Thread by @simonbchen

Business and history.
After suffering colossal destruction and disruption from two decades of upheaval, the most notorious apex of which was the Cultural Revolution, many ambitious and educated people in China realized one (or both) of two things: 1) They were tired of living /1

lies, and they realized that the only way out of their predicament, and not suffer a repeat of the past 20 years again, was to be truthful and look back at what had happened with a seriously honest perspective; and 2) Politics and ideology can be extremely destructive and /2

wasteful, so their salvation was to pivot all-in, into the capitalist business and entrepreneurial experiments that began in China in the 1980s.
By and large, the populations who pursued (1) and (2) were non-overlapping.
Many Party and military historians (although they are /3

largely one and the same, since in Red China, Party history is military history, and military history is Party history) did pursue (1) in the 1980s, the trauma, pain, and suffering of the prior two decades driving their genuine scholarship. However, as China did not pursue a /4

path of political liberalization in the wake of the events of Tian'anmen in 1989, the movement behind (1) largely dissipated by the 1990s.
Obviously, (2) is alive and well.
But you can get only so far with (2) without (1).
And Jack Ma's disappearance shouldn't be a surprise. /end