[extropy-chat] European Free State Project

[Charlie Stross]

On 22 Dec 2003, at 15:24, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>>
>> On a more serious note, what would you describe Hong Kong as?
>
> Considering the heavy handed things that have been going on in HK
> recently in terms of individual rights, it sure ain't what it used to
> be, and even that was lacking in areas. For me, at least. I think that
> people outside the US have a hard time grasping what some of us
> consider real freedom.

Hmm. Not sure what part of the news you're getting in the USA; when the 
party hacks tried to ram through a law restricting freedom of speech 
the resulting demonstrations were so big that they backed down hastily. 
Meanwhile, the income tax regime is way
lower than in the US (both in terms of the highest rate and the income 
level at which it cuts in), business regulations are less, and so on.

This gives the locals a huge amount of bargaining leverage with the 
Communist Party in Beijing, who are terrified of accidentally killing 
the golden-egg-laying goose, but it's the kind of bargaining that 
mostly goes on behind closed doors because nobody wants to lose face in 
public.

> Saw today that China's Communist Party is looking at approving an
> amendment to the constitution that protects private property as being
> co-equal to public property. So they've come half way. Wake me up when
> they finally admit that public property has no legitimacy whatsoever...

In your dreams. (But then again, that goes for most of the rest of the 
world, doesn't it?) What's most interesting seems to be the way that 
the CP has decided Hong Kong is the way they want the *entire* country 
to go, in the long term, and the way they're converging on the role of 
the former imperial bureaucracy rather than sticking to the ideological 
overlay bequeathed to them by Lenin and Mao.


-- Charlie