A question about the Chinese Government

In My Humble Opinion
1

Very specifically, the chinese government. This is not about the various groups, populations, regions etc inside China, only the government.

Is the Chinese Government malicious?

There is no questions that it abusive to various groups, violating human rights of the Uighers comes to mind as one example. I don’t know, oppressive, brutal, intrusive, repressive, I’m sure there are things the Chinese Government has done that each of those adjectives would fit, but is it done with malice?

I see whats happening in and to the US and to me those people, the right wing folks, are at heart doing what they are doing or trying to do out of malice, at the top anyway, the people who are the assorted “leaders” of the right wing demographic. It made me wonder if China’s government, as a whole is acting with malice in its conduct regarding the people living within its borders that the western world considers unacceptable. Or is it just conducting the affairs of China?

2

I’m no expert on China, but my impression is that the Chinese Government isn’t “malicious” in the way that dictators like Kim Jong-un, Saddam Hussein, or Vladamir Putin are. That is to say, those other dictators seem more about their own personal power than any desire to actually “govern”.

The Chinese Government does actually seem to govern China and seems to work in what it believes to be in China’s interest (for example, many of the massive public works China has invested in over the years). That said, the Chinese Government is much more authoritarian and centralized by Western standards and the Chinese people seem to embrace authority, structure, and order more than Americans and Europeans.

Whether governments behave with “malice” is somewhat simplistic IMHO. Some dictators behave with malice in that they are insane and often take pleasure from tormenting those who they see as threats or rivals.

With most governments, more often than not the “malice” is a byproduct of bad or indifferent policies. ie. China didn’t displace a million people out of spite when it build Three Gorges Dam. It displaced them because the Chinese Government thought it was acceptable collateral to producing 22,000 MW of energy for China.

Governments and ideologies can also behave with “malice”, or at least extreme prejudice against groups that won’t or can’t integrate with their rules, culture, and ideology. Obviously, more open and accepting cultures provide more opportunity to integrate people. Again, not being a China expert, my impression is that China has more of a limited culture than the West.

The left is guilty of this as well, by the way. The left tends to think they aren’t “malicious” because they believe they are promoting rights and saving the environment.

3

The Chinese government is not a monolith. Neither is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Both entities, which overlap a LOT, are millions of bureaucrats. Many of whom are very minor players in small towns and some of whom are very powerful.

The CCP does have complicated internal politics, with “politics” meaning how groups reach collective decisions. Chinese society, government, and business is heavily based on personal connections. Your brother’s uncle’s neighbor’s friend matters a lot to you, and the size and power of your own connection network determines a lot of how your life goes. As such, at the highest levels of power you end up with factional leaders, each of whom sits atop a pyramid of connections who, directly or indirectly, owe their success to the faction head. And the faction heads each have legitimate policy differences with the other, as well as simple competitive lust for more money and power than their near-peers.

A LOT of what goes on between factions is malicious, at least to the degree that term can be applied to a group. Wang Chung’s group is going to do X precisely because that harms the interests of Kung Pow’s group, while advancing their own. Whether it’s sound policy for the nation as a whole is not necessarily very important.

Right now, in the last couple of years and next couple of years, we are all watching the current supremo Xi Jinping working diligently to make himself into a Putin-like absolute ruler for life, and along the way, his faction into the permanent ruling sub-class of the ruling class. Much has been done, and not done, that can be described as malicious.


I wonder a bit if the OP isn't mixing malicious with vandalism. When a burgler breaks into a store and steals cash & stuff, they at least gain the money they stole. So there's an exchange of gain and loss. The store is poorer and the burgler is richer. The burgler definitely wasn't considering the store's interests while doing the deed. That's malice.

A lot of what seems to go on in US RW politics now seems to me more like vandalism. Like breaking the store’s windows, trashing the interior, but leaving all the merchandise sitting there. IOW, they’re not trying to gain some tangible value; they’re just having fun destroying something other people value. That’s a different sort of malice.

What does the word “Malice” mean to the OP?

4

I think that’s what a lot of people in the West mistake for malice. The Chinese government comes across as a combination of pragmatic and callous that doesn’t happen in governments that are more accountable to their population. They’ll displace a million people because they want a dam in that spot, and they literally DGAF that they’ve destroyed people’s lives, communities, the environment in that area, etc. because they wanted that power generation capacity.

I don’t think they’re doing it specifically to screw those people; they just aren’t accountable and don’t care otherwise. At the risk of sounding racist, that not caring seems to be something in Chinese culture- there is no shortage of videos of people (and children) falling, getting hit by cars, and otherwise injured, etc… and being flat out ignored by other Chinese onlookers.

And it comes across in international relations as very much a bullying sort of foreign policy. A sort of “We’ll build a military base on Fiery Cross Reef because we can, the West is afraid of starting a war, and the Phillipines/Vietnam/Taiwan can’t actually do anything about it.” They literally don’t care that someone else claims it or that they look like right assholes.

5

They fall into the category of “Bandits” as defined in the Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

Bandits
pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare

For comparison, the GOP seems evenly split between Bandits and Stupid People.

Stupid people
whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests

6

These are over-generalizations about a group of people that is at least as diverse as any other group of people (actually, the first one is over-generalizing about three groups of people). I realize this is not one of our more strict forums that lives and dies by citations and logic, but it would be nice if we could recognize the built-in inaccuracy of statements like this, and find more realistic ways of expressing ourselves.

7

I like your word, vandal, vandalism, seems a better, more specific word for what I was aiming at.

what @msmith537 msmith said about the three gorges dam is a really good example too, of indifference, perhaps, in the people negatively affected, the historical and archeological sites lost etc but not malicious intent per se. Acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of betterment of the country as a whole.

8

I like to put things like this here because most of the time I’m working on refining and or perhaps defining/clarifying my own thinking on something and I think this is a better forum for that sort of thing than Great Debates or Politics and Elections. I don’t particularly care for over generalizations either, but sometimes I find them useful for the discussion they may spark, in that it might highlight poor thinking on my part that I may then adjust myself.