Microblog Memes

They didn't say the CCP are good, they said they are competent.

Not sure whether Xi keeping the job is faltering of the CCP's ideal of collective leadership, or him being the guy the collective leadership wants as figurehead. They certainly don't want a second Mao that's for sure.

The politbureau/party can still elect a new leader even if term limits are removed. There is democracy for "qualified voters" in China.

How is it a complicated to verify claim? Even if you choose to ignore the obvious outcomes, there’s plenty of publications and studies about it. That’s the problem with limiting yourself to “China experts” from the West, they never bother to learn the language or learn about China’s history and politics.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-8057-2_23

In China all politicians including the premier start out as civil servants and a required to pass an entrance exam and have to climb up the ranks.

The US could probably adopt some of this without changing too much. A simple spelling test could have weeded out Trump. Ideally, a number of years of experience in civil service/local politics, should also be required to run for president.

It should be be implicitly obvious so it shouldn’t be explicitly stated. But we are simply comparing how the two systems position people of power. It is not about the people themselves in the positions. Think of it like a company that has its CEO climb up the ranks from an entry level employee vs a company that brings outsiders. Except the latter company leaves the decision to mostly an unqualified mass that sometimes hires a highly unqualified person. Both companies can be evil, or the former evil and the latter good, none of this matters to the point that I’m making.

Not really the CCP is basically using a reformed Mandarin system. To rise within the ranks of the party they look at a combination of how well the thing you administered (e.g. a state factory) performed in comparison to whatever is comparable, as well as opinion polls of the local population, which aside from making sure that you won't be hated (which could cause disquiet and if there's one thing the CCP doesn't want then that's that) also doubles at sniffing out manipulated numbers, the people are generally quite good at spotting corrupt officials. If you rank well within your cohort you get promoted from administering a factory to administering local industry, then regional, etc, etc. What doesn't happen any more is grading people based on how good their poetry is as well as cutting off their balls but the basic system is, broad strokes, similar to how Imperial China educated and selected its civil servants.

That doesn't mean that there's not corruption and grift going on, there's still some degree of princeling privilege but it's basically impossible to fail upwards in the CCP. Knowing people or being someone's kid might open some doors, but it's not going to guarantee you anything. It also means that the top ranks are full of for lack of better characterisation engineer bureaucrats.

Or, put differently: If the CCP was completely incapable they would've long lost power. Their whole legitimacy hinges on being perceived as good administrators, they know that, and they're doing their darnedest to not lose it. Propaganda and secret police alone is not sufficient, history has shown that again and again, you actually need to be good at stuff that's important to people or they cease to tolerate you.

He got up to the point that he can do that through merit. He didn’t suddenly get elected as premier. The point I’m trying to make went right past you. “I point to the stars, you look at my fingertips”.

This isn’t about Xi himself or Trump himself. Xi could be worse than Netanyahu, Trump could be better than Sinwar. It is about how those in power get there, how the system selects its leaders. I tried giving an analogy in my other comment.