Posted on 05/31/2012 2:51:43 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese activist whose flight to the US embassy in Beijing sparked a major diplomatic incident, said Thursday that democratic change in China is slow, but irreversible.
"I'm very optimistic," Chen said. "Nobody can stop the process of history, whether it's the central government, whether the central government wants to move forward or backwards."
In his first major public appearance since being allowed to leave China, Chen told the Council on Foreign Relations that the Internet age meant the communist state machine had already lost much of its grip.
"Chinese society has gotten to the era where if you don't want something known, you better not do it. People are using all kinds of means to disseminate information. Can you do cover-ups? No. That possibility is diminishing," he said.
But activists at home and Western powers watching from the outside should not force China, he said.
"Many people, they want to move that mountain in one week. That's not realistic. We have to move it bit by bit and move it by ourselves."
According to Chen, the central government in Beijing is moving in the right direction, but local authorities, such as the officials who harassed him and he says are still persecuting his family, are acting lawlessly.
"The central government is letting me come to the US to study. That is unprecedented, regardless of what they did in the past. As long as they move in the right direction, we should affirm it, rather than... (be) challenging everything," he said.
The central government is ready to reform, "but I think local authorities are very backward and it's going to take time to change them," he said. If local authorities are not forced to respect China's laws, then the central powers will "lose control," he warned.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Democracy? Fat chance with about 800 million citizens still waiting for a piece of the prosperity. Easy pickins for another Mao.
Yeah, it’s inevitable in North Korea too.....
Here is the thing, Christianity is having great growth in China. Not by traditional western missionaries so much, but more as self-sustaining in-home Bible centered churches like the Book of Acts.
God’s Word sets people free.
The Chi-Coms will see that it is hard to fight against God.
sounds familiar..prior to tienenman square...don’t count any chickens just yet
Capitalism? It's called NEP. Lenin created it a hundred years ago. You'll know for sure that it is Deng's version of Lenin's NEP when all foreign assets are seized and the "useful idiots" are put on a slow boat to America penniless.
Laws? Great laws. Even better than ours in some cases, I've heard -- but there is NO intent or staff to enforce those kind of laws. Theirs is not a nation of laws.
Yes, the Chi-Coms, among many other peoples, will see that they have lost the fight against God in the end.
We all know the stories about rampant abuse of copyright and all the forgeries and fakes coming out of China. A couple friends of mine teach in China - English, Accounting, etc. The students are egregious and sometimes open cheats. They don’t care about being caught and parents are actually proud that they do what it takes to get the grades to get the jobs.
A society of lies is China. That’s their culture. How do you form anything but a dictatorship based on such a culture? You certainly won’t get anything like American liberty there.
Great.
Every Great Leap Forward was a contemporaneous event for me. The Leaps always landed on millions of citizens killing them all.
You are probably familiar with how the GRE was suspended in China and elsewhere.. graduate schools here were warned to be suspicious of the scores and not to depend entirely upon the scores. That was five or six years ago.
Amen and amen.
Let us never forget China’s been calling itself a “democracy” ever since Mao took over.
Not until Shanghai looks like Osaka in September 1945.
He is charmingly naive. As soon as the rulers’ power is threatened, the whip will crack, and hard.
It is a culture where face is more important than truth.
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