i still remember "Clean your plate... the people in China are STARVING!!!"
Posted on 12/30/2006 5:26:32 PM PST by neverdem
i still remember "Clean your plate... the people in China are STARVING!!!"
"Clean your plate" now means that after you clean it, you can read "Made in China" on it.
Interesting rant, but Gordon Chang is always presenting China in the verge of chaos. Is his analysis hype or realistic?
Happy thirtieth, Mao!
May you rot forever in hell.
heh I got "Children in Germany are starving" .....Berlin airlift and all....
Guess that's one way to figure out somebodies age...
The Airlift was an early reference point, for sure...
Interestingly enough, the average Chinese obeys or doesn't obey the law based on the likelihood he will be caught. I think his thesis, that Chinese are rapidly losing (without having completely lost) their fear of the government is correct. It's complicated.
On the one hand, they believe what they are taught in school - that without the Communist Party, China would not exist as a unified state today. On the other, they seem to have very little respect for the laws and regulations put out by the government. They will flout the law at every - and I mean every - opportunity. They respect the government, but at the same time, they have very little respect for its edicts.
I think the real problem is that any authoritarian system where major segments of the population have lost their fear of the government faces the challenge of potential competitors for power. Not to remake China as a democracy, but to take the resources that are now monopolized by Communist Party cadres for themselves. In other words, the risk to the Party is that of a dynasty change. Let me just say that dynasty changes in China have tended to be very violent. The 1949 revolution saw millions executed in the immediate aftermath. Given the ruthlessness of the Party, its replacement would have to every bit as ruthless to prevent a counter-revolution.
Meanwhile, China spent $36 BILLION on their military this year.
Maybe Wen means peace in the traditional Chinese sense, during which Chinese generals pacified the areas for which they were responsible, typically by slaughtering barbarians and annexing their territory.
well, at least not in this house... i'm still eating off of thirty five year old Correll plates made twenty miles from here in Corning NY, but i surly get yer drift and don't disagree.
I'm not really familiar with him. But the story that he relays have been told in other sources.
good observation. only in America can you tell somebodys age by who they were trying to help feed when they were young...
It's hard to imagine what potential elements in society outside the military could muster the power that could lead to a dynasty change and how that new center of power might be as ruthless as the Communist Party has been.
I think the potentially destabilizing impact of a major military setback is a major reason the Chinese elite won't make a move against Taiwan. For them, losing a war for Taiwan could mean losing much more at home.
"But is the modern Chinese state, the Communist regime anchored in Beijing, similarly permanent? In fact, it is bedeviled today by a raft of problems: corrupt institutions, debt-ridden regional governments, a degraded environment, insolvent state banks, unprofitable enterprises, bankrupt pension funds, failed schools, and overburdened hospitals, just to name the most prominent. "
LOL. The author could just as easily be talking about the U.S.A.
Once a contender gets the ball rolling, party members and military men will join up if it looks like he's got a chance at winning.* Whatever the reality, it is said that Party members and military men used to believe in the Communism 100%. Now they believe in looking out for Number One.
As to ruthlessness, until the modern era, dynasty changes in China have involved having family members killed, together with their entire clans. The average Chinese isn't real squeamish about these things, and it's got nothing to do with Communism.
* All successful dynasty changes in China have worked on this model, including the Communist victory in 1949. The Communists recruited a lot of people from the Nationalist Party when it looked like they were winning.
China is China. The remarkable thing about Mao and the supposedly permanent revolution is how very superficial it turned out to be. But given the tremendous social inertia of a country that old and a population that large, we might perhaps have expected it.
I hope no one misconstrues this as racist because it isn't, it's a cultural observation, but the Chinese are, broadly speaking, intelligent, shrewd, far-thinking, and some of the finest capitalists the world holds. Their prediliction for collective effort predates communism by more than a millennium and will, IMHO, outlive it.
This is not unrelievedly positive - it means, for one thing, that extant individuals are the exception rather than the rule in Chinese society and are often viewed with suspicion. It was they who most caught the attention of the Red Guard during the nightmare years of the Cultural Revolution. (The damage that period of horror did to Chinese historical artifacts makes antiquarians cry and may end up validating the plunder that populated the great museums of Taiwan).
There is another issue, however, that will prove a challenge to Chinese society, and it is the demographics that have resulted from decades of one-child policies that have skewed the population toward the male and guaranteed that it will halve in a generation or two. Were it balanced it might not be a bad thing and it has staved off the certainty of eventual famine, but at a price. That price will be fewer couples and more single men and a far higher percentage of insupportable elderly, a configuration that will challenge everything that we think of as Chinese culture. I'm guessing that will constitute a greater long-term change to China than communism did.
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I don't think you understand the pervasiveness of the corruption in China. In China, you need to bribe every government department that touches on your business, or they will close you down. Government officials divert civil service pension funds to back real estate developers who kick back some cash to them for the privilege of using those funds. Eminent domain there means that government officials take the money given by private developers to buy land, leaving the current occupants with nothing.
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