When the west opened trade to China, policy experts assumed China would become more liberal like the west. Instead, the west is becoming more like China. [1, 2, 3]
China is becoming more liberal in the classical sense (more money accruing to regular "new money" entrepreneurs instead of to oligarchs); they just haven't hit the "borgeoisie-funded revolt against the aristocracy" phase of liberalization yet. Give them 50 years.
... That really wasn't what the Tienanmen Square Protests were about, at all.
The protest were a massive mixture of different ideologies, but the dominant ones were democratic politics, and communist economics, opposing the trend towards oligarchic/autocratic rule and liberalized economy.
They boiled the frog with the bourgeoisie. For a long time, there were workarounds if you're generally smart and educated. Nowadays its a hacker level operation to get on a VPN.
And even if you do get a VPN, the inconvenience and network effects push everyone towards censored Chinese alternatives like Weibo and Youku anyway. One thing I've seen working is western countries investing in high-quality media that caters to Chinese audiences. It's an uphill battle but it seems like a promising way for us to bridge the divide.
You're in a pipe dream. All the money accrued can and always will feed the ever bigger oligarchs and spreading their power around the world, effectively why the west are more like china in the question. It's already made sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china, not in another 500 years. And soon not in the west either.
Well, yes, money always feeds oligarchs along with the regular business owners.
The key thing to notice is that, in realpolitik terms, an "oligarch" is only aristocracy — rather than haute bourgeoisie — if they have a collegial relationship with the state. I.e. if their interests inherently align with the state's interests (or they can personally negotiate such alignment) such that that they have no reason to act against the state.
But if you have enough oligarchs who don't have such relationships with the state — disenfranchised oligarchs — then they will inevitably plot to manipulate the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat together into organizing a revolt; and will then — critically — sit back and collectively withhold their support from the state for implementing any suppression of said revolt.
(Look at what's happening in Russia right now. You think they'd have such shitty military equipment if the oligarch owners of their defense contractors believed in Putin and wanted him to stay in power?)
Every successful "populist" revolt/revolution in political history, has had an underlying set of disenfranchised oligarchs, who could have aided in the suppression of the revolt, but instead chose to stand by (or "work to rule") and let it happen, because the revolution would inevitably put them in a better, more powerful position.
Why does every politically-stable country — whether democracy, constitutional monarchy, etc. — have a senate? Because a senate is a body made up of (representatives of) oligarchs whose interests don't inherently align with the state, where the job of everyone in the room is to negotiate a group equilibrium between state interests and industrial interests that both the state and the oligarchs can be happy-enough with that the oligarchs will stop undermining state power.
China has a legislature (the NPC), but insofar as it is only a rubber-stamp — it cannot control the Party – seats there are worthless as an "enfranchisement" for oligarchs. They want a real hand in power.
China, obviously, makes friends with oligarchs whenever it can. But certain oligarchs' power bases are just inherently misaligned with Chinese state interests — in a way that a real senate body would solve, but which cannot otherwise be resolved peacefully.
For example: why did China push both Jack Ma out of ownership of Alibaba Group, and Colin Huang out of his chairman position of Pinduoduo, at around the same time? Well, both of these companies now own petit borgeoisie wealth-creation engines — AliExpress and Temu. But Temu didn't exist yet when Huang was ousted. And AliExpress (via Alibaba Group) is majority foreign-owned, while PDD is a domestic private company (and thereby likely implicitly highly state-invested.)
My interpretation of those facts: the state wanted to replace AliExpress — a company proven to both support foreign interference and the empowerment of local petit-bourgeoisie interests (that could eventually lead to destabilization of power) — with another company the state could control indefinitely: one that seemingly serves the same market function, but with tricks (profit-margin caps, distributor-set sale prices) that mean that Temu is not an engine of wealth-creation for the middle class in practice. (It tricks you into thinking that it is, and continues that illusion for the first few months, "going easy" on new sellers to get them to quit other channels, before coming down on you.)
Ma wouldn't stand for just giving up on the forward momentum of an entire business venture, so he was ousted. Huang wasn't interested in his B2B agrobusiness company being pivoted to focus on replacing AliExpress — so he was ousted too. China's replacement board seats of Alibaba acted to cut off new investment into AliExpress; while China's replacement board seats of PDD Holdings acted to get the company going toward building Temu.
Yes, you could describe this as 'making sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china'. But you can also describe it as disenfranchising some very rich people. Dumb move, tbh.
Or consider: every blockchain/cryptocurrency company in China. Again often foreign-funded, again usually highly successful — but at something that China just can't square with (enabling capital flight out of China, minimizing the state's economic hold over other oligarchs.) In a functioning/long-term-stable China, the Chinese cryptocurrency industry would form an industry body with a lobby, get that lobby represented in the senate, and then that lobby's interests would get carefully negotiated against state interests. In the China we have, these companies are just quashed... despite each shutdown generating new disenfranchised oligarchs by the dozens.
The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.
This is factually incorrect, or perhaps more generously: out of date. SOE market capitalization as a percentage of the total has been increasing for about two years now, and the CPC has stated their intention that SOEs will play a bigger role in the economy going forward.
> The owners of those public-invested private companies. The state didn't decide to buy a majority stake in company A over company B because company A was meritocratically superior; the state had a personal connection to the ownership of company A.
The CPC has nearly 100 million members. A hundred or so people who followed in the footsteps of their parents who were prominent party members in the past, does not make an "aristocracy." To compare this to a dynasty like the Rockefellers or the Rothschilds or the Astors is just beyond ridiculous.
> policy experts assumed China would become more liberal
No one actually thinks that, it's just the line they use to justify themselves to the public. Like how Saudi Arabia has been promising amazing "reforms" for the better part of a decade.
Bold to claim that anything that happened in Russia in the 90s could be called a "success." If that's what was in store for China then good on the CPC and President Xi for averting it. The "integration" of Russia into the global capitalist system was an utter disaster from both a humanitarian and a strategic perspective.
China also adopted capitalism, in some ways more extreme and enthusiastically than anywhere else in the world.
There's a reason both the USSR and China started doing reforms in the 80s: neither system was working well, leading to stagnation at best and outright absurdities and poverty at worst. In both cases, the economic reforms mostly worked out well.
There are a bunch of differences between Russia and China: China never seriously attempted to introduce democracy and has had a fairly stable political system since the late 70s, whereas in Russia the entire communist political system collapsed and was replaced (which is always tricky business). China also never experienced a breakup similar to the breakup of the USSR, didn't have "let's sell off all state properties to my friends for peanuts" kind of corruption, had quite a different make-up (before the reforms most of China was rural and profoundly poor), and probably a few other differences.
I'm not sure the average Russian would agree that the precipitous drop in life expectancy in the 90s, the rampant child prostitution, etc., along with what our idea of "democracy" for them turned out to be - you want to talk about election interference let's start with Russia in 1996 - was worth selling off their natural resources so a few oligarchs could get rich.
Which mean what? You should've picked ~2000, the 90s saw significant decline (of course you're only looking at GDP which not something we have reliable figures for from the 80s).
Again, all you're really saying here is "mass death and misery in the wake of the fall of the USSR was worth it because a handful of criminals got insanely rich" which is exactly the sort of demented take I'd expect from a community bound together by their worship of Mammon, but for those with conscience I must report you're not making a strong argument in favor of the Larry Summers, Shock Therapy approach.
Saudi Arabia did inch along a tiny bit with some reforms, it only took a younger dictator to coup his father.
Usually that's the biggest problem worldwide, the old hold on to old ways to their deaths and prevent any kind of change. And this is a newer phenomena in human history because modern medicine has extended lifespans far beyond the days of old.
It worked mostly fine for most of Eastern Europe after 1990 (with a couple of notable exceptions, like Russia). We tend to focus on the few black sheep where it didn't work, maybe because in hindsight the cases where it worked look so "obvious".
Google’s “web integrity API” is a system to prevent use of software not authorized by a centralized, unelected authority. Even Google’s deceitful claims about it aren’t about copyright, but auth and anti-cheat.
Yup, Deng literally invaded Vietnam and rolled tanks over dissidents. In Lee Kuan Yew's Biography he recounts talking to Deng shortly after Tiananmen, and Deng by LKY's account just said straight to his face "if I had to kill a hundred thousand students to restore order, I would have done it".
I genuinely have to laugh when people tend to say things like "I wish China was as liberal as it was back under Deng", people have concocted some serious alt-history if they think China today isn't more liberal than it was decades ago
I'm convinced that what make a nation is perceived as liberal is a function of its relative power and subservience to the west instead of its inherent liberal value
Especially the word democracy in the geopolitical context, that's what western politicians mean. E.g, spread democracy, this country should be more democratic, etc.
> if I had to kill a hundred thousand students to restore order, I would have done it
Deng was only being blatantly honest.
How many people died due do US involvement to "restore order"? [1]
I know from experience what happened to Greece and Argentina and I wouldn't call it an accomplishment nor something that made the World a better place.
There are no reasons to consider "being liberal" a goal, it's just one of the options, doesn't mean it's the best or the only one.
Of course the US cannot afford to not be hyper-liberal (meaning in reality hyper-capitalistic-run-by-greedy-corporations) because it would kill their economy, even though it could benefit a large squat of the population that, for one reason or another, is being considered a burden for the society by the "liberals" whose only solution is "throw money at the problem and hide it under the carpet".
Worldcoin is a terrible example imo, it's beyond DOA. Much like the rest of crypto, no one will seriously use it, unless we're talking speculation. I think that the riots in HK, the united front against Russia, etc. clearly show that the rest of the world believes free markets are the way to do things and it's just a matter of time (probably when Putin + Jinping bite the dust) until China/Russia also adopt more (classical) liberal stances.
If you're hinting at authoritarianism, Trump has been repudiated by most, and the Republican party is in shambles right now (which is how such a weak Democrat was able to win). I don't really see the doomer point of view.
> and trying to force every country around the world to adopt their 'values'.
Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done.
Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.
Well, Marxism-Leninism did more good for the Soviet Republics in its first 40 years there (beating back an imperialist invasion, rapidly developing industry, beating the Nazis, putting the first man in space, raising the standard of living nearly to par with the West despite being a feudal backwater in 1917, etc) than capitalism has done for those countries since we finally beat them thirty years ago. And, public opinion bears that fact out. So, I'd say the jury's out on just how much of our improvements to standards of living can be attributed to giving 10 people all the money in the world, vs (for example) attributing it to scientific advancement in general.
edit: sadly dang has once again taken it upon himself to stop communists from posting on HN. I'm sure most of y'all agree with this in the first place. at any rate take this as an open invitation to drag me in the comments with whatever ridiculous nonsense you can dream up. I won't be responding to any of it because I literally can't. thanks
Ah yes, you must be referencing the Holodomor here. That sure raised the standard of living. Marxism-Leninism is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fundamentally evil ideology.
> rapidly developing industry
What industry are you even talking about (-oh that's right, the Soviet obsession with steel)? Have you ever actually been in the industrial cities of the Eastern Bloc? Have you toured their inefficient brutalist factories? The same factories that ended up being shuttered in the 1970s. Even ignoring the grave human rights abuses, the communist satellite states were bureaucratic behemoths that collapsed under their own weight. It's like you've never even heard the word "Perestroika."
But in any case, the communists not only persecuted my great-grand-parents for their religion (they had to flee from Ukraine), but also stole my grandparents' land, and destroyed my parents' youth. I was also born in communism (I barely remember the Romanian revolution as I was an infant) and posts like this remind me how quickly people forget and that the Jewish people are really onto something in never letting us forget the horrors of the Holocaust. In similar ways, I've taken it upon myself to never let people forget the horrors of communism.
> despite being a feudal backwater in 1917
Imagine calling regions that gave birth to cultural gems like Prague, Budapest, Kyiv, or Warsaw "feudal backwaters." Did you know that in 1884, Timișoara (the Romanian city I grew up in), became the first European city to implement DC electric street lighting? Backwaters my ass.
People tend to worry about the evils they know or have experienced in their recent past, just as you do. And the US alone has ~300k people per year dying of lack of healthcare (not including heart disease!), and millions sentenced to slave gulags for trivial offenses where their labor is monetized for the personal profit of brutal oligarchs - the largest concentration of slave labor in the world, by a massive factor. And there are just as many famines and other deaths as well - the distortion of crop subsidies on the food export market has repeatedly caused exactly such famines, and that's all a completely capitalistic phenomenon.
People under capitalist rule tend not to think of it as such, but those are the victims of capitalism, just like the holodomor is victims of communism. And that's not "tu quoque" but rather simply applying the same standards and method of analysis to both systems.
That's why people keep diving into that, it's not that communism was so great, it's that capitalism is the particular set of horrors that they're currently living through, so people tend not to be thrilled about that. They are as entitled to their past experiences and history as you are to yours.
Anyway, it's weird, because we all love these organizations called "corporations" that use exactly the kinds of central planning that is supposedly impossible to execute properly. Companies that treat divisions like a "free market" and force them to compete for resources and attention generally find this works extremely poorly, you actually need collective coordination and human benevolence/good-faith for anything to work. The part about capitalism that's nice (on paper) is that it breaks the collectivism down to a scale that humans can plan and function with, and forces active competition between entities such that inefficiency is pushed out of the market (although of course there is an inherent tendency towards oligoply and consolidation without government intervention).
But the thing is countries cannot work like this, and there is no guarantee that a capitalist country doesn't suffer the same "complacency capture" as an oligopolistic market competitor. Nor is there any failure mechanism to replace them when this happens, short of outright political collapse (which may be impossible due to situational factors anyway). Again, we live in a state with millions of political prisoners being exploited for slave labor for oligarchal profit... that's the failure case for communism too, capitalism is just as capable of falling into the same pitfalls. And success is, as always, completely orthogonal to ethical merit - you can be good-hearted and still fail, or act unethically and succeed (and in fact it helps!).
Again, it's not that communism is so great, but pointing at specific bad outcomes while refusing to apply the same standards to specific bad outcomes from capitalistic systems (while chanting "tu quoque") has always been an aggravating feature of american political commentators. The lack of ability for self-reflection is why we live in a prison state and a police state and increasingly a total-surveillance state, we have horrible outcomes here from our system but "it's better than ukraine 1936!". And that's a pretty low bar, why is that always the focus of the discussion?
And why does it have to be "if you like it so much go there", like the only possible choices in the world are US prison state or china/NK prison states. Why can we not choose to be the EU instead, with a generally socialist outlook and many outright collectivist (worker/state owned) enterprises but also a strong democratic system riding herd over limited and regulated market-economics?
> I'm excited to read your next post about how Nazi Germany wasn't really that bad.
Not exactly a good-faith reply to a substantial post, and the quote doesn't even work to the thing you are trying to respond to. Hitler’s bad dude, and he’s usually counted as one of those victims of communism. Can you admit that a number that counts hitler and his soldiers as victims of communism might be a little overwrought?
Deaths due to the prevailing political system are deaths due to the prevailing political system. Slaves forced into a life of servitude due to the prevailing political system are just as much slaves in a Corrections Corp of America prison as in a soviet gulag or a north korean camp, it matters not a whit your personal feelings on the moral complications of the death or the slavery and whether you feel the deaths from some systems are "excusable" or not inherently tied to the system (a grace you of course don’t extend).
Again, the simple fact of the matter is that there are large-scale “excess deaths” and slavery and other morally repugnant outcomes that occur in large scale due to the nature of the capitalistic system and the way it treats problems that are not profitable to solve. If you can't accept that simple fact, then there is indeed no basis for a discussion. Can you even acknowledge that the body count of victims of capitalism is (substantially) greater than zero?
I mean Pol Pot alone... analogous to your hitler comparison, can you not even disavow capitalism in such clear-cut cases of literal murder and death camps? Or Thailand and red drum killings? Do such things not taint the entire concept of capitalism, in the same way that you feel communism has been tainted? Even if the other victims of capitalism don’t matter to you…
At the end of the day the “victims of communism” just isn’t a viable framing for the discussion. Atrocities and both high- and low-level oppression occur under capitalism too but people get very upset if you say it somehow represents a fundamental problem with the capitalistic system, but that’s the standard anything else gets held to.
In the neoliberal consensus, communism is bad because of holodomor or NK slave camps (true) but capitalism is not bad because of pol pot or red drum killings or United States slave camps (false). And that means we can’t even have European-style state enterprises or worker-owned enterprises, because that’s all communism and dirty.
Anyway honestly this is the problem with expats in general, people left for specific reasons and the ones who left are the ones who felt most strongly about an issue. Learned experience is one thing but you’re not exactly getting a balanced take on Cuba from some expat who had their family’s plantation expropriated either. Sure, your family lost your sugar farm, but living standards went up hugely for everyone else.
dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable.
That’s actually completely not true at all and resource-rich countries actually tend to underperform (by getting trapped in an economy that only does one thing and when that resource disappears it’s gone).
You can even see shades of this now with Russia… what is going to happen when the gas runs out, or if western countries block international trade of their gas (as they attempted to do recently)? Nothing good.
Beyond all the other contestable statements in your comment, I think you might have the biggest problem convincing the former Baltic Soviet Republics that they were doing better under the USSR versus now.
Yes, it's true - they're still very mad that their Nazi collaborators who helped murder tens of thousands of Jews during the war had to face actual justice instead of getting paperclipped off to the West.
> Hot take: Yes. Because classical liberalism, the free market, and bottom-up government has done more for the advancement of humankind than sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done.
That's not 'the west' and has never been. The US was born protectionist and pretty much stayed protectionist til today.
Of course today we wrap our protectionism with 'national security'. If a free market exists, then let me know because I've never come across one. All markets are protected and certainly not free. And if there is a bottom-up government, I've never heard of one in history. Can you show me an example of a bottom-up government? I'd love a good laugh.
> Let's stop pretending like all values have the same ethical valence.
And lets stop making up values to suit ones agenda.
Edit: Also, you might want to brush up on your history. 'sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done' have given us civilization and nearly all human progress since the dawn of time. Everything from agriculture, to writing, to the laws of physics were produced outside of 'classical liberalism'.
Many people (both poor and rich) are leaving china, places with sharia law, and moving to the west. Why are they leaving to the west? The west isn't perfect, but people seem to see it as an improvement to their homelands.
Do you think they are moving to the middle east because of their love of sharia law? Or do you think they are moving they for economic opportunities?
People move to 'the west' for the same reason tens of millions of europeans moved to america in the 19th and 20th century. For money. We were the land of milk and honey or that's what they were told. Do you think millions of italians, germans, irish, etc came to america for the nonexistent classic liberalism?
People come here for the economic opportunity that doesn't exist in their countries - much of the time because 'the west' invaded, destroyed or destabilized it. China being one of the many countries 'the west' invaded, destroyed and destabilized.
Their definition includes "Foreign workers", aka kafala. These people live in the country to work and accrue money for their families back home while they live in compounds and rarely directly interact with the host population.
The host countries are largely empty husks which have very unproductive labour. They offset the productivity gap with oil revenues to bring in cheap labour keeping their quality of life higher.
And yes, big IMHO to everything I said. I don't carry source in my back pocket.
Well, if you are self-selecting your comparison to wealthy immigrants looking for economic freedom to enjoy their wealth you are obviously going to get a very particular outcome as to the countries they choose. The "cuban ex-pat" scenario, so to speak.
Working class immigration is still immigration in general.
Your point is straight-up bonkers and the data you yourself cite disproves it. Comparing the UAE (one country, an outlier at that, due to their subsidized incentives) to the collective immigration to Australia + USA + Western Europe + Japan + South Korea is beyond disingenuous. But hey, you do you.
> much of the time because 'the west' invaded, destroyed or destabilized it
You know who destabilized my country? The USSR. I've heard nightmare stories from my grandparents and parents (who lived 35+ years under communism). Boy am I glad to be an American and I wouldn't give up my citizenship for anything. I'll gladly pay taxes even if end up living elsewhere.
> Your point is straight-up bonkers and the data you yourself cite disproves it.
Ad hominems isn't an argument.
> Comparing the UAE (one country, an outlier at that, due to their subsidized incentives) to the collective immigration to Australia + USA + Western Europe + Japan + South Korea is beyond disingenuous.
I wrote the middle east, not the UAE. Very curious. So you are being disingenuous here by misrepresenting my claim. The wealthy countries of the middle east - uae, saudi arabia, kuwait, qatar, etc have more immigration per capita than the US and any country in europe. Why are you including Japan and South Korea when both are highly averse to immigration and are not part of 'the west'?
> You know who destabilized my country? The USSR.
What country is that? It's a good thing the USSR is gone then. Maybe the same should happen to 'the west'? Are you saying it's okay for 'the west' to destabilize countries but not the USSR? I don't even know what your point is here.
> Boy am I glad to be an American and I wouldn't give up my citizenship for anything.
Why would you? Did I say you should?
> I'll gladly pay taxes even if end up living elsewhere.
What? Go ahead.
It's like you build up a strawman on top of a strawman and got confused along the way. All I'm saying is people immigrate to 'the west' for the same reason they immigrate to the middle east. For money and economic opportunities. Like you and everyone else did. Take australia. The biggest immigrant group in australia is the british. Do you think the british moved to australia for 'classical liberalism' and 'western values'?
> You know who destabilized my country? The USSR. I've heard nightmare stories from my grandparents and parents (who lived 35+ years under communism). Boy am I glad to be an American
Both things can exist at the same time. America plays a very equal role in world destabilization in the Cold War era to that of USSR, while also the USSR could be a nightmare under communism for the common person.
> 'sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships have ever done' have given us civilization and nearly all human progress since the dawn of time.
"Given" is a bit of a weird way to put that. We had those things not because they were the best, or were even desired, but because people accumulated power and forced those forms of government on their local populations. Maybe civilization and human progress could have gone much faster, and better, without as much death and strife, if people hadn't lived under repressive regimes for most of human history. These forms of government concentrate power among a relative, unaccountable few. I hopefully don't need to enumerate all the bad things those kinds of people often end up doing.
Western democracy has a ton of problems, certainly. And the US's practice of secretly and overtly interfering in the development of other nations nearly always ends poorly for both sides.
But I'd much rather live in a world where Western democracy exists, if the alternatives are sharia law, tyrants, oligarchies, theocracies, or dictatorships.
App Store was never a totally level playing field either. Amazon Prime Video got a discount on App Store fees[0]. FaceBook[1] and Uber[2] did things for which they got a slap on the wrist. If a less-important developer did that, they would have been banned from the App Store forever.
Epic lost to Apple because the courts saw through Epic’s bullshit and realized they wanted to break up the monopoly only so they could enact their own.
Adobe almost killed Apple by developing Windows-first and sometimes Windows-only products in the 1990s. Many professionals cared about Adobe software more than their hardware device, so moved platforms.
Adobe’s motivation was largely revenge against Apple for opening up printing standards. Previously Adobe had a de facto monopoly license on these.
Steve Jobs was extremely pissed off by seeing Apple get hurt for making a pro consumer decision that was good for the wider industry, and held the grudge for a long time. Even though he wasn’t CEO for much of this period.
This article has more detail if you’re interested [1]
This is a perfect explanation of apple’s relationship with NVIDIA and the CUDA platform too.
Bumpgate affected AMD products too, this was the era of baking your 7850 to try and reflow the solder bumps, and apple was just trying to get the supplier to pay for the problems with the RoHS solders that apple specified in the product designs. Apple has always been a clientzilla that ruthlessly leans on its partners and suppliers (most recently Goldman Sachs is feeling the pain from the Apple Card) and believes that it’s a privilege to hold their business. And nvidia isn’t a company that got rich by bending over for that kind of treatment either (see also their relation with Microsoft).
Apple really wanted to terminate their relationship with nvidia anyway and this was just them demanding a big check on the way out the door. Nothing like making your ex pay for the cost of you moving out during the breakup.
The story with Adobe on Mac in the 1990s is that their apps were so important to the platform that they practically had a veto on the API for Apple’s next-gen OS.
When Apple acquired NeXT, the original plan was for the NeXT API (now called Cocoa) to become the only way to build apps on the new Mac OS. But Adobe made it clear they were not going to port everything to Objective-C. In response Apple came up with Carbon, which was a port of essential plain-C APIs from Classic Mac OS to the new environment.
Apple retaliated pretty hard in 2007-2010 by first knifing 64-bit Carbon when it had already shipped in Leopard betas, and later strangling Flash.
I think Apple was the one who was unreasonable here, not Adobe.
I loathe the idea of giving Microsoft credit for anything, but one thing they got right was their focus on backward compatibility. Certainly that has frayed at times here and there, but MS generally doesn't ask their developers to completely rewrite their applications to use a new application framework.
And because of that, even as far back as 2005, there were 10 ways to create a string in C and depending on which Windows API you were using, you had to convert between them constantly.
Considering how Microsoft has failed to move past Windows while Apple uses the same OS more or less for watches, phones, tablets, monitors, set top boxes, etc without having to support legacy crap.
> less for watches, phones, tablets, monitors, set top boxes, etc without having to support legacy crap.
That's pretty easy when you have no qualms whatsoever about breaking support for software which is older than 2-3 years and offer very limited support for third party software on all of your platforms except one.
Well, asking to rewrite all your stuff, especially such large platforms as Photoshop is a very big undertaking and resource investment. Don't see where the grudge comes from.
E.g. if someone comes to our organization and ask to rewrite half of what we do in their new language, we won't move. Should that someone hold a grudge against us?
it's wechat. you really need it in china. it's practically impossible to stay in touch with most people if you don't have it. a phone that can't run wechat is pretty useless.
hmm, i forgot about those. but i wonder if you really needed wechat and if it wasn't possible to scan them with the government provided app that tracks your healthcode too. i think offering wechat support was more out of convenience, and not to push people to use wechat.
Marc Andreessen famously predicted Netscape would reduce Windows to "a poorly debugged collection of device drivers". WeChat, as the "everything app" Musk aspires to turn Twitter into (ha!) has effectively done that to both iOS and Android.
I'm not sure this article has the slam dunk it thinks it does. Those aren't "apps" they are at best "web apps". They use a JS framework and some special markup from what I can tell. In this sense WeChat is more akin to a web browser than having multiple "apps" inside it.
> Since these are “apps within an app”, many of these mini-programs are flouting the App Store rules since they were not downloaded from the App Store.
I mean Drafts has the ability to download actions (not sure if that is the right term) which are JS that run inside the app. I think this is fine and doesn't skirt any rules, I don't see why WeChat is all that different.
All that said, of course Apple is going to make exceptions for WeChat the same way it makes various concessions to other countries.
Regardless of its implementation, everything in the app is subject to the rule as long as it's distributed in the App Store. In fact, Apple tried to enforce the same rule on WeChat multiple times but gave up since it practically means giving up the entire China market.
Implementation is very much part of the rules. Apps cannot download and execute external code… unless it’s JavaScript in a browser.
Nothing in the article suggests that WeChat apps are not plain websites, so it seems that they don’t know the rules nor the alleged rule breaker’s technical side.
I wouldn’t exclude that WeChat really does get a pass from Apple, but the article does not clarify this important point.
A lot of these superapp mini-app can be just a link. It can be an in-app browser with static link to a college level javascript games page, maybe with credit purchase through native code going back and forth with URL parameters and callbacks. If you're doing superapps you're likely going for a janky bag full of features so that'll be fine.
I thought Apple disallowed apps from downloading things that were executable. A team I was on got rejected for this in 2015 or so. We were using Ionic to make a WebView based app for a news station. We wanted some of the css and js to be loaded from the internet so we could change various things without needing an official app update.
We were told to we could fetch news story data from an api, and get back json/xml/etc, but not JS and CSS files.
I know of multiple apps that have that ability and I've personally shipped 10+ cross-platform apps built on Quasar+Vue+Capacitor and Ionic+Angular+Cordova/Capacitor and a few have had the ability to remotely update the code (just the JS/HTML/CSS) and they have all been approved. I am interested in the exact way the rejection was worded. IIRC their dev agreement had an exception, at one point, to the "no downloading executable code" rule, it said that using downloaded code in JavascriptCore was allowed. Apple doesn't seem to approve of remote updating but they seem to turn a blind eye to it, I would assume most big companies that use these cross-platform tools like this have a way to remotely update the code (JS/HTML/CSS).
I totally believe they rejected your app though, App Store review is pretty bad. I mean at least they are _way_ faster now but it's reviewer roulette for sure. I've been dinged for things that aren't even in the App Store dev agreement, they were in some other document. Even worse the reviewer told me I needed to change my wording when requesting a permission, the problem? She wanted me to change text I don't control in the permissions dialog. I explained that I only had control over the single string in quotes but she told me I was wrong (I got through on the next review). The inconsistency in the review process is maddening and so much of it is reading the tea leaves of what they actually want and what is allowed. I mean, we all know it's against the rules to send advertising/marketing push notifications right? Right? That _never_ happens in the App Store... Make whatever rules you want but dear god please enforce them consistently and change/remove a rule if you've decided to not enforce it.
It's been a while but I think it was because it was considered a remote update mechanism. We planned to keep it limited to small layout fixes and such but in theory we could have changed everything about the app (it had news available in like 15 languages and there was always some new issue related to right-to-left, or CJK font stuff or etc. We didn't want to make all users have a new update just because Cyrillic needed some layout change or something).
But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer.
In this case we decided to just remove that feature and re-publish.
> But yeah it also probably was partly due to reviewer roulette. I've experienced the same on other apps, things that have been in the app for a year can suddenly get it rejected without a corresponding rules change from Apple. Just different interpretations of our code by a new reviewer.
Been there. The best is when I have an app that has actually been released on multiple other accounts (white label app) and then a reviewer wants to say it's all wrong and reject it. I the worst thing that's happened to me is when they dinged me for a soft permission prompt (asking the user before throwing the one-time-only system dialog), I removed it since I needed to get the update out (it wasn't related to this at all of course), then they started nit-picking and not only were they wrong in a lot of the cases but they were making me do like 1-2 word changes to permission prompts to make them more specific. I had no clue how many new things they'd come up with for each submission, we went back and forth a few times before it finally got through, I just bumped the build number and resubmitted.
I've never actually developed a mini program, but worked on projects with our china teams to develop some activation for our brand on WeChat.
What I understand is that a mini program needs to be "packaged" and shipped to WeChat as a bundle. The size of the bundle is relatively small. (~10mb ?)
Of course you can load some content from outside, not everything is within those 10mb, but I think it's still relatively limited. Calling it apps within apps is a stretch.
It’s really dependent on what reviewer you get. I develop a coding app for iPad (Codea) and for the longest time was not allowed to let users share their code in any form. I asked the reviewer “but they can just copy and paste it?” And the reviewer said “that is ok.”
In the end, it was down to whether it _looked like_ your app was downloading executable code more than whether it actually did. Reviewers are non-technical, and when the policy is technical they often make an inference that may be incorrect — however they will not budge on that without consulting actual engineers further up the chain, which can take weeks
They have become a lot more relaxed about this policy in the last five years or so (ever since Shortcuts)
> WeChat is more akin to a web browser than having multiple "apps" inside it
>> Apple bans alternative web browsers too... so..
If they use a different browser engine they are currently banned but you can wrap Safari/webkit like every browser app on iOS does and provide different chrome/features. WeChat isn't embedding a different rendering engine, just using webkit.
>> I mean Drafts has the ability to download actions (not sure if that is the right term) which are JS that run inside the app. I think this is fine and doesn't skirt any rules,
I'm not familiar with that particular app but if that happens it's not fine and it seems to get a pass from Apple. The apps are not allowed to download executable code. You have to bundle it all in the app.
That's not exclusive to that app. Being able to update the app without going through the App Store was one of the big selling points of React Native a few years back. Apps are not allowed to download native code, however.
You cannot download and execute native code on iOS, the sandbox prevents it. Memory protection ensures that pages marked as data cannot be executed
There is a special entitlement to allow some Apple apps and frameworks to do this — Apple’s JavaScriptCore can do JIT, which requires executing data pages. Similarly, Swift Playgrounds can compile to native code and execute that code
So, for example, you could ship a C compiler on iOS and it would compile perfectly valid binaries, but you would never be able to execute those binaries natively without code-signing them and deploying them in an Apple sanctioned way, which you cannot do on-device (except with the above mentioned exceptions)
That's ...not a feature of React Native. It's possible to reload the app's content on code change, but this very clearly intended for development only.
You’re describing fast refresh, the parent is talking about codepush. The whole point of CodePush is definitely to update the app without going through the store. It downloads a JS bundle (which is usually most of the app functionalities) and executes it.
I use WeChat to talk to my in-laws in Mainland China. I am aware of the mini-apps that exist but they are severely lacking features & more of add on utilities to the WeChat interface.
For e.g. a popular one is a mini-app for DiDi cabs. It'll allow you to book a nearby cab & place a call/text using the WeChat integration. It is more of utility to WeChat/Weixin rather than an appstore within their app. Agreed it is somewhat borderline in definition, but the way I see it - the utilities and apps are sandboxed within WeChat ecosystem.
It is probably exciting for Apple to contemplate support for this type of platform. To see other cultural approaches is probably worth giving some freedom to becuase it will stretch their own thinking.
Here's a stat I heard a few years back: WeChat has over 50% time share in China. Meaning people in China are on WeChat more than all other apps on their phones combined.
That seems high to me. A lot of people seem to spend most of their time on xiaohongshu (like Pinterest?), douyin (tiktok), bilibili (like YouTube) etc. WeChat is good for its utility functions like ordering a Didi, chatting with friends or ordering from a restaurant but for entertainment (where people spend most of their time) it's pretty basic.
This rules inconsistency (alongside unpredictable (dis-)approvals and double standards for WeChat, Roblox, and (at times) Amazon and others) came up as one of a dozen reasons that, as a solo casual game developer, _launching_ in the App Store is not necessarily the no-brainer decision it seemed to be a decade ago (despite its enormous market power) I lay out in a separate post here https://keydiscussions.com/2023/07/26/as-a-web-game-dev-poin...
And if we assume on average 10 updates to each app then we have ~20m approvals/rejections.
Given that the process involves real people it is only normal for there to be many inconsistencies and double standards at this scale. Especially when the rules have evolved over the last 15 years and you have app developers who like to push the limits of what's allowed.
At the very beginning it likely conformed to all the rules as there likely wasn't much functionality in v1.0. By the time it attracted the attention of Apple decision makers, it was too sticky to ban as another user pointed out.
i.e. Wechat users would rather switch to Android than lose the app.
I guess the lesson is that exceptions will be made if you can grow an app literally a million fold in a few years and become a vital part of your user's day-to-day lives.
it seemed in your initial response to the topic of the probabilistic, random exception excuse, that you agreed with me that such an excuse wasn't credible, and that the exception was, and continues to be, made consciously and intentionally
This is just me rambling but I think there's a simple explanation to Tumblr, Twitter and WeChat: Tumblr was a global app with English speaking userbase. Twitter and WeChat are de facto country-specific apps that Apple has no clear pictures on.
The latter two are "big in ___" apps that are hardly known anywhere else, namely SA, Japan, and China, to which anything HQ in California do will only cause unpredictable and unobservable, likely negative financial impacts. I'm from "Asia" but all I know about WeChat is about as much as that it's a brand with a logo, that's it.
Apple et al allows maximum leniency, budget and local decisions for those local apps because of that. "No one's using it anyway", only cash is coming in, so whatever happens there won't matter anyway, as long as the gig won't stop. Hell, if they need datacenter for all data to stay in China, so be it, if they need extra rapid payments to keep Shinjuku going, so be it.
Tumblr is different; they have US users and negative impacts can be readily measured. So they - its owner Yahoo! US at the time of its death - were not scared to do whatever.
From what I understand is was more because Tumblr had a much younger user demographic with very ineffective content reporting tools. Allowed NSFW content without a desktop opt-in function. And also being bought by Yahoo who wanted to cash in on Tumblr advertising probably played a huge role in it too.
Twitter skews older, requires desktop opt-in for NSFW content, and (before Musk) had decent content reporting functions.
Do you have any information about this? Where did you hear this? I'd always heard it was because some people at Apple used Twitter, but nobody used Tumblr, so Tumblr didn't get a free pass from arbitrary torment.
From news links and comments here on this site, especially around 2018 when Tumblr was going through repeated App Store rejections. I think people, including myself, infer it from this information:
1. Apple executives like Phil Schiller used Twitter for years.
> I don't totally understand the concept of having an everything app. Isn't the OS the "everything app"?
Why are you downloading apps from the App Store instead of running separate OSes? This is the same concept, just one level down.
Really, WeChat is just a browser with extra APIs and a website catalog.
> Do people like the wechat experience because you have one login and don't have to go through an onboarding process in every mini-app?
I’m not fully familiar with its history, but from what I understand Tencent added more and more “apps” to their chat app and eventually let third parties into it. This is exactly what Facebook did in 2010: we also had third party “apps” on Facebook. They were also just iframed websites with extra APIs.
> I’m not fully familiar with its history, but from what I understand Tencent added more and more “apps” to their chat app and eventually let third parties into it. This is exactly what Facebook did in 2010: we also had third party “apps” on Facebook. They were also just iframed websites with extra APIs.
It's crazy how long ago this feels. FarmVille legitimately took over the country for a bit.
the concept is that the primary feature that wechat provides is your identity with your wechat account. you connect to other people and you have verified their identity as well. from there it is most logical that you then want to use that identity to share work, make appointments, pay for things, etc.
the miniapp that we used the most was a voting tool. you could see who in the group had voted for what and it was very useful to have it all integrated, as opposed to an external website where none of the voters were verified to be the same people from the group.
sending money is also a no brainer once you can trust that the person you are sending money to is really the same one. and external payment system means that you would have to verify that the person you are sending money to is the same person you were talking to on wechat. that's just extra steps. if happens of course otherwise alipay would not exist, but part of that is because alibaba has other features (like the market) that people want to use, and they do not support wechat pay. i wuld suspect that if they had supported wechat pay, then alipay would not have been able to gain any significant market share at all.
I'm not even anon on twitter, but bonkers to think that people would want to directly connect their finances to things they say in online in public in this day and age
wechat content is not public. the one feature it does not have is a public space where you can see what people say or share without being connected to them (or being in a group with them. groups are limited to 500 people, so even there not many people see what you share). there is also no algorithmic pushing of content from people i am connected with.
Maybe there is an expectation from superapp users that their interactions are private by default(and they are unless explicitly warned), like it is on a Discord server.
Because nearly all Chinese people use WeChat, but not all Chinese people use iPhones.
For Chinese people, you could say that WeChat serves as an OS with a greater coverage. It could even be said that WeChat represents half of China's mobile Internet.
Only after acquiring a substantial user base did WeChat launch its "Mini Programs". This feature has further boosted the usage of WeChat. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, certain types of apps forced people in remote areas to start using WeChat. However, the fundamental reason is that the usage rate of WeChat was already high.
This explains why, outside of China, WeChat's "Mini Programs" aren't particularly striking: in those regions, there simply aren't enough WeChat users.
It's just that if you had more user distraction on your app in a single-app platform, that'll earn your app some long tail of extra attention and bad user decisions and therefore revenue. Kind of like a chat window in e-commerce websites, or imagine on the bottom right of HN were a miniature minesweeper screen. Add enough of those and someone calls yours a superapp.
I think they 'like' it more because it's the Chinese communist party control and surveillance tool. So they make it ubiquitous in China. Whether they like it or not doesn't matter. Choice is not really free there.
I mean, there are some other choices but they also answer to the party. It's more for show.
wechat got popular all on its own. nobody is forced to install wechat. there are also no government services that you might want to use that would "encourage" you to install it.
i didn't see an pushing. and from all the social media and messaging apps that i have seen or used, wechat is the most convenient to use. it beats telegram, and it leaves whatsapp and signal in the dust with the things it can do and the convenience it provides. it really is that good.
people elsewere depend on facebook just as much as people in china depend on wechat. not more and not less. alternatives do exist for the determined. you just have to accept that you can't easily stay in contact with everyone. the same tradeof you have to make if you don't use facebook.
Back in the 90s when the PlayStation was released, Sony Computer Entertainment America implemented rules about which sorts of games would and would not be approved: specifically, you needed to be developing 3D polygon games. If you were developing a sprite-based game, you were likely unable to get approval to publish it. We missed out on a lot of great Japanese sprite based games this way, simply because they didn't fit into SCEA's marketing strategy based around the idea that sprites are old hat, and the PlayStation is the sexy new console that leaves all that behind in favor of 3D polygons.
Of course, Sony made exceptions to this policy for major publishers and their big-ticket franchises like Capcom with Street Fighter...
This article is obviously biased in every possible way to measure it.
1. WeChat is not the only app that comes with "mini program", Alipay for a big example.
2. WeChat is not the only app that delivers news and media information and consumes a huge amount of users's time, DouYin for a big example.
Why mention and only mention political events when you are talking about an iOS app and Apple store censorship ?
Or you're just merely talking about politics of your value.
>And with Apple’s shareholders not in agreement to actually put their money where their mouth is when it comes to human rights, it’s not likely Apple is going to go against China anytime soon.
The concatenation of "Apple is" might make this the most egregious garden-path sentence[0] I have read in the last few months. I had to re-read this multiple times.
I love that your previous comment was that "people use twitter because of free speech", and now I can't even look at it without logging in. Proof that on the internet anyone can sound confident.
WeChat is the "everything app" because it has a government monopoly. I'm sure there was and is some organic competition but it's also obvious they picked a winner and ran with it.
Under COVID, when being able to board public transport, enter venues, etc. required showing one’s health status from one’s phone, the Chinese state facilitated that through two apps in particular: WeChat and Alipay.
WeChat was ubiquitous in China way before the incident. It’s simply being practical and using a method that almost everyone has access to. Whether it was a correct way to do so or not is a different topic.
> Are you sure they couldn't even bring printed out forms?
In China your health status (green/yellow/red) was automatically calculated based on what neighborhoods of the city you had been in, what other people you passed by in the street or on public transportation, etc. So, it could change in an instant, and that is why it was shown from phone apps that constantly updated. It wasn’t a fixed thing like vaccination status, where a printed form would make sense.
yes and no. you needed regular testing and in most cases you only needed to show that you had a clean test. you could get that on paper, it just wasn't practical. i had the issue that sometimes the test station was not able to enter my data because i don't have a chinese ID. in that case they had to print out the test results and i would use those. when i travelled that sometimes meant that they sent me a photo of the results because i did a test in the morning in one city, but the results were not available until i arrived in the other city.
to get your digital travel status there was an app you could download (actually each province hat their own app) and you registered on that with your phone number and passport details (or chinese ID). no wechat or alipay required.
if you didn't have a working phone then you could log in to that app on any other phone at see your status there. in theory it was possible to travel without a phone and not have the fact that you travelled reflect in the app, but in practice it was not worth the trouble.
it doesn't have a government monopoly any more than facebook has a monopoly elsewhere. it just happens to be the most popular app. others do exist but they don't market themselves to the average consumer.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrit...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/ready-for-your-e...
[3] (countless more examples, especially recently...)