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My critique is that not only are these campaigns to correct problems wrongheaded and ineffective, they're of the long-term sort that expose the systemic problems of the party. Namely, that the party commands too much from the top-down. Party planners wanted to correct the birth rate to avert Malthusian catastrophe and did so in a inhuman and vicious matter. Now, all of those girls they aborted are a haunting hole in the demography. The slightest concern for the environment or health regulation could have forestalled disaster and plague. But it didn't happen.
Not to say that this doesn't happen in the West. But the corrective mechanisms in an authoritarian society are simply too slow to react to largely foreseeable problems. No doubt the next set of existential crises are lurking about, unchecked, because to point them out would be embarrassing to the local politicians - and to the party, by proxy.
This does not sound like a communist, technocratic government where pragmatism dominates. This is the rot of the Soviet Union - a bureaucracy and party apparatus who can only react and not proactively solve problems. I wish for the best for my countrymen. I hope they prosper to provide a second pole if America should falter. But I enjoy western liberal norms, and I'm not willing to oblige myself to the strong authority of a state. So I'm stuck in an uncomfortable place.
Ah well. My opinion doesn't really matter.
I don’t think I agree with you on your diagnosis of the party, but I think this disagreement mostly comes from how we interpret the same phenomenon.
My main issue with the party is that, not unlike all its predecessors, it shows a profound disregard for human value. And that attitude is so pervasive in the society. It sometimes manifest itself as “greed and materialism” like you complained, as a result of grading all human on a single variable that is wealth or power. It sometimes manifests itself as the destruction of nature, which is of course what you do when you don’t even value human let alone animals or plants.
Mao once made a less famous but in my opinion quite insightful remark: 百代皆行秦政法 孔学名高实秕糠 (Age after age, governance follows the laws of Qin, Confucianism enjoys great renown, yet in reality it is empty husk). The Chinese state preaches Confucianism, which despite endorsing a hierarchical social order, still places emphasis on the well-being of individuals (I especially like Mencius on his humanitarianism. Almost got his spirit tablet removed from Confucius temple by the first Ming emperor because of that). Yet the Chinese state, as both ancient and modern observers have noted, is extraordinarily ruthless. Like a giant in Lilliput it tramples over small people without even noticing.
Where does this utter contempt for human value come from? I think it ultimately traces back to Legalism, the “laws of Qin” Mao referred to. Legalism is a philosophy obsessed with control, governance, and the organization of people, concerned primarily with how to persuade, manipulate, or coerce the people to achieve the will of the “great man”. Think of Machiavelli, but born in 400BC and also getting his philosophy adopted by a country the size of Rome for two millennia. Humans are nothing more than means to an end. This is the core of Chinese state philosophy, “outer Confucianism, inner Legalism” 所谓外儒内法.
You see this influence everywhere. From the burning books and burying scholars to the pervasive censorship of today. The state is everywhere. Nothing lies outside its grasp, and nothing should lie outside of its grasp. I’m glad that perhaps for hbd reasons the country is usually run by competent people (unlike you, I don’t seriously doubt this), many of them are even well-intentioned. Most of the time, this system works great and even preferable, since the values of the great man and the commoners mostly align. But that competence of the bureaucrats is also what makes them dangerous (and that’s partially why I don’t think you should see them as incompetent, because they are dangerous not stupid). These intelligent people often have little sense of how much power they wield, and even less humility in how they use it. They could actively abuse it, or merely to crush the weak by accident. To them anything is possible if the will is strong enough and one is willing to sacrifice whatever is necessary and that includes people “beneath” them. It would be nice if their values always align with others but of course that’s not the case.
This is also why I’m glad societies like the US exist, although it is also deteriorating at an unimaginable speed. I believe our societies can benefit from each other, to maintain a delicate balance so that neither slides too far into the seductive and destructive extremes.
I gave my society too little credit here for the sake of discussion. But thats all I wanted to say today.
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