After spending some time with Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin biography, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878-1928, I am surprised more people do not compare Xi to Stalin (though of course some have). Both men rose in an authoritarian system formally run by a collective leadership, and shifted it in the direction of more personalized rule for themselves and tighter political controls on everyone else.
:jesse-wtf:
Stalin, of course, also unleashed a historic economic catastrophe upon the Soviet Union, when he abandoned the market-tolerating New Economic Policy and embarked on a crash course of agricultural collectivization and forced industrialization.
:michael-laugh:
I’m the China research director for Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent economic research firm with offices in Hong Kong and Beijing.
My day job is to write and talk about the Chinese economy, and manage a team of analysts. The research we produce is available on our website, though access is restricted to clients of our firm.
From 2015-17 I was a senior nonresident fellow at the Paulson Institute, the Chicago-based think tank. I also used to be a reporter for The Wall Street Journal; more about my professional background is at my LinkedIn profile.
lol
This is a neolib article about how privatizing everything is good and creates a Good Economy(TM), written by some think tank ghoul.