Jimmy Lai Is a Martyr for Freedom
reason.com386 points by mooreds 3 months ago
386 points by mooreds 3 months ago
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.
Another crucial factor that's part of the CCP's victory in HK is that China inherited a police force essentially structured as a colonial occupying force. Police staff get benefits that include segregated housing (such as the West Kowoon Disciplined Services Quarters), which maintains morale in the ranks and allows those so inclined to live quite separately from the rest of the populace.
There was also quite a lot of cooperation for many years between the relevant organisations.
The prosperity in the 80-90s numbed people’ minds
If anything it's the opposite. Many in HK in the 60s and 70s were much in favor of uniting with China, there were protests and movements about that. Took lots of British propaganda and a lot of clampdown to change the minds of the younger more inexperienced generations.
China can trade directly with the rest of the world through Shanghai- it no longer needs the middleman.
That prosperity was based on a system that no longer exists. Hong Kong is a normal Chinese city now.
> there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
Look into 2019 protests
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.
There was one guy who fell down a high rise garage and there was a street cleaner who was killed by the protesters.
Compare that to when the British were taking over Hong Kong, and hundreds of protesters were killed.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the pandemic didn’t occur soon after.
What’s crazy is the trigger was a Hong Kong national who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. Taiwan wanted to extradite him but there was no law in place to do so. Apparently the killer is still free today.
Officially no deaths caused by police.
Chan yin-lam case is one that always sticks in my head.
I can well believe correlation is sometimes the answer but the odds of an award winning swimmer doing a midnight dip and washing up naked the next day, with a rushed police investigation and extremely expedited cremation is a fair bit to accept as coincidence
I checked Chan Yi Lam’s Wikipedia page. It was ruled a suicide. The conspiracy theories surrounding this case are absurd and out of control. People even challenged her mother’s identity, forcing a DNA test to be done, and yet the crowd still continued to harass her mother.
Minor blip?
When a government has massive protests week after week, where close to 1 out of 5 citizens comes out in some cases, that's a huge problem.
Not to mention when it can only be "fixed" by baton swinging police and arrests for the very act of protesting.
Minor blip? First one million people marching. Then a week later nearly two. Street battles between police and protesters supported by many thousands of people. I saw a video of a guy being shoved out of a high-rise window. No doubt that was ruled "suicide" too, but it never broke out as a news story. A protester was shot but not killed by police. It's a miracle more lives weren't lost. To say it was a "blip" betrays a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about the events.
Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover negotiations even began. You can thank Murray MacLehose for the mess they're in now.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2025/06/13/the-empires-last-ab...
UK offered a rather simple pathway to immigrating to the UK for most Hong Kong residents [1]. But the choice between the stagnant UK and the booming mainland China was not obvious for everyone in late the 1990s, when China seemed to be democratizing more and more (despite the Tiananmen massacre), and growing richer by the day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_(Overseas)
They had multiple pathways. The top three destinations were Canada, the USA, and Australia. These locations offered a major benefit over the UK - they were on trade routes along which people from Hong Kong were already doing business.
Canada was particularly affected. It absorbed the most immigrants, they were a larger share of the population, and this was a major increase in ethnic diversity. The resulting cultural clashes were sometimes an issue. Here is one that literally doubled car insurance rates in British Columbia around the time I left.
Three cars, 2 in front with the left-hand car being driven by a Canadian, and the back car driven by a recent immigrant. The immigrant sees the opportunity to pass, swings out into oncoming traffic, and guns it. Leaving just a few inches of room. Normal Hong Kong driving.
The Canadian has no idea that this is happening until OMG I'M ABOUT TO BE HIT! The Canadian then swerves right to avoid the emergency, and hits the car on the right.
The immigrant drives off. Presumably wondering about these crazy Canadians who don't know how to drive.
Everyone involved behaved reasonably for how they were used to driving. But the combination worked out very poorly...
I would argue that the immigrant behaving reasonably "for how they were used to driving" is itself unreasonable. When you move to foreign country you have to adjust some things about your behavior. Driving behaviors and anything else with such a strong public safety component should be the most obvious thing to adjust for an adult, without needing to be told.
Question, have you been an immigrant? Do you know any immigrants?
When you immigrate into a country, all of a sudden all of your reflexes are wrong. Some are obviously wrong. Some are more subtle. It is overwhelming, and too much.
While in retrospect it is easy to say that they should prioritize some things over others, in practice they tend to learn from experience after people respond badly, and those who are a little more used to the culture explain why they are wrong. And the experience of being told that they are wrong all of the time will make many hold on to some of their old habits extremely strongly.
Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
As an immigrant (I immigrated to Hong Kong)，I disagree when It comes to road safety. I believe that it's the responsibility of every driver to learn the differences when driving and until then practice safe defensive driving.
I agree with you that it takes a while to adapt to new sociale mores and it's worth cutting immigrants some slack but that's different from driving a multi-ton heap of metal where safety is important.
Sidenote: Of the different cities I've lived in Asia, HK drivers are some of the worst. Combination of aggressive driving with refusal to signal their attention (by using their turn signal) makes for very poor driving. Not everyone but a significant percentage.
How many of those aggressive drivers do you think would agree with your reasoning? The standard reasoning is something like, "I'm fine as long as I don't hit anything." If you have that attitude, you will feel that you are safe in another country. Shifting this attitude takes time.
I was an immigrant to a new country. I made an effort to learn the new rules. The immigrant adapts, not the country.
I haven't been a permanent immigrant, but I have lived for over a year each in India, China and South Korea, driving in India and South Korea (I'm from the US). I made a lot of social faux pas, but you can bet I did my best to adapt to the rules of the road before I even got behind the wheel.
As an immigrant myself, this criticism on driving is valid. What you said should apply to more social contextes like table, public manners.
> Don't criticize how slowly immigrants adapt to a new country, until you've been an immigrant in a foreign culture.
I am an immigrant and find this line of thinking to be a cheap rhetorical trick, a thought-terminating cliché. Yes, people who are not immigrants can share their opinion on the behaviors of immigrants. Maybe we can all learn a little from each other instead of gatekeeping anybody who has had a different lived experience.
I'm sorry but that not acceptable when you're putting people's lives at risk.
Can I ask if you've ever lost someone you love because of a mistake made by a driver?
I'm sorry to have to say this so bluntly to you but migration status is not an excuse.
You should get lessons if you're unsure how to drive correctly and if you can't follow the local rules of the road you shouldn't be driving at all.
I lost both a classmate and an uncle due to car accidents. I nearly lost my brother.
The problem here is not what you know that you don't know. It is what you don't know that you don't know. You can believe yourself safe, when you aren't.
Related: Vancouver has, in my opinion, the best southern Chinese food in North America.
A rather bizarre digression...
It sounds like they got freaked out on the road, swerved and hit a car next to them, and now have concocted a story where it’s actually the fault of immigrants.
The theory "Canadians made this up to explain their own bad driving" requires an explanation of why there was also a large enough rise in accidents that car insurance rates needed to double.
The theory "it happened like they said it" explains why the rise in accidents happened, and fits with normal driving habits in Hong Kong.
I'm talking specifically about this ridiculous story. Sure, it might connect to this broader phenomenon, but it sounds like you don't even know for sure if an immigrant was involved!
It was a far cry from the full Portuguese citizenship offered for Macau, both in the latter's lack of conditions on acquisition (beyond being over age 15 at the handover), and in passing it on to descendants.
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Portugal-give-full-citizenship...
BN(O) is/was not a simple pathway to UK residence. As the wikipedia article says
> BN(O)s are British nationals and Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens. They are subject to immigration controls when entering the United Kingdom and do not have automatic right of abode there
Things were different before the 1981 British Nationality Act but it's not too relevant for HK as the 1981 act is before the Sino British Declaration.
I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex, but we are 30 years after the handover, 40 years after the negotiation, so surely China bears some if not pretty much all the responsibility here.
And it's not like the UK had much of a choice in the first place. China threatened to invade and there is very little the UK could have done to prevent a full control.
Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
You can’t gloat that the sun never sets on your empire and then absolve yourself from responsibility for events that you had a heavy hand in influencing. Regardless, if you think the article is wrong, your point would he better served by providing examples of where it’s wrong and stating why.
How many years does it take for that influence to expire? In 40 years many/most of the people involved in the old system aren’t even alive anymore.
That would be like blaming me for the Gulf War when I was in diapers.
We can attribute cause and effect to countries without implicating any individual citizen.
nitpick: I would argue that it is more accurate to attribute cause and effect to certain groups of citizens within the country rather than the entire country.
The Holocaust, for example, is, in my opinion, more accurately described as being the fault of the Nazi party of Germany, which is a subset of the German population that was politically active in the early-mid 20th century, rather than just being "Germany's" fault.
The war crimes committed by the Empire of Japan during WWII are similarly the fault of a subset of the politically active population during that time, not "Japan".
I believe this method of attribution has the added advantage of noting that certain citizens, or groups of citizens can make mistakes, and using them as an example of what NOT to do, for other citizens to learn from, rather than tarring everyone with the same bad brush, which I think can have negative psychological consequences - people should be held accountable for their actions, rather than stigmatized for belonging to a specific group by no fault of their own (it's not your fault you were born with citizenship in X country, but it is your fault if you start killing people).
> I know that attributing to western countries the responsability [sic] for any bad thing happening in this world is a common reflex
I don't think I'm being superficial here. There are a few distinct events during the 20th century which can be attributed to the British. The handover of Hong Kong, Suez Crisis and the Balfour Declaration stand out the most.
> And it's not like the UK had much of a choice in the first place. China threatened to invade and there is very little the UK could have done to prevent a full control.
The leased territories are Chinese territory. Full stop. Hong Kong island and the ceded land could not survive alone. All of the water processing happens in the New Territories. It would have been impossible to either break up HK or defend it.
https://i.redd.it/zghghoib1k1a1.png
China has not rolled back any reforms that happened before negotiations began [0]. They did rollback the last-ditch efforts of Chris Patten [1] because at that point it was seen a malicious attempt to undermine the handover.
The mechanisms for China to take control were largely left in place by the British so they bare some responsibility, but it is the PRC asserting this control and there's an argument to be made that most of HK supports the PRC and it's their right to do what they wish with their own territory.
> Worth also remembering that "one country, two systems" came with an expiration date that is rapidly approaching anyway.
It'll be interesting to see what is kept. China's experimenting already in Hainan. They could structure Hong Kong in a similar fashion.
[0] The PRC did introduce PR with the idea that it would reduce the risk of majorities forming but the system is arguably more democratic than FPTP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Hong_Kong_electoral_refor...
The Chinese absolutely bear responsibility for how they've governed the last 30 years, just as the British bear responsibility for how they governed the prior 150.
The fact that British HK liberalized a little at the very last second before handover is better than nothing, and the National Security Law is definitely bad, but right now the scoreboard is 7/150 years of free speech under the UK, compared to 23/28 years of free speech under PRC. It'll take another 100 years for the PRC to have a worse record than the UK.
I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to ignore the trend direction.
The Netherlands has a longer history of monarchy under their current government (present monarchy founded 1813) than North Korea (current government established 1948). Does that mean you’d rather live in North Korea than the Netherlands?
The plain and obvious fact remains that Hong Kongers would have more political liberties today if the UK retained control of the territory, regardless of the complete colonial insanity of the original arrangement.
Can you name one present existing British overseas territory that has less of a right to criticize the government than Hong Kong? There are still a bunch of them to choose from from.
Wasn't meaning to ignore the trend, the PRC bears full responsibility for their actions. Just saying that complaints from the British in particular are a little rich.
Also they appear to be arresting more people for speech in total and per-capita than HK:
https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/30-people-arrested-daily-for-sp...
https://insider.iea.org.uk/p/30-people-arrested-daily-for-sp...
That is not even remote comparable. There is a huge difference between arrest and conviction, and whether people are given a proper hearing or not, between legal process and things like disappearances, and between laws that punish criticism of the authorities and hate speech laws.
I do not like the UK's hate speech laws at all, but the fact is that I can criticise them, from the UK, without fear, and I can criticise the government. Could I do that in China? Of course not.
I'm not disagreeing too hard with you, we probably feel similarly about both cases. I just don't like how western media takes a "we're the good guys and they're a dystopia" approach to reporting it.
They've charged like 250 people in 5 years under this law[1], I don't like any one of those cases, I'm also against it, but it gets characterized like nobody ever catches a bullshit charge in the West.
[1]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/06/hong-kong-nat...
You can't even accuse people of sex crimes or threaten to murder them without getting arrested any more! What is the world coming to?
Or surely PRC should get all the praise for diffusing geopolitical traps UK like to leave whenever they lose a colony. Patton threw a curve ball right before handover to last minute liberalize HK a little to hold onto influence, something they didn't do under UK rule. Of course it was geopolitical trap to make PRC look bad if they ever decide take away from HK what UK never provided, but PRC managed to do it anyway and most of world, i.e. global south got example that it is possible to excise legacy colonial tumors from declining empires who choose not to pass gracefully.
I have no idea how you came to the conclusion that liberalization (giving ever so slightly more freedom) would increase foreign UK influence post handover.
>I have no idea
Yes, it shows. 11th hour liberalization was the spiked punch that subverted/prevented PRC from doing useful reforms, like (patriotic) education (MNE / moral national education in 2010s), getting rid of colonial british textbooks that koolaid generations of minds and tethered them to muh anglo liberal values, libtards that would later collude with foreign powers to sanction their own gov. Instead PRC had to waste 20 years unwinding the shitshow because they didn't want to rock the boat too hard during period of heightened end of history wank, i.e. didn't want to risk unrolling last minute landmine reforms which could lead to sanctions / capital flight.
Then there's liberalization bullshit like court of final appeal (staffed with overseas anglo "judges", read compradors, friendly to UK values and interests) that replaced UK privy council to enshrine liberal, UK aligned, rulings vs Beijing. Under colonial UK rule, privy council, decision makers in London, got to overrule HK local moves that countered UK interest. Or Legco reforms that enabled direct elections / local veto that didn't exist prior, which stalled art 23 / NSL implementation for 20 years, something Beijing would have otherwise been able to ram through using old colonial system where governor or Beijing equivalent get to rubber stamp whatever the fuck they wanted... like NSL. Or retooling societies ordinance, public order ordinance, bill of rights ordinance, that was previously used by UK crush dissenting groups with absolute power/prejudice into liberal instruments that now allow retooled ordinance to proliferate with greater judicial power over PRC appointed executive vs pre 90s when these were all tools UK executives used to crush dissent. Liberalization took away all the fancy authoritarian killswitch UK used to rule HK as colony with iron fist.
Post NSL, PRC gave all the compromised none-Chinese judges the boot and get to designate PRC aligned judges that rule on PRC interests. Nature is healing etc.
> Britain had the chance to liberalize Hong Kong before the handover
How would it have made a difference when the Chinese military invaded?
TBH UK never had the chance because PRC saw through their games. TLDR UK wanted to maintain influence post handover for their investments, but like most other colonies on the fading empire they had no leverage, i.e. negotiate to turn HK into self administered territory (like Singapore)... along with UN decolonization rules meant engineering pathway for HK independence. PRC keked and said fuck off and promptly removed HK from UN list of non-self governing territories. There's a reason UK/Patton had to jam in HK liberalisation efforts last minute to increase UK influence post handover and not before... because if they did it before, i.e. pre 90s there would be so much anti colonial and pro CCP sympathies that political freedom in HK could be contrary to British interests. HK was just another Suez, symptom of UK weakness, not any one man.
If there was one critical miscalculation the West (particularly the US) made in the last 40 years, it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms. There was a mistaking of capitalism for human rights. While it is a human right to own property and use it to rationally pursue one's self-interests, that does not mean that capitalism in its current form is conducive to that for the greatest number of people, or to the evolution of other human rights in the societies in which capitalism is practiced.
If investment was the key to liberalization, we would have seen far greater investment behind the then-fallen Iron Curtain, where countries had actively turned their backs on command economies. The cynic in me thinks that capital didn't like just how that had turned out. If a country's people could either violently (Romania) or peacefully (almost everywhere else) remove such totalitarian systems of politics and economics, they could also reject methods of accumulating capital that might run afoul of their values.
China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism. People were free to try new things that could create economic expansion, but only in a way that served the needs of the state. Anything else would be handled with the same totalitarian methods that political dissidents and class enemies were once handled with under Mao. While this has ebbed and flowed over the years, it essentially remains the system in place.
Lai is a victim of this miscalculation.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
They went to China because it was cheaper. They went there in detriment of their countrymen that went without jobs, in detriment of the environment (what with all the shipping boom that followed), even in detriment of their own countries, since this would stifle development and industrialization. And they KNEW that technology transfer would follow, because China had made it clear.
No one forced them to do it. They did it knowingly in the name of short and medium-term profit. I’m not even judging if that is bad (I do THINK it’s bad overall, but I’m not arguing it here). I’m just pointing out what happened.
So now the West must not be surprised. And they aren’t! They just need to craft narratives that will paint them in good light.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization. Businesses always just follow the money, but for a long time American policy makers had made it difficult to invest in China, from regulatory uncertainty to restrictions on dual use technology exports to high tariffs.
It really was an intentional decision, largely on the part of the Clinton administration, to make investing in the country easier and improve the economic well being of Chinese citizens in the hopes it would inevitably lead to democratization. Clearly, those hopes were just that though
> Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that US policymakers deregulated capital flows with China in the hopes that it would lead to political liberalization.
I'd say "in the hopes it would satisfy the political-donor class." The desired liberalization of the PRC was... not necessarily a falsehood, but not the main reason either.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
Yes I think. At least a lot of Western policymakers did buy a "change through trade/investment" story, and it wasn't pulled from nowhere because it had worked in the past.
In postwar Japan and later South Korea, integration into the West's economic system coincided with eventual democratization, closer alignment of values, and alliance.
It was reasonable to think the same thing would work in China, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also the US intentionally set China up for investment by doing things like bringing them into the WTO. All that investment wouldn't have happened without some level of government support.
I think it’s more accurate to say that Western policymakers sold that story to the public on behalf of the companies that bought, er, lobbied them.
I'd totally believe they would have lobbied for it, but even absent lobbying I think policymakers would look at historical trends and conclude that deeper western economic times would ultimately benefit the West strategically as well. Lobbying could have further incentivized and accelerated it though.
> South Korea
Didn't they have a dictatorship or two for quite a while? I think they've only been a democracy in fact, for about 35 years.
Right. They liberalized as they became more wealthy.
As did Taiwan.
True, but both SK and Taiwan had always wanted to be more aligned with the West as they needed to be under the US defense umbrella. The liberalization could only come after gaining stability.
On the other hand, China has always sought to regain what it considers to be its rightful place as a first world power and to recover from its “century of humiliation.”
I think the CCP has been pretty consistent in this stance. Policy makers in the West that didn’t notice were blinded by corporate wishful thinking.
You’re confusing the faction leading the country with the people themselves.
South Korea and Taiwan as countries don’t have an inherent will to align with the West. The countries are made up people with different beliefs, some are more aligned to democracy (what you call the West) and some aren’t. Even today Taiwan has a political party that is pro-CCP.
The logic is not that the CCP will suddenly want to align with the West, it’s that the people will become more pro-Democratic as they become more developed (both economically and politically).
No, I’m intentionally speaking of the leadership. Yes there are dissidents in China (and Russia and NK…) but the governments have been able to make their work seem futile.
There are also some Chinese who are happy to live in a police state. There are also some US citizens who would like more of a police state, provided the police are on their side of the culture wars.
The fantasy is that capitalism automatically breeds liberal democracy. Sometimes it does, but don’t forget it can work the other way too. It was the excesses of capitalism in the gilded age that led to the rise socialist revolutions in the first place. Sometimes might say today’s billionaire capitalists are becoming like the robber barrons of the gilded age.
In our current system, which is, without a doubt, a corpocracy, it's easy to forget that before the 1970s, corporations didn't have that much power at all, and they were regularly overruled by other organizations - labor unions, government social welfare programs, religious institutions, grassroots movements, etc. Allowing corporations to maintain access to the US market while outsourcing jobs to countries with slave labor is the exploit/loophole that allowed corporations to amass wealth and MADE corporations as powerful as they are today.
Bring back capital controls!
This does sound radical (and it is), but the lack of capital controls is essentially what's created the ability for corporations to engage in massive, massive labour arbitrage to the detriment of many citizens in the West (I personally, and my family have benefited from this, but that doesn't make it right).
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
I think the OP would frame this as the Western governments allowing Western businesses to invest in China.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
Not the businesses. Governments and their advisors that encouraged it thought that. Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" bullshit was widely believed, and even now retains some influence.
Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
You’re right in your assumption that profit-seeking was the major part of it - like, it wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
But the idea that the West trading and interacting with China would mean the populous (and perhaps government) would come to understand the benefits of a free society, and so China would trend towards a Western political system - probably gradually rather than violently - was a mainstream view from the 80s to the early 2010s.
> Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such? Isn’t that framing a bit naive?
It worked in south korea and taiwan which were severe military dictatorships before (maybe you could throw japan im there too?) so the history of capitalism liberalizing countries isn't all failures
SK was a capitalist dictatorship for almost as long as has been a capitalist democracy.
There's literally nothing about democracy that capitalism finds necessary or even particularly attractive.
Yeah, so what?
There was definitely a broad (not universal) triumphalist belief on the part of both elites and the broader population in the West after the fall of the Berlin Wall and disintegration in the 90s that capitalism and democracy were intertwined and the triumph of both was inevitable.
This widespread belief doesn't have to be true to help contribute to explaining why decisions were made to allow broad economic integration with and technology transfer to China, in a ways that never really happened with the Soviet Union, and only happened in very limited ways with China prior to the collapse of the Soviet bloc.
People who burnt witches generally believed that witches existed. That belief doesn't have to be true to be useful in contributing to explain the behavior.
I mean, yes, you are right, I lived through all that, and I remember it well.
But to me, even at the time, this was at best, magical-thinking bullshit. But what does a teenager know..? I just write the things my teachers tell me to and get graded on them.
The massive backslide in Russia throughout the 90s and 00s towards autocracy at the same time as it was turning into a capitalist country... Wasn't exactly a state secret.
Warsaw pact states tying themselves to a democratic union in an effort to get as far as they could from Russia was, I think, the larger reason most of them didn't go down the same road.
>Did big businesses in the West really think “investing” in China would lead to “freedom” and such?
BDS is a thing. It toppled South Africa's regime and makes Israelis gnash their teeth. Part of the "sell" for investing in China, and buying Chinese products, was that we were bringing them Capitalism, which would bring them wealth and freedom. The alternative is that you're fueling a Communist regime that is going to become your rival and adversary. Maybe I'm mixing up which was explicit and which was implicit, but there's no way Americans would have been on board with everything if the latter was seen as a real possibility. So either big business knew and suppressed it, or they genuinely themselves believed that they could do business in China and not support strengthening the CCP. (And, before Xi rose to power, that was not an completely unreasonable thought.)
"Lai is a victim of this miscalculation."; I don't think Lai miscalculated, he knew what was coming and fought it anyway.
"Authority comes from submission"; sure someone can threaten you with physical coercion, but they can't make you want to submit. I would strongly suspect that Jimmy knew what was coming, but the point isn't "winning" in the "hollywood" sense, but rather that he did the right thing even. I would suspect not even in spite of the cost, but because of the cost.
Are principles that don't cost you anything even principles?
It’s hard to see Jimmy Lai purely as a victim. Much of his “martyr” narrative appears to be constructed by Western media as part of an ideological battle. From what I remember in Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai had a rather shady reputation. His media outlet was widely known for publishing paid-for stories, spreading misinformation, harassing news sources, and sensationalising sex scandals.
His original intent in setting up the news outlet was often said to be market manipulation for personal gain rather than journalism. He was also known for publishing xenophobic content targeting mainland Chinese. One of the most controversial examples was running ads that portrayed mainland tourists as “locusts” and called for them to be driven out of Hong Kong.
In addition, he donated money to prominent US neoconservatives. I’m not sure whether Western media are unaware of his earlier background in Hong Kong, or if they are deliberately choosing to whitewash his reputation.
The weird thing is China is absolutely jam packed with small companies. Go to a trade show and you'll find dozens of companies selling basically the same products with minor variations. It's absolutely cutthroat.
In the US we tend to see small companies get gobbled up by huge incumbents regularly, but in China the situation is much more in flux and it's not always obvious who the winners are going to be. It's the opposite of what you would expect from a command economy, at least in the tech and consumer product sectors.
> It's absolutely cutthroat.
Meanwhile in the land of the free, it's consolidation galore with very little competition.
I think your perspective is biasing you.
The US has a massive number of small and medium companies. For example small part machining there are dozens per city.
43% of US GDP is small and medium size business. That’s effectively 50% of China’s entire GDP.
Sure China has more, but it also has 4x the population and an economy more focused on labor intensive industry.
> it was thinking that investment in China would equal liberalization and democratic reforms
China now _is_ far more liberal than in the 80-s. But it's also not even close to the Western democracies.
> China, on the other hand, had not moved away from command economics at the time. Instead, the result was state capitalism.
Not really. "State capitalism" really is misleading. China is fiercely capitalistic, far more than any modern Western country. The ruling party has an unspoken agreement with the population: you stay out of politics, and they stay out of your business.
But I don't think this is sustainable. Russia had a similar social compact, and it had been broken after the Ukrainian invasion. There was too much power concentrated in one person, and it just never works.
> Not really. "State capitalism" really is misleading. China is fiercely capitalistic, far more than any modern Western country. The ruling party has an unspoken agreement with the population: you stay out of politics, and they stay out of your business.
I mean sure, unless you happen to be Jack Ma and are about to IPO your financial institution.
I was under the impression that he got got for the very political reason for his company being used to circumvent capital controls.
The West failed in its goals but the flip side is they unintentionally made it possible to pull 750 million people out of poverty. Probably the greatest western foreign policy victory ever.
Nixon went to China because he thought he could use the PRC as a wedge against the USSR. Then China opened up in 1979 and a lot of people believed it will be a new market for goods. It was until it wasn't.
Miscalculation on what level? I think you are right concerning the methods as during the “last-stand” at hk poly technic, tanks were assembling in Futian Shenzhen (sat images.. what was this site again)
I think that laypeople in the US were willing to see more investments in China with the rationalization that it could lead to more human rights. If you had polled random Americans in 1995 with a question like, "Should the US government and American companies invest in the People's Republic of China in an effort to increase human rights and liberalization there?", most people would have responded "yes".
The miscalculation comes from thinking that the investment would actually have that effect. And I do think some people at the top knew it wouldn't have that effect, but of course, there was cheap labor to be had, and that was what they wanted more than anything else.
I think it started out that way before Xi. But they soon realized they can actually overtake the US if they play it right. At least until the Chinese demand higher wages relative to the world, it’s going to be nearly impossible to compete against China in manufacturing. Likely at least another 15-20 years.
I don't think it was a miscalculation, it was big business interests winning over geopolitical considerations. Of course, with some added hubris when it came to opinions on the ability of third world countries to develop into competitors and willful ignorance of the direction things were going over the years. But I do think it was all quite calculated, specifically to make the line go up for the shareholders.
So far you're right but the tide can always turn. China has massively overbuilt housing supply, which is the kind of mistake that a freer economy couldn't make. China's failed birth policies (1 child until 2015!) are another example.
My opinion is still that capitalism (Western style) will win. Not because markets are never wrong but because the scope for fucking up is so much less. Markets can't decide "families can have only one child" or "we need to build 90 million units of housing" (that now sits empty). An accumulation of fuck-ups in this vein is inevitable when you have a small group of people making these kinds of decisions. In the long run, it will be fatal.
It depends though, whom you are asking about failed or successful policies. For example I have seen a normal flat of a friend in China in a capitol of a province, who lives alone in this 4 room apartment. I asked how much rent they had to pay and then asked them what they think, how much they would have to pay for that in Berlin. When I told them they would probably have to pay some 2k EUR rent, they thought for a moment, then just said: "That's insane!". The rent they paid was maybe 1/8 to 1/6 of that. And that apartment was not somewhere far out. It is well within the city and has good public transport connection. People can afford to rent. People can move. Single people. Over here not so much. This is also a result of the state having built houses and apartments.
i don't know much about the rental market in china, but living there, always renting, i had the impression that rents do not cover the cost of the apartment. it is as if most people rent out their apartment because it would otherwise stay empty. when we finally bought an apartment, the mortgage payments were twice as high as what we would have paid for the same apartment in rent. we had a 15 year mortgage i think, so that means it takes 30 years in rent to just cover the cost of the apartment. is that profitable? i don't know. in germany rent has to be profitable.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
Sure they can. Just make it unaffordable to do anything else.
Yes. Unfortunately, we don't live in capitalism anymore, we live in feudalism. The feudal lords just so happen to wear the skin of formerly capitalist corporations. That's how we get the opposite but identical kind of failure, where basically any desirable city gets almost no housing buildout (because any idiot with a billion dollars can make it arbitrarily expensive to do) and families can't afford to even have one child.
> Markets can't decide "families can have only one child"
Actually they can. It's part of the reason why a lot of capitalist nations are seeing major problems with population stagnation and possibly shrinkage.
The problem is markets don't care at all about society. If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
Capitalism is geared towards minimizing workers' free time. And, unfortunately, free time is how babies get made and kids get raised.
That is where western capitalism is failing. Shouting louder and young adults to pull on bootstraps harder isn't making them have kids in their studio apartments.
South Korea and Japan are 2 examples of this train-wreck that's coming for the US and other nations.
> If they can require that every member of a household has to work and extract all their money as efficiently as possible, then they leave little room for society to have families.
This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Capitalism says nothing about free time. Make the connection in your argument - people without enough money work as much as they can, maybe… but I still don’t see the lower wage people I know working 16 hour days. In fact it is the people who have a use for the extra money, usually to buy free time later, as one would expect in a capitalistic system.
> This ascribes an agency to capitalism that doesn’t exist.
Oh no, it really doesn't.
Captialism is everyone working to maximize profit. It's the lack of foresight on social problems and pressures in capitalism that leads to exactly this problem.
> The families themselves make the choices to have more or fewer children.
Right, because of the pressure of a capitalist society. People can be priced out of having children if necessities like food, housing, and clothing price them out of being able to take care of a child.
> Capitalism says nothing about free time.
Capitalism is about maximizing profit. A direct path towards that is paying employees the minimal amount and having them work the most hours to extract the maximum amount of value from them.
Before mass unionization, 60 or 80 hour workweeks were pretty common in the US. Even today, we see companies that use salaried employees as a way to make employees work longer hours.
If overtime wasn't so expensive, you could bet that McDonalds would have people working 12 hour shifts. Hospitals already do that to nurses.
> capitalism is everyone working to maximize profit
This is nonsense. Capitalism is about the private ownership of productive stuff, i.e. capital. That’s it. Profit is a corollary, and one that is bounded by preferences and tastes.
That completely ignores the coercive law of competition.
"Accumulate! Accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets."
- Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
> completely ignores the coercive law of competition
Not a forcing function unless you’re levered. Competition can’t push your return on a productive asset below zero (by definition), just lower by increasing the value of said asset while reducing the cash flows from it.
`Not a forcing function unless you’re levered`; but every one is levered, you aren't born with all the housing, food, and water you'll need for the rest of your life. Everyone is born with a net negative of the necessities of life, the difference though is that a very small minority are bequeathed this by well heeled ancestors. But for the overwhelming majority there is a life long struggle to afford to live a suitable life.
