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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 06 2019, @10:15AM   Printer-friendly
from the getting-roughed-up dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Chinese state media has urged authorities to take a "tougher line" against protesters in Hong Kong who vandalised state-run Xinhua news agency and other buildings at the weekend, saying the violence damaged the city's rule of law.

[...] In an editorial, state-backed China Daily newspaper criticised the "wanton" attacks by "naive" demonstrators, adding, "They are doomed to fail simply because their violence will encounter the full weight of the law."

Police fired tear gas at black-clad protesters on Saturday and Sunday in some of the worst violence in the Asian financial hub in weeks, with metro stations set ablaze and buildings vandalised.

Violence also erupted on Sunday after a man with a knife attacked several people and bit off part of the ear of a pro-democracy politician. Two of the victims are reportedly in critical condition, according to reports.

The past five months of anti-government protests in the former British colony represent the biggest popular challenge to President Xi Jinping's government since he took over China's leadership in late 2012.

Protesters are angry at China's perceived meddling with Hong Kong's freedoms, including its legal system, since the Asian financial hub returned to Chinese rule in 1997. China denies the accusation.

The widely-read Global Times tabloid on Sunday condemned the protesters' actions targeting Xinhua and called for action by Hong Kong's enforcement agencies.

"Due to the symbolic image of Xinhua, the vandalizing of its branch is not only a provocation to the rule of law in Hong Kong, but also to the central government and the Chinese mainland, which is the rioters' main purpose," it said.

On Friday, after a meeting of China's top leadership, a senior Chinese official said it would not tolerate separatism or threats to national security in Hong Kong and would "perfect" the way it appointed the city's leader.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @03:12PM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @03:12PM (#916816)

    In regards to the Chinese voting system, it deserves some consideration. I think a big part of the reason our democratic systems have been failing is because of lowest common denominator issues. Democrats have to promise handouts to people, because it's how they've built their support. Reparations are the most visible example of this. We'll pay for you to vote for us! Even better, we're not paying you with our money! And the party platform is now increasingly frequently now turning into free everything, we'll sort out the implications or how to pay for it all later. Republicans, by contrast, end up proposing things like building a wall, even though if you magically zapped every single brown person out of the country today and split the US and Mexico by a few hundred miles of Pacific, I think it's improbable we'd see a dramatic improvement in conditions/wages for the labor class. It might help some but the gesture is largely symbolic, though the cost is anything but. In both cases it's simply appealing a lowest common denominator.

    In China the government is designed as an hierarchy of representatives. People start voting at an extremely low level. Villages vote for their representatives who have a pretty substantial degree of federally backed power to enact positive change in a community they live within. Those representatives in turn vote for a branch of higher representatives one tier up and so on upwards until you get the 2,280 delegates that choose the president. I think the biggest weakness of this system is also its biggest strength. It removes accountability of one representative from individuals substantially far removed from himself. And so there is no real appeal to the lowest common denominator, people only vote for people who are closely connected to them.

    Because of this China are able to focus more on the long-term. Many positive longterm actions be demonized with short-term rhetoric. For instance China recently built the world's largest radio telescope. [wikipedia.org] That's a great achievement which will help advance China technologically as well as push them closer to becoming a scientific hub which would have immeasurable benefits. At the same time you are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to listen for faint signals from outer space. In a top-bottom democratic system this is difficult to do because, "Wasting hundreds of millions of dollars to listen for ET while children starve back here on Earth?" It's a disingenuous argument for many reasons, but it's highly effective nonetheless. In the Chinese system these sort of attacks have no value because the 2,280 are sufficiently informed to understand the big picture and the value of such systems.

    And of course such a political system does not stop change. If people were genuinely upset with President Xi, then he could be removed in rapid order even if by simply changing their representatives to ones that promised to do such. What about the electoral college? At a glance the systems seem similar, but they're radically different. The electoral college is unelected, unaccountable, and has no power to do anything except decide the president. Something similar would be like if we had county/subcounty mayors each representing around 2,000 or so people. These individuals would have substantial power to enact local change. They would, in turn, elect district mayors who elected regional mayors who ... elected the president. As a citizen your sole responsibility was electing the man who would represent you and 2,000 other people in immediate vicinity to you. Now talking to your representative would no longer be a token act with form letters and bullshit responses. Even if one of these representatives was visited by every single member in his constituency, it'd be less than 7 people a day. That's completely doable.

    In America today each member of the house of representatives represents 711,000 people. That's why "write your representative" has become practically a joke. Far from having any impact, you'll be lucky to get a form letter sent out by an intern with a stamp of "your" representative's signature on it. If we drop labels and preconceptions, which system offers a greater degree of democracy?

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @06:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 06 2019, @06:34PM (#916897)

    And the party platform is now increasingly frequently now turning into free everything

    Name some of those issues, and then tell me why it would be bad for them to be paid for using taxpayer dollars. Try to take into account other countries where those policies are already implemented while you do so. Then, tell me whether or not you support "free" military, firefighters, law enforcement, and other public services.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:01AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:01AM (#917127) Journal

    I think a big part of the reason our democratic systems have been failing is because of lowest common denominator issues.

    Keep in mind that you are the lowest common denominator! If governments should be ignoring your opinions, then why should I be any different?

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:48AM (11 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 07 2019, @03:48AM (#917158) Journal

    In China the government is designed as an hierarchy of representatives. People start voting at an extremely low level. Villages vote for their representatives who have a pretty substantial degree of federally backed power to enact positive change in a community they live within. Those representatives in turn vote for a branch of higher representatives one tier up and so on upwards until you get the 2,280 delegates that choose the president. I think the biggest weakness of this system is also its biggest strength. It removes accountability of one representative from individuals substantially far removed from himself. And so there is no real appeal to the lowest common denominator, people only vote for people who are closely connected to them.

    How many levels is that? And why should it ever be more than one level thick?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:27AM (10 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:27AM (#917197)

      When the United States government was first formed (following the first representative election) we had 65 members in the House of Representatives. The exact number of voters is unclear since there were quite a lot of restrictions on who could vote, most exclusive being the need to be a property owner. But our very first presidential election is at least going to give us the right ballpark (since turnout is going to be high for such an historic event). And in that election exactly 43,782 votes were cast. That gives us an average of each representative representing about 674 voters. This number rose pretty quickly, but still stayed quite low. Today in the United States each representative represents more than 700,000 people. We're increasingly passing all sorts of awful laws. But what are you going to do? Your representative couldn't care less about you. His power is not sustained by appealing to his constituency but by mass media advertising alongside party affiliation. When you reduce the the number of people represented each vote suddenly starts to matter and so your voice does matter more than mass media or partisanship.

      The Chinese system ends up with the lowest level representative representing about 2,000 people on average. So let's adapt that to our system, but make it a single tier. We'd now have a house of representatives with roughly 164,500 members. Might need to make a somewhat larger house! I think you can see quite clearly why multiple tiers are needed in systems with good ratios of representation:population. And that's just in the United States. China has more than 400% our population, so their representation system would be pushing towards a million members! China has 3 tiers: local, provincial, national. And the local group (which is directly elected by the population) has the power to recall their elected provincial representative at their discretion. Plenty more details here [wikipedia.org].

      I suppose the key question is, is democracy sustainable in the age of mass media and the internet? The problems we're facing in the US are more visible than in other places, but they're not unique. Democracy everywhere seems to be running into some turbulent times. And I think this is largely because mass media now means elections are being largely decided by voters whom are not only quite low information, but also being actively deceived. So we're getting to stage of 'Vote for me because I have a pussy.' At one point the 2020 election looked like it might be Trump vs Opera. Reality TV Star vs TV Talkshow Host. Are we really that far off from Idiocracy? And if not, how do we stop it? Trying to get corporations to curate mass media is a joke along the same lines of 'fact checkers.' It's an institutionalized version of the same stupidity we do as masses. Fact Checking = 'stuff that affirms my biases = true', 'stuff that contradicts my biases = false'. Worthless.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:54AM (4 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @05:54AM (#917203)

        I'm a little dubious of this ACs claim that they are American...

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:50AM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @06:50AM (#917233)

          Of course you are. Much like during the Red Scares anybody who said 'Guys, perhaps we're kind of freaking out a bit...?' would immediately be labeled at minimum a 'sympathizer' and likely an overt communist himself. Deport 'em! It's even similar to the various witch trials throughout history. You must remain vigilantly ignorant and zealous against the witch, lest you yourself risk being labeled the next witch. This is precisely how such stupidity spreads. People become afraid to learn about the 'enemy' for fear as being seen as one of them.

          And in this case I think there's something people don't really want to consider. About 50 years ago we put a man on the moon and were a united nation making unimaginably rapid progress. At about the same time Chinese were literally starving to death by the tens of millions in their 'Great Leap Forward.' Today? Outside of more toys (all of course made in China as a completely government endorsed means of bypassing our labor/environmental standards), it's hard to say we've advanced much. We are certainly becoming much more divided, and our government has become not only much less representative but also increasingly incapable of achieving things on a big scale. This is particularly important as we enter into the space era of humanity. We can turn to private industry, yet there's no guarantees there. What if China offered Elon Musk effectively unlimited funding and support to become the technical lead in China's space program? The chief architect [wikipedia.org] of our Apollo program was literally a key Nazi scientist we recruited. Led to some amusing satirical quotes, "I am at the stars, but sometimes I hit London."

          On the same time frame China has gone from mass starvation to becoming an established superpower. And they've improved the quality of life for their citizens to an unimaginable degree. They are also rapidly advancing in all scientific fields where they are very much capable of achieving 'big picture' progress. They're now running experiments about growing food on the moon while we struggle to get back to the moon at all. Do you think these trajectories are suddenly going to change? If not imagine how the world might look in 50 more years along these lines. One must consider possibility that perhaps China is doing something right, as well as the possibility that we are doing something wrong. I think ignoring this possibility, let alone condemning it, because they are 'bad guys' is the epitome of jingoism, and real jingoism - not the irrelevant divisive rhetoric now regularly published by our lovely media.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:14PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @12:14PM (#917275)

            You certainly built an impressive straw man out of a single sentence, have a lot of time on our hands don't we? And what an incredibly biased reading of recent (and not so recent) Chinese and American history. The American government, and society in general, seems quite capable of "achieving things on a big scale"; the amount of innovation coming out of that country in the last 20 years has been impressive, much more so than China. Yes, as you say, China is doing much better after making significant free market reforms (people are in the main, no longer starving, yay) but there is no guarantee this will continue without reducing the high levels of corruption, corruption being one of those things that happens when you can only elect your leaders from a well vetted list of candidates (and voted on only by a select group of citizens - did't mention that before did you?).

            BTW I'm also not an American :)

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:01PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:01PM (#917438)

              I've obviously had this debate before and the regularity with which one is declared a 'secret China spy' or whatever simply for being a mixture of reasonably informed and not rabidly opposed to any and everything from the 'bad guys' is remarkable. Hey China, if you're listening and willing to pay me for my regular rants - please do get in contact. I type fast + come with experience! ;-) But more seriously, I think it indicates some degree of deterioration of our culture that's aiming to prove Orwell right: "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength." How many people who declare e.g. Jinping a dictator, have even the vaguest understanding of the Chinese political system? And I would not understate China's successes. Yes, people are no longer starving. And they now also have the fastest growing middle class in the world, more billionaires than any other nation in the world, and are achieving a slew of technological and scientific successes. The nation once starving while we put a man on the moon is now learning how to grow plants with a lander on the moon while we try to figure out how to get back to the moon...

              I agree there's no guarantee it will continue, but that is always true. I see no reason to believe it won't. A big part of the reason for Jinping's popularity is specifically because he's been quite brutal [wikipedia.org] on corruption and has taken down corrupt officials at the height of Chinese politics. And the consequences there are real. You have politburo members serving life sentences in prison. In past corruption cases, the death penalty has been utilized. Ultimately I think the Chinese system offers a lot to consider -- I do not believe that the extremely positive results they're having are just some coincidence. It's similar to our past. The United States went from a poorly developed backwoods outpost to absolutely dominant world leader in less than 200 years. To not deeply consider how we achieved such would be foolhardy for any student of politics or history. At the same time, I think it would be equally foolhardy to not consider why we seem to be stalling out in more recent decades.

              ---

              Two questions for you though:

              1) What do you think are some of the "much more impressive" government driven achievements of the US in the past 20 years?

              2) What do you mean on only select people being able to vote in China? My Chinese handler hasn't given me a sufficient instruction in their political system yet, so I'm still left to to use the interwebs like a pleb. From the page [wikipedia.org] I referenced earlier:

              Under the Organic Law of Village Committees, all of China's approximately 1 million villages are expected to hold competitive, direct elections for sub-governmental village committees. A 1998 revision to the law called for improvements in the nominating process and enhanced transparency in village committee administration. The revised law also explicitly transferred the power to nominate candidates to villagers themselves, as opposed to village groups or Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branches.

              And that law was adopted in China, as mentioned, in 1998.

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:21PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:21PM (#918620) Journal

                What do you think are some of the "much more impressive" government driven achievements of the US in the past 20 years?

                I would point out the massive expansion of global trade (among other things, making the possibility of turning the entire world into the developed world) and development of the internet as examples. They aren't government-driven, but the same is true of the massive development of the Chinese economy which grew more by the absence of government influence than its "driving".

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:26PM (4 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 07 2019, @01:26PM (#917296) Journal

        When the United States government was first formed (following the first representative election) we had 65 members in the House of Representatives. The exact number of voters is unclear since there were quite a lot of restrictions on who could vote, most exclusive being the need to be a property owner. But our very first presidential election is at least going to give us the right ballpark (since turnout is going to be high for such an historic event). And in that election exactly 43,782 votes were cast. That gives us an average of each representative representing about 674 voters. This number rose pretty quickly, but still stayed quite low. Today in the United States each representative represents more than 700,000 people. We're increasingly passing all sorts of awful laws. But what are you going to do? Your representative couldn't care less about you. His power is not sustained by appealing to his constituency but by mass media advertising alongside party affiliation. When you reduce the the number of people represented each vote suddenly starts to matter and so your voice does matter more than mass media or partisanship.

        Name any of those problems that get better with the Chinese system, which doesn't even represent you in the first place. There's the "state-run media" as an AC put it, which serves the role of mass media advertising. There's the sole political party which serves the role of partisanship. This is a great example of whataboutism. China sucks so let's peer at the flaws of a single other country to justify the suck. Even if the US isn't the greatest example of democracy at present, it's not the only democracy out there.

        I suppose the key question is, is democracy sustainable in the age of mass media and the internet? The problems we're facing in the US are more visible than in other places, but they're not unique. Democracy everywhere seems to be running into some turbulent times. And I think this is largely because mass media now means elections are being largely decided by voters whom are not only quite low information, but also being actively deceived. So we're getting to stage of 'Vote for me because I have a pussy.' At one point the 2020 election looked like it might be Trump vs Opera. Reality TV Star vs TV Talkshow Host. Are we really that far off from Idiocracy? And if not, how do we stop it? Trying to get corporations to curate mass media is a joke along the same lines of 'fact checkers.' It's an institutionalized version of the same stupidity we do as masses. Fact Checking = 'stuff that affirms my biases = true', 'stuff that contradicts my biases = false'. Worthless.

        Of course, it is - but will we choose to sustain democracy? That is a different question. As to your criticism of the 2020 election, what's supposed to be wrong with Trump versus Oprah? They're both successful business people who have demonstrated ability to lead large numbers of people. What's different about the US system is that we have a vast portion of society who can run for and be successful at political office. It's not just some ideological or technocratic people who have never had experience outside of the political apparatus.

        My take is that China is much more likely to replace its present government in the near future than the US. The US has a government that has lasted over two centuries. China has already radically changed its governance over the past few decades. My take is that instead of creating problems in Hong Kong, it's time to complete that process and become a grown-up country.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:39PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @07:39PM (#917453)

          I answered your question within the block of text you quoted. When your representative only represents a small number of people - your opinion does matter. 2,000 people is enough such that a single individual could meaningfully influence an election in cases of an injustice from a politician. And, furthermore, those 2,000 people are very physically close to you and so they too are likely going to be interested in issues that matter to you. Partisanship and mass media only start to matter at large scales when both people are quite disconnected from their representative and their representative is quite disconnected from them.

          ---

          As for democracy, I assume you're well aware of what a tragedy of the commons is. There's a pond. Each fisherman fishes enough to fill himself. At the end of the year the pond runs dry from overfishing, and there's no fish anymore for anybody. Each person acting in their own best interest results in a catastrophic collapse for everybody - whereas had they chosen to suffer individually, everybody could have at least something for years to come. I do not think democracy is inherently immune to such possibilities.

          How many people voted for Hillary because they thought 'I think this person truly stands for the values I believe in and will make a great president.'? How many, instead, voted for her because the alternative was simply unthinkable? And similarly for those that voted for Trump. Think about, from a politician's perspective, what a remarkable achievement they've made. They both managed to get people to vote for them, by the tens of millions, that didn't even like them! All they had to do was to convince enough people that the alternative was Hitler. Politicians discover that dividing people is a far more effective means of garnering votes than actually running on their own policies. And so they set forward on that. And it works. But as a result you end up with increasingly mutually incompatible groups. Democracy does not work when groups are mutually incompatible - it simply reverts to a tyranny of the majority. In the longrun the very act enabling you sustain your control in a democracy ends up undermining that same democracy.

          ---

          Trump vs Oprah was simply indicating what our democracy is devolving into. Our early political leaders were political philosophers and writers who spent extensive time considering political issues, writing on these topics, and trying to logically 'solve' politics so much as they could with what information they had available. In modern times our political leaders have become jokes. It's little more than a mixture of celebrity + demagoguery + charisma. Imagine a political discussion between e.g. James Madison and Trump or Oprah... And it's not like great political thinkers no longer exist, but they don't have what it takes to get elected by large numbers of low information voters.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 08 2019, @12:23AM (2 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 08 2019, @12:23AM (#917655) Journal

            As for democracy, I assume you're well aware of what a tragedy of the commons is. There's a pond. Each fisherman fishes enough to fill himself. At the end of the year the pond runs dry from overfishing, and there's no fish anymore for anybody. Each person acting in their own best interest results in a catastrophic collapse for everybody - whereas had they chosen to suffer individually, everybody could have at least something for years to come. I do not think democracy is inherently immune to such possibilities.

            And yet, who pollutes more? The US or China? Just because democracies don't always deal well with tragedies of the commons doesn't mean that they are the worst at it.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:27AM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 08 2019, @04:27AM (#917751)

              I'm not sure you're engaging in good faith here. That is a huge tangent that has little to do directly with the point.

              But beyond that, it's a humorous tangent. I can only imagine you thought your question was rhetorical, because the answer is that it's the US, by a huge margin. China's CO2 emissions are 7.7 tons of CO2/capita. The US is more than double that at 15.7. Those figures are made even more absurd by the fact that a huge chunk of China's emissions are also driven by manufacturing outsourced by countries, including the US, so we can bypass our more stringent labor/environmental laws!

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 08 2019, @01:19PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday November 08 2019, @01:19PM (#917847) Journal

                I'm not sure you're engaging in good faith here. That is a huge tangent that has little to do directly with the point.

                A tangent some AC introduced. Several times someone has similarly claimed problems in US or developed world societies while ignoring that China has those problems as well. It's a dead end not because it's irrelevant but because China happens to be worse at it.

                But beyond that, it's a humorous tangent. I can only imagine you thought your question was rhetorical, because the answer is that it's the US, by a huge margin. China's CO2 emissions are 7.7 tons of CO2/capita. The US is more than double that at 15.7. Those figures are made even more absurd by the fact that a huge chunk of China's emissions are also driven by manufacturing outsourced by countries, including the US, so we can bypass our more stringent labor/environmental laws!

                Because mass of CO2 emissions are the sole measure of pollution? I assure you that a lot more people per capita are dying of air, water, and soil pollution in China than the US. And it remains that China's emissions driving by outsourced manufacturing are still China's emissions.

  • (Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:31AM

    by istartedi (123) on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:31AM (#917253) Journal

    In the US, senators used to be appointed by state legislatures. Quite some time ago, the Constitution was changed by amendment so we directly elect them now--making the Senate more democratic and less elitist was the idea; but it has the consequence of causing people to care less about state legislative elections. There hasn't been a huge move to repeal that amendment; but I think it's worthy of consideration. I definitely wouldn't want to go full China though and seat all the House members like that.

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