zlacker

>>el_dud+(OP)
The title is a little misleading, as it's a region of China and not the entirety.

However, the implications are still ominous.

I'm curious, how did China develop into such a police state? Anyone able to point me to some reading on the subject?

>>boverm+M3
China was never really not a police state of some sort. The ancient Imperial system broke down at the dawning of the modern era, and the Kuomintang "Republic of China" arose to replace it. It never managed to achieve either internal security or nationwide fair elections, and got into an extremely brutal fight with Communist insurgents. The communists were forced into retreat (Long March) during which most of them died - but the survivors, Mao among them, were inured to brutality. Eventually the Communists won on the mainland, leaving the Kuomintang in control of the island we now call Taiwan. The shooting stopped but the war is still officially in progress, hence all the weirdness around recognising Taiwan.

The key to Communism in the Maoist approach was absolute central control and the sweeping away of all obstacles; if you stood in the way of, objected to, or even were insufficiently enthusiastic about its plans you would be murdered.

Economic control was gradually loosened in the latter half of the 20th century, but political control remains tight.

>>pjc50+mb
> China was never really not a police state of some sort.

Even ancient Imperial China was very much like this. To the point where China basically had no such thing as a legal system in the Western sense! The only kind of dispute resolution was mutually-assured destruction via criminal-like prosecution, basically "If I think you've been trying to cheat me out of something, I can get government goons to beat you up, for theft or whatever." And the government goons often beat up both disputants, for good measure. It's surprising that they even managed to build a halfway-functioning society and keep it going for thousands of years, out of such crudities.

>>0815te+5d
But that's what's interesting about China!

It's an alternative civilization!

The last 30 years we've seen it develop at a rate that is obviously impossible given the experience of all other countries. Yet this, very different, country does it.

It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes, even from systems everyone "knows" shouldn't work.

>>Burnin+de
> It's good to have diversity in governance systems and be able to see the different outcomes...

I've been lucky not to experience this myself, but I imagine it is bad to experience the "different outcomes" firsthand when the governance system -- novel as it might appear from a distance -- has foundations in violent suppression of individual freedom.

>>npongr+6j
Are you sure you're not experiencing it right now? There aren't many countries that weren't founded on violent suppression of individual freedom - either through war, (probably with compulsory conscription), occupation, or a low-freedom society like feudalism or tribalism.

When you say individual freedom, I think you really mean individual political freedom. Excluding Xinjian, China has probably more freedom in day-to-day life for individuals than, say, America because it has less violent crime, less imprisonment, and lower regulatory barriers to doing business. It might be that it can only achieve these good things by restricting political freedom.

Even when they do restrict individual freedom, like with the one child policy, and internal travel restrictions, that has the aim of making the overall society better. There's a trade-off between individual freedom and survival and growth of the society. Too much freedom is anarchy and too little is totalitarianism. Where is the sweet spot?