The government focusing it's investment in the state sector while the private sector changes policy to allow for more control by the CCP does not strike me as a particularly encouraging political reform. Nor as reform that was spurred by the middle class.
I would like to know what political reforms you believe have taken place, not what steps China has taken to continue growing their economy.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
The government focusing it's investment in the state sector while the private sector changes policy to allow for more control by the CCP does not strike me as a particularly encouraging political reform. Nor as reform that was spurred by the middle class.
I would like to know what political reforms you believe have taken place, not what steps China has taken to continue growing their economy.
I don't make a differentiation between the two. If you do and that is a firm point for you, then I won't be able to satisfy you in that regard.
Well yeah, cause when most of us talk about a growing middle class bringing about political reform, we don't mean generally get richer and more comfortable in the midst of an ever increasing control by the government over every aspect of their lives.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Well yeah, cause when most of us talk about a growing middle class bringing about political reform, we don't mean generally get richer and more comfortable in the midst of an ever increasing control by the government over every aspect of their lives.
Why? That's literally the story of America. We just dress it differently.
There is a wealth of information on this, and answering satisfactory in a post will be reductive. Suffice to say that since 1970 the middle class economic reforms have been substantial, with a great deal of them being since 2005-2006 to present. They have swung toward US-style capitalism and then back toward more populist control when that lead to major economic bubbles. Poverty and inequality are at all time lows in China, which while still a long way from where they are in the west, compared to where the average citizen in rural and urban China were 5, 10, and 20 years ago its a massive increase in the quality of life-- especially in the availability of medicine, education, and the ability to get specialized work.
That doesn't mean there isn't tremendous inequities between urban and rural prefectures, there are. Nor does it mean China's government hasn't been authoritarian as fuck the whole time, they certainly have. But their goals tend to shift as the next wave of party folk as they enter majority in reaction to the last group's failures. The current swing toward greater control by the party in places of business largely comes from a desire for stability and the ability to absorb shocks to prevent another 2010-2012 economic collapse. I'd expect the 2020-2030s to see folks lowering the firewall and instead placing greater focus on controlling their social media consumption companies and increasing their influence in the education system as a means to ensure party loyalty as the firewall is an imperfect tool for social control and narratively supports the fringe cases like Hong Kong which resist party control (rightly so). We already have been seeing this in how higher education systems in China are doing lend-retrieve degrees with Western partners, but only after the students have a significant amount of party propaganda civics courses.
But these aren't the actual political reforms the people that daveNYC's post references. Nor do they seem to be the kind of political reforms you are implying either.
They are, though. Just as right now China is in a swing of more state control, from 2000-2012 saw a significant liberalization up to the point where the bubble collapsed and opinions changed. Again, the reforms we ~want~ to see from a western lens aren't necessarily those seen as needed by the middle and upper classes of China.
Yes, that's the point. The kind of changes we are seeing are not the kind that were being predicted. Nor do they seem to be the kind you were implying either. To be more clear, the whole "China's expanding economy is going to create a middle-class that demands political reforms" thing was (as far as I ever read) always a reference to (basically) "less authoritarian" when it said "political reforms". It does not strike me that this is what we are seeing and I'm not seeing anything in what you are talking about to suggest otherwise.
You seem to be fairly explicitly saying they will just switch to another form of control. And the problem here I think that's causing the confusion is that your initial comment of:
I guess 1984 was just a preview after all then. Because if China could do citizen nerve stapling ala Alpha Centauri, I think they absolutely would at this point. Everything about their big data, social credit, history rewriting hyper police state just gets worse all the time.
Each time they get more pushback though. China’s middle and upper classes hate the firewall, eventually it will have to reform as they take their places as the next wave of party leadership.
seems to imply a lack of those restrictions rather then just a subtle change in them to a different form of authoritarian control.
shryke on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
First off, Quid? You're ignoring every other thing I'm saying and trying to steer the conversation toward some narrative I'm not interested in engaging with. It's kinda rude.
Second, I'm not saying we are the same as China, I'm saying that looking at the reforms that make people richer and more comfortable in exchange for governmental control over their lives is also our history and that saying you can't look at those reforms as meaningful is, at best, disregarding a substantial amount of desire via a very classist lens. We literally enslaved people to allow the middle and upper classes to get more comfortable, and we're pretty high up there on the social purge death total. We still do that, just now we do it with starvation wages in third world countries we outsource to or via undocumented immigrants and other marginalized peoples within our own borders. I'm well aware that China is an authoritarian state with literally horrific things going on, right now, as we type this comfortably on the internet. I'm not sugar coating that. The party has done awful things in literally every humanitarian sector they touch, and will continue doing those things into the future. But it doesn't matter if we are talking about the modern west or developing China, both are built upon controlling populations and mass suffering for the sake of making the middle and upper classes more comfortable.
What I'm saying, and have been saying since the last page, is that those power structures of China which are enabling such terrible things are supported by the middle and upper classes, which steer their policies toward making their lives richer and more comfortable and what that means historically since 1970 has shifted with each new generation entering the party. Those reforms have happened. They haven't been for humanitarian or social liberty reforms, but they have reformed policies in ways that made the majority (and specifically Han) of their population better off. And they have also changed and reversed those policies measurably in reaction to the problems their middle and upper classes have faced.
Reforms, driven by their middle and upper classes, have happened and continue to happen.
And, once again, they aren't driven in the way the citizens of Hong Kong want, or that any of us in the West would want. But they are driven in way that their powerbase want, which is richer and more comfortable lives. Saying to divorce the economic reforms from political reforms is ignoring a huge, huge point of how the party has stayed in power, and continues to stay in power. You aren't talking political reform, you are talking about western social reforms exclusively. Which, sure. I'd love for China to wake up tomorrow and allow Hong Kong full self governance again and spread that to the rest of the prefectures. But that isn't the only thing that is political reform.
And looking forward, there are two possibilities for the firewall. One is for it to come down, which would be necessary for Chinese business interests and investment to really take off on the international influencing stage and allow China to attempt to supplant the US as the hegemony, or the other is to maintain it to a greater degree and force neighboring entities and client states to join in one by one, which would give some Chinese aristocrats a ton of power and money but not enough to really be shared by the majority of the middle and upper classes. My bet is on the firewall coming down slowly over the next ten years as the current 20-30 somethings become more prominent in the party and as China continues to look to expand its interests beyond Asia into Africa and the West, but that's still speculation.
You said "That's literally the story of America. We just dress it differently." but even accepting that basic framework that's literally ignoring the vast differences in both kind and degree here that really matter and extend well beyond just dressing it differently. That's where the disconnect is happening.
shryke on
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
There is a wealth of information on this, and answering satisfactory in a post will be reductive. Suffice to say that since 1970 the middle class economic reforms have been substantial, with a great deal of them being since 2005-2006 to present. They have swung toward US-style capitalism and then back toward more populist control when that lead to major economic bubbles. Poverty and inequality are at all time lows in China, which while still a long way from where they are in the west, compared to where the average citizen in rural and urban China were 5, 10, and 20 years ago its a massive increase in the quality of life-- especially in the availability of medicine, education, and the ability to get specialized work.
That doesn't mean there isn't tremendous inequities between urban and rural prefectures, there are. Nor does it mean China's government hasn't been authoritarian as fuck the whole time, they certainly have. But their goals tend to shift as the next wave of party folk as they enter majority in reaction to the last group's failures. The current swing toward greater control by the party in places of business largely comes from a desire for stability and the ability to absorb shocks to prevent another 2010-2012 economic collapse. I'd expect the 2020-2030s to see folks lowering the firewall and instead placing greater focus on controlling their social media consumption companies and increasing their influence in the education system as a means to ensure party loyalty as the firewall is an imperfect tool for social control and narratively supports the fringe cases like Hong Kong which resist party control (rightly so). We already have been seeing this in how higher education systems in China are doing lend-retrieve degrees with Western partners, but only after the students have a significant amount of party propaganda civics courses.
But these aren't the actual political reforms the people that daveNYC's post references. Nor do they seem to be the kind of political reforms you are implying either.
They are, though. Just as right now China is in a swing of more state control, from 2000-2012 saw a significant liberalization up to the point where the bubble collapsed and opinions changed. Again, the reforms we ~want~ to see from a western lens aren't necessarily those seen as needed by the middle and upper classes of China.
Yes, that's the point. The kind of changes we are seeing are not the kind that were being predicted. Nor do they seem to be the kind you were implying either. To be more clear, the whole "China's expanding economy is going to create a middle-class that demands political reforms" thing was (as far as I ever read) always a reference to (basically) "less authoritarian" when it said "political reforms". It does not strike me that this is what we are seeing and I'm not seeing anything in what you are talking about to suggest otherwise.
You seem to be fairly explicitly saying they will just switch to another form of control. And the problem here I think that's causing the confusion is that your initial comment of:
I guess 1984 was just a preview after all then. Because if China could do citizen nerve stapling ala Alpha Centauri, I think they absolutely would at this point. Everything about their big data, social credit, history rewriting hyper police state just gets worse all the time.
Each time they get more pushback though. China’s middle and upper classes hate the firewall, eventually it will have to reform as they take their places as the next wave of party leadership.
seems to imply a lack of those restrictions rather then just a subtle change in them to a different form of authoritarian control.
But they did! From the mid1970s to just about 2012 they got WAAAAY more social liberties. And then the market crash wrecked their economy and they changed direction in the face of that.
Those initial reforms were not driven by the middle class. They were driven by Deng Xiaoping and his allies to dig China out of the economic rut they'd been in for decades. The middle class emerged after those reforms. When that same middle actually did try to push for greater political reforms they were utterly crushed by the government and forgotten by the greater population.
That's not the middle class pushing political reforms. That's political reforms allowing for a larger middle class every bit as oppressed by an authoritarian state as they were before.
Your prediction has no basis in China's political climate over the decades and is demonstrably contradicts the direction it's taken over the decades, which also contradicts your claim that a larger middle class is forcing political forms. The great firewall has only increased in its extent and measures right along with the growing middle class.
I know perfectly well what you're saying. You're failing to understand others. When people have said in the past a growing middle class would bring about political reforms, they've never meant solely improved material conditions. That was already there and happening since '78. What people meant has always been a move away from authoritarianism. Which China has shown zero indication that they will, and indeed have started embracing further.
But they did! From the mid1970s to just about 2012 they got WAAAAY more social liberties. And then the market crash wrecked their economy and they changed direction in the face of that.
They absolutely do have more than in the past.
I've seen zero evidence they were brought about by the middle class pushing for them. A large, stable middle class is necessary for a more prosperous country. China's authoritarian government moved towards creating the conditions for one. Every single time those conditions became a threat to the CCP's power they were eliminated.
Various news agencies are reporting, mostly in smallblurbs, that Kim Jong-un may be somewhere between "critically ill" and "critically dead" following a surgical procedure.
Various news agencies are reporting, mostly in smallblurbs, that Kim Jong-un may be somewhere between "critically ill" and "critically dead" following a surgical procedure.
Yeah I just saw that, I believe NBC was reporting he's brain dead which would be insane if true.
I would like some money because these are artisanal nuggets of wisdom philistine.
MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
May be. Take any breaking news out of North Korea with a grain of salt, because there have been plenty of reports from North Korea that have been completely, utterly wrong, like reports of high officials being elaborately executed and then showing up for the next few years perfectly healthy and fine. Meanwhile, stuff actually happening has been missed and unmentioned for years.
The problem is that there are two main sources of 'news' out of NK: official state propaganda, which is obviously deeply suspect, and defectors, which have their own set of problems. Supposedly, defectors still have lines of communication inside the hermit kingdom and can get valuable information smuggled out through various means. In reality, most of them are just utterly broken from their lives in North Korea and can't break the habits they formed to survive there. The main issue is that if any higher official asks for information in NK, you'd better have something to say. Anything. Saying "I don't know" is likely to get you killed. Making up an elaborate lie on the spot though can buy you enough time that the official will probably get distracted by something else and forget about you before you get caught. Even if you get caught, you can usually blame someone else (lower ranking) who in turn will spin an elaborate lie for distraction purposes, and so on until the officials let you live.
This is so ingrained that when journalists are going down their lists of contacts and make a friendly phone call to see if anyone heard anything juicy recently, a lot of them fall on old habits and tell these whopping tall tales because they're afraid the journalist might have them deported or something. It was pretty depressing to learn about this.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Quick Googling this morning has China and South Korea throwing cold water on the story. Put it out of mind until it can be confirmed seems to be the best course for now.
South Korea still seems to say he's fine, China has sent medical experts to advise. Japan says he's in a coma after heart surgery, couple other countries say he's dead from a heart attack, US says he's critically ill. Some variation in root cause, but heart problems is the shared nugget.
North Korea is the Schrodinger's Cat of news.
Hevach on
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
South Korea still seems to say he's fine, China has sent medical experts to advise. Japan says he's in a coma after heart surgery, couple other countries say he's dead from a heart attack, US says he's critically ill. Some variation in root cause, but heart problems is the shared nugget.
North Korea is the Schrodinger's Cat of news.
This is on top of having zero Covid-19, a single confirmed case (that fled the country), and an unchecked pandemic with insufficient medical response.
His younger sister is the probable successor and she's had a major role in shaping NK's national zeitgeist. She and her older sister seem to have been the only ones actually interested in the actual work of running and presenting the country internationally.
Schrodinger's Dictator. Either he makes a public appearance and dispels the rumors or someone takes power and complete with pulling the plug on him if he is comatose.
With everything in the US it is easy to forget Hong Kong is still be taken over by Beijing via fiat. Good on Johnson. The US and other countries should follow suit allowing Hong Kong citizens to be able to immigrate easily.
It will cause a brain drain. But also is a threat to China for implementing the new security law. There is a lot of secondary effects to this though. Especially for those who may not be able to leave.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Maybe we should bring the discussion about the India-China dispute to this thread? There have already been reports of twenty Indian soldiers dying, but we hadn't heard about the Chinese soldiers. The death toll on their side might be 35-43, including one senior officer. Also some of the deaths may have been from falling off a cliff during the fighting rather than just from beatings.
Trump - completely unsurprisingly - gave Xi his blessing on building concentration camps
I mean I wish I could say I was shocked, but it's more just surprising that we've only found out about it now
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
It's hard to say exactly what's going on though, since it's Chinese state media versus Indian news that is all but state media, just propaganda vs. propaganda. One thing that is frightening though is how I've seen in multiple places people claiming that Modi "ceded" the valley to China the moment they "claimed" it all, and are basically pushing for all-out war. Even saw an Indian commentator basically claiming that India would have a short, victorious war against China if they directly clashed.
So, two nuclear powers with rocketry capabilities that are at least orbital (India got an orbiter to Mars) are still hyping themselves up for war during the goddamn global pandemic. That's still a thing going on.
What was that line in Red Dawn? There only being 700k Chinese left? I guess that is one way to deal with Chinas and Indias population issues.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
US Customs just seized a shipment of hair products, which is to say, actual human hair, from Uighur concentration camps. Thirteen tons worth of it. I've seen an estimate that to get that much hair would require two-to-three hundred thousand people's worth of hair (possibly a lot less if it's women, but the camps are full of men). Also, this is the second mass shipment of human hair from China that's been stopped and seized.
I guess if they're already trafficking the organs, might as well sell the hair too, they figure. State capitalism has to make their buck.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
There are now two major coronavirus outbreaks on Okinawa both from the US Marine bases there. The people of Okinawa have long been opposed to the bases, so "oh hey we're bringing plague in too" is yet another insulting injury added to the long list. If the outbreaks spread to the general population and especially if anyone dies from it, I expect the push to remove the bases to return stronger than before.
US Customs just seized a shipment of hair products, which is to say, actual human hair, from Uighur concentration camps. Thirteen tons worth of it. I've seen an estimate that to get that much hair would require two-to-three hundred thousand people's worth of hair (possibly a lot less if it's women, but the camps are full of men). Also, this is the second mass shipment of human hair from China that's been stopped and seized.
I guess if they're already trafficking the organs, might as well sell the hair too, they figure. State capitalism has to make their buck.
One day we are all going to be horrified when we know for sure what is going on there.
US Customs just seized a shipment of hair products, which is to say, actual human hair, from Uighur concentration camps. Thirteen tons worth of it. I've seen an estimate that to get that much hair would require two-to-three hundred thousand people's worth of hair (possibly a lot less if it's women, but the camps are full of men). Also, this is the second mass shipment of human hair from China that's been stopped and seized.
I guess if they're already trafficking the organs, might as well sell the hair too, they figure. State capitalism has to make their buck.
One day we are all going to be horrified when we know for sure what is going on there.
We already know enough. It's one of if not the biggest crimes against humanity currently going.
I guess at least Facebook isn't involved in this one.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Like, we have satellite pictures that mosques have literally been paved over with parking lots.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
We also have reports from people who have escaped. The woman in this story was tortured and likely experimented on; she was sterilized by injections. One of her children, an infant, was killed. China was pressuring Egypt to deport fleeing Uighur back to China so they could be arrested/tortured/killed and even in the US have agents that track down and harass them.
But let's be honest here. She has cancelled elections permanently with the pandemic as a pretext. Beijing is finalizing its consolidation of Hong Kong and having the people of the city voting for anti-Beijing representatives who then have to banned from being seated slows down that process. Empty seats will be filled with cronies and sycophants who will decide to abolish the legislative council (or something along those lines).
It's the end for Hong Kong, and everywhere else should take hard notice.
But let's be honest here. She has cancelled elections permanently with the pandemic as a pretext. Beijing is finalizing its consolidation of Hong Kong and having the people of the city voting for anti-Beijing representatives who then have to banned from being seated slows down that process. Empty seats will be filled with cronies and sycophants who will decide to abolish the legislative council (or something along those lines).
It's the end for Hong Kong, and everywhere else should take hard notice.
Was there an excuse for why mail-in voting or such wouldn't work?
But let's be honest here. She has cancelled elections permanently with the pandemic as a pretext. Beijing is finalizing its consolidation of Hong Kong and having the people of the city voting for anti-Beijing representatives who then have to banned from being seated slows down that process. Empty seats will be filled with cronies and sycophants who will decide to abolish the legislative council (or something along those lines).
It's the end for Hong Kong, and everywhere else should take hard notice.
Was there an excuse for why mail-in voting or such wouldn't work?
Fuck you, what are you going to do about it? That's Chinas excuse and all they need.
They aren't willing to run out the clock on the treaty and honestly now is the best window to stamp out any dissent in Hong Kong.
Disappear a few thousand / tens of thousand people, the protesters have known they were screwed from day 1 and it would be a miracle if they weren't sent to camps or just branded as undesirables with no social credit, jobs, housing...and you know China doesn't allow homeless.
Who is going to stop Xi?
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving Japanese prime minister in history, has resigned, citing health reasons.
"Even though there is one year to go in my tenure and there are challenges to be met, I have decided to stand down as prime minister," said Abe at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday, adding that he would like to apologize to the people of Japan for being unable to fulfill his duties during the coronavirus pandemic.
Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving Japanese prime minister in history, has resigned, citing health reasons.
"Even though there is one year to go in my tenure and there are challenges to be met, I have decided to stand down as prime minister," said Abe at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday, adding that he would like to apologize to the people of Japan for being unable to fulfill his duties during the coronavirus pandemic.
Abe is resigning.
I wonder why. Is this the equivalent of resigning to spend more time with your family?
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TraceGNU Terry Pratchett; GNU Gus; GNU Carrie Fisher; GNU Adam WeRegistered Userregular
Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving Japanese prime minister in history, has resigned, citing health reasons.
"Even though there is one year to go in my tenure and there are challenges to be met, I have decided to stand down as prime minister," said Abe at a press conference in Tokyo on Friday, adding that he would like to apologize to the people of Japan for being unable to fulfill his duties during the coronavirus pandemic.
Abe is resigning.
I wonder why. Is this the equivalent of resigning to spend more time with your family?
He's got colitis. It's what caused him to resign the first time around.
Can't stand the man personally but running a world government with colitis is just... ouch.
Posts
I would like to know what political reforms you believe have taken place, not what steps China has taken to continue growing their economy.
I don't make a differentiation between the two. If you do and that is a firm point for you, then I won't be able to satisfy you in that regard.
Why? That's literally the story of America. We just dress it differently.
Yes, that's the point. The kind of changes we are seeing are not the kind that were being predicted. Nor do they seem to be the kind you were implying either. To be more clear, the whole "China's expanding economy is going to create a middle-class that demands political reforms" thing was (as far as I ever read) always a reference to (basically) "less authoritarian" when it said "political reforms". It does not strike me that this is what we are seeing and I'm not seeing anything in what you are talking about to suggest otherwise.
You seem to be fairly explicitly saying they will just switch to another form of control. And the problem here I think that's causing the confusion is that your initial comment of: seems to imply a lack of those restrictions rather then just a subtle change in them to a different form of authoritarian control.
Second, I'm not saying we are the same as China, I'm saying that looking at the reforms that make people richer and more comfortable in exchange for governmental control over their lives is also our history and that saying you can't look at those reforms as meaningful is, at best, disregarding a substantial amount of desire via a very classist lens. We literally enslaved people to allow the middle and upper classes to get more comfortable, and we're pretty high up there on the social purge death total. We still do that, just now we do it with starvation wages in third world countries we outsource to or via undocumented immigrants and other marginalized peoples within our own borders. I'm well aware that China is an authoritarian state with literally horrific things going on, right now, as we type this comfortably on the internet. I'm not sugar coating that. The party has done awful things in literally every humanitarian sector they touch, and will continue doing those things into the future. But it doesn't matter if we are talking about the modern west or developing China, both are built upon controlling populations and mass suffering for the sake of making the middle and upper classes more comfortable.
What I'm saying, and have been saying since the last page, is that those power structures of China which are enabling such terrible things are supported by the middle and upper classes, which steer their policies toward making their lives richer and more comfortable and what that means historically since 1970 has shifted with each new generation entering the party. Those reforms have happened. They haven't been for humanitarian or social liberty reforms, but they have reformed policies in ways that made the majority (and specifically Han) of their population better off. And they have also changed and reversed those policies measurably in reaction to the problems their middle and upper classes have faced.
Reforms, driven by their middle and upper classes, have happened and continue to happen.
And, once again, they aren't driven in the way the citizens of Hong Kong want, or that any of us in the West would want. But they are driven in way that their powerbase want, which is richer and more comfortable lives. Saying to divorce the economic reforms from political reforms is ignoring a huge, huge point of how the party has stayed in power, and continues to stay in power. You aren't talking political reform, you are talking about western social reforms exclusively. Which, sure. I'd love for China to wake up tomorrow and allow Hong Kong full self governance again and spread that to the rest of the prefectures. But that isn't the only thing that is political reform.
And looking forward, there are two possibilities for the firewall. One is for it to come down, which would be necessary for Chinese business interests and investment to really take off on the international influencing stage and allow China to attempt to supplant the US as the hegemony, or the other is to maintain it to a greater degree and force neighboring entities and client states to join in one by one, which would give some Chinese aristocrats a ton of power and money but not enough to really be shared by the majority of the middle and upper classes. My bet is on the firewall coming down slowly over the next ten years as the current 20-30 somethings become more prominent in the party and as China continues to look to expand its interests beyond Asia into Africa and the West, but that's still speculation.
But they did! From the mid1970s to just about 2012 they got WAAAAY more social liberties. And then the market crash wrecked their economy and they changed direction in the face of that.
That's not the middle class pushing political reforms. That's political reforms allowing for a larger middle class every bit as oppressed by an authoritarian state as they were before.
Your prediction has no basis in China's political climate over the decades and is demonstrably contradicts the direction it's taken over the decades, which also contradicts your claim that a larger middle class is forcing political forms. The great firewall has only increased in its extent and measures right along with the growing middle class.
I know perfectly well what you're saying. You're failing to understand others. When people have said in the past a growing middle class would bring about political reforms, they've never meant solely improved material conditions. That was already there and happening since '78. What people meant has always been a move away from authoritarianism. Which China has shown zero indication that they will, and indeed have started embracing further.
They absolutely do have more than in the past.
I've seen zero evidence they were brought about by the middle class pushing for them. A large, stable middle class is necessary for a more prosperous country. China's authoritarian government moved towards creating the conditions for one. Every single time those conditions became a threat to the CCP's power they were eliminated.
Yeah I just saw that, I believe NBC was reporting he's brain dead which would be insane if true.
pleasepaypreacher.net
The problem is that there are two main sources of 'news' out of NK: official state propaganda, which is obviously deeply suspect, and defectors, which have their own set of problems. Supposedly, defectors still have lines of communication inside the hermit kingdom and can get valuable information smuggled out through various means. In reality, most of them are just utterly broken from their lives in North Korea and can't break the habits they formed to survive there. The main issue is that if any higher official asks for information in NK, you'd better have something to say. Anything. Saying "I don't know" is likely to get you killed. Making up an elaborate lie on the spot though can buy you enough time that the official will probably get distracted by something else and forget about you before you get caught. Even if you get caught, you can usually blame someone else (lower ranking) who in turn will spin an elaborate lie for distraction purposes, and so on until the officials let you live.
This is so ingrained that when journalists are going down their lists of contacts and make a friendly phone call to see if anyone heard anything juicy recently, a lot of them fall on old habits and tell these whopping tall tales because they're afraid the journalist might have them deported or something. It was pretty depressing to learn about this.
South Korea still seems to say he's fine, China has sent medical experts to advise. Japan says he's in a coma after heart surgery, couple other countries say he's dead from a heart attack, US says he's critically ill. Some variation in root cause, but heart problems is the shared nugget.
North Korea is the Schrodinger's Cat of news.
This is on top of having zero Covid-19, a single confirmed case (that fled the country), and an unchecked pandemic with insufficient medical response.
The mad libs of medical scenarios.
With everything in the US it is easy to forget Hong Kong is still be taken over by Beijing via fiat. Good on Johnson. The US and other countries should follow suit allowing Hong Kong citizens to be able to immigrate easily.
It will cause a brain drain. But also is a threat to China for implementing the new security law. There is a lot of secondary effects to this though. Especially for those who may not be able to leave.
Trump - completely unsurprisingly - gave Xi his blessing on building concentration camps
I mean I wish I could say I was shocked, but it's more just surprising that we've only found out about it now
It's hard to say exactly what's going on though, since it's Chinese state media versus Indian news that is all but state media, just propaganda vs. propaganda. One thing that is frightening though is how I've seen in multiple places people claiming that Modi "ceded" the valley to China the moment they "claimed" it all, and are basically pushing for all-out war. Even saw an Indian commentator basically claiming that India would have a short, victorious war against China if they directly clashed.
So, two nuclear powers with rocketry capabilities that are at least orbital (India got an orbiter to Mars) are still hyping themselves up for war during the goddamn global pandemic. That's still a thing going on.
I guess if they're already trafficking the organs, might as well sell the hair too, they figure. State capitalism has to make their buck.
One day we are all going to be horrified when we know for sure what is going on there.
We already know enough. It's one of if not the biggest crimes against humanity currently going.
I guess at least Facebook isn't involved in this one.
And this is a story from a survivor.
Philippines Congress does Duterte's bidding, shuts down ABS-CBN. 11,000 people laid off in the middle of a pandemic.
At this point I'm expecting a Chinese-owned broadcasting company to move in.
John Oliver did a nice baseline for the Uighur concentration camps that China is running. Nothing new but still a good thing to watch.
Also nothing like VW pretending they don't profit from ethnic slave labor.
But let's be honest here. She has cancelled elections permanently with the pandemic as a pretext. Beijing is finalizing its consolidation of Hong Kong and having the people of the city voting for anti-Beijing representatives who then have to banned from being seated slows down that process. Empty seats will be filled with cronies and sycophants who will decide to abolish the legislative council (or something along those lines).
It's the end for Hong Kong, and everywhere else should take hard notice.
Was there an excuse for why mail-in voting or such wouldn't work?
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Fuck you, what are you going to do about it? That's Chinas excuse and all they need.
They aren't willing to run out the clock on the treaty and honestly now is the best window to stamp out any dissent in Hong Kong.
Disappear a few thousand / tens of thousand people, the protesters have known they were screwed from day 1 and it would be a miracle if they weren't sent to camps or just branded as undesirables with no social credit, jobs, housing...and you know China doesn't allow homeless.
Who is going to stop Xi?
Abe is resigning.
I wonder why. Is this the equivalent of resigning to spend more time with your family?
He's got colitis. It's what caused him to resign the first time around.
Can't stand the man personally but running a world government with colitis is just... ouch.