> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
I lived in China for years and am pretty well versed in life there under Xi and how the "rule of law" actually works there.
> unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age
I left China in 2017 so it's _possible_ that things have dramatically changed since then, but from all accounts it hasn't. So it's not ironic because everything still runs on guanxi rather than on the rule of law.
I've heard the explanation of "planned corruption" from two different upper class Chinese people.
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.