Links - 26th November 2019 (1) (China's "Peaceful" Rise)

The Land That Failed to Fail - The New York Times - "Factories should meet state quotas but sell anything extra they made at any price they chose. It was a clever, quietly radical proposal to undercut the planned economy — and it intrigued a young party official in the room who had no background in economics... For decades, the United States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one that has lifted both nations.During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot... China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction... Analysts sometimes say that China embraced economic reform while resisting political reform. But in reality, the party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant.The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets. These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system... President Xi has sought to assert the party’s authority inside private firms. He has also bolstered state-owned enterprises with subsidies while preserving barriers to foreign competition. And he has endorsed demands that American companies surrender technology in exchange for market access... Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.”... Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must."
Some leftists claim that it is science and technology that lead to economic growth, not capitalism. Strange how the USSR despite prioritising science and technology failed and China grew after embracing market reforms

Chinese theft of US intellectual property ‘greatest transfer of wealth’ in history - "The Chinese theft of American intellectual property, according to a former NSA director, is the “greatest transfer of wealth in history,” likely costing the U.S. upward of $400 billion per year."

Much More Than a Trade War with China > Brandon J. Weichert - "With the Chinese belief in the “All Under Heaven” concept, and given that Chinese emperors were believed to possess the “mandate of Heaven,” order and unity radiated outward from the emperor, the center of Chinese power, and toward the farthest edges of the map. All of the world fell under the control of the Chinese emperor and all had to pay tribute to the emperor as a symbol of his supremacy. Those farthest removed from the emperor’s power were considered barbarians. In the eyes of the Chinese, inevitably, all would be subordinated to the will of the all-powerful emperor and his potent, centralizing bureaucracy. Thus, going back to antiquity, the borders of China were fungible; always waiting for China to gain the strength needed to push to those farthest edges of the world map and bring barbarianism and chaos to civilized order... At some point, the declining power and the ascendant one reach relative equilibrium in terms of relative power and conflict ensues. Allison has dubbed this the “Thucydides Trap.”... Yet, as the preeminent China scholar, David C. Kang, has long advised audiences: don’t apply Western case examples onto China, a country with a rich 4,000-year history (most of which occurred without much interaction with the West)... most Chinese conceptualize the world as being roughly akin to the environment that China found itself in during the Warring States Period... In his analysis of China’s “barbarian-handling” tools, Edward N. Luttwak describes how Chinese elites seek to enmesh foreign foes in trade deals that ultimately benefit and empower China at the expense of China’s trading partners—even when those trading partners are foreign conquerors... By the end of the Second World War, when their common Japanese enemy had been vanquished (mostly through the hard fighting of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces), the Chinese Communists were able to focus their ire on defeating the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. By 1949, thanks to poor strategic decisions by Chiang and his Nationalist generals, as well as the fact that the Nationalists were severely depleted from years of having fought the Japanese invaders (whereas the Communists deftly hid out in the mountains and bided their time, for the most part), Mao’s forces defeated the Nationalists... The fact that many of the centralizing themes of Communism comported nicely with historic Chinese cultural and political patterns, such as those found in the Legalist, Confucian, and even Taoist schools of thought was, until very recently, missed by most scholars... One of the main reasons for the Sino-Soviet schism revolved around the fact that Nikita Khrushchev’s government was giving the Chinese government plans for nuclear weapons devices, as per their friendship agreement. Yet, when Mao threatened neighboring Taiwan—prompting American threats of major retaliation—Khrushchev begged Mao to stand down and negotiate a settlement. Mao’s response was that he did not “fear nuclear war”... Khrushchev believed he was dealing with a madman and ordered the nuclear weapons sharing project suspended... No American leader until President Donald J. Trump has identified these trends and responded in any meaningful way. The president is the first American leader of the modern age to respond to the Chinese threat as vociferously as he has. Unfortunately, even Trump’s response may be insufficient. After all, Trump has targeted mostly old world-type sectors"
So much for China not engaging in imperialism

Opinion | After Tiananmen, China Conquers History Itself - The New York Times - "I was giving a talk about Tiananmen Square’s legacy at an Australian university about two years ago when a young Chinese student put up her hand during the question-and-answer session. “Why do we have to look back to this time in history?” she asked. “Why do you think it will be helpful to current and nowadays China, especially our young generation? Do you think it could be harmful to what the Chinese government calls the harmonious society?” She wasn’t challenging the facts of what had happened on June 4, 1989. She was questioning the value of the knowledge itself... The student was deftly sidestepping her government’s act of violence against its own people, while internalizing Beijing’s view that social stability trumps everything else. At the end of the talk, a second Chinese student came up to ask whether the very knowledge of June 4 could be dangerous to “our perfect society.”... These overseas students are part of China’s post-Tiananmen generation, raised in the era of patriotic education, which emphasizes China’s century of national humiliation at the hands of the Western and Japanese colonial powers. History has become an ideological tool, with certain episodes celebrated for showing the party’s best version of itself, while others are rooted out and erased. The narrative that runs throughout this discourse is China’s modern-day renaissance, driven by its refusal to be bullied by outside powers. All of this is in the ultimate service of legitimizing the current leadership... The so-called Five Heroes of Langya Mountain, for example, were members of the Eighth Route Army in 1941 during the Japanese occupation of China. Facing capture by the Japanese, they instead chose to jump off a mountain, and three lost their lives. When a historian questioned this legend recently and was sued, the court decided against him, finding that the national sentiments and historical memories reflected in this story were important components of modern China’s socialist core values. History, in other words, is used explicitly for political ends, and historical research can be seen as defamation... a Chinese online education company that employs 60,000 teachers in the United States and Canada sacked two American teachers for discussing Tiananmen and Taiwan with their students in China... In some ways, indoctrinating China’s young people with a utilitarian view of history is an even more powerful tool than censorship itself. When people accept that history must serve the interests of the state, they become closed off to the spirit of academic inquiry or even idle curiosity."
Truth/merit/virtue/correctness is whatever has instrumental value

Today’s China will never be a superpower | Financial Times - "Reform aside, there are three obstacles to China’s long-term economic growth. The first is the debt problem. At some stage, the costs of debt have to be borne, whether by people, companies or the government, and whether by inflating debt away, increasing taxation or cutting public investment and spending. The second obstacle is demographics. While China’s population will continue to grow for perhaps a decade, its labour force is already shrinking — precipitously... Another demographic fact is worrying in terms of instability: gender imbalance... The third problem, and perhaps the greatest, is a looming water crisis in 12 northern provinces that account for 41 per cent of China’s population, 38 per cent of its agriculture, 46 per cent of its industry and 50 per cent of its power generation... It is commonly said that if any government is capable of pushing through change, however unpopular, it is the CCP. If that were so, Mr Xi would not have expended so much energy in cajoling and excoriating officials for failure to implement his policies. The governance model is flawed: 1.4bn people cannot be governed using top down fiat and inspection, while eschewing self-regulation.Yet Mr Xi has specifically turned his back on four useful allies: the rule of law and an independent judiciary, which is essential for business and private sector confidence; a free press, for example to help expose corruption or abuse of the environment; civil society, from where ideas, innovation and pressure flow; and some sort of political accountability, to encourage officials to work for the benefit of the people and not of themselves or the party.All four of those allies weaken party controls and risk leading eventually to a pluralist system, undermining one party rule. So the CCP rejects them. To the factors above can be added a lack of trust by the people in the CCP. Nationalism is an inadequate substitute... If you claim credit for all good things, you also earn discredit for the bad."

Guangdong Tops China’s “Stability Maintenance” Budget - "The Chinese government’s “stability maintenance” expenditure last year was 1.37 trillion yuan (US$200 billion). It is expected that the actual cost of “stability maintenance” this year will exceed 1.4 trillion yuan.China’s official defense budget for 2019 is 1.19 trillion yuan (US$180 billion). Lui said that the phenomenon of the stability maintenance expenditure continuously surpassing military spending shows whether the Beijing authorities purpose “is mainly to prevent people or to prevent foreign enemies.” Although most of the outsiders think that these maintenance funds are mostly used in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Sichuan, as a matter of fact, according to past years from the China Statistical Yearbook, the top seven provinces in year 2017 in terms of “stability maintenance” spending were Guangdong, Jiangsu, Xinjiang, Shandong, Zhejiang, Sichuan and Beijing, .Guangdong spent around 121.4 billion yuan (US$18.05 billion), about 11 percent of the national total, more than twice that of Xinjiang province.Lui’s article said that, after Chinese President Xi Jinping took office, Guangdong has always topped the stability maintenance spending, with an average annual growth rate of 13 percent. In recent years, it has increased at a rate of about 20 percent to 30 percent, much faster than the spending in Xinjiang.He believes that Guangdong’s huge stability maintenance costs relate to Hong Kong."

30 years after Tiananmen, a Chinese military insider warns: Never forget - "For three decades, Ms Jiang Lin kept quiet about the carnage she had seen on the night when the Chinese army rolled through Beijing to crush student protests in Tiananmen Square.But the memories tormented her — of soldiers firing into crowds in the dark, bodies slumped in pools of blood and the thud of clubs when troops bludgeoned her to the ground near the square.Ms Jiang was a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army back then, with a firsthand view of both the massacre and a failed attempt by senior commanders to dissuade China’s leaders from using military force to crush the pro-democracy protests... Ms Jiang, 66, has decided for the first time to tell her story. She said she felt compelled to call for a public reckoning because generations of Chinese Communist Party leaders, including President Xi Jinping, have expressed no remorse for the violence. Ms Jiang left China this week. “The pain has eaten at me for 30 years,” she said in an interview in Beijing. “Everyone who took part must speak up about what they know happened. That’s our duty to the dead, the survivors and the children of the future.”Ms Jiang’s account has a wider significance: She sheds new light on how military commanders tried to resist orders to use armed force to clear protesters from the square they had taken over for seven weeks, captivating the world. The students’ impassioned idealism, hunger strikes, rebukes of officials and grandiose gestures like building a “Goddess of Democracy” on the square drew an outpouring of public sympathy and left leaders divided on how to respond... Ms Jiang’s decision to challenge the silence carries an extra political charge because she is not only an army veteran but also the daughter of the military elite. Her father was a general, and she was born and raised in military compounds... She never imagined that the army would turn its guns against unarmed people in Beijing... Ms Jiang said she believed that China’s stability and prosperity would be fragile as long as the party did not atone for the bloodshed.“All this is built on sand. There’s no solid foundation,” she said. “If you can deny that people were killed, any lie is possible.”"
China lovers will dismiss her as being bought out by Westerners, or trying to get revenge on China because she was a failure

Chinese developers fear losing open source tech to trade war : programming - "the IP transfer is entirely one-sided -- just try to steal original IP from Huawei or another Chinese company and see what happens -- I predict lawsuits in jurisdictions where IP ownership enforcement isn't a joke and the Chinese government directly applying pressure to punish the guilty company. Or, y'know, the company "mysteriously" gets hacked and wrecked."
"when i was running Bitbucket, a group of Chinese technology companies approached us to put mirrored servers in China. Bitbucket is mostly wrote in Python, so if they had physical access to the servers they'd be able to get the code as it's a interpreted language not compiled.we politely told them, "i'm sorry but we need to protect our IP and will not be setting up servers in China due to trade concerns.". THE NEXT DAY we were shut off at the great firewall of china.we had to hire lawyers, work withe consulate office, and file official complaints to the Chinese Ministry of Technology to get the site access turned back on for the customers and users in China.the chineese are horrible. fuck them. i hope trump bends them over HARD in the negotiations and forgets the lube."