish, reform religion to be less extremist, and doing it in <10 years, i.e. single generation. Not only would it have not been genocide, it would have been exemplar model to emulate. Which is broadly what XJ securitization is, the most successful deradicalization and integration program in human history.
Why not? Dictators often purge anyone who is a threat, often because they form a possibly competitive power structure (regardless of their intent), and often because of paranoid perceived disloyalty, and for actual disloyalty.
And corruption is the cover story they commonly use - it's vague, general, the public sees enough gov't corruption to believe it and to hate it. Trials are not needed. Off the top of my head, Putin in Russia, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, ...
That's not an "or" question, imo. If you threaten the king by having too much power, too many allies, or too keen a mind, you get moved off the board. Disloyalty and risk of disloyalty are both abhorrent to autocrats.
What about the bridge falling down people, or the overpromised scam apartment people, or the tunnel that flooded people, or the police officers that blocked view of the flowers left for the folks who died in the tunnel that flooded people, or the opened the dam to flood the farmers during the rainy season people, or the fake drains people, or the fake fire hydrants people, or the lead paint in the kids school food people, or the covered up the lead paint in the kids school food doctors, or the apartments with styrofoam instead of concrete that collapsed in venezuela earthquake people...?
LOL. Bribery is basically required in China for anyone with a medium sized business. Otherwise, you'll be indefinitely blocked by a bureaucrat who has no incentive to help you. Departments in municipal governments are often underfunded and bribery makes up for a significant portion of their effective payroll.
In some countries, doctors or surgeons are severely underpaid and it would be customary for a well off citizen to bring them a gift or a cash summ before an important surgery.
That’s quite different from Kickbacks (rampant in UK leaseholds by the way), etc.
What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.
When John Meriweather and the rest of LTCM nearly blew up the market they didn't get a bailout, and the taxpayer didn't fund the hole in the balance sheet. The New York Fed organized private money and leaned on all their counterparties to get it done, but they didn't backstop it. Meriweather and the Sheik and Scholes and the rest were wiped out, they worked it off for a couple of years for salary and then skunk away in shame (we had shame back then). Took it like men near as I can tell. I admire John Meriweather a great deal in spite of the scandal.
President Clinton was impeached and very nearly removed from office for (ultimately) consenting but untoward involvement with a young woman (they got him on lying about it technically, but the political will was there because the country was furious about the skirt chasing.
Enron. Accounting that went from aggressive to sketchy to fraudulent (most of it would pass with flying colors today). Hard time. Skilling, Fastow I think just got out like five years ago (don't take my word for the date). Ken Lay IIRC died before they locked him up which saved him dying inside.
Madoff, died in prison. Ebbers, I think he died in prison too.
When Microsoft was gearing up to strangle the web in its crib the Justice Department pulled guys off of terrorists and human traffickers to go take a pipe to Gates until he backed off, he was allowed to keep Microsoft intact by letting the web happen, the Feds weren't asking, he decided to not fuck around and find out.
Consequences for serious fucking bad shit for people who are our leaders work. A people gets exactly what it demands from it's leaders and that's exactly what a people deserves.
Right now we're choosing to settle for a lot less, China is demanding more. Which is why we're getting our asses kicked.
> China is demanding more.
I have yet to see evidence of that beyond propaganda. Naming someone who reportedly gets a harsh sentence is not evidence.
And if I show you official statistics you will say statistics out of China can’t be trusted.
Folks like yourself will only realise when it’s too late
The collapse of our standards has been heartbreaking to see and I am observing that most are simply in denial.
The mores of the time caused them to be a little more circumspect about their pornographic rapine of the body politic, but they squeezed just as hard and their fists were stronger. Children died working in factories, diseases of poverty claimed entire city quarters, Pinkertons shot striking workers flat dead and walked away like ICE with a brisk stride before they'd even holstered their weapon the way I read it.
Just like today they paid no tax of any kind. And we're heading back there at speed. The typical person is closer to being in an Amazon warehouse where someone has died or the subject of an OSHA report that Instacart hushed up than they were five years ago, things are getting worse for most everyone.
But a few things broke the public's way, a couple of muckracking journalists tee'd it up, Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle, you get one class traitor in the White House, and in less than thirty years the robber barons had lost it all, the economy goes into hyperdrive, the working man goes to sleep every night knowing, not hoping, that his children will live far better than him.
This one comes back around too, and the endless vulgarity and corruption on every surface that can render a photo or a sentence? That's not organic someone is paying for all that, it ebbs and flows too. I'm optimistic we can have cool R-rated movies and no banned books without hustler culture Instagram and celebrity yachting YouTube being crammed into every eligible impression.
Until then?
The worse? The better.
You don't have to buy your way out as long as you are the government, i.e. the chairman.
anyone who spent a lot of time in that part of the world will tell you this stuff can basically be made up
the western method to do this is to plant csa material on a person and then publicly announce they've been caught with it. not many people consider that 'possession' can simply be a USB stick found in a tree on your 2 acre lot, or a usb stick that has been planted in your car
your entire family and social network will immediately cut you off and very few consider these things can be fabricated
That's because that's not how the laws worked in the U.S., nor have the laws ever worked that way. If that was actually how the laws worked, a lot of enemies of each administration would get tarred with this, instead of literally none of them.
https://abcnews.com/US/florida-deputy-arrested-allegedly-pla...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/07/20/538279258...
Did you actually read your cites?
Absolutely you can. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire thing is fabricated to just execute political opponents that don't align with Xi.
If you’re well connected (or making the right people rich) they are happy to overlook it. But if you bite off too much and they need a head to roll they will find one (usually someone lower level).
I mean look at the number of military leader simply dismissed in China for massive corruption. They get a fat pension and go away quietly and the small guy pays with his life.
Not sure I’d be expounding the greatness of that system.
Is he dumb? Surely he is smart enough to know he committed a capital crime and yet he kept doing it. Perhaps he only kept doing it because he believed he could somehow get away with it? Perhaps he saw others pull off the same stunt? Or perhaps he had the political capital to keep himself out of trouble and is now facing justice because he rubbed someone higher up the wrong way?
Is the prosecution dumb? 300 million is no small money are they really so incompetent that over the course of 30 years they could not find anything wrong with this guy? Perhaps they had a reason to keep him around? Perhaps he had them in his pocket? Perhaps he had the connection to fuck up anyone who dares investigating him? Perhaps they never meant to care about corruption anyway and only went after him because someone somewhere issued an order and they are just charging him for corruption because the true reason is less convenient?
China has invested a lot in whitewashing its public image these days. Every young left leaning westerner is salivating at the idea of a Chinese century because they somehow convinced themselves that the Chinese has the solution to everything that went wrong in the west. It's sad to see it spreading even to this website.
Damn
is it prone to abuse by those who yield power - Yes!
however - the alternative - where corruption goes unchecked is even worse!! if you come from a poor country e.g in Africa - you would've experienced the effects of corruption.
American are now experiencing it now - & the country is already worse off. though before corruption in American was used as an incentive mechanism - now it's just pure grift.
so yeah sentencing one or two people to death explicitly is the humane outcome vs sentencing thousands to death implicitly.
We don't need death sentence, we just need, like, any regular sentence
Holmes et co have been charged and incarcerated, SBF is also sitting in prison, other executives at smaller companies have also been prosecuted and faced imprisonment. I think there is a lot of fraud in various industries, but some of it is prosecuted, and some of it is legal enough that there is only a fine to pay. There is some accountability, and as much as i can criticize what corps do, i don't think of them as "legally responsible" for every misuse of their tools. Today it seems that if someone cuts their own leg off with a power saw it is a lawsuit against the tool company.
Insider trading - Using knowledge of impending policy decisions and military operations to massively profit from the stock market.
Further than this, one could argue that those policy decisions were made, or at least timed, in order to deliberately short stocks in order to reap profit. The timing of a lot of the Iran war announcements followed very suspect patterns.
Using the highest office in the land to promote personal businesses.
Awarding military contracts to companies linked with family members of the administration over other more suitable options.
We'll likely never see any accountability for the literal billions being illicitly gained by the current administration after they've left office.