thegreatdivide wrote on May 1^st, 2024 at 8:07pm:


So the CCP is not evil because they did not intend to starve 50 million people to death, they merely failed to care enough to stop it?

Suppose you built a robot to take people's hats off and set it loose, and it walked up to the first person and removed their head, and you said "whoops, that's an administrative error," then stepped over that corpse and followed it round and said that another 50 million times, once for each head it removed.

Would that be evil, or 'merely' an unintended consequence?

freediver wrote on May 2^nd, 2024 at 8:06am:
 

They were incompetent macroeconomic managers with no guide-book on how to lift a billion people out of absolute agrarian-subsistence poverty.  (Marx did not adress China's circumstances).

Evil? No. Incompetent, yes.

And I would argue the CCP is still incompetent - despite having created the most productive industrial capacity in the world  (partly on the back of 1st-world inability to  compete witn low wage China, resulting in the 1st world "rust belt"). 

With the most productive industrial capacity in the world  (currently called "over-capacity" by Western free market neoclassical ideologues), China should have NO youth unemployment, and should not have a private  real- estate company debt crisis.   

But the CCP's goal of common prosperity- said to be "inefficient" according to Western free market ideologues - is a good goal. 

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You can see why neoclassical economists have hindered development of functional economies which work for all - they adopt absurd unrealistic models like this, and then draw the wrong conclusions.

(Note: so far,  robots don't go around removing people's heads) 

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It would be absurd, like mainstream neoclassical economic orthodoxy overseeing entrenched poverty and soaring inequality. 

thegreatdivide wrote on May 2^nd, 2024 at 1:03pm:


As absurd as starving 50 million people to death by trying to feed them all equally?

How many Chinese people would they have to kill before it became evil?

thegreatdivide wrote on May 2^nd, 2024 at 1:07pm:



Sooooo... what happened to consensus meritocracy..

Neither consensus- 50 million dead.
Nor merit - incompetent, imprudent, blurred vision resulting in catastrophic (un?)intended consequences.


Free societies self-correct, blinkered, one- party dictatorships crash or crash through - then crash.

Last Saturday was May 4. Anyone conversant with modern Chinese history knows that date is associated with student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1919 challenging the world order and calling for modernisation in China. This was 70 years before the mass demonstrations of April-June 1989, which the communist dictatorship drowned in blood, but which it has airbrushed out of its history.
...
The students in Tiananmen Square on May 4, 1919 (about four thousand of them) called for a new China and a new world order. We need both now. But we have all too many students in our own universities championing the fascistic Hamas and calling for the destruction of Israel. And we have too many people in this country defending Xi’s China, or simply asserting that its rise and hegemony are unstoppable. None of this works as a future we should want.

Liberal democratic institutions globally are under siege on various fronts, and their own histories and geopolitical stances are being attacked by mobs of deluded activists. Unless we rally and articulate a clear and robust case for liberal order in politics, trade and international law, we risk the global order regressing disastrously.
...
When people who are household names in this country – whether in business, politics or academia – lionise the party’s governance of China, they and their audiences need sharply to be reminded the party arrests, censors, tortures, disappears and executes dissidents and civil right activists. That is not a China the hegemony of which in Asia we should be in any way willing to accept.

Our difficulties with Beijing are rooted in this reality. The insistence by Beijing’s acolytes, fellow travellers and useful idiots that calling it out is “Cold War thinking” and risks taking the world down a dangerous path are seriously muddled. We are on a dangerous path because Xi’s China and Putin’s Russia are on a war footing and we have all been caught napping.

Given the Communist Party denounces any serious critical history writing as “historical nihilism”, we should take May 4 away from it, as an international day of reflection on the possibilities for a new, liberal international order on the far side of the dictators being seen off. Its hero should be Hu Shih, a participant in the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and a kind of Chinese John Dewey.

Diplomat, essayist, novelist, philosopher, political reformer, president of Peking University (Beida, as it is called today) and editor of the Free China Journal, Hu Shih was a critic of both nationalist and communist dictatorship and urged that the world adopt Western-style democracy. He contested Sun Yat-sen’s assertion that China was not ready for democratic government. He fled China for Taiwan in 1949. He would not have survived Mao.

Next time someone tells you China is well governed under Xi, tell them it would be better governed if Xi’s dictatorship was replaced by Hu Shih Thought – and the 21st century world a much safer place.

Paul Monk
Paul Monk is the former head of China analysis for the Australian defense department and is the cofounder of Austhink, a critical-thinking skills training and consulting firm in Melbourne

Frank wrote on May 6^th, 2024 at 11:33am:


Yes, soon after the collapse of China's  ancient imperial system,  at the hands of more advanced foreign powers.

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We certainly do, but the West is still stuck in its free market religion - which China is struggling to learn how to deal with.

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Correct: calling to resist judeo-christian imperialism.

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I wish....; and what's wrong with a prosperous socialist society in all respects (CCP centenary goal)  - as an antidote for the entrenched poverty and soaring inequality in the neoliberal West?

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Correct (noting the correction above).

And what are the policies of  this posited "liberal order", to create common prosperity? 

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Er - dissendents in the West "disappear" also - Assange in prison for most of his life.  China has to struggle against dissidents within, because the paranoid "freedom values" West intent on maintaining global hegemony is attacking China on all levels (from the outside). 

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Vicious, ignorant, Western imperialism propaganda.

NATO should have been disbanded, and Russia been admitted into the democracies as an equal, when the USSR collapsed.

And Taiwan is none of the West's business, it's part of China.

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Sun Yatsen was correct. China was in a much worse state than even India under British rule; democracy would have been a non-starter in China, at the same time the Russians were throwing off their Zsarist yoke.

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Delusional thinking;  under Western neoliberalism, the world is sinking into economic and environmental catastrophe. Practically every nation on the planet is citing "difficult economic conditions" - a stark manifestation of failing global and national economic governence.

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He's obviously a blind,  neoliberal free-market ideologue.

Deplorable.

"The markets are good servants, but bad masters, and a worse religion": Amory Lovins.

 

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It always comes second to CCP bureaucrats saving face. That's the culture that has been firmly ingrained in the CCP.

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How many more tens of millions of Chinese citizens do you think the CCP will have to kill before they figure out how to catch up?

If they killed a billion Chinese people, would you consider them evil then, or still make excuses?