For some reason I am getting the impression that folks who are arguing this with me and some idea I don’t really understand the difference in various political systems.
The truth is, you folks are seeing exactly what the media feeds you - and what you’re all failing to take into account is the facts about what China really IS.
China is trying it’s level best to put on a good face for the world for the Olympics, and certainly they are Capitalist in the respect they want money.
HOWEVER, you’re also failing to realize that they have a serious, underlying “Socialist” bent and hate to tell you this, but the folks out there “making the money” are ALL government sanctioned. Every, single company in China must be sanctioned by the Chinese Government first. Guess what else? A lot of their “officers” are government officials.
That, folks, is COMMUNISM hiding behind a facade.
A lot of folks in the world of marketing, and economics, and certainly in Liberal Arts simply do not want to ADMIT that China hasn’t REALLY changed since 1949.
I’ve been to China. I’ve seen it first hand. I’ve dealt with their “non-communism” and you guys are wrong. Sorry, that’s the way it is, and you can argument semantics all you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are still listed as a Communist regime and they treat their PEOPLE like they are under a communist regime.
When they stop treating religious groups as political prisoners (which they won’t) I might be willing to believe they are trying to change, but that isn’t going to happen.
Believe me, I’ve been to China, more than you have.
What you don’t seem to understand is that I’m not trying to somehow pretend that China is a much better place because it’s moving away from Communism.
You may not believe this but there are other forms of government that is just as bad, and that Communism is not the only form of tyrannical government.
China is historically and culturally authoritarian and imperialistic, that has been true for about two thousand years. Much of what you are seeing, where everything has to be sanctioned by the government, isn’t something that was introduced to China through Communist ideology, it was something that was always true in China, even before the Communists.
The issue isn’t whether China has changed since 1949, it’s whether it has changed since about 200 B.C. The time period between the fall of the Qing imperial government in the early 1900s and the Communist take over of 1949 was
the exception to this general rule as the result of a lack of a strong central government during that period.
I really don’t get people who are permanently stuck in the cold war mindset. It’s as if the only enemies they are allowed to recognize are Communists.