This has nothing to do with Marxism. There are fewer Marxists in China than in Cambridge, Massachusetts. China has been governed by a Mandarin caste selected by standardized exams for more than 2,000 years, and the Communist Party is merely today’s name for the new Mandarin bureaucracy. William F. Buckley said that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard. China’s ruling caste is more like a government of National Merit Scholars. The Chinese look with contempt on a democracy that allows us to elect stupid leaders if we so desire.
Chinese civilization is 5,000 years old. Why has it lasted so long? You haven’t run into any Hittites, Sumerians, or Romans of late. Every time China collapsed it reconstituted itself on the same model. Foreign invaders became emperors and found there was only one way to run the place. So they assimilated and Chinese civilization prevailed.
Napoleon was right...............
This article has a lot of good points but also a lot of errors.
First of all, the Chinese civilization is not 5000 years old, that’s Chinese propaganda. it’s somewhere around 3,500 year olds.
2ndly, this is reason for concern but not for alarm. It doesn’t matter how much they spend on R&D, their return on investment is always tiny compared to the west. Because in a society where any independent thought is immediately punished, it’s very difficult to accomplish goals that require ingenuity and creativity. That’s why China spend so much of their effort on stealing western research, they can’t do it themselves.
Seek and Find. I never thought you were an ignorant buffoon before.
Very astute observation.
To call China “communist” is idiotic and ignorant.
The essence of communism is the prohibition of private property. China has taken to capitalism with a vengeance and has probably more billionaires than we have.
What China is is a single party dictatorship. And the party that calls itself “communist” is simply the latest incarnation of the traditional chinese dynasty with Xi Jinping as the latest emperor.
And it is true that most Chinese are apolitical. In a top down dictatorship politics doesn’t exist, so it’s a total waste of time to have a “political” opinion.
You work within the system, get to know the right people, keep your nose clean and make the best of things.
As for the leaders, they know that if they want to keep their dynasty going they better keep the masses relatively happy. They have a patriarchical attitude and are more grounded in reality than we are, which will serve them well in the long run.
As you say it’s been like that for 5000 years. Chinese are used to it.