Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now.
UK offered a rather simple pathway to immigrating to the UK for most Hong Kong residents [1]. But the choice between the stagnant UK and the booming mainland China was not obvious for everyone in late the 1990s, when China seemed to be democratizing more and more (despite the Tiananmen massacre), and growing richer by the day.
They had multiple pathways. The top three destinations were Canada, the USA, and Australia. These locations offered a major benefit over the UK - they were on trade routes along which people from Hong Kong were already doing business.
Canada was particularly affected. It absorbed the most immigrants, they were a larger share of the population, and this was a major increase in ethnic diversity. The resulting cultural clashes were sometimes an issue. Here is one that literally doubled car insurance rates in British Columbia around the time I left.
Three cars, 2 in front with the left-hand car being driven by a Canadian, and the back car driven by a recent immigrant. The immigrant sees the opportunity to pass, swings out into oncoming traffic, and guns it. Leaving just a few inches of room. Normal Hong Kong driving.
The Canadian has no idea that this is happening until OMG I'M ABOUT TO BE HIT! The Canadian then swerves right to avoid the emergency, and hits the car on the right.
The immigrant drives off. Presumably wondering about these crazy Canadians who don't know how to drive.
Everyone involved behaved reasonably for how they were used to driving. But the combination worked out very poorly...
It was a far cry from the Portuguese citizenship offered for Macau, both in the latter's lack of conditions on acquisition (beyond being over age 15 at the handover), and in passing it on to descendants.
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.
China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.
"Lai is a victim of this miscalculation."; I don't think Lai miscalculated, he knew what was coming and fought it anyway.
"Authority comes from submission"; sure someone can threaten you with physical coercion, but they can't make you want to submit. I would strongly suspect that Jimmy knew what was coming, but the point isn't "winning" in the "hollywood" sense, but rather that he did the right thing even. I would suspect not even in spite of the cost, but because of the cost.
Are principles that don't cost you anything even principles?
Miscalculation on what level? I think you are right concerning the methods as during the “last-stand” at hk poly technic, tanks were assembling in Futian Shenzhen (sat images.. what was this site again)
I think that laypeople in the US were willing to see more investments in China with the rationalization that it could lead to more human rights. If you had polled random Americans in 1995 with a question like, "Should the US government and American companies invest in the People's Republic of China in an effort to increase human rights and liberalization there?", most people would have responded "yes".
The miscalculation comes from thinking that the investment would actually have that effect. And I do think some people at the top knew it wouldn't have that effect, but of course, there was cheap labor to be had, and that was what they wanted more than anything else.
I don't think it was a miscalculation. Greed always ran deep in the West too.
> If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics
It's not always possible. It works in some countries but not in others. For instance, it seems not possible in Russia.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state.
I somewhat agree, as the sinomarxist theorem and strategem is about that (and the sinomarxists also managed to bring out many people out of poverty too), but your analysis is not entirely correct either as China has many superrich now, which is a perversion in the system. So Xi also lies here. Because how can there be so many
super-superrich? This is a master-slave situation, just like in other capitalistic countries. So why then the lie about sinomarxism? They just sell it like an ideology now, not unlike the Juche crap in North Korea.
But Russia has never removed the Communists from power. It removed the Communist party, that's true. But plenty of the revolutionaries were themselves Communists; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were very high-ranking Communists. They liked the idea of economic liberalization, but the political liberalization was only allowed as long as they stayed in power. I'm not sure Russia has seen even a single honest presidential election. The current "president" of Russia is a former KGB officer.
Calling Yeltsin a communist is bananas. He played a central role in collapsing the Soviet Union by pulling Russia out of the Union, without any democratic input from the people. He then privatized everything, sold it all to the oligarchs and outside American/European hedge funds, and gutted all of Russia's remaining social safety programs from the SU. Yeltsin would be considered the very definition of a neoliberal, and was considered a friend and ally of the United States, which is now something we try to whitewash.
The key thing for me here is that Yeltsin apparently falsified a lot of elections, including his own, to keep the right people in power. Economic liberalization (which had quite an effect) while holding the political reins tightly is very much like the Chinese communists acted during Deng Xiaoping's tenure. The Chinese managed to bring somehow wiser people to top though, it seems.
Yeltsin may have used Communists as a scare during his campaign. But today's Russia is in hands of a former Communist dictator, much like today's China is in the hands of a career-Communist dictator.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms...
That's a rewriting of history and a common misconception I've seen repeated ad nauseam both on HN and (what I assume is it's origin) Reddit.
The West (primarily the US and then-West Germany) began investing in China in the 1970s to 1989 explicitly as a bulwark against the USSR [0] due to the Sino-Soviet Split. The "economic democratization" argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO [1] along with to reduce the sanctions enforced following the Tienanmen Square massacre [2].
George HW Bush as well as Clinton's NSC Asia Director Kenneth Lieberthal were both massive Chinaphiles, and played a major role in cementing the position China is in today.
“The ‘economic democratization’ argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO” is what they’re talking about. American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us.
Prior to that it was principally geostrategic. But prior to that, the argument was never made.
> American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us
The NSC in the first Clinton admin and the HW admin was ambivalent-to-opposed to the "endogenous democratization" approach, as was seen with Clinton 1's decisions during the China Straits Crisis under Anthony Lake (who was canned in 1997) along with Bush 1's retrenchment of sanctions in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre under Brent Scowcroft. Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2 due to personnel changes and a significant loss of political capital due to then ongoing controversies.
> But prior to that, the argument was never made
Yep. The "endogenous democratization" argument only arose in 1997 after Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi's paper "Modernization: Theories and Facts" was published back in 1997 [0].
Interesting point and pardon my naïveté but I’m curious, by “the west began investing” do you mean public sector investments? Or are you including people like jim rodgers long time China bull? I think private sector investment wouldn’t be done for anything other than profit. It seems like trade liberalism is an ideological thing that people seem to believe in above and beyond geopolitical concerns. Those who believe in trade liberalization (globalization) are sort of religious in their belief that it leads to liberalism in all spheres, not just the economic. I’m thinking of classic liberals, economists, Ayn Rand fanboys, etc.
Both public and private. Read my first citation - I don't feel like relinking dozens of citations on 1970s-80s US-China relationship.
Tl;dr - the Carter and Reagan administrations both heavily invested in building the PRC's R&D, military, and industrial capacity through a mix of public-private investments primarily as a bulwark against the USSR along with US Army boots on the ground in Xinjiang.
I think that it's both a rewriting of history and a rationalization of the investment on some people's parts.
Nixon's opening of relations with China was definitely a move against the USSR, but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe. The fact that the CPC was still very much in charge while all of this investing was occurring had to be rationalized somehow in the minds of people who were less cynical, and "it'll help liberalization" was probably one of the rationalizations used. And in some ways, you can use investment as a way to leverage social changes within countries, and some people (though apparently not enough) thought that was the intention with China, but there was only a carrot, not a stick, and by the time there was a desire to use a stick, there was too much dependency on China as a market and producer for the West. That's where we're at now.
> but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe
Most of the capital investment and institution building that led to China Shock in the 2000s only happened due to the extreme degree of tech and capital transfer in the 1970s-80s, along with the visiting student program. Heck, Vietnam had a higher HDI [0] and GDP PPP per Capita [1] than the PRC until the early 2000s. The only difference was Vietnam was strictly in the Warsaw Bloc camp, and was negatively impacted by the collapse of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and GDR while China was able to leverage ties with the US during that period.
> While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.
Capitalism is optimized to reduce or eliminate property access. For example, a free market capitalist has no problems with a very rich individual buying a city and perpetually renting the property to it's employees at rates above their salary, putting them in perpetual debt to that individual. They own nothing and can't escape their circumstances. Nor can their children.
Capitalism with minimal or no regulation naturally devolves into feudalism.
Communism as such has never existed and will never exist because it ignores human nature. Private property rights are a fundamental tenet of human psychology.
But hey, in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts, if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries . . . sure, give it another go.
Capitalism is the worst economic system that has ever been tried . . . except for all the others.
Socialist bailouts for big companies, central planning from HQ for big companies, shared ownership for rich shareholders. Dog-eat-dog market forces, rugged individualism and bootstraps for the poor. Don't you think that's weird?
> "in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts"
Just curious, there wasn't any interference from outside during these 'failures' was there? Any trade embargoes? Any military intervention? Any assassinations? Any deliberate destabilizing? Any puppet governments?
> "if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries"
There's 1.3 - 1.9 million people in American prisons now. 4.9 million who have been in prison. 19 million with felony convictions. Prisons are for-profit, and prisoners are used for forced labour, either paid nothing or paid less than minimum wage. The US ICE is disappearing people off the streets. The US president is targeting people who criticize him accusing them of treason (punishable by death)[1] and writing "Chuck Schumer said trip was ‘a total dud’, even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!".
Why is "Communism" the cause of gulags but "Capitalism" isn't the cause of these things? Why does this American "communism can't work, has never worked, and reminder Communism == mass graves" post always appear with the same template, and always feel like a loud pledge of allegiance trying to make it clear to the powers that be that you aren't critisizing them, begging them not to disappear you?
Are you not even allowed to entertain a different idea? To consider how what you're saying is nonsensical, even if Communism doesn't/can't work?
Anthropologically speaking these statements about human fundamentals (or "human nature") end up falling flat.
There have been plenty of societies organized in ways such that private property was irrelevant when existing at all.
I suggest "Debt" from David Graeber for a great dissertation of this topic (which is not the core topic, but definitely touched).
All of this without considering that private property of means of production is different from private property in general.
For the record, I'm not a communist. I'd probably say my values are pretty close to socialist-capitalist. And that is a form of government that many nations have adopted and are successfully running.
What's been failing is neoliberalism. Every nation that's been moving in that direction has serious problems as their social safety nets have started to collapse.
No OP. But if it’s similar to what I believe in, it’s free-market capitalism for business (with provisions for market failure, e.g. antitrust and utility regulation), redistribution of wealth for individuals, strong individual investor and consumer rights, and the state providing the bare basics through the market (housing voucher, food voucher, public education or an education voucher, electricity voucher, water voucher, internet voucher, and public healthcare).
And for who's done it, basically every capitalist nation at this point.
Simply put it's recognizing that capitalism has failings but so does communism. It doesn't seek full state control of everything, just over industries where it's needed. It tries to strike a balance between public and private ownership.
Everything from Vietnam to the US have aspects of market socialism. I think that there are more industries where the US should take ownership, particularly industries that lend themselves to natural monopolies or oligopolies.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that regulating capitalism is necessary, but I also think the "where it's needed" portion of your thesis is a real sticking point.
I would be interested to know what industries you have in mind where the US should take ownership, and in what form.
- Railroads - The lines themselves and the operation should be owned by the federal government. Private rail companies should buy access which pays for line expansion and maintenance. The US needs regulations on things like train length and line speeds (none of these super massive trains blocking roadways because they don't fit inside a rail yard).
- Medicine - Medicare for all, but honestly I think nationalizing major hospitals and pharmaceuticals would probably be warranted. It's in the national interest to fund a wide breadth of research and medicine production even if that medicine doesn't ultimately turn a profit. But even if we just did insurance, the US is already covering the most expensive pool of individuals with Medicare (old people) expanding it to all citizens wouldn't be that expensive. Reform to medicare would help (particularly removing Part C, that's just a slush fund for insurance companies, but then also expanding and simplifying the other parts).
Utilities ownership - Doesn't need to be nationalized, but having municipal or state ran utilities would, IMO, be preferable. The state utilities boards suck and putting in checks for utility companies. They aren't elected and are easy to corrupt. For example, my water utility was recently purchased by a company. In order to cover the loan they took out to purchase the previous water company, they raised rates (fat chance those go down). For telecommunications, I think a British telecom style system would work well. The government owns the lines while various telecommunication companies compete for service. That'd make it easier for more than just 2 companies providing internet service to a given location. Cellular networks practically already work like this, the big 3 own everything and sub-carriers just lease access. It'd be better if the government nationally owned cell service deployment. Especially in terms of spectrum usage.
- Food production - I don't really think government ownership is needed here, I think anti-trust and breakups are needed. These markets have consolidated to a huge extent which is really bad for everyone. Having just ~5 different national grocers is a bad thing. Having just a few mills (like general mills) is a bad thing.
- Chip fabrication - This should be owned by the government much like TSMC. And like TSMC, the likes of nvidia/intel/amd can buy a fab to do their runs. Fabs are just too crazy expensive and losing the competitive edge here is a security problem.
Basically, my view centers mostly around when an industry gets too consolidated. Especially when I think it's something that has critical importance to the general public. I could be open to more of these sorts of actions, it just depends on if an industry can be naturally competitive or not. Like, for example, I think a nationalized shoe manufacturing is a dumb idea as it's already a highly competitive market that could be easily broken up.
So far you're right but the tide can always turn. China has massively overbuilt housing supply, which is the kind of mistake that a freer economy couldn't make. China's failed birth policies (1 child until 2015!) are another example.
My opinion is still that capitalism (Western style) will win. Not because markets are never wrong but because the scope for fucking up is so much less. Markets can't decide "families can have only one child" or "we need to build 90 million units of housing" (that now sits empty). An accumulation of fuck-ups in this vein is inevitable when you have a small group of people making these kinds of decisions. In the long run, it will be fatal.
The "ghost cities" narrative has been bunk for a while. Most of those developments have been filled up and are now seen as highly desirable ultra-modern cities, e.g. Pudong New Area in Shanghai, but much cheaper for first time buyers than anywhere in the North America or Europe.
They prebuild 10 years of housing runway but still have another 10 years, aka 100m+ housing shortage for urbanization goals. They realize they got overzealous and was venturing in bubble and and intervened during boom vs after collapse. AKA preplanning and prematurely fixing something, which is the kind of intervention a freer economy can't do.
Family planning was also massive successful in preventing frankly 100s of millions of useless mouths from being born and concentrating resources to upskill 1-2 kids, hence their massive catchup within a few generations. Now they make more technical talent than OCED combined and will have the greatest high skill demographic dividend to milk for at least our life times, giving them 40+ years to sort out better family planning.
BTW US overspending 5-10% of GDP aka 2.5 Trillion per year on healthcare vs OECD baseline is basically more wasteful misallocation than anything PRC has ever done, including RE misallocation (3-5% waste). And at least they still have housing units left to use (being converted into affordable housing), instead of piles of paper work and personal debt. Accumulation of fuckups that are not resolvable in western style capitalism, it will be fatal medium term.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
Actually they can. It's part of the reason why a lot of capitalist nations are seeing major problems with population stagnation and possibly shrinkage.
The problem is markets don't care at all about society. If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
Capitalism is geared towards minimizing workers' free time. And, unfortunately, free time is how babies get made and kids get raised.
That is where western capitalism is failing. Shouting louder and young adults to pull on bootstraps harder isn't making them have kids in their studio apartments.
South Korea and Japan are 2 examples of this train-wreck that's coming for the US and other nations.
> If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Capitalism says nothing about free time. Make the connection in your argument - people without enough money work as much as they can, maybe… but I still don’t see the lower wage people I know working 16 hour days. In fact it is the people who have a use for the extra money, usually to buy free time later, as one would expect in a capitalistic system.
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
Oh no, it really doesn't.
Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.
> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.
> Capitalism says nothing about free time.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.
Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.
If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
> capitalism is everyone working to maximize profit
This is nonsense. Capitalism is about the private ownership of productive stuff, i.e. capital. That’s it. Profit is a corollary, and one that is bounded by preferences and tastes.
> completely ignores the coercive law of competition
Not a forcing function unless you’re levered. Competition can’t push your return on a productive asset below zero (by definition), just lower by increasing the value of said asset while reducing the cash flows from it.
Leave it to Reason to pick out a billionaire as a martyr. Normally when I hear about free speech heroes, they've said something. Apparently, what Jimmy Lai stands against is the extension of China's "illiberalism" to Hong Kong.
What exactly is that supposed to be describing, and what is he against? If all he's against is the financial setup that allowed him to become as rich as he did, and the fact that he would have to deal with new masters as Hong Kong's colonial period was ended, why the hell should I care? What does Jimmy Lai stand for that China stands against that I should care about?
"Illiberalism."
Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side. Not that Reason would support that, either, but China doesn't have any monopoly on "illiberalism," and illiberalism in the control of speech is far more important to me than the oppression of billionaires.
Lai's just getting Khodorkovsky'd: some of the rich think they're beyond government, when they operate purely through the blessing of and coddling by governments. You would think you would know that when all you do is accumulate and trade government promises in the form of currency, but the amount of praise you get as a disturbingly rich person must destroy brain function to some extent. There has got to be some atrophy in your sense of cause and effect and a distortion of your place in the world when you're on top in every room.
> Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.
> Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.
The sinomarxist mono-party is kind of doing their powerplay here.
The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim
was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the
position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against
the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong).
But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the
total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that
is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy
(though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is
still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship.
Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros
oligarchs.)
We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if
that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more
rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s
I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now.
Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading
Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly
similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion
of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell
the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is
that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of
put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries
without nukes.
>But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences,
One reason why Lai's fate has only limited impact is because it doesn't resonate that strongly with working people for whom Hong Kong isn't an example of upward prosperity. His rags to riches 'boomer optimism' appeals more to the Western audience than to someone who has lived in the stagnation of Hong Kong of the last few decades, where ambitious tech talent now migrates to the mainland.
Likewise on the mainland the youth is significantly less interested in emulating the West or old Hong Kong which to them is not a symbol of dynamism.
1Country2Systems is still in place, just the version that was always meant to be, not the lie western propaganda sold.
HK failed their half of 2System by not implementing national security law on their accord after 20 years of failures and it became obvious they were never going to do it out of own volition. Frankly if local preferences is to be under national security umbrella and be free to commit treason their preferences should be completely nullified because that's unserious position. Hence PRC, after UNREASONABLE patience had shove it down their throats under 1C mandate (1C supercedes 2S) - HK only ever had "high" degree of autonomy, not full autonomy. It was always in Beijing's prerogative to force HK to eat their vegetables, it just took 20 years of HK incompetence before Beijing ran of patience. AKA the 1C2S muh HK has full autonomy under Sino British declaration tier of retarded western propaganda fed to useful idiots was a lie and got dispelled.
That's a whole lots of words to say that the people of HK don't get any say in how their lives are run, and that it's justified to force them into a situation they don't want. That's a crock of shit, and I suspect you know it.
I don't care about the specific politics, and I don't know his biography. You can love this man and hate China with the power of every cell in your body. But calling anyone a martyr, even with poetic license, has very specific connotations which don't seem to apply here.
>The dissident was convicted in Hong Kong earlier this week of two counts of conspiring to collude with foreign forces
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; at trial, Lai testified that he had asked them to voice their support for Hong Kong.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to help convince anyone buddy.
Jimmy Lai is more courageous and principled than anyone you've probably ever met in your life. He'll die in prison for his belief that speech should be free in Hong Kong.
This man will spend the rest of his (possibly short?) life in prison for the crime of publishing ideas that the government didn't like. He chose to stay in hong kong defending the principles that mattered to him instead of abandoning his principles and fleeing to the UK, which was on option entirely open to him.
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo;
To sanctions HK politicians btw aka, comprador traitor gets the traitor treatment. Man should be in extraterritorial laogai in 247 stress positions but get kids treatment because CCP too lenient, and well they don't have those.
Reminds me of the recent Nobel "Peace" Prize winner, Corina Machado, who begged America and Israel to bomb her own country (Venezuela). If these people are supposed to be our heroes then I'll go with the villians.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-ab...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_(Overseas)
Canada was particularly affected. It absorbed the most immigrants, they were a larger share of the population, and this was a major increase in ethnic diversity. The resulting cultural clashes were sometimes an issue. Here is one that literally doubled car insurance rates in British Columbia around the time I left.
Three cars, 2 in front with the left-hand car being driven by a Canadian, and the back car driven by a recent immigrant. The immigrant sees the opportunity to pass, swings out into oncoming traffic, and guns it. Leaving just a few inches of room. Normal Hong Kong driving.
The Canadian has no idea that this is happening until OMG I'M ABOUT TO BE HIT! The Canadian then swerves right to avoid the emergency, and hits the car on the right.
The immigrant drives off. Presumably wondering about these crazy Canadians who don't know how to drive.
Everyone involved behaved reasonably for how they were used to driving. But the combination worked out very poorly...
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Portugal-give-full-citizenship...
How would it have made a difference when the Chinese military invaded?
If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.
China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.
Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
"Authority comes from submission"; sure someone can threaten you with physical coercion, but they can't make you want to submit. I would strongly suspect that Jimmy knew what was coming, but the point isn't "winning" in the "hollywood" sense, but rather that he did the right thing even. I would suspect not even in spite of the cost, but because of the cost.
Are principles that don't cost you anything even principles?
The miscalculation comes from thinking that the investment would actually have that effect. And I do think some people at the top knew it wouldn't have that effect, but of course, there was cheap labor to be had, and that was what they wanted more than anything else.
I don't think it was a miscalculation. Greed always ran deep in the West too.
> If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics
It's not always possible. It works in some countries but not in others. For instance, it seems not possible in Russia.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state.
I somewhat agree, as the sinomarxist theorem and strategem is about that (and the sinomarxists also managed to bring out many people out of poverty too), but your analysis is not entirely correct either as China has many superrich now, which is a perversion in the system. So Xi also lies here. Because how can there be so many super-superrich? This is a master-slave situation, just like in other capitalistic countries. So why then the lie about sinomarxism? They just sell it like an ideology now, not unlike the Juche crap in North Korea.
But Russia has never removed the Communists from power. It removed the Communist party, that's true. But plenty of the revolutionaries were themselves Communists; both Gorbachev and Yeltsin were very high-ranking Communists. They liked the idea of economic liberalization, but the political liberalization was only allowed as long as they stayed in power. I'm not sure Russia has seen even a single honest presidential election. The current "president" of Russia is a former KGB officer.
Yeltsin may have used Communists as a scare during his campaign. But today's Russia is in hands of a former Communist dictator, much like today's China is in the hands of a career-Communist dictator.
The US helped with that.
That's a rewriting of history and a common misconception I've seen repeated ad nauseam both on HN and (what I assume is it's origin) Reddit.
The West (primarily the US and then-West Germany) began investing in China in the 1970s to 1989 explicitly as a bulwark against the USSR [0] due to the Sino-Soviet Split. The "economic democratization" argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO [1] along with to reduce the sanctions enforced following the Tienanmen Square massacre [2].
George HW Bush as well as Clinton's NSC Asia Director Kenneth Lieberthal were both massive Chinaphiles, and played a major role in cementing the position China is in today.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264332
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/20/opinion/IHT-america-needs...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/1993/07/14/opinion/forget-the-tianan...
You both agree.
“The ‘economic democratization’ argument was a 1990s-era framing to reduce opposition to the PRC joining GATT/WTO” is what they’re talking about. American security analysts believed that making China richer would make it more like us.
Prior to that it was principally geostrategic. But prior to that, the argument was never made.
The NSC in the first Clinton admin and the HW admin was ambivalent-to-opposed to the "endogenous democratization" approach, as was seen with Clinton 1's decisions during the China Straits Crisis under Anthony Lake (who was canned in 1997) along with Bush 1's retrenchment of sanctions in response to the Tiananmen Square Massacre under Brent Scowcroft. Much of the shift happened in Clinton 2 due to personnel changes and a significant loss of political capital due to then ongoing controversies.
> But prior to that, the argument was never made
Yep. The "endogenous democratization" argument only arose in 1997 after Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi's paper "Modernization: Theories and Facts" was published back in 1997 [0].
[0] - https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Modernization%3A-Theor...
That’s when the relevant argument was made and, by my reading, mistakes made per OP’s comments.
Nobody is criticizing Nixon splitting China from the USSR. The criticism is in trade liberalization and technology transfer following the 1990s.
Both public and private. Read my first citation - I don't feel like relinking dozens of citations on 1970s-80s US-China relationship.
Tl;dr - the Carter and Reagan administrations both heavily invested in building the PRC's R&D, military, and industrial capacity through a mix of public-private investments primarily as a bulwark against the USSR along with US Army boots on the ground in Xinjiang.
Nixon's opening of relations with China was definitely a move against the USSR, but that was nothing compared to the extent of investment that was seen after the fall of Communism in Europe. The fact that the CPC was still very much in charge while all of this investing was occurring had to be rationalized somehow in the minds of people who were less cynical, and "it'll help liberalization" was probably one of the rationalizations used. And in some ways, you can use investment as a way to leverage social changes within countries, and some people (though apparently not enough) thought that was the intention with China, but there was only a carrot, not a stick, and by the time there was a desire to use a stick, there was too much dependency on China as a market and producer for the West. That's where we're at now.
Most of the capital investment and institution building that led to China Shock in the 2000s only happened due to the extreme degree of tech and capital transfer in the 1970s-80s, along with the visiting student program. Heck, Vietnam had a higher HDI [0] and GDP PPP per Capita [1] than the PRC until the early 2000s. The only difference was Vietnam was strictly in the Warsaw Bloc camp, and was negatively impacted by the collapse of the USSR, Czechoslovakia, and GDR while China was able to leverage ties with the US during that period.
[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi?year=2005
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?end=2...
I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.
Capitalism is optimized to reduce or eliminate property access. For example, a free market capitalist has no problems with a very rich individual buying a city and perpetually renting the property to it's employees at rates above their salary, putting them in perpetual debt to that individual. They own nothing and can't escape their circumstances. Nor can their children.
Capitalism with minimal or no regulation naturally devolves into feudalism.
Everyone owns the world oceans (“common heritage of humanity”). How is that going for its fisheries and sea bottoms.
Co-op fisheries are owned by the co-op. They aren’t a problem and regulate access.
Common heritage fisheries are trawled unregulated because when everyone owns something, nobody owns it.
For the communist model to work, the state has to own everything. Which in practice means apparatchiks control everything.
Do something like project Cybersyn [0], but give all decision making to a digital planning engine.
No humans, no apparatchiks.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
But hey, in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts, if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries . . . sure, give it another go.
Capitalism is the worst economic system that has ever been tried . . . except for all the others.
> "in defiance of 100+ years of failed attempts"
Just curious, there wasn't any interference from outside during these 'failures' was there? Any trade embargoes? Any military intervention? Any assassinations? Any deliberate destabilizing? Any puppet governments?
> "if you want to see Politburos putting people in gulags again for being counterrevolutionaries"
There's 1.3 - 1.9 million people in American prisons now. 4.9 million who have been in prison. 19 million with felony convictions. Prisons are for-profit, and prisoners are used for forced labour, either paid nothing or paid less than minimum wage. The US ICE is disappearing people off the streets. The US president is targeting people who criticize him accusing them of treason (punishable by death)[1] and writing "Chuck Schumer said trip was ‘a total dud’, even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!".
Why is "Communism" the cause of gulags but "Capitalism" isn't the cause of these things? Why does this American "communism can't work, has never worked, and reminder Communism == mass graves" post always appear with the same template, and always feel like a loud pledge of allegiance trying to make it clear to the powers that be that you aren't critisizing them, begging them not to disappear you?
Are you not even allowed to entertain a different idea? To consider how what you're saying is nonsensical, even if Communism doesn't/can't work?
[1] https://time.com/7290536/miles-taylor-president-trump-treaso...
I suggest "Debt" from David Graeber for a great dissertation of this topic (which is not the core topic, but definitely touched).
All of this without considering that private property of means of production is different from private property in general.
Communism indeed is highly unlikely to works as a political state system, due to human nature.
What's been failing is neoliberalism. Every nation that's been moving in that direction has serious problems as their social safety nets have started to collapse.
What is this? Are the existing examples you mentioned considered examples of democratic socialism, or are you referring to something else?
And for who's done it, basically every capitalist nation at this point.
Simply put it's recognizing that capitalism has failings but so does communism. It doesn't seek full state control of everything, just over industries where it's needed. It tries to strike a balance between public and private ownership.
Everything from Vietnam to the US have aspects of market socialism. I think that there are more industries where the US should take ownership, particularly industries that lend themselves to natural monopolies or oligopolies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
I would be interested to know what industries you have in mind where the US should take ownership, and in what form.
A few that I'd see the need.
- Railroads - The lines themselves and the operation should be owned by the federal government. Private rail companies should buy access which pays for line expansion and maintenance. The US needs regulations on things like train length and line speeds (none of these super massive trains blocking roadways because they don't fit inside a rail yard).
- Medicine - Medicare for all, but honestly I think nationalizing major hospitals and pharmaceuticals would probably be warranted. It's in the national interest to fund a wide breadth of research and medicine production even if that medicine doesn't ultimately turn a profit. But even if we just did insurance, the US is already covering the most expensive pool of individuals with Medicare (old people) expanding it to all citizens wouldn't be that expensive. Reform to medicare would help (particularly removing Part C, that's just a slush fund for insurance companies, but then also expanding and simplifying the other parts).
Utilities ownership - Doesn't need to be nationalized, but having municipal or state ran utilities would, IMO, be preferable. The state utilities boards suck and putting in checks for utility companies. They aren't elected and are easy to corrupt. For example, my water utility was recently purchased by a company. In order to cover the loan they took out to purchase the previous water company, they raised rates (fat chance those go down). For telecommunications, I think a British telecom style system would work well. The government owns the lines while various telecommunication companies compete for service. That'd make it easier for more than just 2 companies providing internet service to a given location. Cellular networks practically already work like this, the big 3 own everything and sub-carriers just lease access. It'd be better if the government nationally owned cell service deployment. Especially in terms of spectrum usage.
- Food production - I don't really think government ownership is needed here, I think anti-trust and breakups are needed. These markets have consolidated to a huge extent which is really bad for everyone. Having just ~5 different national grocers is a bad thing. Having just a few mills (like general mills) is a bad thing.
- Chip fabrication - This should be owned by the government much like TSMC. And like TSMC, the likes of nvidia/intel/amd can buy a fab to do their runs. Fabs are just too crazy expensive and losing the competitive edge here is a security problem.
Basically, my view centers mostly around when an industry gets too consolidated. Especially when I think it's something that has critical importance to the general public. I could be open to more of these sorts of actions, it just depends on if an industry can be naturally competitive or not. Like, for example, I think a nationalized shoe manufacturing is a dumb idea as it's already a highly competitive market that could be easily broken up.
Hopefully that answers your question.
My opinion is still that capitalism (Western style) will win. Not because markets are never wrong but because the scope for fucking up is so much less. Markets can't decide "families can have only one child" or "we need to build 90 million units of housing" (that now sits empty). An accumulation of fuck-ups in this vein is inevitable when you have a small group of people making these kinds of decisions. In the long run, it will be fatal.
Family planning was also massive successful in preventing frankly 100s of millions of useless mouths from being born and concentrating resources to upskill 1-2 kids, hence their massive catchup within a few generations. Now they make more technical talent than OCED combined and will have the greatest high skill demographic dividend to milk for at least our life times, giving them 40+ years to sort out better family planning.
BTW US overspending 5-10% of GDP aka 2.5 Trillion per year on healthcare vs OECD baseline is basically more wasteful misallocation than anything PRC has ever done, including RE misallocation (3-5% waste). And at least they still have housing units left to use (being converted into affordable housing), instead of piles of paper work and personal debt. Accumulation of fuckups that are not resolvable in western style capitalism, it will be fatal medium term.
Actually they can. It's part of the reason why a lot of capitalist nations are seeing major problems with population stagnation and possibly shrinkage.
The problem is markets don't care at all about society. If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
Capitalism is geared towards minimizing workers' free time. And, unfortunately, free time is how babies get made and kids get raised.
That is where western capitalism is failing. Shouting louder and young adults to pull on bootstraps harder isn't making them have kids in their studio apartments.
South Korea and Japan are 2 examples of this train-wreck that's coming for the US and other nations.
This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Capitalism says nothing about free time. Make the connection in your argument - people without enough money work as much as they can, maybe… but I still don’t see the lower wage people I know working 16 hour days. In fact it is the people who have a use for the extra money, usually to buy free time later, as one would expect in a capitalistic system.
Oh no, it really doesn't.
Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.
> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.
> Capitalism says nothing about free time.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.
Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.
If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
This is nonsense. Capitalism is about the private ownership of productive stuff, i.e. capital. That’s it. Profit is a corollary, and one that is bounded by preferences and tastes.
"Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
Not a forcing function unless you’re levered. Competition can’t push your return on a productive asset below zero (by definition), just lower by increasing the value of said asset while reducing the cash flows from it.
What exactly is that supposed to be describing, and what is he against? If all he's against is the financial setup that allowed him to become as rich as he did, and the fact that he would have to deal with new masters as Hong Kong's colonial period was ended, why the hell should I care? What does Jimmy Lai stand for that China stands against that I should care about?
"Illiberalism."
Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side. Not that Reason would support that, either, but China doesn't have any monopoly on "illiberalism," and illiberalism in the control of speech is far more important to me than the oppression of billionaires.
Lai's just getting Khodorkovsky'd: some of the rich think they're beyond government, when they operate purely through the blessing of and coddling by governments. You would think you would know that when all you do is accumulate and trade government promises in the form of currency, but the amount of praise you get as a disturbingly rich person must destroy brain function to some extent. There has got to be some atrophy in your sense of cause and effect and a distortion of your place in the world when you're on top in every room.
-----
* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:...
> Jacques Baud, a former Swiss army colonel and strategic analyst, is a regular guest on pro-Russian television and radio programmes. He acts as a mouthpiece for pro-Russian propaganda and makes conspiracy theories, for example accusing Ukraine of orchestrating its own invasion in order to join NATO.
> Therefore, Jacques Baud is responsible for, implementing or supporting actions or policies attributable to the Government of the Russian Federation which undermine or threaten stability or security in a third country (Ukraine) by engaging in the use of information manipulation and interference.
The interesting thing is that the "two systems, one state" claim was revealed to have been a lie. I can kind of understand the position of China too, mind you - after all there was a war against the UK empire and they forced ceding territory (e. g. Hong Kong). But that still does not nullify the local's people preferences, and Beijing simply bulldozered through by force here. That's the total antithesis to freedom. Xi will focus on Taiwan next - that is also clear. It is in the "DNA" of the sinomarxistic philosophy (though one can wonder how much marxism with chinese focus is still left; it's kind of capitalistic led by a dictatorship. Oddly enough the USA is also transitioning to this by the tech-bros oligarchs.)
We kind of see that freedoms are being eroded. I don't know if that was always the case, or whether it just happens now more rapidly so; or is reported more often, but in the late 1990s I would say we had more freedoms, globally, than right now. Somehow the trend is going towards less freedom. Putin invading Ukraine, occupying land and killing people there is also highly similar to the pretext of the second world war, with the invasion of the Sudetenland by Germany, and then the Gleiwitz lie to sell the invasion of Poland. I think the only real difference here is that more countries have nukes. And smaller countries are kind of put in a dilemma now, since they can not offset bigger countries without nukes.
One reason why Lai's fate has only limited impact is because it doesn't resonate that strongly with working people for whom Hong Kong isn't an example of upward prosperity. His rags to riches 'boomer optimism' appeals more to the Western audience than to someone who has lived in the stagnation of Hong Kong of the last few decades, where ambitious tech talent now migrates to the mainland.
Likewise on the mainland the youth is significantly less interested in emulating the West or old Hong Kong which to them is not a symbol of dynamism.
HK failed their half of 2System by not implementing national security law on their accord after 20 years of failures and it became obvious they were never going to do it out of own volition. Frankly if local preferences is to be under national security umbrella and be free to commit treason their preferences should be completely nullified because that's unserious position. Hence PRC, after UNREASONABLE patience had shove it down their throats under 1C mandate (1C supercedes 2S) - HK only ever had "high" degree of autonomy, not full autonomy. It was always in Beijing's prerogative to force HK to eat their vegetables, it just took 20 years of HK incompetence before Beijing ran of patience. AKA the 1C2S muh HK has full autonomy under Sino British declaration tier of retarded western propaganda fed to useful idiots was a lie and got dispelled.
I don't care about the specific politics, and I don't know his biography. You can love this man and hate China with the power of every cell in your body. But calling anyone a martyr, even with poetic license, has very specific connotations which don't seem to apply here.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/martyr
> a person who suffers very much or is killed because of their religious or political beliefs, and is often admired because of it
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/martyr
> 2: a person who sacrifices something of great value and especially life itself for the sake of principle
>he also met with then–Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; at trial, Lai testified that he had asked them to voice their support for Hong Kong.
Yeah, I don't think that's going to help convince anyone buddy.
I think perhaps we've lionized the term martyr to mean too many things, but his actions seem in line with the dictionary definition
“He may be sentenced to die in prison in connection with his efforts promoting liberty in China.”
Martyr doesn’t sound like overstatement if that happens.
Explain why you think it's overstated.
To sanctions HK politicians btw aka, comprador traitor gets the traitor treatment. Man should be in extraterritorial laogai in 247 stress positions but get kids treatment because CCP too lenient, and well they don't have those.