Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Look according to western MSM and Dr Zenz these people are drugged by Chinese secret service and force to celebrate Eid
solarz
Brigadier
Look according to western MSM and Dr Zenz these people are drugged by Chinese secret service and force to celebrate Eid
Man, I've never seen so many dancing prisoners!
Thats the forced reeducation program administrated by Emperor Xi himself for you peasant!Man, I've never seen so many dancing prisoners!
They learned the dance moves in concentration camps!Man, I've never seen so many dancing prisoners!
One would not be allowed to fly a drone over the celebrating crowd in NZ because it would be considered an invasion on ones personal privacy.Man, I've never seen so many dancing prisoners!
(from broadsword at CDF)Look according to western MSM and Dr Zenz these people are drugged by Chinese secret service and force to celebrate Eid
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
The west is dismantling meritocracy in the name of ultra liberalism and advancing minority right. While China implementing "political meritocracy" for once Bloomberg has interesting op/ed. No wonder thing is going to the dog in the west. I think LKY got it right it is not democracy that lead to prosperity but meritocracy. And the tradition of honest scholar/official/gentlemen of the old where the smartest/richest from the clan lead the people.
The Chinese Communist Party claims that it is trying to create a system based on “political meritocracy,” with senior positions allocated not on the basis of Western ideas of democracy (which the elite associates with decadence) but with objective performance measures; it is certainly shifting its power base from the farm and the factory to the university and the office, routinely recruiting the brightest young students into its ranks. The party’s Organization Department acts as a giant human resources department keeping records on high-fliers across the country. Provincial governors and university presidents are evaluated on the basis of their success in hitting a number of targets. Perhaps all this is a contrived illusion to conceal the money-grubbing of a self-perpetuating clique. But the West should at least prepare itself for the possibility that, albeit messily, China is turning itself into a giant Singapore, determined to use meritocracy as a tool of growth and social progress.
This vision has not survived the passage of time. Far from becoming more democratic as they have joined the global economy, Russia and China have become more authoritarian (indeed, far from seeing liberalism flowing eastward, we have seen illiberalism flowing westward). And far from producing democracy and prosperity in the Middle East, neoconservative policies have produced bloody chaos. China has grown by about 10% a year for the past four decades. The democratic West has suffered from the worst economic crisis since World War II and a “great stagnation.” Countries as diverse as Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates have chosen authoritarian modernization over democracy.
There are many contingent reasons for this vast intellectual failure: Vladimir Putin’s seizure of power in Russia; the premature dismantling of the Baath regime in Iraq; America’s ideological and economic enthusiasm for granting mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. Still, one reason is more profound than all the others: The idea that there is a necessary relationship between democracy and growth rests on a false positive. The really robust relationship is between meritocracy and growth.
The West has thrived materially over the past century or so in large part because it managed to fuse democracy with meritocracy. America’s Founders understood that the reason for embracing democracy was not that it made us rich, but that it gave ordinary people a say in how their country was governed. They also understood that democracy could actually destroy prosperity if it wasn’t diluted with a degree of meritocracy. They built meritocratic restraints into the Constitution by giving senators six-year terms and giving Supreme Court justices jobs for life. They also put limits on the power of the state to interfere in the wider economy. One reason meritocracy flourished was that the U.S. made it easy for companies to claim limited liability without declaring an explicit public purpose. Another was that the U.S.’s lax immigration laws and vast territories attracted tens of millions of ambitious and energetic people from more crowded and tradition-bound societies.
Other Western countries pursued a similar policy of fusing meritocracy with democracy: France and Britain competed to produce the world’s most elite civil services, and the European Union imposed even more restraints on democratic overreach than the United States did. During the golden years of the 1980s and 1990s this formula worked because the democratic part of the formula generated political legitimacy and the meritocratic part generated good government and economic growth.
A cohort of rising powers are trying a different approach: linking meritocracy with autocracy of various degrees of hardness. Lee Kuan Yew recognized that the best way to enjoy Western levels of prosperity was not to introduce one-person-one vote but to borrow Western mechanisms such as an elite civil service, recruited through open competition and dedicated to corruption-free government, and graft it onto older Mandarin traditions of the rule of the scholar-bureaucrat. Since then a growing number of countries, led by mighty China, have tried to imitate his model.
The current attack on meritocracy is not just a threat to the prosperity of particular countries. It is a threat to the prosperity of the whole democratic world. Prosperity will increasingly be identified with top-down authoritarian regimes that make up for their failure to give their people a voice by giving them jobs and improving their welfare. Democratic countries in turn will be associated with economic stagnation, populist revolts and racial disharmony, as people try to get ahead in a low-growth environment by emphasizing their membership in defined groups rather than their individual merits.
The Chinese Communist Party claims that it is trying to create a system based on “political meritocracy,” with senior positions allocated not on the basis of Western ideas of democracy (which the elite associates with decadence) but with objective performance measures; it is certainly shifting its power base from the farm and the factory to the university and the office, routinely recruiting the brightest young students into its ranks. The party’s Organization Department acts as a giant human resources department keeping records on high-fliers across the country. Provincial governors and university presidents are evaluated on the basis of their success in hitting a number of targets. Perhaps all this is a contrived illusion to conceal the money-grubbing of a self-perpetuating clique. But the West should at least prepare itself for the possibility that, albeit messily, China is turning itself into a giant Singapore, determined to use meritocracy as a tool of growth and social progress.
A Case of Mistaken Identity
In the 1980s and 1990s, Western intellectuals convinced themselves that they had discovered a firm link between economic growth and democracy. Liberal democracies grew faster than other political systems, they argued, and fast growth led to democratic liberalism, in a self-reinforcing virtuous circle. This discovery created a period of near-Victorian evangelism, with policy makers welcoming China and Russia into the global order on the grounds that they would inevitably evolve into liberal democracies, and a group of neoconservatives even arguing in favor of “regime change” in the Middle East on the theory that democracy and prosperity would naturally replace the toppled regimes.This vision has not survived the passage of time. Far from becoming more democratic as they have joined the global economy, Russia and China have become more authoritarian (indeed, far from seeing liberalism flowing eastward, we have seen illiberalism flowing westward). And far from producing democracy and prosperity in the Middle East, neoconservative policies have produced bloody chaos. China has grown by about 10% a year for the past four decades. The democratic West has suffered from the worst economic crisis since World War II and a “great stagnation.” Countries as diverse as Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates have chosen authoritarian modernization over democracy.
There are many contingent reasons for this vast intellectual failure: Vladimir Putin’s seizure of power in Russia; the premature dismantling of the Baath regime in Iraq; America’s ideological and economic enthusiasm for granting mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them. Still, one reason is more profound than all the others: The idea that there is a necessary relationship between democracy and growth rests on a false positive. The really robust relationship is between meritocracy and growth.
The West has thrived materially over the past century or so in large part because it managed to fuse democracy with meritocracy. America’s Founders understood that the reason for embracing democracy was not that it made us rich, but that it gave ordinary people a say in how their country was governed. They also understood that democracy could actually destroy prosperity if it wasn’t diluted with a degree of meritocracy. They built meritocratic restraints into the Constitution by giving senators six-year terms and giving Supreme Court justices jobs for life. They also put limits on the power of the state to interfere in the wider economy. One reason meritocracy flourished was that the U.S. made it easy for companies to claim limited liability without declaring an explicit public purpose. Another was that the U.S.’s lax immigration laws and vast territories attracted tens of millions of ambitious and energetic people from more crowded and tradition-bound societies.
Other Western countries pursued a similar policy of fusing meritocracy with democracy: France and Britain competed to produce the world’s most elite civil services, and the European Union imposed even more restraints on democratic overreach than the United States did. During the golden years of the 1980s and 1990s this formula worked because the democratic part of the formula generated political legitimacy and the meritocratic part generated good government and economic growth.
A cohort of rising powers are trying a different approach: linking meritocracy with autocracy of various degrees of hardness. Lee Kuan Yew recognized that the best way to enjoy Western levels of prosperity was not to introduce one-person-one vote but to borrow Western mechanisms such as an elite civil service, recruited through open competition and dedicated to corruption-free government, and graft it onto older Mandarin traditions of the rule of the scholar-bureaucrat. Since then a growing number of countries, led by mighty China, have tried to imitate his model.
The current attack on meritocracy is not just a threat to the prosperity of particular countries. It is a threat to the prosperity of the whole democratic world. Prosperity will increasingly be identified with top-down authoritarian regimes that make up for their failure to give their people a voice by giving them jobs and improving their welfare. Democratic countries in turn will be associated with economic stagnation, populist revolts and racial disharmony, as people try to get ahead in a low-growth environment by emphasizing their membership in defined groups rather than their individual merits.