When living in Beijing in 2017-2019, I thought that the CCP would probably lose the power soon. I didn't believe it would be swept by a popular revolt, or a military coup. I assumed that once the current generation of Party leaders dies, the Party will degenerate and collapse.
Why did I think so? I hanged out with students of Peking and Tsinghua universities. And noticed that in their view the Party career was not prestigious. Founding a start-up, doing a Phd in Stanford or getting a job in Tencent was cool. Becoming a Party official - not cool at all
This wasn't because of oppositional views - such a stance was purely pragmatic. Around 1980 a talented and ambitious young Chinese hardly had any alternative to a Party career. You could not rise your social status without joining the nomenklatura.
But the economic boom created opportunities more lucrative than the Party career. Top Chinese alumni know that Party officials are poorly compensated. Yes, if you are lucky, by the age of 50 you gonna live well. But why wait if you can join Huawei and live well right now?
Therefore, current rulers of China are people who chose the Party career when there was no alternative to it. At that period, the Party incorporated the most intelligent and ambitious young Chinese. Current rulers are some of the smartest and hardest in their generation.
But the younger generations of Party officials chose the Party career when there were plenty of more lucrative opportunities to it. Most of smarter and more ruthless folk would probably choose the private sector over the Party job.
I extrapolated those tendencies to the future and concluded that there was now a mechanism of negative selection to the top Party jobs. Once the current generation of Chinese leadership is gone their places would be taken by far less capable successors
That's why I believed that a quick collapse of the Party after the death of Xi and his generation is likely. Now I think I was wrong.
The dynamics of career paths among the brightest young people of China are changing quickly. In the late 2010s the number of alumni of Peking University, who would choose a state job increased by more than 1.5 times. Meanwhile the number of those entering the tech sector halved.
Why did it happen? Not so sure. I think one of more important reasons might be that the emigration became less attractive. When I lived in Beijing a lot of the brightest young Chinese wanted to emigrate to the West. Nowadays this idea is far less popular
What does it all imply? First of all, China seems to return back to normality, and by normality I mean its historical tradition. It's cool to take an exam and become a civil servant, while being a merchant or an artisan/engineer - far less prestigious.
Secondly, we should not expect a 'natural' collapse of the Party. If the negative selection to the ruling elite continued, I would say that collapse is likely. However, if China returns back to normality - when the most capable become mandarins - I don't think it gonna happen.
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Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other
"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education
Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:
Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one
And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong
What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)
Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age