Seeing Like a Finite State Machine

There’s a lot of vague and unsupported supposition going on here and some very non-socialist thinking being applied to some important social problems. Some points about the things discussed above.

On Social Credit Scores (SCS):
1. if you want to see a social credit score in action, watch the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Every society has informal social networks and power relations, and it is a given of socialist thought (dating back to the 1970s) that we should find ways to weaken these or make them explicit. Putting a credit score on these social relations serves to bring them into the light of day and to make them modifiable. It is a socialist act to undermine these informal power networks. The fact that it (apparently!) is being done with a scoring system might be an interesting insight into the technocratic nature of Chinese communism, but given the ease with which east Asian cultures attach names to and formulate social relations explicitly, it could just be an Asian thing. It’s certainly not on its face a bad thing.
2. To follow this up, all western societies have credit scoring systems that are invidious and extremely hard for poor people to avoid or beat. They’re also formalized and scored. It’s much easier for a poor person to have a good SCS than a good financial credit score, of which poor people run afoul all the time. China also has financial credit scores. It could be interesting to ask questions about why a communist country has extended this to social credit, but again it could be reflective of a genuine commitment to socialist ideals. No one here seems to have thought about whether SCS is socialist or authoritarian.
3. If you live in a poor community in Australia or the UK you are almost certainly crying out for implementation of some form of SCS. Poverty-stricken areas in the west are riddled with minor forms of anti-social crime that are inimical to the enjoyment of ordinary social life and potentially dangerous (nuisance fires and traffic interference in particular). The much-maligned system of ASBOs in the UK (which was not so much maligned by people who lived on housing estates around anti-social behavior) is a good example of a nascent SCS in the west. One could ask whether China’s SCS is inferior or superior to slapping criminal orders on people, but to do so one would need to be bearing in mind that the west should be treated as a comparator to the east, not a superior model of development (which you guys are doing). Also, most of you have never been near a poor neighbourhood and don’t know what happens in them, or what the lives of poor westerners are like, so probably the need for a SCS, and the similarities with (or even existence of) ASBOs and “broken windows” policing probably escaped you.
4. I have never met a Chinese person who even knows what a SCS is, or cares about their own, and I think it’s all vapourware bullshit being floated by anti-China wankers in think tanks. I’ve heard extensive complaints about Xi’s red app but nothing about SCS.

On Hong Kong:
1. Ben Marshall talks of police violence and very carefully avoids reference to the explicit examples I give of anti-chinese violence (and makes the facile point that HK and mainland Chinese are the same race so it can’t be racism anyway). There is ample evidence of the violence and racism of this movement. They call mainlanders cockroaches (and have done since 2014), they set one on fire for disagreeing with them, and then sent video of the event to his wife with gloating messages. They killed a mainland Chinese man with a brick. There are many videos of them attacking young mainland Chinese women. When you see a video of a group of demonstrators beating a young woman with iron bars, or slapping a girl repeatedly in the face because she refuses to reject the One China Policy on film, do you think “oh these are definitely people whose politics I can get behind”? This would be the first movement in history that people support having seen (or I guess in most people’s case here, been told of) this kind of violence. What are you thinking? Is this socialism?
2. The original goal of the antiElab movement was to maintain HK’s position as a haven for criminals and tax evaders. The law they originally objected to was passed to enable extradition of a man who murdered his girlfriend. The movement explicitly rejects holding murderers to account, and wants to ensure that HK remains a tax haven. When it won that fight it moved on to open street violence against mainland Chinese, to the extent that students had to be evacuated by boat. If you don’t think that’s fascist – a movement to maintain a criminal tax haven where people from a different country can be violently attacked and murdered in the streets with impunity – you either know nothing about this movement or you have no socialist or left wing ideals in you at all.
3. If the same movement had been active in any western city the police would have killed many by now. We can test this though, can’t we! Because about a score of gilet jaunes have been killed by French police in the same time frame. The gilet jaunes are much loved around here but strangely we don’t see a comparison of police violence in “authoritarian” China with “free” France, because you aren’t treating the west as a comparator to Asia, but as its moral superior.

Regarding Uighur and Face recognition:
1. I don’t think anyone commenting here can read Chinese, let alone speak it. I can’t but I can read Japanese, which was enough to do a search for 民族 in the documents Pinboard linked to and see exactly how prominent the Uighur are in them (not very), and to identify a few text chunks to translate. I would have thought given the geopolitical circumstances it might be a good idea to check the sources used by a guy called “Pinboard” who today tweeted that there is no party in the UK opposing Brexit (a real deep thinker, eh?) This is an academic blog, people should check sources and know when they’re out of their depth.
2. I haven’t, contra Ben Marshall, been denying the internment of Uighurs. I have been denying certain claims about the process of oppression there, in particular the role of facial recognition software and the technology used. Most technology used to support the security state in China is human beings doing boring leg work. You would know this if you had spent any time there. If you had visited China you would know that they don’t use facial recognition for border security the way Oz and the UK do. If you had bothered to investigate any of the lies and smears being spread by “china experts” in the past few years you might also know that the “organ harvesting” thing is completely being misrepresented.
3. On my blog I didn’t do any whataboutery on Uighur vs. Australia (thank you MFB). I simply responded to a commenter saying China is “particularly tyrannical and cruel”. The blogpost that Henry refers to was about a vision for a left-wing, independent Hong Kong but was derailed by exactly this kind of discussion.

About Xi losing control of the provinces:
I have already pointed out that John Quiggin’s evidence for this is happening in his own country. This idea that China is in decay or falling apart, that the provinces are out of control – it’s utterly fanciful bullshit.

Also, Steve Bannon is rich and has always been rich, and the idea that he brought down American politics to get back at the people he’s been mates with for 50 years is just so stupid that I can’t even. I just can’t even.

Henry wants to make some points about the role of technology, AI and machine learning in authoritarian states, and I think it’s reasonable to point out that when you do this you need to:
a) Know something about what tech is actually being used in those states, and how their security system works, and
b) Be actually willing to compare them with democratic states, rather than just assuming (as almost everyone here is doing) that the democratic states don’t do concentration camps, extra-judicial murder, tech-based surveillance, arbitrary detention, and social management systems.

So again I ask people to have some suspicion about sources, respect the limits of your own knowledge, and stop treating China as some monolithic monster and the west as a paragon of freedom. I would bet no one commenting here has met a Uighur person, or indeed any Chinese minority; hasn’t ever met someone from the party; hasn’t worked with mainland Chinese on the mainland; has never lived in China; has never dealt with government officials; doesn’t know much about east Asian cultures; can’t read or speak any language from the region; and doesn’t have friends from that country. My god I bet none of you even have a Tik Tok account! You might want to bear in mind that it’s just possible that you don’t know much.

You need to decolonize your minds. You need to stop treating low-income countries and Asian countries as inferior shitholes that have to look up to us, and you need to stop thinking that the west is a paragon of freedom or some morally superior place that Asians need to look to for freedom and a better life. Once you have done that you might start to understand that there are alternative systems growing out here in Asia, one-party states and authoritarian states, and you need to deal with them, because the future is over here, and either you learn to think about it clearly or you get left behind by it. And more importantly, you’re dropping your left wing principles and turning into right wing nutjobs and fascists every time you try to talk about a country you clearly know nothing about. This is an academic blog for left wing people, and when China gets invoked you become right wing non-academics. It’s time, as Mao might say, for a little critical self-reflection!

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