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When addressing politics, we must accustom ourselves to thinking and speaking about the actions and interests of specific, named leaders rather than thinking and speaking about fuzzy ideas like the national interest, the common good, and the general welfare.
that's a very good advice, politicians only think about themselves, it is navie to think otherwise
revolts are defeated through suppression of the people—always an unpleasant task—so coalition members need to receive enough benefits from their leader that they are willing to do horribly distasteful things to ensure that the existing system is maintained.
Dirty cop in HK
In politics, coming to power is never about doing the right thing. It is always about doing what is expedient.
China Government never care about their people
If a ruler runs out of money with which to pay his supporters, it becomes far easier for someone else to make coalition members an attractive offer. Financial crises are an opportune time to strike.
that's why china spent so much money on the stupid police and army
democrats need to find effective public policies that their supporters like and reward their loyalty that way.
One of the reason why democracy is better than dictatorship for the people no matter what
Autocratic politics is a battle for private rewards, for a bigger slice of a relatively small pie.
Thaty why china do not care about the financial status of HK. Because even if the pie became smaller, the rich china officer still get a considerable good share of money and benefit
It should be obvious that any board members involved in deposing the former CEO have the potential to be a problem for a new CEO. Since they have already been coup makers, there is little reason to doubt that they stand ready to start trouble once again if they think the circumstances warrant it.
The three most important characteristics of a coalition are (1) loyalty, (2) loyalty, and (3) loyalty.
Just like HK politics, as long as you are loyal and act as a dog, you will be good in political world. All CCP want is loyalty
“The answer was that as long as there is a revolution, there will be a counter-revolution.”5 As we said before, those who can bring a leader to power can also bring the leader down.
That's true, think twice before revolution
Rigged elections are a warning to powerful politicians that they are expendable if they deviate from the leader’s desired path.
Everybody in the Soviet selectorate could, with a very small probability, grow up to be general secretary of the Communist Party, just like the petty criminal Joseph Stalin and the uneducated Nikita Khrushchev. Those already in the inner circle knew they had to stay in line to keep their day jobs. Bravo, Lenin.
How ccp work
Although autocrats survive longer, they find surviving the initial period in office particularly difficult.
During their first six months they are nearly twice as likely to be deposed as their democratic counterparts. However, if they survive those first turbulent months, then they have a much better chance of staying in power than democrats.
A smart leader sacks some early backers and replaces them with more reliable and cheaper supporters. But no matter how much he packs the coalition with his friends and supporters, they will not remain loyal unless he rewards them.
Money is king
Secrecy ensures that everyone gets the deal they can negotiate, not knowing how much it might cost to replace them. Thus every supporter’s price is kept as low as possible, and
Same trick is illustrated in the Japanese anime "the liar game"
many new leaders seizing the people’s wealth and property. Such confiscations of property might well damage revenue in the long run, but if a leader does not find money in the short term, then the long run is someone else’s problem.
Typical ccp trick
First, taxes diminish how hard people work. Second, some of the tax burden inevitably will fall on the essential backers of the leader. (In general, the first constraint limits taxes in autocracies and the second constraint sets the boundary on taxes in democracies.)
Taxation, especially in small-coalition settings, redistributes from those outside the coalition (the poor) to those inside the coalition (the rich).
劫貧濟富
Fearing exclusion and poverty under an alternative leadership, supporters are all the more fiercely loyal.
If you don’t like paying taxes—and who does—then you want to live in a democratic nation.
Autocracies have high implicit taxes—if you have something valuable then it simply gets taken.
Communism
In autocracies, it is unwise to be rich unless it is the government that made you rich.
It is the reality in china that the economy and politics are strongly related to each others
Taxing the poor to pay the rich has plenty of bad economic consequences, but these tend to be “in the long run”—that is, on another leader’s watch.
Autocrats can avoid the technical difficulties of gathering and redistributing wealth by authorizing their supporters to reward themselves directly.
In a phenomenon often called the resource curse, nations with readily extractable natural resources systematically underperform nations without such resources.19 Resource-rich nations have worse economic growth, are more prone to civil wars, and become more autocratic than their resource-poor counterparts.
Natural resources don’t require freedoms to be productive, and so they allow a leader to pay her coalition without the risk of empowering the people. A leader who can afford to keep the people isolated, uneducated, and ignorant and chooses not to do so is a fool.
Admittedly the minerals need to be extracted, but by and large autocrats can achieve this without the participation of the local population.
The oil companies run security firms, effectively small private armies, to keep the locals from obstructing the business or complaining about the environmental degradation that results.
resource curse enables autocrats to massively reward their supporters and accumulate enormous wealth.
