20th century socialism vs. 21st century socialism

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1692442921717629311

趙紫陽. 改革歷程. Edited by 杜導正 and 鮑彤. 香港: 新世紀出版社, 2009.

To understand the dramatic collapse of the socialist order and the current turmoil in the formerly communist world, this comprehensive work examines the most important common properties of all socialist societies.

János Kornai brings a life-long study of the problems of the socialist system to his explanation of why inherent attributes of socialism inevitably produced in-efficiency. In his past work he has focused on the economic sphere, maintaining consistently that the weak economic performance of socialist countries resulted from the system itself, not from the personalities of top leaders or mistakes made by leading organizations and planners.

This book synthesizes themes from his earlier investigations, while broadening the discussion to include the role of the political power structure and of communist ideology. Kornai distinguishes between two types, or historical phases, of socialism. The “classical socialism” of Stalin, Mao, and their followers is totalitarian and brutally repressive, but its components fit together and make up a coherent edifice. Associated with names like Tito, KNBdar, Deng-Xiaoping, and Gorbachev, “reform socialism” relaxes repression, but brings about a sharpening of inner contradictions and the eventual dissolution of the system. Kornai examines the classical system in the first half of the book, and moves on to explore the complex process of reform in the second half.

To cite this book: Kornai, János. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691228020.

China’s Xi calls for patience as Communist Party tries to reverse economic slump

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has called for patience in a speech released as the ruling Communist Party tries to reverse a deepening economic slump and said Western countries are “increasingly in trouble” because of their materialism and “spiritual poverty.”

China’s defeated youth

Across China young people are disillusioned. They have been raised on stories of economic dynamism and social mobility. The Chinese economy more than doubled in size every ten years from 1978, when Communist Party leaders first adopted market reforms, until 2018. City kids could study hard, get into a good university and expect a white-collar job upon graduation. Lucky students from small towns or the countryside might do the same and make their way into the middle class. Less-educated young people had fewer options. But they could travel to cities, where rising wages in factories or on building sites were enough to start a family.

China is relying on increases in “human capital” (like education) to offset its decrease in humans. But the lying-flat phenomenon and high graduate unemployment show that is not enough. The tightening grip of the authorities over civil society, popular culture and entrepreneurs also would seem to discourage the risk-taking that marked earlier generations.

Some of China’s best-educated youngsters will no doubt emigrate. Others are seeking a different kind of safe harbour. Applications for the civil service are expected to jump again this year. And the share of graduates ranking state-owned enterprises as their first-choice employer has increased for three years in a row, according to the survey by Zhaopin. These businesses offer stability and security over dynamism and ingenuity. If China is to become the more innovative economy Mr Xi demands, it cannot afford to lose too many of its best minds to its least efficient firms.

Now, though, Mr Xi says the “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation is to be achieved by focusing on collective goals, rather than by encouraging individual aspirations. He admonishes the young to obey the party and toughen up—to “engrave the blood of their youth on the monuments of history, just as our fathers did.” That is a message that relatively few young people are taking to heart. Told to eat bitterness, they prefer to let it rot.

How to Kill Chinese Dynamism by Yasheng Huang

In my new book, The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, I show that Hong Kong, at least until very recently, functioned as a hidden-in-plain-sight source of rule of law and market finance for many high-tech entrepreneurs in China.

Though mainland China does not have rule of law and market finance, it effectively outsourced those functions to Hong Kong after Deng Xiaoping succeeded Mao Zedong and launched China’s reform era.

Hong Kong was still a British colony in 1994, and between 1997 and 2019, it operated under the “one country, two systems” formula. Though the territory was under Chinese sovereignty, it preserved its legal and operational autonomy as a historically laissez-faire economy with a market-oriented financial system, rule of law, and secure property rights. China did not furnish any of these core functions, but its reformist government made them available to some of its entrepreneurs.

Let’s get this straight: China’s success has less to do with creating efficient institutions than with providing access to efficient institutions elsewhere.

Outsourcing the Rule of Law

China is special not because it has cracked the code of state capitalism, but because its system has had an escape valve.

Hong Kong has been dragged away from the rule of law toward China’s “rule by law” – and this at a time of geopolitical tensions, deglobalization, and increasing economic insularity. New safe harbors have emerged, such as Singapore, but this time they are hosting economic refugees from China rather than performing the institutional functions that previously powered China’s high-tech entrepreneurship.

Soon, China will feel the effects of no longer being able to outsource the rule of law and the other basic ingredients of innovation-driven growth, and it will pay a steep price for getting basic economics so egregiously wrong.

Stephen Kotkin held the same idea:

> People ask me all the time how come Gorbachev didn’t do a China? Well, first, they didn’t have enough Chinese. Secondly, he had no Hong Kong, which is to say a private entrepo, a financial system with the rule of law that made decisions investment decisions based upon economic not political criteria.

中国的两种前途（2013）- 吴敬琏

两种可能的前途严峻地摆在前面：一条是沿着完善市场经济的改革道路前行，限制行政权力，走向法治的市场经济；另一条是沿着强化政府作用的国家资本主义的道路前行，走向权贵资本主义的穷途。这样，中国的经济就成为一场两种趋势谁跑得更快的竞赛。

Summer on the Oregon Coast | Camping & Cooking in my 4Runner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4d83wucm-U

I Just Spent Two Months in China. Don’t Believe the CCP Reporting 21% Youth Unemployment, It Is Definitely Way, Way Higher.

I’ve been to China a few times since 2000 and this is the first time I could see and hear deep structural stress on the economy and society. China has always felt like the Wild West to me because there’s just so many people there living on top of each other that everyone just looks out for themselves.

Even before COVID, I rarely saw common courtesies like the waiting in line and not being rude to strangers. That selfishness still exists but is now on hyperdrive since people don’t have easy access to jobs anymore. I’m curious how Xi is going to keep people in line when the wheels come off completely, it is not going to take much at this point.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/15xgm7j/

Top voted reply: Bro is about to end up in a Chinese prison next time he visits.

Xi’s Apparatchiks Will Struggle to Revive Economy: China Watcher

“Xi Jinping and his closest advisers do not know much about the economy,” Lam, a senior fellow at Washington-based think tank The Jamestown Foundation, told Nikkei Asia. “After the 20th Party Congress in October ... most of the people he promoted are not technocrats.

“They know very little about international trade, international finance, etc. They are mostly party apparatchiks who specialize in ideology ... propaganda. Most of them do not speak English,” Lam adds.

The appointment of Xi’s new top advisers in October marked a departure from a previous administration filled with educated technocrats well-versed in international finance and how foreign companies operate.

Why China’s economy ran off the rails

For those subset of readers who are rolling their eyes and saying “Oh my God, ANOTHER China post?”, all I can say is, when there’s a big event that’s all over the news, people need a lot of explainers. And right now, the big event that’s in the news is China’s economic crisis.

If there’s a grand unified theory of China’s economic woes, it’s simply “too much real estate”.

But why? What about China’s political economy sent them down this path? As America and Japan learned, real estate bubbles are something that happens to a lot of economies, but China’s real estate sector looks far more swollen. I think there are at least two basic reasons China let that happen.

First, refusing to pump up real estate in response to the end of export-led growth, the 2008 financial crisis, and later economic threats would have run the risk of a recession.

The second reason China pivoted to real estate is that this helped local governments pay for things.

Export-led and FDI-led growth can’t go on forever, and when they run out, it’s better to divert capital toward building a well-balanced economy of high-tech manufacturing and services than to shower it on property developers and shadow banks. Pivoting to real estate will come back to bite an economy eventually.

你是很好的孩子，不怕没有进步，但不可太用功。要多走路，多玩玩，身体好，进步更快。 #胡适

来源

‘Hold on to the Green Horse’: Popular Imaginations of the Health Code and the Cultivation of Algocratic Attunement in China in the COVID Era #健康码 #小红书 #消费主义 「守住绿马」

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Health Code played a decisive role in regulating Chinese citizens’ everyday activities, where securing a green code became essential.

This article examines an outburst of popular discourses around the ‘green code’ and its homophone ‘green horse’ on a popular Chinese platform, Xiaohongshu, revealing the multifarious ways in which people imagine and experience this algorithmic technology—whether as an instrumental task, an object of romanticization, or a trigger of casual superstition.

Such discourses betray an assortment of dispositions and responses that I call ‘algocratic attunment’, including proactive endorsement, pragmatic complicity, and convivial nonchalance. Entangled with consumerist culture, algocratic attunement is quietly cultivated by a host of private actors on social media, shoring up a sociocultural climate conducive to algorithmic governance.

To cite this article: Zou, Sheng. “‘Hold on to the Green Horse’: Popular Imaginations of the Health Code and the Cultivation of Algocratic Attunement in China in the COVID Era.” Journal of Contemporary China, August 23, 2023, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2023.2251012.

The Qing Conception of Strategic Space

In this essay, I argue that all three are either mythological or at best misleading. In fact, the Qing sense of strategic space was formed by military expansionism into China and Central Asia and by the Qing empire’s initial effort to restrict Han outward migration over land and sea.

The narrative described above, built on the tryptic of tianxia, Sinicization, and tributary system, was codified by John King Fairbank in 1968, though it reflects treasured tenets of Confucian ideology and propaganda that were originally formulated in the first millennium BCE. It is entirely wrong about the Qing empire.

The tianxia paradigm with its concentric rings and civilizational gradient leads to the assumption that the Qing did not concretely demarcate territory, or care to do so. That is untrue. For example, in negotiating its first treaty with a more or less European power—the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) concluded with Russia—the empire mobilized maps and landmarks to claim lands north of the Amur as Qing.

For most of its first two centuries, bridging the reigns of Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong, the sector of strategic space dominating the Qing empire’s concern was the north and west where the Junghars were gathering power. This strategic concern drove the war economy and resulted in Qing westward expansion and ultimately the addition of Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet to the former Ming lands.

The Qing empire did not ignore the south or the sea, however, which offered strategic concerns of its own through the seventeenth century.

During their rapid expansion into non-Chinese lands, the Qing attempted imperial compartmentalization, actively trying to keep Han Chinese out of Taiwan, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and sometimes even areas in the southwest inhabited by non-Chinese peoples.

The idea that these borderlands were colonies (zhimindi) and like European colonies should be used for resource extraction to benefit the center also became unapologetically popular among Chinese statecraft thinkers at this time.

The Qing empire did not Sinicize, it did not “become Chinese,” as we used to say. Rather, the concept of China began to be reinvented from the eighteenth through the nineteenth century to include new Qing conquests, regardless of vast ethnic and geographic diversity. It was at this time that in Chinese versions of treaties the Qing empire began to refer to itself not just as Da Qing, but as Zhongguo. This process, which we might call the Zhongguo-ization of the Qing empire, continued beyond the Qing fall in 1912, and still continues today. The PRC conviction that vast tracts of central Eurasia as well as Taiwan “belong to China” or have been “on the map of China since ancient times” is no less hotly held for being an invented tradition.

Conceptions of Strategic Space in Republican China - Bill Hayton

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcKtH9nFDSo

In this compelling and highly-readable account, Hayton shows how China’s present-day geopolitical problems—the fates of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and the South China Sea—were born in the struggle to create a modern nation-state. He brings alive the fevered debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when reformers and revolutionaries adopted foreign ideas to “invent” a new vision of China.

Ranging across history, nationhood, language, and territory, Hayton shows how a few radicals, often living in exile, adopted European beliefs about race and nation to rethink China’s past and create a new future. He weaves together political and personal stories to show how Chinese nationalism emerged from the connections between east and west. These ideas continue to motivate and direct the country’s policies into the twenty first century. By asserting a particular version of the past Chinese governments have bolstered their claims to a vast territory stretching from the Pacific to Central Asia.

Hayton, Bill. 2020. The Invention of China. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300256062.