I mean, yeah, he criticized the party publicly. This is what happens. For as wealthy, powerful and influential as he is, for him not to realize what was going to happen to him is kind of flabbergasting.
Evaluating intellectual capacity of a person from a different culture based on a couple of topics expressed in a foreign language does not strike me as accurate.
Meh. What I got out of those interviews is that Ma is more of a humanist and Musk a technologist. Not a fair apples-to-apples comparison. I’m sure Ma brings skills in other areas.
Oh I'm not defending them whatsoever. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that this kind of thing is utterly normal in China, which is terrifying in and of itself. People go missing there all the time. This isn't even the first billionaire [1] - and that guy they grabbed from Hong Kong back before they renationalized it.
Knowing that, you'd expect him not to get too big for his britches in such a public way.
I expect a similar story arc here: he's going to pop up in a few months, explain he was seeking medical treatment, or he's discovered a new love of mining minerals on the western frontier, and apologize for the trouble he's caused. Then we'll never hear from him again.
> That's great, I wonder that others think of this.
You don't understand. It means that in China basically EVERYONE is at the mercy of the government, not just the rich. You just don't read about the anonymous ones they crush every day, and then you find them in your 'Real Body' exhibitions around the world.
Yeah, so they just treat everyone equally. Equally bad, that's right, but do you want me to cheer for the US where money creates this enormous shield against everything while we are left to suffer ? I'm not buying it.
Not to descend in whataboutism (you are right about the terribleness of the american penal system), but China has concentration camps for minority religions. We should avoid turning this into a "who is more fascist" competition.
Us has concentration camps for south Americans. We are bad and I can do more about US (since I live here and likely most HN readers are too) than China so I tend to focus on US.
> That’s good, everyone should play by the same rule.
Again missing the point. There's no rule in dictatorships. The only 'rule' is the whims of the leadership. I wonder why so many people want to leave such countries instead of emigrating there - there must be some kind of reason, but I can't exactly picture it...
USSR is a failed civilization because they couldn’t steer good government policies. China is way different. Don’t equate the two just because they’re both “communists”
Politely suggesting moderate policy reforms in the context of a business workshop dedicated to such matters is hardly "publicly fighting with regulators" let alone anything deserving of being disappeared.
So you talked to Jack Ma? Lol you read a bunch random speculation about how he’s missing when there’s no proof. The. Try to construct a narrative from it
All this speculation could be laid to rest with egg on the face of western media outlets with just one proof-of-life phone call. The CCP, who he would like to get back in good graces with, would certainly want that. So why hasn’t it happened?
It's not really even true. There is one thing you can't get away with if you're wealthy in China and that is criticizing the CCP. You can get away will all sorts of awful things with a little Hongbao but, I'm not going to link sources as I'd get flagged/down'd by the sympathizers.
It might be a good thing, if it was just “Privileged position doesn’t get you out of justice” and not “Privileged position doesn’t map as directly to wealth”.
(That also, of course, assumes that being targeted by the government in either case maps well to some concept of justice.)
Right, yeah, it left out all the context is what I’m getting at. Being able to criticize the government is paramount to western ideals. That’s about the only thing you can’t do in China with enough money.
You can also get away with all sorts of illegal and terrible things in China with enough money, just like anywhere else.
But, in China, you can’t criticize the government no matter how poor or rich you are. That’s the only reason Ma disappeared- he defied the government. Not to say bad things don’t happen to dissenters in the US but it’s not a matter of course like China.
IMHO, being able to criticize the government publicly without being disappeared is paramount to our ideals of society.
The article’s interpretation left out all that context.
That is completely false, and I bet from someone who has never worked professional nor lived in China
Corruption is one of the thing that will end your career, even your life. Things like smuggling drugs, creating fake products that endanger lives, will get you executed.
Jack didn’t even go against the CCP. He criticized the financial regulators for not allowing innovation.
Weird that people desperately want this to be “China Bad Government” vs the Good Billionare Jack. But it’s more akin to an FCC vs Musk battle
Yeah but that's another point totally. I still don't think that allowing only those with money to criticize our government is something to be proud of.
You’re still missing what I’m saying. Anyone in the US can legally and publicly criticize any level of our government without fear of reprisal. In almost all cases.
> Anyone in the US can legally and publicly criticize any level of our government without fear of reprisal.
Both the internal statements by violent right-wing counter-demonstrators about widespread expectation of police tacit support without need for direct coordination that came to light and the actual police behavior toward violent right-wing counter-demonstrators in many cases during the recent BLM protests demonstrate that that certainly isn't true in substantial, recently-salient cases.
> I still don’t think that allowing only those with money to criticize our government is something to be proud of.
reply
You generally don’t have to be rich to criticize the government in the US (without punishment; being rich may be necessary to get heard, though, but that’s a different problem); on the issues where the government at any level will retaliate, directly or indirectly, for criticism, wealth isn't really all that effective in stopping it, either.
No, US media has some sort of infatuation with China right now. I think they figure if they kowtow enough they’ll get access to that sweet China market.
> No, US media has some sort of infatuation with China right now
Now? I've seen this since 2014 when the Yellow Movement happened in Hong Kong, and I was living in a jungle on an Island in the middle of the Pacific. What World are you living on that you didn't see the rise of a tyrannical juggernaut that had no qualms intervening in affairs of it's neighbors to flex its power on the World stage, and kicking sand in the face of people's metaphorical face when it came to Human Rights abuses all while using its populace as slave labour, debasing its currency to create ghost towns with massive cheap fiat and calling it prosperity while the CCP controlled Industries sourced endless amounts of funding from Elites in the West that systemically undercut most local and small businesses?
No, I'd say most people who believe that China is only now in the Media are the problem as they didn't see the obvious and thought buying cheap disposable goods from China would never ensure that manufacturing base of most countries would be centralized and create a massive central point of failure which would put supply chains in a very detrimental position and in the hands of the CCP. COVID only happened to expose just how deadly this was, but this was very clear to see if you bothered to look at China's behaviour in the last 2 decades.
Sinophobia, as it were, isn't what I think should be the focus as I honestly have a great deal of sympathy and sorrow for the plight of the average Chinese citizen who is simply trying to get ahead in what is a short window in what has otherwise been a state of poverty, wide spread perpetual misery and economic despair coupled with countless purges and Civil warfare.
And before I get accused of being racist: its worth noting that one side of my family has it's origin in Guangzhou.
I know people cry "whataboutism" when these counter arguments come up, but I'm genuinely curious how all this squares up.
Most of the countries we'd hope would "stand up to China" have a poor human rights record. I don't want to say one is better or worse than the other - I don't know how you measure one group of injustices against another - but in the scale of things, generously, both have room for improvement.
If the argument is that just because country A does B+C+D, doesn't mean they can't stand up to country W for doing X+Y+Z, doesn't it just become an issue of who can yield the bigger stick or carrot? If protecting human rights is selectively applied based on might AND that same might is also used to oppress human rights, isn't that setting an dangerous precedent?
Either you’re missing an /s somewhere, or you’re arguing that a past pattern of behavior itself serves as justification of continued behavior in the same vein.
It seems as though this notion gets very subjective and gets leveraged to influence policy decisions. Libya and Iraq are the first examples that come to mind.
Get our own house in order first, then write a book about it and ship it out for free. If they don’t listen, it’s their loss. You won’t right every wrong nor mend every fence. It’s impossible, and the price you pay for constantly trying the same old failed thing is felt at home by some other minority group that could have used the resources which were squandered on faraway struggles of the cold or hot variety.
Considering the British had a huge colonial empire, the US had brutal segregation, rampant anti-Semitism ( so much so they refused ships with Jewish refugees and sent them back to their death in German occupied Europe) and eugenics experiments, and the USSR( the third main country in the Allies, mostly by necessity, but nonetheless) was pretty much as violent to their minorities as the Nazis were... What could any of them say without being blatantly hypocritical?
Strange that people are making a huge deal out of this. How’s he missing? To whom? He’s not the CEO of Alibaba anymore and doesn’t have to appear in any events
He’s a billionaire, who’s in trouble with regulators for public ally flouting their regulations. Maybe it’s a good idea to stfu for a few months until it’s settled.
The sentiments from some people on HN are so weird about this. Everyone wants to screw the big bad tech companies for having so much monopolies on what we do, until China does it then it’s “oh no big bad government takes down billionaire.”
I can choose to not use Google, Facebook, etc and market forces still are a factor here. I can't choose to not be born in China, and there is much more friction to leaving China than not using tech products by these companies.
I don't expect too much criticism of China in this thread. Too much Chinese money in SV startups for most people to risk it. I expect underhanded comments deriding the US instead as is typical in threads like these.
> Too much Chinese money in SV startups for most people to risk it.
Despite HNs sponsorship, I don’t get the impression that the readership is dominated by people financially dependent on the SV startup scene. Sure, they are overrepresented here, but given how small a percentage of world the SV startup scene is, it can be massively overrepresented and still be a minority position, and HN has a very broad audience.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627043
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25636045
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25627398
Mostly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25629774 too.