A long essay but an incredibly good one. Dan is able to communicate the thinking of the Chinese government.
Long but well worth reading to understand current events and how they might unfold - from Dan Wang:
2020 letter
I. Inspiration
It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to explore space. There are easier ways to extract minerals, doing anything at all is terribly expensive, and Mars is a hard place to make a living. The benefits of space exploration are instead mostly inspirational. Few other human activities are so grand to captivate the imagination, and doing these uneconomic projects have pulled forward technological capabilities that may otherwise have languished.
It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to practice socialism. Its historical results have ranged from catastrophic misallocation of talent at best to mass deaths at worst. But socialism still retains appeal to broad segments of many populations, which shows that it has considerable inspirational value. For better or for worse, there are still many advocates for the creation of some form of a more equal society.
This year, I read every issue of Qiushi (translation: Seeking Truth), the party’s flagship theory journal, whose core task is to spell out the evolving idea of socialism with Chinese characteristics. For those not familiar, Qiushi reads like a cross between the New Yorker and the Federal Register. Published twice a month, the magazine features lengthy essays, thick pages, and some of the finest writers in the party. Each issue starts in the same way: a reprint of a speech or essay by Xi Jinping—in a font distinct from the rest of the magazine’s—and then commentary and reports from the rest of the party state. Accompanying pictures feature either the country’s leaders making inspections, scenes of the people, or major pieces of infrastructure and heavy industry.
Its audience? People with nothing better to do than read the party center’s commentary (like retired cadres), or those who are keenly interested in Beijing’s priorities, like local officials. Reading party speeches with its various annexes and cross references echoes my main professional activity these days. That is the study of the US sanctions regime—namely Commerce’s Export Administration Regulations and Treasury’s IEEPA-based authorities. Party speeches and US regulations are both made up of arcane, formal language that make references to more obscure texts, which themselves hint at still more distant and terrible truths. US sanctions lawyers, I suspect, can have a splendid time with Qiushi.
Steady engagement with the journal throughout the year has forced me to think more deeply about the Chinese Communist Party. There are many things that Xi wants to do, I believe that his most fundamental goal is to make this Marxist-Leninist party an effective governing force for the present century. His patient work to reshape the bureaucracy are aided by a distinctive feature of the Chinese system: the use of propaganda to create centralized campaigns of inspiration. Some of Xi’s efforts have borne fruit: the country’s governance capabilities have markedly improved, a trend that is observable in daily life. At the same time, the state has grown much more repressive. A focus on repression shouldn’t neglect the improvement in the country’s institutional and commercial strengths; and appreciation of this improvement ought to be tempered by the party center’s growing mania for control.
And this is barely scratching the surface. The English Language website of Qiushi can be found here: CPC Central Committee Bimonthly - Qiushi
I would expect that this version has been someone "laundered" for Western sensibilities.
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