Why do Russia and China still have authoritarian political systems?

[Hardkill]

I know that each of them are mainly stage Blue countries. However, why do these countries need strong autocrats if they are not poor or weak nations at all? They are after all the two most powerful countries in the world after the USA. Russia has the second most powerful military in the world and China has the third most powerful military in the world. Russia apparently has the 11th largest economy in the world and is ranked 6th in the world for GDP (PPP). China has the 2nd largest economy in the world and is ranked 1st in the world for GDP (PPP). Also, these countries have had some of the most brilliant intellectuals in history. According to wikipedia, Russia has actually been ranked as "very high" in the Human Development Index. 

So, why on earth are these countries still ruled by dictators? Why the hell is China still one of the most authoritarian countries in the world? Could it be that Russia and China have been lying about how successful their countries and that the living conditions of the vast majority of people in China and the vast majority of people in Russia are really not anywhere near as good as their respective leaders say they are? Could it also be possible that both Putin and Jinping have been lying about how powerful each of their militaries are?

[Hardkill]

Actually, after having rewatched Leo's vid on "How Society Evolves - Introducing The World Values Survey," I am now starting to understand why both Russia and China still have authoritarian regimes. It's because even though both of them have the 2nd and 3rd militaries in the world, have the 11th and 2nd largest economies in the world respectively, and have the 6th largest GDP (PPP) and the 1st largest GDP (PPP) in the world respectively, the GDP (nominal) per capita and GDP (PPP) per capita in each of those countries are much lower than any of westernized countries, island nations, city states, mini states, etc.. Also, both Russia and China are still behind all of the westernized societies with the regard to the secularization process.

[Roy]

Consider the collective trauma of tens of millions of your people dying to slaughter and starvation, and you can begin to appreciate the psyche of these cultures and regimes. It's no wonder they both developed corrupt authoritative political systems. It wasn't an accident, it was necessity.  It's not just something that can be evolved out of so quickly either, even with economic prosperity (Russia is actually a poor country btw).

WW2 and the Communist Revolutions shouldn't even be considered "history" yet. They happened still within a lifetime ago. My grandparents were both children in Germany when it was getting occupied towards the end of the war. My Opa told me he used to swim in rain-filled bomb craters with body parts floating beside him when he was 5 years old. And his father died serving in the Luftwaffe, probably bombing the same Russians we are talking about here.

There are probably people active on this forum that lived through Mao Zedong's China.

Human beings and the way they organize themselves is a complicated ordeal that can't be reduced to GDP or Military spending. Do not make the mistake of confusing power, influence, and wealth, for development and secularization. It's a naïve assumption that they ought to be correlated. 

Consider the radical possibility that maybe a lot of Chinese people actually like living in a dictatorship.

[Windappreciator]

@Roy

I'm sorry but this is misguided

When there is a credible threat, corruption is actually an obstacle and is taken out fast, because it hinders function and survival to overcome obstacles.

In any environment with an actual threat any corrupt person gets prisoned or killed asap, authoritarian or not.

it is because there is none and the necessary embrace of higher values is hindered is where corruption blooms

and there is no real outside threat neither for china nor russia to justify authritarianism at this point.

What is happening with china and russia is just plain old ego addiction.

People distribute pain to keep as many others as possible in lower states just so they don't have to change themselves by cultural pressure.

 

Edited December 18, 2021 by Windappreciator

[hyruga]

They have to be authoritarian. To control such large nations, they have to impose strict laws and rules. 

[DocWatts]

In the case of Russia specifically, economic imperialism by Western governments and multinational corporations bear at least some responsibility for the difficulties faced by the short lived Russian democracy that emerged during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The economic 'shock therapy' adopted in good faith by the naive and desperate Russian government at the behest of multinational corporations operating under the paradigm of neo-liberalism proceeded to economically devestate a stagnating country that just went through a major crisis.

This 'shock therapy' basically involved a rapid shift to neo-liberalism and free trade, and gave multinationals free reign to interfere with the development of a country whose best interests would have been better served by adopting a protectionist model until it was on a more equal footing with the West (similiar to how South Korea successfully developed in to an affluent country).

Granted this is far from the only reason why democracy proved unstable in post Soviet Russia, but the transition from a crumbling authoritarian system to a parliamentary democracy is already difficult enough without external actors being given a free reign to destabilize your country.

Edited December 20, 2021 by DocWatts

[silene]

4 hours ago, DocWatts said:

In the case of Russia specifically, economic imperialism by Western governments and corporations bears at least some responsibility for the difficulties faced by the short lived Russian democracy that emerged during the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The narrative I heard about this is that it was Russian oligarchs who bought up the state assets at cheap prices, under the govt of the ineffective alcoholic Boris Yeltsin who didn't stop it. Vladimir Putin later came along as a strong leader to bring the oligarchs under control, although he effectively became a govt oligarch himself. 

So what I don't understand is what involvement you're saying the Western govts & corporations had? 

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, silene said:

The narrative I heard about this is that it was Russian oligarchs who bought up the state assets at cheap prices, under the govt of the ineffective alcoholic Boris Yeltsin who didn't stop it. Vladimir Putin later came along as a strong leader to bring the oligarchs under control, although he effectively became a govt oligarch himself. 

So what I don't understand is what involvement you're saying the Western govts & corporations had? 

Naomi Klein wrote an entire book about this practice, but in short what happened in post Soviet Russia bears similarities to how Western countries acting at the behest of multinational corporations have opportunisticly taken advantage of crises to coerce nations in desperate financial and political circumstances.

This is done in order to push through pro-corporate policies such as Free Trade and Privatization, at the expense of the citizens of that country. It's a way of interfering with the internal development of other nations to make them more profitable environments for multinational corporations to operate in.

In Russia's case, the country was in terrible need of international assistance after the collapse of the Soviet Union. International aid was tied to accepting neoliberal market reforms that were primarily beneficial for multinational corporations, and further destabilized the country (something that both the Russian oligarchs and Putin took advantage of).

The country would have been far better off using protectionist policies to ease the transition to a market economy, similiar to what countries like South Korea used to achieve affluence 

That's of course not to excuse Russian leadership during this era, which had varying degrees of incompetence, corruption, and naivety at the proposed 'reforms' being suggested by Free Market think tanks and the international business community.

[Fleetinglife]

12 hours ago, DocWatts said:

That's of course not to excuse Russian leadership during this era, which had varying degrees of incompetence, corruption, and naivety at the proposed 'reforms' being suggested by Free Market think tanks and the international business community.

''In February 1992, Russia's vice president, Alexander Rutskoy denounced the Yeltsin program as "economic genocide."

The conflict escalated soon, however, with the parliament changing its prior decision to hold a referendum. Yeltsin, in turn, announced in a televised address to the nation on 20 March 1993, that he was going to assume certain "special powers" in order to implement his program of reforms. In response, the hastily called 9th Congress of People's Deputies attempted to remove Yeltsin from the presidency through impeachment on 26 March 1993. Yeltsin's opponents gathered more than 600 votes for impeachment but fell 72 votes short of the required two-thirds majority.

During the summer of 1993, a situation of dual power developed in Russia. From July, two separate administrations of the Chelyabinsk Oblast functioned side by side, after Yeltsin refused to accept the newly elected pro-parliament head of the region. The Supreme Soviet pursued its own foreign policies, passing a declaration on the status of Sevastopol. In August, a commentator reflected on the situation as follows: "The President issues decrees as if there were no Supreme Soviet, and the Supreme Soviet suspends decrees as if there were no President."

On 21 September 1993, in breach of the constitution, Yeltsin announced in a televised address his decision to disband the Supreme Soviet and Congress of People's Deputies by decree. In his address, Yeltsin declared his intent to rule by decree until the election of the new parliament and a referendum on a new constitution, triggering the constitutional crisis of October 1993. On the night after Yeltsin's televised address, the Supreme Soviet declared Yeltsin removed from the presidency for breaching the constitution, and Vice-President Alexander Rutskoy was sworn in as acting president.

Between 21 and 24 September, Yeltsin was confronted by popular unrest. Demonstrators protested the terrible living conditions under Yeltsin. Since 1989, GDP had declined by half. Corruption was rampant, violent crime was skyrocketing, medical services were collapsing, food and fuel were increasingly scarce and life expectancy was falling for all but a tiny handful of the population; moreover, Yeltsin was increasingly getting the blame. By early October, Yeltsin had secured the support of Russia's army and ministry of interior forces. In a massive show of force, Yeltsin called up tanks to shell the Russian White House (parliament building). The attack killed 187 people and wounded almost 500 others.

As the Supreme Soviet was dissolved, elections to the newly established parliament, the State Duma, were held in December 1993. Candidates associated with Yeltsin's economic policies were overwhelmed by a huge anti-Yeltsin vote, the bulk of which was divided between the Communist Party and ultra-nationalists. However, the referendum held at the same time approved the new constitution, which significantly expanded the powers of the president, giving Yeltsin the right to appoint the members of the government, to dismiss the Prime Minister , and, in some cases, to dissolve the Duma.''

''Some economists argue that in the 1990s, Russia suffered an economic downturn more severe than the United States or Germany had undergone six decades earlier in the Great Depression.''

Nolan, Peter (1995). China's Rise, Russia's Fall.

Edited December 21, 2021 by Fleetinglife

[DocWatts]

@Fleetinglife

 

Russia’ wasn’t a repeat of Chile – it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West.’

‘For the country’s oligarchs and foreign investors, only one cloud loomed on the horizon: Yeltsin’s plummeting popularity. The effects of the economic program were so brutal for the average Russian, and the progress was so self-evidently corrupt, that his approval ratings fell to single digits. If Yeltsin was pushed from office, whoever replaced him would likely put a halt to Russia’s adventure in extreme capitalism. Even more worrying for the oligarchs and the ‘reformers,’ there would be a strong case for renationalizing many of the assets that had been handed out under such unconstitutional political circumstances.'

‘By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia’s ‘economic reforms’ can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years.

‘The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired – but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s ‘savage and barbarous nations’ where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness.’

- Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine (2007)

Edited December 21, 2021 by DocWatts

[Fleetinglife]

2 hours ago, DocWatts said:

@Fleetinglife

 

Russia’ wasn’t a repeat of Chile – it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy, and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West.’

‘For the country’s oligarchs and foreign investors, only one cloud loomed on the horizon: Yeltsin’s plummeting popularity. The effects of the economic program were so brutal for the average Russian, and the progress was so self-evidently corrupt, that his approval ratings fell to single digits. If Yeltsin was pushed from office, whoever replaced him would likely put a halt to Russia’s adventure in extreme capitalism. Even more worrying for the oligarchs and the ‘reformers,’ there would be a strong case for renationalizing many of the assets that had been handed out under such unconstitutional political circumstances.'

‘By 1998, more than 80 percent of Russian farms had gone bankrupt, and roughly seventy thousand state factories had closed, creating an epidemic of unemployment. In 1989, before shock therapy, 2 million people in the Russian Federation were living in poverty, on less than $4 a day. By the time the shock therapists had administered their ‘bitter medicine’ in the mid-nineties, 74 million Russians were living below the poverty line, according to the World Bank. That means that Russia’s ‘economic reforms’ can claim credit for the impoverishment of 72 million people in only eight years.

‘The movement that Milton Friedman launched in the 1950s is best understood as an attempt by multinational capital to recapture the highly profitable, lawless frontier that Adam Smith, the intellectual forefather of today’s neoliberals, so admired – but with a twist. Rather than journeying through Smith’s ‘savage and barbarous nations’ where there was no Western law (no longer a practical option), this movement set out to systematically dismantle existing laws and regulations to re-create that earlier lawlessness.’

- Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine (2007)

Thanks for sharing highly insightful stuff from Klein worth picking up and reading as a whole.

Btw Chile just got a new left-leaning socialist president of Balkan Croatian descent  that swept away the old guard elite neoliberal conservatives in Chile that held power since the country introduced back democratic institutions and a new constitution shortly after Pinochet left in the '90s.

My father when he went to Canada at that time also knew a couple of his Serbian friends that visited Russia in that period for business reasons and investment purposes with a lot of scary anecdotes about the rampant crime, and widespread mafia controlled run cities, and orchestrated terror, violence, intimidation, racketeering, and blackmailing in open daylight in some cities against citizens, and even them as Slavic foreigners in night clubs and sometimes even broad daylight that came to visit from a different nation shielded and protected by the local oligarchs, where the police would just run from and pass by crime scenes and trouble if they knew it was from a certain shielded group they couldn't afford to touch.

 

Edited December 21, 2021 by Fleetinglife

[silene]

@DocWatts  Thanks for the reply. I can see how global corporations try to operate independently of national govt where they can, play them off against each other (eg shopping around for tax havens), and exploit weak and corrupt countries. What can be done about it, other than have strong, and to some extent authoritarian govt?

Strong govt is ok for us ordinary folks as long as it remains democratic and uncorrupt. But there seems to be an implication that it's those same strong, democratic and (relatively) uncorrupt countries which, through their freedoms, generate these global corporations, that go on to cause the problems elsewhere. Looks like a catch-22 and a difficult issue to solve. 

[DocWatts]

@silene It's a difficult problem to be sure, as the inventive structure of global capitalism rewards this sort of economic imperialism by giving a competitive advantage to nations and multinational corporations that are able to exploit developing countries in this way. Short of a transition to an economic system beyond capitalism (whatever that ultimately ends up being), the economic incentives to interfere with the internal development of other countries won't be going away anytime soon.

'Strong' authoritarian governments arguably make the problems of exploitation even worse for developing nations, as the public doesn't have any way to punish thier leaders for corruption and for selling off thier national assets to foreign enteties. At least in a democracy there's a mechanism that the public can use to weigh in on policy decisions (however imperfect that can be in practice).

If there's a silver lining, it's that international exploitation does become more difficult to sustain as first world nations develop up the spiral from SD-Orange to SD-Green, as Green is the first stage that where these types of exploitative practices start to become socially unacceptable.

Democratization efforts which bring public scrutiny to the clandestine efforts of multinational corporations, and regulations which limit thier ability to set national policy agendas is probably the best we can hope for under the prevailing socio-economic paradigm.

Edited December 22, 2021 by DocWatts

[silene]

@DocWatts  yes, I'd say SD orange in it's current form is becoming unsustainable. After only a couple of hundred years (a mere speck in the total history of humanity) the environmental impact and demographic trends make it clear to me that orange is already at or near its peak. 

Re the multinationals; we've had freedom of information for the public sector for decades now, how about extending that to large public companies? I guess the problem is, how to create a level playing field internationally. Govts will want to give competitive advantage to "their people". 

[Fleetinglife]

12 hours ago, DocWatts said:

international exploitation does become more difficult to sustain as first-world nations develop up the spiral from SD-Orange to SD-Green, as Green is the first stage that where these types of exploitative practices start to become socially unacceptable.

And as those exploited developing countries advance to solid Blue stage consciousness for the majority of the populace and their leaders to high Blue or Orange. It is easier to exploit more selfish, egocentric, divided, weak, fearful, and stupid people.

Edited December 22, 2021 by Fleetinglife

[DocWatts]

4 minutes ago, Fleetinglife said:

And as those exploited developing countries advance to solid Blue stage consciousness for the majority of the populace and their leaders to high Blue or Orange. It is easier to exploit more selfish, egocentric, divided, weak, fearful, and stupid people.

That brings to mind the way in which the British Empire was able to colonize and exploit a region as populated and geographically vast as India, by getting this 'divide and conquer' strategy down to a science. Exacerbate existing ethnic and cultural tensions by playing different groups against one another, thereby getting local leaders to become willing collaborators in the exploitation of thier own country.

Really it's not so different with how capitalism is able to keep the working classes divided today, by deliberate efforts to distract and egoicly flatter portions of the working class who feel threatened by evolving social norms.

[Hardkill]

So, then how come India has a democracy even though it's much poorer than both Russia and China, has much worse quality of infrastructure than both Russia and China, and have many more religious people in its country than both Russia and China have in each of their countries?

[silene]

@DocWatts  I was reading up recently on India, and the British takeover of India (from the Mughal empire don't forget, who had their own history of imperialism) was softened up by some of the earliest multi-national companies, first the Dutch East India company, then the British East India company who ended up as a paramilitary organisation with their own army. The profit was the motive before the colonisation. And yes the divides like Hindus vs Muslims, made it easier too. 

@Hardkill  Maybe because it used to be in the British Empire and adopted a lot of British legal system, education, administration etc (ok maybe the railways need updating a bit now) so was put into a democracy when we left. China's never been a democracy and Russia only since 1989.

 

Edited December 22, 2021 by silene

[Fleetinglife]

6 hours ago, DocWatts said:

Exacerbate existing ethnic and cultural tensions by playing different groups against one another, thereby getting local leaders to become willing collaborators in the exploitation of their own country.

Yup timeless old danger and tale by smart, educated, perfidious, and cunning minds, though as the saying goes when you spark fratricidal or ethnic conflicts that way you can't ''light up that fuse without an abundance of gunpowder laying already prior around it.'' That's why as Leo said Forgiveness is Key to breaking that Chain of Hurt.

''“The rich ruling class has used tribalism, a primitive caveman instinct, to their advantage since the beginning of time. They use it to divide and conquer us. They drive wedges between us peasants and make us fight each other, so we won’t rise up against our rulers and fight them.

You can observe the same old trick everywhere in America today: Red states and blue states are fighting. Christians and Muslims are fighting. Men and women are fighting. Baby Boomers and Millennials are fighting. Black people and white people are fighting.

That doesn’t just happen all by itself. There are always voices instigating these fights.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, How to Defeat the Trump Cult: Want to Save Democracy?