I don't know how idealistic and utopian you'd have to be to think that there wouldn't be corruption in communist parties and the governments of socialist nations.

You see a slow but steady stream of corruption cases coming out of countries like China and Vietnam.

What's most telling is that often the officials and party members who are found guilty of corruption are given extremely harsh sentences. China often hands down the death penalty for the most extreme cases of corruption, although in effect these are usually commuted to being life sentences in practice.

What you're approaching this article with is a one half of the unfalsifiable orthodoxy; if the Chinese government punishes cases of corruption within its ranks then it proves that their model has failed and the government is corrupt yet if there are no corruption cases against Chinese government officials then that's proof that the Chinese government is hiding its corrupt nature.

Of course there are going to be abuses of power and corruption within the government. That's what happens and nothing is going to change that fact.

What I'm more interested in is how an organisation works to prevent these corruption and abuses of power and what steps it takes to punish them when they are discovered.

[–] N1cknamed 1 points 2 years ago (35 children)

Is it idealistic? My country in western Europe is pretty corruption free as far as anyone can tell. Seems perfectly achievable to me.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 38 points 2 years ago (10 children)

Corruption-free is when you have a government that works hand in glove with corporations to protect their interests and you have a revolving door between politics and mahogany row.

Corruption-free is when most corruption has been legalised through regulatory capture.

Corruption-free is when your supranational organisation is opaque, anti-democratic, and riddled with lobbyists.

You're not really going to tell me that there aren't countless examples of government corruption in Western Europe that I could point to, are you?

Keep in mind that China's population is 1.4 billion. Whichever country you happen to live in, I can tell you right now that its population pales in comparison. Of course there are going to be cases of corruption when you have a population that large.

[–] N1cknamed 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

The EU is of course famous for not protecting consumer interests or regulating corporations. They never do such a thing.

Compared to the US, where the government does everything in its power to protect the status quo of the wealthy, or China, where the people can't even vote for, let alone criticize their own government, European countries seem to be making quite a good effort to accommodate the will of the common man.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 29 points 2 years ago (2 children)

That's a lot of whataboutism and goalpost-shifting that you're doing there. I never claimed that the EU doesn't ever pass consumer protection laws or that they never regulate corporations.

In fact, implicit in my argument about regulatory capture is the notion that there exists regulatory bodies who are performing the function of regulation of the market whose interests get perverted by the appointment of business people and executives, often from the exact same industries which said regulatory body oversees. So pointing out that regulatory bodies regulate in the EU is no more proof to the contrary of the existence of regulatory capture than using ice-skates on a hockey rink disproves the fact that ice-skates are designed for use on ice.

You must be pretty across China to be able to make a call like "let alone criticize their own government".

I take it that you don't consider the White Paper Protests to be criticisms of the Chinese government and its COVID policy for some reason? Have you just not looked into this protest or is there some other reason why it's not an example of Chinese citizens voicing criticisms of their government?

And as for elections, China has them. (Remind me again how people are elected to the European Commission, the Secretariat of the European Parliament, the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union, and the Committee of Permanent Representatives...)

[–] redtea@lemmygrad.ml 22 points 2 years ago

I hear you, I hear you, but does China even have changedotorg and fearless journalists willing to speak truths handed down by power?

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