Chinese economist Zhu Hengpeng disappeared after criticizing Xi Jinping, the WSJ reported. He reportedly made comments on China's sluggish economy.
A top economist has joined the growing list of China's elite to have disappeared from public life after criticizing Xi Jinping, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zhu Hengpeng served as deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for around a decade.
CASS is a state research think tank that reports directly to China's cabinet. Chen Daoyin, a former associate professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, described it as a "body to formulate party ideology to support the leadership."
According to the Journal, the 55-year-old disappeared shortly after remarking on China's sluggish economy and criticizing Xi's leadership in a private group on WeChat.
Lots of people, especially the Chinese. The sentiment about work, investment, economic prospects, consumption are all quite bad. The central bank is cutting rates. Just today the government dipped their toes into the helicopter money game. The only thing keeping the party going is exports
I had the most hilarious discussion with a Tankie about China a while back. They refused to accept that China is pretty much communist in name only. I pointed out that they had billionaires, privately-owned companies, a stock exchange and private property, meaning you can earn capital in China.
The Tankie actually said something on the lines of, "If you would JUST READ MARX you would know that earning capital is a fundamental cornerstone of communism!"
The Tankie actually said something on the lines of, "If you would JUST READ MARX you would know that earning capital is a fundamental cornerstone of communism!"
I'm a communist who doesn't want to call China a communist country, so I don't really agree with the person that you were talking to, but your second paragraph does show you haven't researched communism or its history. The debate of whether societies need to undergo capitalist capital accumulation first to enter communism is about as old as communism, and the history of communism is full of examples of this. It's the ideological reason why the Russian Socialist Democratic Labor Party split into two wings: the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, the former believing that the Russian Empire had to undergo capitalism first in other to become communist, and the latter wanting to implement socialism to the primitive almost feudalist Russian empire. Some similar split happened more discreetly inside the Communist Party of China, with Mao implementing socialism directly to the extremely underdeveloped Chinese society, and later Deng Xiaoping opting for the more market-socialism (known now to many as "socialism with Chinese characteristics).
So you may or may not agree whether china is communist, but from your comment it's clear that you're very oblivious to the historical and ideological reasons for the argument as to whether china is or isn't a socialist country and whether they're on the path to it. It's good to discuss things and to have opinions, but please get informed before dismissing other people's opinions on topics they've probably dedicated more time than you to studying.
I mean you can still have private property under communism, it's the capital making property that's more owned by the workers themselves, but you can still own things under communism.
Similarly, you can earn capital under communism too, it's just that the tools for earning said capital aren't owned by corporations under corporations under CEOs under the 1%. It's not a cornerstone for sure, but it's not like communism is anti capital and growth and owning things
I mean, you definitely should read Marx. China is Socialist, guided by a Communist Party. It hasn't reached Communism, and when they tried to jump to Communism under Mao and the later Gang of Four, they ran into massive issues because the Means of Production weren't developed enough.
Marx maintains that the next Mode of Production emerges from the previous, dialectically. That doesn't mean China needed to let Billionaires run rampant, doing whatever they want, it means that it was the correct gamble to heavily industrialize and interlock itself with the global economy while maintaining State Supremacy over Capital, focusing more than anything on developing the productive forces.
Like it or not, the USSR largely collapsed due to trying to stay isolated from the West, which legitimately led to dissatisfaction towards the lack of consumer goods. They had strong safety nets and all the necessities they needed, but lacked the fun toys (to simplify a multi-faceted issue, along with increased liberalization and betrayals from Gorbachev). The PRC watched this in real time, and didn't want to repeat it.
In that manner, the PRC is Socialist. It maintains a Dictatorship of the Proletariat over Capital, Billionaires fear persecution, state ownership is high and growing, the Proletariat's real purchasing power is growing. The bourgeoisie exists, but has been kept no larger than can be drowned in a bathtub, in terms of power relation to the CPC, so to speak.
There is risk of Capitalist roading, and the bourgeoisie wresting control from the CPC. This risk is real, and is dangerous, but it hasn't happened yet. Wealth disparity is rising, so we must keep a careful eye on it.
The greatest analytical tool of a Marxist is Dialectical Materialism. When analyzing something, it isn't sufficient to take a present-day snapshot, you must consider its history, its relations to other entities, its contradictions, and its trajectory. Engels was a Capitalist, was Marx hypocritical for keeping Engels as his closest friend and ally? No. Class reductionism is dogmatic, we must analyze correctly.
America doing ‘bad stuff’ is a comical understatement. Sure, the genocide of native Americans and chattel slavery is “bad”, but it is probably worse than general authoritarian actions. You seem to have them the other way around, or at least imply that.
Both suck. Both have superiority complexes. I have to deal with American superiority complexes, so that paints me as “pro China”.
Reminds me of the Clinton Death List, where anyone tangential to Bill and Hilary who had a bad turn was allegedly victimized to cover up an even more insidious crime.
The most ridiculous I have heard is that when I pointed out that people had to wait for years to get a car, and bread lines were common, I got told that the scarcity in communist states is by design.
SuRe yOu lIvE iN tHe CoUnTrYsIdE, bUt YoU dOn'T nEeD a CaR. JuSt WaLk oR gEt A bUgGy.
Yeah over production of goods is a problem but the ussr was built different. Hungary(where im from) has the second best land for agriculture in all of europe only after ukraine and somehow we still had food rations. Same in ukraine too. They had it even worse.
when I pointed out that people had to wait for years to get a car, and bread lines were common
Breadlines weren't common. Breadlines never took place in the USSR between WW2 ending and Perestroika taking place, you're being ahistorical. Food supply wasn't secure for all the population in any nation until the green revolution, the USSR being no exception to that.
Regarding waiting for a car, the soviet economy simply didn't prioritize car manufacturing. The planning didn't intend for every citizen to have a car in the 70s or 80s, they didn't intend to make so many cars, so naturally, the people who had the wealth to buy a car, had to wait in waiting lists to get one, it's not so hard to understand. There are no waiting lists in capitalism because you can segregate 99% of the population from consuming a particular good simply by making it expensive. In socialism, when you don't have extreme inequality, most people will have access to purchase power for the vast majority of goods you produce. This in turn means that either you manufacture literally from the start one product for every citizen, or there will be waiting lists, it's really as simple as that.
When you can't afford a house in capitalism until you're 35 (if you can ever afford it) you aren't technically in a waiting list, so even if there's only new housing for 5% of the population every year, there will be no "waiting list" because simply the prices will go up until only 5% can afford it. In socialism, the same 5% of housing can be afforded by 50% of people, so the way to allocate the goods is a waiting list instead of priority through wealth accumulation.
I'm sure everyone else who works there will make sure to be completely honest with their findings going forward, regardless of how it might make the Party look.
I'd prefer to redirect them to the north. Let them invade the fertile and undeveloped lands russia has neglected, and get back Yongmingcheng. It beats fighting every other country in the pacific - aside from North Korea.
Western media talking about "disappearances" is always the funniest thing to me. If somebody just goes like a week without appearing on TV, they can say they "disappeared," and the audience will immediately assume that they're in some black site with a bag over their head. If they show up the next week and tell everyone they're fine, then they have plausible deniability since they never actually said anything bad happened to them. Of course, then you've got your audience primed to believe that something's up and can write another headline like, "Questions remain regarding the disappearance of so-and-so." Once you get a name trending, it doesn't matter what the facts are.
I remember coming under fire from an irl friend over the "disappearance" of tennis player Peng Shuai... until she reappeared, and the International Olympic Committee confirmed that she was perfectly fine. The only evidence that anything bad had happened to her was the lack of a public appearance, but then, after making public appearances, the story didn't die, instead each new appearance simply gave the media more to talk about, keeping it in the public consciousness and always insisting that "questions remain."
Of course, that's not even mentioning all the times the media doesn't just claim a "disappearance" but just outright lies about these things. If Business Insider can't even muster up a "detained," it's pretty safe to assume it doesn't mean anything. And of course, if someone says anything critical of the government, then they are immediately absolved of any and all suspicion of having committed actual crimes - absolutely zero investigation into the charges of corruption is needed for everyone to conclude with 100% certainty that they're trumped up.
I can't wait to see how many downvotes I can get lmao.
People in China say something the government doesn't like and aren't heard from at all for a while, you really think they can say that something bad happened to them when they reappear?
We're really entering into conspiracy theory territory here. Imagine if I monitored every public figure in the US and whenever one of them didn't appear in public for a while, I automatically assumed that they had been abducted by the NSA, and when they later showed up and were fine, I concluded that the only reason they weren't talking about it was because the NSA was holding their family hostage or something. Do you need any actual evidence to make conclusions like that, and is there any form of evidence that could possibly falsify such conclusions?
It's impossible to account for ever minute of every person's life so it's always theoretically possible that any time someone doesn't have an alibi, it means that they're being held in detention where they are also sworn to secrecy about being held in detention - but just because it's theoretically possible doesn't make it a reasonable assumption.
What i find interesting is that youre so quick to criticise "the west" but when its china there is always a way out. Where you fail is you are extremely one sided while on lemmy most people i see are pretty critical of the US, china and every other entity that does a bad thing. If china does something bad, you try to explain why its actually good but when the eu wants to do some shitty thing, lemmy actually wants to change that instead of just mindlessly criticising or endorsing it.
I'm happy to criticize China on its actual faults, but I'm not going to jump to conclusions based on inadequate or inaccurate information. The standard for evidence is much lower when it comes to criticizing China, most of the media we consume comes from Western sources, and people just don't have firsthand experience and will believe just about anything, and so I may push back more simply because there is more bullshit to push back on.
You accuse me of "mindlessly endorsing" everything they do, but there is stuff I criticize and when I don't, I explain my reasons quite thoughtfully. What I don't do is mindlessly criticize everything they do (or are accused of doing, or assumed to be doing, without evidence) which is pretty much the standard that people expect from me. There's countless accounts on here that only ever criticize China and do so without providing explanations or justifications for it. They don't even come up with any original quips, it's all just lazily repeating "haha Winnie the Pooh" to each other with zero thought or analysis. Generally, these people could only name one or two events from Chinese history, and have no interest whatsoever in learning about or understanding their perspective, which makes having an intelligent discussion on the subject impossible.
I try to take such claims seriously and I think we all should, just in case there’s any truth to them and someone is actually kidnapped. Of course knowing that they may not have been. Flagging certain individuals as potentially at risk isn’t wrong per se. But I get your point about how it is a relatively easy claim to make and exploitable politically. Still, I think it should be taken seriously, just in case.
That's perfectly fine, I just think it's important to treat claims critically, and to understand what it actually means to say that someone has "disappeared" in this context - it doesn't mean that their friends or family have reported them missing, it doesn't mean that a reporter has checked their house and found it abandoned, it just means that they haven't been on TV, and it requires a lot of assumptions on the part of the audience to conclude from that that they've been kidnapped or extrajudicially detained.