The rotten CHICOMS are monitoring all in Beijing and if the sheep are bad then are punished. Also are embedding non-muslims with Muslim families. When will the masses rise up?
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell
Chinese have no respect for or laws to protect animal welfare which in practice means torture of animals is extremely common in China. Torturing animals is strongly associated with psychopathic and sociopathic behavior. It disturbs me to think of all the kids who walk down the street each day seeing street vendors slaughter animals in the slowest and cruelest ways imaginable. They need to realize this is barbaric and not going to let them enter the first world.
Were I to rise at all from financial obscurity in a place like China, the FIRST thing I'd do is make it known that I wanted to be a member of the Party.
China went from hating the wealthy to only hating the religious.
Communist membership in China is kind of equivalent to freemasonry in Britain. A networking club for those who feel they need to be able to connect with others behind the scenes. They are not confident enough in their abilities to be open about what they do and to get ahead based on that alone. Don’t know what the equivalent outfit might be in the US.
If there is any outrage, it is manufactured. Why, it'd be a surprise he wasn't!
Power and money go together no matter where you go. Capitalist, communist, socialist, whatever. It is a matter which leads which. The British doles out the OBE or what have you. America has the kitchen cabinet or FOB or whatever.
So Ma is a member of the CCP, what deal! Not!
1
What we call communism in China appears to me more like a unifed national policy to generate more employment and wealth creation in China. Policy is directed toward what is seen as good for all of China long-range, rather than toward what may improve short term profits for the few in the short-range.
The US has no official policy that mandates balanced foreign trade. We could, by granting $ trade credits to US exporters, that US importers must buy on a regulated exchange before releasing equivalent $ to pay for imports. We do not.
US-based companies give up their intellectual property rights by their own choice in China. They have no true need to manufacture in China for export to the US. They give in to such demands in the interest of short-term gain. The Chinese take advantage of such short-sighted weakness -- more like astute business people than like pie-in-the-sky Marxists.
1
Deng fomented a second Chinese revolution when he essentially repudiated Mao and embraced capitalism. Now the party is only Communist in name.
Very interesting posts from around the world.
It would appear that Mao's reign murdered more people than Hitler's reign.
Both men, IMHO, were evil, and yet we always seem to dwell more upon Hitler than Mao. Perhaps because Hitler was a European and Caucasian?
I do not know. Just asking the question.
4
The big question is whether Mr. Ma disclosed this on his US visa application? He owns a home in the US, therefore he must have a US visa.
2
The goal of the Republican Party is to remodel the United States based on a Sino-Russian model. And they are largely succeeding as the Democrats generally stand for nothing...except not being Republicans.
On Dec,1,2014, the highlights of my comment on the article
" Hong Kong Police drive out pro-democracy protesters in violent clashes" in The Guardian,UK becomes appropriate after four years to repeat today.
"When we make an in depth study of democracy and communism,the road of communism ends up in democracy. China's economic upheaval has changed its communism in certain areas, especially in global business,overseas employment,liberal western education to its students etc."
Now I prefer to describe China today as follows.
'Marxism was the era of Mao, Compromise between statism and privatization was the era of Den Xiaoping and Capitalism
in the bottle of Communism is the era of Xi to catapult the largest economy of the world by the second largest in 2018. Probably the post Xi era of China be a three dimensional democracy born out of Communism with the strength and weakness of the occidental democracy of America and its neighbor,India's oriental democracy.
Proletariat of the world unite!
1
This Christmas our family is participating in a CFZ- China Free Zone, for gift giving. We are buying local. Canadian made is first choice, but nothing from Communist China.
Will our choice have an impact? Perhaps not. Nevertheless, we do not wish to participate in the exploitation of under age Chinese children working for slave wages.
It is not that hard to say no to the communists.
5
The richest in the United States are fortunate to have two parties from which to choose...
4
And what party does billionaire Donald Trump belong to?
And the Koch brothers? And the Walmart family?
4
Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time
1
These wealthy property owners are communists in name only. In genuine communism, ownership of private property doesn't exist. It's a communal ideology in which everyone shares everything, so these folks are blatantly fake communists.
6
China is a rogue state with no concern for human rights, run by old men. We are not confronting them as we should because of political myopia. Many in this country falsely think Trump's outrageous behavior is on the same order of magnitude as the efforts by the Communists in China to destroy the ethnic identities of the Tibetans, Uyghurs, and indigenous Taiwanese, among other atrocities.
4
@Epistemology On judgment day, God will remember each one of the millions of innocents they slaughtered.
3
Don’t give Trump ideas or he will demand Republican Party cells in every business and appoint political officers to the military.
2
What I find interesting is the apparent collusion between Ma and the CPC to cloak his membership for what may be many years. What was the motivation for that?
Domestically, Ma has icon status, was he afraid to be tarnished by claims of 'guanxi'?
Or was the CPC willing to give him cover for Alibaba filings on foreign stock exchanges?
2
And in the USA the Koch brothers support any Republican candidate and the Republican Party. The Walmart family and heirs to the Walmart fortune spend millions every year to influence and boost conservative candidates, conservative causes and the Republican Party. And Bill Gates will fund whatever political Party - and the devil himself - if it benefits Bill Gates.
5
The NYT recently ran a very interesting article about how communist China adopted and adapted capitalism to its gain, and impressively so. They have bested us. We are no longer the superpower of the world.
4
While openly oppressive, the CCP often acts to the benefit of the population. Zheng Xiaoyu , head of State Food and Drug Administration (FDA equivalent) was sentenced to death for bribery. Pharmaceutical companies covering 98% of USA market were all convicted of criminal conduct in a 20 year period. Twice. Nobody went to jail. China, like all communist countries, has death penalty for economic crimes. In Western democracies (except Iceland) no bankers went to jail after 2008. Liberalism was turbo-charged after the French Revolution. It took almost 200 years before liberals enmeshed in the money/power structure of Western democracies. The rise of nationalism shows that significant portion of voters would rather revert to Nation State era than put up with the institutionalized corruption cemented through organized lobbying. If the next stage will be a further regression - along the lines of Feudalism - or another liberal movement cannot be predicted. But it is certain that communism and capitalism will be "consigned to the ash heap of history" (Ronald Reagan 1982, Yuri Andropov 1983).
I suspect he became a member very recently, after Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.
3
Having lived a year in Beijing...I’m not surprised at all.
1
So now we know why Jack Ma “retired” from Alibaba.
3
Jack Ma is one of many Communist entrepreneurs. Lei Jun of Xiaomi and Ren Zhenfei of Huawei are prominent ‘Maoist entrepreneurs’.
Liu Qiangdong, founder of e-commerce giant JD.com, even claimed that robots would make Communism possible in one generation if the government nationalized all companies and redistributed the wealth.
A Harvard study found, “All but one of fifteen CEOs we interviewed told us they often turned to Mao’s teachings for management ideas”.
4
Money is the strongest ideology in the history of man.
10
Most of the CCP members are in diligent pursuit of money, which
is fine, just like most of us in the States. 99% no longer believe
in true Communism, and 90% don't bother to read Marx any more, which is fine too.
The question is then, why do they call their party the Communist
party? Would it be more accurate to say it is a Leading Party
or Power Party, and more honest too?
7
So should we admit the truth: that the "Party" is simply a racket for a self-anointed group to maintain political power at the expense of the country, the suppression of human rights, and the masquerade that somehow this clique represents the "People."
15
Consider a party in the USA that identifies itself as red, supports Russia and its ex-Communist dictators, is fervently supported by them to the point where Communist former KGB operatives try to foil our elections to help this party win power, says that it represents The People, and uses massive propaganda and controls its own media.
Communist Party?
Sorry, correct answer, the Republican Party.
3
@simon sez Oh, grow up, Simon. If you ever lived in a real communist state, you wouldn't pontificate such puerile pablum.
6
@JOHN How about YOU grow up, John. I too possess an ostentatious lexicological perspicacity, especially regarding sesquipedalianism, however, I for one — unlike you — am not apt to vaunt.
@Mark It looks as though you are the one who is pontificating such puerile pablum.
4
Jack Ma, the Chinese version of Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? What kind of Communist Chinese Party becomes now? A social and business club for elite and powerful Chinese people. The birth place for corrupted Chinese people and officials? Really sad for the millions of young Chinese dreamers sacrificed their live for the Chinese Communist revolution from 1921-1949.
The CCP was originally funded by Mao Zedong and 12 other young Chinese dreamers in Shanghai on July 1, 1921. By the time on Oct. 1, 1949, the founding day of PRC only Mao and another founding member still alive. Jack Ma and other new Chinese business and high tech elites now becoming the dominating forces in the Chinese society and CCP. This is may be the new beginning of the end of the CCP. It should be renamed the Chinese Capitalist Party, also CCP.
I witnessed the Sino-Japanese War from1937-1945 and Chinese Civil War from 1946-1949, it is difficult for me to believe this is happening. Zhou Enlai died in 1976, Mao died the same year, Deng Xiaoping, the economic reformer died in 1995. Is there any real CCP members left in China?
China is now the second powerful economy of the world. What America and Trump are going to do? The trade war can't continue forever. Is Jack Ma going to be next leader of China because he is still young and energic. A realist. Not a racist.
5
@Mclean4
Yeh that Mao, he was some hero wasn't he? The tens of millions who died under his idiotic reign might say otherwise. China is retracing his footsteps under Xi and the results are likely to be the same.
6
Greed, wealth, power knows no ideology but it's own. Anything can be rationalized and justified where the end justifies the means.
We see it everywhere.
5
For people who say that it is capitalism saves billions of people from abject poverty, you are erasing the economic accomplishments of other nations and people of color using capitalism. This is a practice of Western supremacy through erasure. Racism and Western-centrism are not justified because you are critiquing the Chinese. Human beings save human beings. There are many nations that adopt capitalism as an idea but fail to save people from abject situations.
1
Do they have a Republican Party?
Orwell said it best in his prophetic "1984". All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. The CCCP has long abandoned its pretense to be the vanguard of the working class in China, unless one defines that working class as being a minority who is very well off indeed. However, calling itself a communist party readily provides the ideological framework for an authoritarian rule of the self-selected few over the many, and can also capture at least some of the idealistic young people who often are the ones upset by the enormous differences between the few very rich and the many very poor. We here in the US often don't know that hundreds of millions of people in China still live (really, barely survive) on a few dollars a day, all while a select few like Jack Ma amass billions, which those chosen ones then try to squirrel away to safe havens outside China as soon as the opportunity arises. I believe that the biggest threat to the CCCP would be an actual socialist or communist movement, and that is why they won't allow that to happen.
11
@Pete in Downtown
Two words: Animal Farm
1
@Pete in Downtown@JOHNAt the expense of the country? Sometime between 2020-2025 every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care. On that day there will be more suicides and executions, and more homeless, poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.
By 2021, 450,000,000 urban Chinese will have more net worth and disposable income than the average American, their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years ahead of–and outlive–American kids.
That was "Animal Farm" not "1984".
At least he doesn't belong to the Republican party.
9
@tom Why would they want him ?
This is an uninformative bit of Western self-comfort. What do you tell us about the CCP? It is an elite club of power brokers “eager to prove its legitimacy by affiliating itself with capitalist success stories.” Nonsense. The elite Western view of China is simply the mirroring of its own values onto the Chinese: “Why would I join the CCP? To further my own selfish ends. Surely that is what they are doing too.”
The CCP has not “veered away from its communist roots.” It has learned. Learning is a basic principle of the CCP going back to Mao who criticized dogmatism and to Deng who said, “Seek truth from fact.” The NYT might try that themselves. Look to the actual activity of CCP members. For example, they work in large numbers in the poor remote places of China, finding solutions for rural poverty. They have been very successful, transforming lives. It is long hard work and involves no “elite power brokering.”
2
@stonetrouble
Are you for real? Yes, there are those who join the communist party out of ideology, the same was true in the old USSR, there were people who cared about the illiteracy in both countries, and who really saw communism as a 'government of the people'. However, that doesn't apply necessarily to the leaders of the party or the people we are talking about. China is not a communist system economically, it is a dictatorship where the government is the 'silent partner' of almost every business in the country, and it has nothing to do with ideology. In China, some of the richest people are members of the government and the communist party leadership, who have created no companies or products. Jack Ma and others know that if they didn't join the communist party (and through that, give 'their cut' to the leaders), the government would make sure their business failed and then ended up in the hands of 'sympathetic' interests. In return, Ma was allowed to run Ali Baba with no competition, since places like Amazon and the like are not allowed in China. Other business leaders were given plum 'joint contracts" with western companies and allowed to basically steal intellectual property at will. There is nothing 'western bias' in asking why a billionaire capitalist would join the party; it is because to not do so would be corporate suicide, pure and simple. Jack Ma isn't out to 'save China', he was out to make a lot of money for himself and his cronies.
9
Of course he's a member. Do you have any idea how many checks he's written to Generals and Party Chieftains? He's got bills to pay and greasing the skids is a big part of business in China.
9
Jack Ma being a member of CPC comes as no surprise. This is typical of single-party ruled countries and suits both sides. Having a 'business hero' in the party adds to CPC's legitimacy while the membership benefits Ma in myriad little ways. Big business anyway has to work closely with the state in any country, more so in China.
1
He was a member all along, otherwise his assets would’ve been seized a long time ago (or worse).
The same goes for all Chinese billionaires who haven’t defected.
4
I would put it a bit differently- if he weren't member all along, he would never have accrued his assets in the first place.
3
@Chris So much insight and wisdom!
@Chris In 1989, when the Communist Party allowed semi-free elections in Poland that produced a democratic Cabinet, the slogan was "Your President (Jaruzelski, the traitor who imposed martial law), Our Premier."
The slogan for China is "Your Economy, Our Politics." Go and get rich, make money, bring it to China. Just don't dare to have a voice in ruling your country.
3
I personally will never join the C party, as I cannot forgive the destruction to the culture the Party did to the country and people. We are still searching for our identity in a thicket of western consumerism, party doctrines, Buddhism, Confucian and Taoism. Also, I don’t need to as my livelihood doesn’t depend on the Party.
However, i learned from my niece who is 20 year old in a top university in China that the Party is extremely popular among the college students. Only the best of the best in the class can become a Party member. And the process to become one is lengthy, 2-3 years if one is lucky. She is in the process. I can somewhat understand her motivation, because the Party is striving to bring prosperity to everyone, and the young want to belong to the most advanced and powerful club. One of Xi’s goals is to eliminate extreme property by 2030, and Made in China by 2025. While American dream is an individual dream, the Chinese dream is a collective one. Jack Ma has achieved his individual dream. Being a party member will hopefully make him a bigger contributor to China’s collective dream.
9
If the Chinese dream is a collective dream, then why does corruption continue to plague economic performance? You can't get more individualistic than that.
Human nature is human nature. People are looking out for their own particularistic interests no matter their cultural background. Seems to me the whole collectivist argument is not much more than part of the campaign by China to appeal to its neighbors and the rest of the world, and to explain away its lack of freedom.
4
@FF Ren it’s a collective dream because in the USA we did the whole “chicken in every pot” about 90 years ago. China has a long, long way to go.
@FF Ren
Hong Kong bookstores...Fahrenheit 451
1
You could call it “Chinese Capitalist Party” or even “Chinese Methodist Party” and it would not matter. Back in the early 90’s, the Chinese leadership came to realize that power for power’s sake was far more important than any ideology. Embracing the capitalist way was the path of power, and they took it.
It’s not that different in Russia. Yedinaya Russia, the dominant ruling party there has no firm ideological platform besides a vague sense of nationalism and cult of personality around Putin.
Power is power. Ideology is just window dressing.
24
Just remember. The Communist Party has helped lift 800 MILLION Chinese out of abject poverty.
We are spoiled here in the West but if you had been in China in the 1990s and seen the shacks that most people lived in. And compared to now, you’d understand.
15
@Jay Lincoln Correction. Capitalism has helped lift 800 million Chinese and hundreds of millions of others worldwide out of abject poverty.
7
So, the Chinese communist party has traded freedom for economic development, at great human cost, but perhaps it's paid off pretty well so far. But to my inexpert eyes, they look pretty rickety, what with debt, and a weak banking system, and an export reliant growth model. I personally have my doubts as to whether a dirigiste regime can weather the twists and turns China will face ahead. Here's hoping I'm wrong, for the sake of human well being.
1
@Jay Lincoln actually Jay it was the foreign investment from the west that made that happen, it was just a coincidence that so and so was in power and we did to ensure that yet another nuclear power did not collapse like the USSR leaving nukes hanging around all over the place. ;)
3
Whenever I get discouraged by living in Trump's America, I cheer my self up by thinking, "at least I don't live in China." They're a mess!
3
Really? With the non stop wild fires in CA? Living in China is actually a lot of fun: rich culture, art, food, well maintained infrastructure, no excessive political correctness, no American style feminism, no hatred between liberals and conservatives, affordable health insurance and care, affordable education, no gun violence.
7
Well... Dont foget to mention the fatal smog going on in major cities of northern China, the intentional car cashing into innocent pedestrians, the citizens being held at "vocational schools," etc.
2
It's great fun as long as you don't feed your kid baby food with arsenic in it. Or get your house bulldozed so a party elite can get rich building a skyscraper. Or as long as you're not a Xuigur. or a Tibetan. Or a Hong Kong democracy advocate. Or a human rights lawyer. Or a rival to Xi. Or a baby girl. And of course you have to have an acceptable social profile. Etc.
5
Like the criminals in "communist" South American countries, the supposed political philosophy of the country is meaningless to the rich. The only people that point to communism being the reason for the failure of such countries are hardly deep thinkers.
1
The words lost their meaning in today’s post-post-modern world. Not that most people who belonged to any Communist Party ever and in any place understood what Karl Marx meant by it. It is not dissimilar with the Republican Party, the National Socialist Party, the Democratic Party, the Christian Democratic Party, the Justice and Development Party.
Just empty words.
Jack Ma belonging to the Communist Party is an insult to the bearded man who was born 200 years ago no matter what your political affiliations are.
2
The communist party in China believes in communism as much as the Republican party in the U.S. believes in democracy.
59
Jack Ma is, as the late Tom Lantos once described his business partner Yahoo Founder Jerry Yang, a "moral pygmy."
He did not even issue an apology when nonviolent dissidents were turned over by Yang and Ma's company--Yahoo China to the State who tortured them, and sentenced them to 10 years in a camp for writing about the anniversary of Tienanmen Square. At the time he said he was simply following the law and expressed no remorse in his company's role in turning them over to government officials.
Ma and Yang's cowardice was justly exposed by Lantos during Congressional hearings.
The fact that he is a member of the Chinese Communist Party is certainly no surprise--as in Russia working closely with their respective repressive governments is a prerequisite for billionaires.
What is a surprise is that Western business journalists simply overlook their past.
18
How could Ma not join the CPC? In China, there is no independent judiciary. Its 1% ultra rich is always at the mercy of CPC.
6
While openly oppressive, the CCP often acts to the benefit of the population. Zheng Xiaoyu , head of State Food and Drug Administration (FDA equivalent) was sentenced to death for bribery. Pharmaceutical companies covering 98% of USA market were all convicted of criminal conduct in a 20 year period. Twice. Nobody went to jail. China, like all communist countries, has death penalty for economic crimes. In Western democracies (except Iceland) no bankers went to jail after 2008. Liberalism was turbo-charged after the French Revolution. It took almost 200 years before liberals enmeshed in the money/power structure of Western democracies. The rise of nationalism shows that significant portion of voters would rather revert to Nation State era than put up with the institutionalized corruption cemented through organized lobbying. If the next stage will be a further regression - along the lines of Feudalism - or another liberal movement cannot be predicted. But it is certain that communism and capitalism will be "consigned to the ash heap of history" (Ronald Reagan 1982, Yuri Andropov 1983).
The China economic miracle is based on theft.
Like Russia, they use our greatest strengths - freedom and openness - against us. Hopefully this isn’t news to anyone in our government. But these days you never know.
29
@Bhj
"they" are being helped and have been since Nixon by those you seek to inform.
2
It is no surprise at all to finally find out that Ma is a communist party member, but it does not mean he is a communist or marxist. As the author suggests, the party itself is hardly marxist.
4
Meaning that Marx, Marxist, and Marxian are different notions for the CCP. The CCP uses these terms in compliance with the party's own best interests at any given time. So the CCP is neither socialist nor communist. Instead, they are more like act utilitarianists.
Let's remember that the Communist Party, Chinese-style, is more like the Skull and Bones Society than any communist party.
31
@Fourteen
C’mon, they cannot be as bad as that :-)
2