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Kouros's avatar

The US has absolutely no problem with corruption, internally (which is perfectly legalized and with recent changes in laws, impossible to challenge in courts due to the the language inserted in laws) and especially externally.

US had absolutely no problem with the massive corruption and the innordinate outflows of money from Russia prior to Putin and from China prior to Xi Jinping. However, when they started tackling corruption, they suddenly became autocrats.

Here is a different perspective on the corruption in China, where people still celebrate the act of protest of a bureaucrat from hundreds of years ago, who committed suicide to make a point: https://www.unz.com/article/corruption-in-china/

Hong Kong IS Chinese territory and this is undisputable. The protests from a couple of years ago weren't for democracy but as a refusal to be incorporated into One China system, from a security and safety perspective, which was supposed to happen soon after 1997.

The corrupt administration in HK, who still serves the tycoons, is well and hearty, haven't been touched by Beijing.

As for the representative democracies, the question is, who do they represent? Obviously not the public: https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/predicting-united-states-policy-outcomes-with-random-forests

As in the US, the same in the rest. Living in the Anglosphere, I had my fair share of dealings with the government and its issues, from inside and outside. My polity definitely did not have a law abiding government or parliament, last time I checked. I lost my war with them but I managed a victory: due to fortuitous circumstances (an existing scandal), I forced the Parliament to replace the existing corrupt Merit Commissioner. But I was the exception there...

I am not trying here to defend China as the perfect place. We are humans and thus imperfect. However, I cannot take the level of hypocrisy, self-righteousness and exceptionalism emanating from the west, which only pays lip service to identifying problems in its own political system and peddles its values as they were actually true in fact, and not some normative things that nobody cares about in practice.

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Kouros's avatar

I find the analysis biased in a particular sense. Why is China described as ideologically inflexible when the US is the one that is inflexible from an ideological perspective? Why use the term Xi regime when Xi administration would be more appropriate? We don't see mentions of Biden or Obama regime...

Truth be told, US presidents do not matter in a Plutocratic regime like the US has (as solidly demonstrated by academic research) where pragmatism, as Mr. Tooze sees it is in fact the "Go die" dictum used by Lambert at Naked Capitalism.

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