i still remember "Clean your plate... the people in China are STARVING!!!"i still remember "Clean your plate... the people in China are STARVING!!!"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.
Meanwhile, China spent $36 BILLION on their military this year.
"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.
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.
Read later
The moden Chinese state is more fascist than communist.
.....As Deng correctly calculated, shedding the blood of hundreds had the effect of intimidating hundreds of millions. There were few disturbances in the years immediately following Tiananmen.
Marking.
This long article leaves out much. For starters, it is not universal among Chinese that the studen protests in Tianamen were a good thing, that putting them down was a bad thing.
This writer ignores significant Chinese history that weighs heavily in the opinions of many Chinese, many of whom suffered directly under Mao.
Many welcome stability and the one party system over what they had before. They want nothing to do with student movements that brought such misery on the land.
This writer can be likened to a liberal utopian in the U.S., full of ideal and short on practical reality.
bump
Once again, we see the power of the MSM to kill a story, its most dangerous attribute.
Yesterday there was an assertion on a thread that Russia is doomed by its demographics, and this is not hard to see, but also China is doomed by its demographics and this is not so clear. Is China approaching a Social Security crisis as they limit births and the population approaches retirement?
Thanks for posting this. I have been a Commentary subscriber for over 20 years and this article is another good reason why.
Perhaps we should help them link up.
The model that China is now following is that of Singapore; both authoritarian and successful.