Topic: expect a set of 3 articles about China situation and a prediction following (Read 4724 times)

Ah Mr. Zhang, that kind of freedom. I know what you mean, but I'm not so sure that letting your business hurt customers, pollute a lot, beat up workers, and/or squeeze out competitors can really be considered "freedoms" when they are only freedoms for a few people and hindering the freedoms of a lot more people.

And for other things likes drugs, prostitution, gambling, ignoring traffic laws, counterfeit goods, etc., sometimes people do get into big trouble, randomly taken down, and/or are made an example of, all on the whim of party officials.

Yep, what you keep describing is soooo much better than what we have in the West.  So much better to be filthy rich and powerful but still live in a cage and live in fear, than the system we have.

In fact, the Nazi leaders and military commanders were also rich and powerful, but lived under a state of control and fear.  And we have all seen how that turned out...

/s

The "More" part is the Freedom of doing everything without much regard to law. (A true librarian wouldn't call it a freedom.) The red line is not to touch Lord's regime and not to get negative media attention. Media is growing power these days.

It's easier to explain by quoting.   Gavin Elster in the movie "Vertigo":

"The things that spell San Francisco to me are disappearing fast. . . . I should have liked to live here then. Color, excitement, power, freedom. . . ."

The "More" part of Chinese freedom is the kind of freedom mentioned there. It's a time of heros, scoundrels and barons. People can be wealthy and as powerful as not to touch or damage Lord's regime, the state is not in their way. Unlike the western view, this game, despite being relentless merciless, is not even unfair, because everyone can be a baron and do have a chance. 90% of the wealthest started empty handed: Quote http://thinkingchinese.com/index.php?page_id=284

People can dream. Society structure in regarding to wealth is fluid. You can be what you want, if what you want is wealth (the only true want). The path to wealthy is open.

Small examples: Special businesses doesn't require special registration and regulation. There is a man who buildt his small mound on top of apartment buildings (he enjoys the view of mountain) and stopped at media pressure but not law pressure. Police dooesn't want to bother you or can be bribed, but unlike western imagination, the more usual case is "they don't want to bother you", not that "they can be bribed". Postive examples I mentioned above. I also have many provoking examples: you can drink on the street, eat in subway, block airport access in rage of delayed plane without worrying police taking you.

I keep referring the central government as the lord because:

If you are rich and powerful, the Lord can still take you down, doom your reputation and confesticate your business in an overnight, but you know the Lord won't do it without a good reason. The central is so efficient, that you better think it as a unified person with integrity, that he doesn't retaliate without reason and purpose, and he doesn't act on too small offenses or lack of briibe, he knows if you are loyal by the look, and he acts relentlessly - you can even love him for his integrity.

Members can't rely information on market share on cryptocoincharts because it doesn't include Huobi. The share of chineses markets is currently around 68%: http://www.bitcoinity.org/markets/list?currency=ALL&span=24h
Huobi still decides the price of bitcoin, western exchanges just follow it.

Could you be more specific? More freedom to do what, exactly?

China holds only 7% of total bitcoin volume. They are important but not that important.

One of those is interesting but I couldn't read it all trough.

what stopped you

I came very close to making a "Tankmancoin".

The principle is correct (indulge fear) but the extent is different.

Put aside moral choices, in the case of an abused wife, the advantage of breaking away for freedom outweights the risk of looking for another husband, and freedom is a rational choice. If the man, instead of beating the wife as he wish, decides to beat his wife only when she is disloyal to him, she got less incentive to fight for freedom, at least before she fall in love with another.

Chinese living in mainland China enjoys a considerable degree of freedom, in many aspects more than the west. In general you enjoy the seemingly free life, but you know if you touch the lord's 'red line' you are in trouble. The Chinese can't identify themselves with the people in  1984 or "The brave new world", thanks to the current freedom they enjoy, hence these books are not forbidden.

It seems to every individual that the effort to break free brings in China offer little advantage. One cannot be sure freedom is a necessity or just a hobby.

And again, freedom is first a state of mind before it's a state of the flesh.

The cold, harsh truth is that nobody is stopping anyone - not even in communist/totalitarian style rulership nations - from being free but you. I understand the brainwashing and conditioning but when you are capable of looking around and seeing other people choosing freedom and refusing to live in servitude to anyone else and you make excuses for it and shrink back down instead of rising up for your own best interests, the problem lies with you. Most people won't do anything - even here for that matter - because they're terrified their government enforcers will just kill them. So they settle down and comply.

That is the mark of a slave.

And an accomplice.

There's a saying here in the USA, I think it initiated from Oprah or someone along those lines about domestic violence and abused women that goes, "The first time, she's a victim. Every time after that, she's an accomplice." Because she makes a choice to stick around and cling to her bad beliefs and conditioning, and indulge her fears of radical change.

I'd never allow myself to become a servant of anyone else...and I'll surely, gladly die preventing it - taking out the arrogant psychos with me, guaranteed.

But that's me. Clearly, the people of China (and elsewhere) haven't managed to join us in the 21st century paradigm of freedom the way they have with certain technology. Nothing worse than a bronze aged paradigm in a $5000 suit.

China does not have a free market. A free market is a whole lot more than individuals being able to choose between McDonald's and KFC or Huawei and Xiaomi. There are some free market elements at play, but China has a mixed planned economy. The People's Republic of China has very low productivity and very large amounts of economic waste. I'm not sure how having a GDP per capita roughly equal to Iraq or Angola proves anything other than that China is a poor developing country. A developed economy requires market liberalizations that would end the current form of government. So far, economic growth in China has been relatively easy. But moving forward, it is always going to get a lot harder for each 1 yuan increase in GDP per capita. The CPC's "social harmony" and "Confucian values" excuses can only go so far when the economy stagnates because the party is unwilling to relinquish its control over the economy and society as a whole.


Well the people who say that are puppets of the party, gullible idiots, or both. That doesn't make any logical sense. Show me one high productivity country ruled by despotism

There is a historical parallel when it come to intellectual property between China and the United States in the late 20th and 21st centuries and between the United States and Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Industrial designs were actually smuggled aboard sailing ships for shipment from Great Britain to the United States.  What many do not realize is that China is copying from the United States now much in the same fashion as the United States was copying from Great Britain back then. The United States did not ratify the Berne Convention on copyright until 1989 over 100 years after it was effective in 1887. The Untied States' aggressive stance on Intellectual property is actually rather recent, largely driven by the fact that most manufacturing has left the United States. If a significant amount of manufacturing starts to leave China I would expect China to start taking a much tougher stance on intellectual property also.

Before any of these happened, as long as I can remember (> 12 years), http://mp3.baidu.com has been offering amazing repertoire of music to download from Woody Guthrie to Bartok (you must come from an IP address of China to download these illegal copies, and I drunk this well like crazy), and every other rule of entertainment industry you mentioned has been broken in Chian from the start - so is software copyright, e.g. few pays Microsoft Tax here.

But I don't see this freedom bring any influnce on the free thinking to China. I also cannot ascribe the entertainment and software industry development to this freedom. Indeed observing from China, this 'freedom' is slowly reducing thanks to stronger and richer Chinese entertainment industry. So, observing from this end of the earth, it is difficult to convince a Chinese that the world trend is the one you describe, and there is still no proof freedom brining productivity if you look from here. we observed reverse trends, that merger and takeover are mainstream in china internet sector.

Personally I know the event and 'development' you described and observed, but my fellow countrymen doesn't, thus they joined Bitcoin game for a very different reason than yours. I wrote another article to address the reason Chinese joined Bitcoin since late 2013, still it is in the editing workflow.

You also said freedom bring indie developers with new technology. We have every new Internet technology the West have, with our state controled imitation, many have more users than the original. So lack of innovation does not make life harder. If you link freedom to innovation, you will find a funny fact, that we decided to outsource this freedom to the West and see what they produce, and copy it. So without adding more freedom here, we enjoy the fruit none the less. Mindboggingly: If freedome can be outsourced, there is no reason why we must produce it ourselves.

That depends...can you get me the hell out of the USA? 

I agree...they have to undergo a paradigm shift toward personal liberation as a state of mind before anything changes.

So sexy..you sound like a possible future ex-wife..single by chance?    (joking of course)

In the famous words of Janis Joplin.


Me and Bobby McG


Until the East feel's it has nothing left to lose..nothing will change. They find 'comfort' in this authority.

I can accept the cultural chasm and where it comes from. I get it. And it's much easier for those in a presumably free country to protest and revolt enough that the powers that be back down.

I realize conditioning of communism and dictatorships prevent the citizenry from truly understanding what true freedom feels like...so they're still scared to death to rise up and remove those who threaten their freedom under a bs guise of protecting them. They are not protecting anything but their own authority.

It's not just China. I feel the same when I see middle eastern women wearing head to toe coverings and accepting being treated like a punching bag for a bunch of goat screwing psychopaths. I can't help but see an easy solution: women just need to lace the Cheerios with rat poison and kill them off in bunches, take off the wraps and recognize they hold the real power and always have. If any guy ever tried to force me into compliance that way I'd beat him to death in his sleep.

Freedom is a state of mind before it is a state of reality.

PS the same dismantling of religion is also taking place, rapidly so, now that the world has full access to information - religion is now being recognized as a parasitic mind virus not to be taken seriously.

Freedom revolution is taking place because of the choice to be free over being ruled, and innovation in every industry is thriving where a free market has been established by a freedom securing people. Across the globe.

The only heroes in China are the ones who fought and died on their feet, not the ones living on their knees.

What are you talking about?  The Chinese have been ruled by emperors and masters for thousands of years.  They have never had a choice for a truly free market, ever.

Okay, My wording is not good enough, allow me to step back and rephrase it:

Milton Friedman suggested "a society allowing free market will eventually evolve into a free society thanks to its influnce on people's willingness to choose; free market is incompatible with regime of centralism in the long term". What Chinese calls Socialism with chinese characteristics worked well enough and long enough to disapprove Milton.

In china people compare China to India and conclude democracy not a condition for high productivity.

Or: there is no proof that what Milton Friedman suggested is true, that "a society allowing free market will eventually evolve into a free society thanks to its influnce on people's willingness to choose"

---

I posted about this elsewhere but it fits here in response to the above. There is ample proof this is fact. Consider the evolution of P2P file sharing for music that got the government all up in a tizzy trying to regulate it and protect the corporate music industry. The people recognize an alternative to being told what and who they could listen to, what and who was "popular" according to how much the industry made, and when (radio air time) was to transfer, digitize, compress individual music files and pass them around between themselves outside the regulatory authority...and the record companies lost...those who didn't adapt to digital mp3 on demand went out of business.

The same evolution happened exactly with the movie industry and television networks - people figured out an alternative to being told what they could and couldn't watch, and when, and without being forced to choke down bs advertising, and being censored, and they chose P2P file sharing of video files amongst themselves...and the industries again lost to the will of the people's preference for freedom of choice.

Same exact evolution happened with the publishing industry when people opted for the freedom to create and publish independently of a publishing house who was the final authority over who was worthy of being published and who wasn't.

The entire entertainment industry has been co opted by the will of the people refusing to accept the rules and regulations of some central authority for their recreation.

The same thing is happening with marijuana...

Freedom is the only option and people do choose it and they do thrive. Once the "on demand" issue was resolved by the people refusing to buckle to the fear mongering bs of the government and corporate money, innovation exploded - indie app developers rained down new technologies. Once the scientific community protested enough to get through the rules and fear mongering, the medical technology field exploded.

So your assertion there is no proof that a free society would be productive is absurdity and oblivion to the reality of human nature.

It's 2014. Nobody "owns" anyone.

Any time I see some clown calling himself a king or a prince, or a lord or a master, or a pope, all I see are a bunch of delusional crackpots playing dress up.

Freedom is the ONLY way the world needs to be.

Whilst I agree with your moral opinion on this, I also respect the deep look into the Chinese psyche offered by zhangweiwu. Most Westerner's fail to understand how deeply entrenched this mentality is, just as the East fail's to grasp the mind set of the individualistic West.

I find this article sum's it up rather well. moon-and-stars