Is Xi Jinping Stifling China's Tech?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247417

by fsndz • 2 years ago

6 16 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

From blocking IPOs to imposing strict data security laws, and cracking down on tech giants like Alibaba and Didi. What's the end game of this, given the lacklustre economic growth in China recently.

verdverm5• 2 years ago

People who study China and authoritarians note that the end goal is not the same as capitalism. The goal is to always maintain party leadership and control. The CCP made a deal with the people, rapid growth in exchange for govt control. Now that many hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty, they are looking for what comes next, choice and a say in how they are governed. Unfortunately, this does not work for the CCP. Their greatest enemy is a political alternative to their leadership.

The primary end game is thus

- staying in power at all costs, economics matter little

- elimination of political alternatives, most notably Taiwan as ethnic Chinese with a democracy and great success

All else is secondary. Authoritarian regimes are always willing to harm their people and country for their own benefit.

markus_zhang3• 2 years ago

Actually I think modern Capitalism's end goal is exactly the same. For example the US version. It tastes and looks a bit different due to historical reasons, but in the core it's exactly the same thing. If we replace "party leadership and control" with "elites and control", it's pretty much every country.

verdverm5• 2 years ago

The difference is that democracies have elections and this year we are seeing them reject the oligarchy and populism, across many countries.

Democracies are not perfect, often messier, but they can course correct and have meaningful checks and balances.

AnimalMuppet• 2 years ago

Right, but the CCP seems likely to be seen as breaking the deal with the people soon, because they likely aren't going to be delivering rapid growth. The cracks in that are already showing.

Worse, the people are getting to the point where rapid growth isn't enough. It was what they wanted when China was a poor country. Now that they aren't in poverty any more, growth is nice, but they want other things more. As you say, they want choice and a say in how they are governed. (What they really wanted was a better life, not growth for growth's sake. Growth was just the form that a better life looked like when they were poor. Now it's not.)

I also see a parallel between China and Russia here. Russia attacked Ukraine because Putin couldn't tolerate a prosperous, democratic, ethnically similar neighbor - it might give his own people ideas. China's in the same boat, except that they have the Taiwan Strait to deal with, and the US at least appears to be willing to back Taiwan more forcefully than it backed Ukraine.

Fricken• 2 years ago

The first goal of any institution is to maintain the power it has. The second goal is to expand those powers. This is as true for your nearest pickleball club as it is for the CCP.

verdverm5• 2 years ago

Joe Biden is certainly an exception, setting aside his ego and candidacy to pass the torch to the next generation

I've also been in multiple small groups where this power dynamic is not a thing.

yongjik• 2 years ago

Don't anthropomorphize an authoritarian regime too much, especially one made of millions of officers with different career goals and ambitions. You end up with an oversimplified model, and you're in danger of projecting your own political views and fears onto it.

markus_zhang3• 2 years ago

Cracking down on tech giants and blocking IPOs are basically political moves because tech giants (anywhere, not just China) are backed by political powers.

maxglute• 2 years ago

The end game is directing best and brightest to other strategic sectors, especially hard tech (like semi) where employment and wages and market cap are exploding. Ditto with killing edtech, capping finance compensation, it's wasteful for all math PhDs to be quants or adtech.

It's just correctly identify that it's retarded to pour so much money in service platforms with diminishing returns, i.e. DiDi is already stupid efficient in most areas, what's the point of spending billions to shave average delivery by a few more seconds when it's just going to shit up traffic more. It's realizing spending 300B on importing semi conductors and billions more on other imports / paying patent fees to western countries that are no longer reliable is dumb.

IMO at this point, if you see western articles saying XJP is doing XYZ bad things, he's probably doing right thing, things that west is about to do (industrial policy, increase speech controls, regulation/antitrust in big tech), or things they wish they can do.

solardev• 2 years ago

Conversely, is it really a good thing that our corporations are more powerful than our (supposedly democratic) government? They're not subject to the same checks and balances of elected government, and can leave pretty negative impacts on everything from technology to society to the environment to, at a certain scale, history itself. Meta and X at this point really hold more social power through selective propaganda than most governments in the world, arguably including ours. They have powers of amplification and reeducation that our formal schools and universities could only dream of. They also have economic war chests rivaling many countries and militaries, and increasingly control much of our infrastructure across land, air, radio, and now space. The end goal of any such corporation is always monopoly control unless some outside force stops them. Competition alone won't prevent that because they'll eventually just get acquired or become a duopoly.

Maybe China goes too far in the direction of state control, but it's possible to go too far in the opposite direction too. IMO the EU has a better balance in this regard.

Is Xi Jinping Stifling China's Tech?

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