ForeignAffairsMag在2021-07-26~2021-08-01的言论
- 19: The Age of Zombie Democracies: Why Autocrats Are Abandoning Even the Pretense of Democratic Rituals, submitted on 2021-07-30 23:59:54+08:00.
- 20: China’s Sputnik Moment? How Washington Boosted Beijing’s Quest for Tech Dominance, submitted on 2021-07-31 00:23:15+08:00.
19: The Age of Zombie Democracies: Why Autocrats Are Abandoning Even the Pretense of Democratic Rituals, submitted on 2021-07-30 23:59:54+08:00.
—– 19.1 —–2021-07-31 00:01:10+08:00:
[SS from the article by Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch.]
Traditional dictatorships make no pretense of democracy. The Saudi and Emirati monarchies don’t even bother to hold direct national elections. Nor does the Chinese Communist Party; its kin in Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam; or the unapologetically authoritarian governments of post-Soviet Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Other authoritarian regimes, such as the military junta in Myanmar that has killed hundreds of protesters and imprisoned thousands more since it seized power in February, have overthrown elected governments and dispensed with democracy altogether.
But in a growing number of countries, governments have cloaked their autocratic rule in the garb of democracy—only to strip away this thin disguise to the point of risibility in recent years.
20: China’s Sputnik Moment? How Washington Boosted Beijing’s Quest for Tech Dominance, submitted on 2021-07-31 00:23:15+08:00.
—– 20.1 —–2021-07-31 00:24:32+08:00:
[SS by Dan Wang, a Shanghai-based Technology Analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics.]
The Chinese government has long had twin ambitions for industrial policy: to be more economically self-sufficient and to achieve technological greatness. For the most part, it has relied on government ministries and state-owned enterprises to pursue these goals, and for the most part, it has come up short. In semiconductor production, for example, China has barely crossed the starting line. Rather, China’s private entrepreneurial firms have driven the bulk of the country’s technological success, even though their interests have not always aligned with the state’s goal of strengthening domestic technology. Beijing has, for example, recently begun cracking down on certain consumer Internet companies and online education firms, in part to redirect the country’s efforts towards other strategic technologies such as computer chips. This has meant that China’s most impressive technological achievements—building state-of-the-art capabilities in renewable energy, consumer Internet services, electronics, and industrial equipment—have as often been driven in spite of state interference as they have because of it.
Then came U.S. President Donald Trump. By sanctioning entrepreneurial Chinese companies, he forced them to stop relying on U.S. technologies such as semiconductors. Now, most of them are trying to source domestic alternatives or design the necessary technologies themselves. In other words, Trump’s gambit accomplished what the Chinese government never could: aligning private companies’ incentives with the state’s goal of economic self-sufficiency.
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