Tag: China

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Accountability moral hazard term limits too much government

Dictatorship with the Usual Characteristics

Mao, term limits, China, Xi Jinping, censorship, Mao Zedong

“Argh, we’re going to become North Korea,” a dejected Chinese citizen wrote on his country’s social media site, Weibo. 

His comment, later removed by China’s “safe space” police, responded to the Communist Party’s announcement that it would soon remove term limits on President Xi Jinping.

While neighboring North Korea has been ruled in totalitarian dynastic fashion by the Kim family since 1948, the Chinese have had their own experience with extended one-​man rule, 33 years of Mao Zedong.

“From 1958 to 1962, his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people,” the Washington Post clarified, “easily making it the biggest episode of mass murder ever recorded.”

A decade after Mao’s death in 1979 — there’s always that ultimate term limit — even Communist Party apparatchiks embraced a formal limit on the president and the vice-​president of two five-​year terms … to block dictatorship.*

Talk about a reform popular across the political spectrum!

So popular that, as Business Insider explained, “Criticism of the Chinese government’s desire to abolish presidential term limits has seen censorship soar since Sunday.” Searches for “two term limit,” “third consecutive term,” and “Emperor Xi” were blocked. 

“There are no longer any checks and balances,” complained a political analyst at the Chinese University in Hong Kong.

This is bad news for everybody everywhere. 

The need to limit those in power is universal. At National Review, John Fund reminds us of our “ongoing job here at home to limit the insatiable urge of incumbents to remain in office for years, even decades, and sometimes until they die of ripe old age.”

Early retirements for all!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* There are also five-​year limits on the tenure of those serving in the National People’s Congress. Do I hear six years for our Congress?

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom government transparency ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies too much government

No Joking Matter

encryption, freedom, Chen Sho Uli, China, Chinese, Orwell, repression

He thought he was just horsing around.

Using the popular app WeChat, a Chinese construction worker supervisor Chen Sho Uli made a gossipy joke about government officials while chatting in a chat group. But being too casual about what you say — and where — can be dangerous in China. For his sin Chen was incarcerated for several days. 

“Picking quarrels” is another no-​no in the country.

In lieu of Orwell’s telescreen in every room, modern Internet technology enables repressive governments to punish citizens for thoughtcrime that becomes app-​speech crime. If the Chinese government can spy on you, it will. And penalize you for remarks it deems offensive to the dignity of the state.

Because of such repression, blogger Stephen Green observes that “strong encryption is everybody’s friend — except the tyrant’s.”

Agreed. Encryption is an important line of defense. 

But some societies require this more than others, because harmless, incidental communications are not equally attacked by government, from country to country. Which means that encryption is actually a second line of defense. 

The first is a cultural and political tradition respecting individual rights.

For one thing, robust encryption helps only those who engage in hyper-​careful private discourse, or hyper-​careful anonymous public discourse. Encryption won’t help thinkers of controversial thoughts who wish to express those thoughts publicly and under their own name. Everywhere we can, then, we must strengthen both the technological and cultural defenses of open discourse — recognizing that the latter is the more crucial and fundamental.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Not So Bad, Communism?

New York Times, apologist, China, Soviet Union, communism, Walter Duranty

First the good news. The New York Times has repudiated Walter Duranty’s 1930s-​era “journalism” for whitewashing — “underestimating” — the murderousness of Soviet Communism.

So that’s done, right? 

Whatever its failings today, the paper will certainly no longer allow writers to use its august pages to discount blatant systematic evil. 

Right?

But Helen Raleigh, a writer for The Federalist who is an immigrant from China, finds that the Times does indeed persist in glossing over the sins of Communism. In commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the paper is “once again proving itself Communism’s greatest apologist” through articles variously arguing that “women had better sex under socialism to now claiming China’s Communist revolution taught Chinese women to ‘dream big’…”

As if, suggests Raleigh, Duranty’s ghost were still calling the shots.

In rebuttal, she recounts what so many people suffered under Communism, as exemplified by the fate of her Aunt San. 

At age 15, her aunt was forced by Mao’s government to leave the city and work in the countryside, separately from her siblings, who were forced to do the same but in different villages. Cutting family ties was important “so people could devote themselves 100 percent to the Communist Party’s causes.” 

Primitive farming, mandatory singing of gruesomely cheerful revolutionary songs, food rations, malnutrition, ritual humiliation, derailed education, derailed or extinguished lives. 

Just a few of the standard ingredients of the totalitarianism that, according to the Times of 2017, taught women to “dream big.”

Which should remind us: despite only a few countries’ close ties to the doctrine — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — Communism’s threat to world peace, prosperity, and freedom remains big.

The Times must change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability general freedom moral hazard responsibility

Kim Jong Un-civilized

North Korea, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, China

The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea isn’t.

That is, it isn’t democratic and it is not “the people’s” in any republican sense.

But it does exist … as the world’s most totalitarian dictatorship. A tyranny that would make the Pharaohs, Caesars, and Grand Poobahs of the ancient world wince in distaste.

Once dubbed The Land of the Morning Calm, North Korea is today the darkest place on Earth. Agitated, terrified — not calm.

In Pyongyang, the Seventh Worker’s Party Congress is going on, and Kim Jong Un, the nation’s tyrant, has laid out a blustery, challenging barrage of threats to the outside world, particularly South Korea and the United States, with 30,000 soldiers stationed on the peninsula.

Kim Jong Un has a new “five-​year plan,” and his foreign policy, though backed by nukes, doesn’t seem so much Stalinesque as Husseinish.

He threatens offensive action, raining down destruction against his enemies.

But he also says he’d only use nukes in defense. Plus, his capabilities are much doubted.

No wonder many analysts dismiss his talk as a cover to keep his people in line. And to worship him. The subject North Koreans are weak in the face of such monstrous tyranny, and the more Un “challenges” the world, the bigger and more impregnable he seems.

And yet, when one individual rides herd so cruelly on so many, there’s a certain … frangibility about the whole system.

I hope.

Like the late Saddam Hussein, Un’s braggadocio is a sign of weakness, likely designed to discourage more powerful nations — China, South Korea, and our country — from intervention.

And we shouldn’t intervene.

But neither should we make any more stupid deals to provide him oil.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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North Korea, Kim Jong Un, Saddam Hussein, Stalin, China

 

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general freedom ideological culture meme moral hazard national politics & policies Popular

Socialism’s Idealistic Youth

socialism, communism, China, Red Guard, Cultural Revolution, individual rights, Common Sense, meme

When the protection of individual rights is replaced with vague and pious appeals to the “collective good”… things can get very ugly, very quickly.

The Cultural Revolution, was a social-​political movement that took place in the People’s Republic of China from 1966 until 1976. Its stated goal was to purge all remnants of capitalism and traditional elements from Chinese society

In 1966, the Communist Party Central Committee passed its “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” This decision defined the Cultural Revolution as “a great revolution that touches people to their very souls and constitutes a deeper and more extensive stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country.” China’s youth responded by forming Red Guard groups around the country.

Currently, our objective is to struggle against and crush those people in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art, and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system. —Excerpt from “Decision Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”

The revolution aimed to “sweep away all the monsters and demons”, that is, all the class enemy who promoted bourgeois (the “capitalist” class) idea within the party, the government, the army, among the intellectuals, as well as those from an exploitative family background or belonged to one of the “Five Black Categories.” Large number of people perceived to be “monsters and demons” (牛鬼蛇神, literally “cow ghosts snake spirits”) regardless of guilt or innocence were publicly denounced, humiliated, and beaten. In their revolutionary fervor, students denounced their teachers, and children denounced their parents. Hundreds of thousands of individuals were persecuted. Many died through their ill-​treatment or committed suicide.

According to the documents for the prosecution of the Gang of Four, 142,000 cadres and teachers in the education circles were persecuted, and noted academics, scientists, and educators were sent to rural labor camps. Many survivors and observers suggest that almost anyone with skills over that of the average person was made the target of political “struggle” in some way. The entire generation of tormented and inadequately educated individuals is often referred to in the West as well as in China as the ‘lost generation’.

But doesn’t the success of Scandinavian “democratic socialism” prove that socialism can work? Doesn’t Denmark show that socialism doesn’t always lead to economic collapse, political oppression, poverty and starvation? Find the answer to that question here: Does Denmark Prove That Socialism Can Work?

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socialism, communism, China, Red Guard, Cultural Revolution, individual rights, Common Sense, meme

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folly general freedom ideological culture too much government

Discreditable Credit

China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense

Capitalism can be rigged a hundred different ways, apparently. China’s is run by its Communist Party, and even current innovations bear the stamp of the Party.

Take “social credit.”

Not the quaint decentralist economic reform movement that was a minor deal in politics on the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada 60 or more years ago.

What I’m referring to is the innovative credit scoring system devised by a gaming company in cooperation with China’s commie-​run government.

But it’s not quite like the credit scoring systems set up by competing companies in the U.S., which cook up “credit scores” based on going into debt and paying off debt. If you pay your bills, you get a higher score. If you don’t, it plummets.

The new “Sesame” credit scoring system is less interested in the debts you pay off and more in what you buy and what you put up on social media. The company has concocted a secret algorithm, and gives higher scores to good citizens — obedient people — and lower scores to lazy people (inferred from, say, if you play a lot of video games) or to folks who are rebellious free thinkers (posting pictures of Tank Man in Tiananmen Square, for example).

That is what it seems like, so far.

It rewards those Chinese who are industrious (yay?) and who kowtow to Communist Party expectations (yikes!) — and makes me extra glad I live in the U.S., where government is too chaotic and stupid to cook up anything quite this insidious.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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China Credit System, Sesame, China, Credit Rating, Common Sense