Reblogged - The Future of China:
It's not your Father's 3rd World dictatorship
G-Scope "finds it hard to believe that the 21st century will "belong to China" when their leaders are this pathetic" and believes "they can succeed on sheer exploitation of both their citizens and environment for only so long."
What G-Scope fails to understand is that the Chinese government is not some petty third world dictatorship that rules a hostile populous. Say what you will, but the average modern Chinese attitude towards the government is little different than that of their ancestors, going back two thousand years. Social Harmony is even more a universal cultural value among the Chinese than liberty and personal freedom ever was to Americans.
The old Chinese ideas of sovereign legitimacy is just as strong and pervasive as it ever has been, whether you are talking to mainland Chinese officials, Shanghai residents, Taiwanese businessman or Chinese ex-pats around the world. Governments in power have a divine right to rule; a divine right that is lost only when the rulers lose faith with the gods, losing that right by the force of history (eg, when Mao took over from the Nationalists, he did because the "gods lost faith with the Nationalists and graced Mao").
Chinese society isn't a house built on sand. Or on the backs of a disenfranchised and repressed public. It is a vibrant, dynamic, integrated and viable culture, socially, economically, politically. Ask any Chinese and they will tell you it has a bedrock firmer than any nation, government or civilization extant today.
Not that I personally believe Chinese cultural and values are far superior to American (I most fervently don't), but by and large, they do.
What G-Scope fails to understand is that the Chinese government is not some petty third world dictatorship that rules a hostile populous. Say what you will, but the average modern Chinese attitude towards the government is little different than that of their ancestors, going back two thousand years. Social Harmony is even more a universal cultural value among the Chinese than liberty and personal freedom ever was to Americans.
The old Chinese ideas of sovereign legitimacy is just as strong and pervasive as it ever has been, whether you are talking to mainland Chinese officials, Shanghai residents, Taiwanese businessman or Chinese ex-pats around the world. Governments in power have a divine right to rule; a divine right that is lost only when the rulers lose faith with the gods, losing that right by the force of history (eg, when Mao took over from the Nationalists, he did because the "gods lost faith with the Nationalists and graced Mao").
Chinese society isn't a house built on sand. Or on the backs of a disenfranchised and repressed public. It is a vibrant, dynamic, integrated and viable culture, socially, economically, politically. Ask any Chinese and they will tell you it has a bedrock firmer than any nation, government or civilization extant today.
Not that I personally believe Chinese cultural and values are far superior to American (I most fervently don't), but by and large, they do.
posted by Jay Cline | 1:33 PM
2 Comments:
G-Scobe
responds:
...If you believe, as I do, that market capitalism and democracy are the best organizing principles of a society, then you tend to believe in their eventual predominance across the globe...
Absolutely!
Though I would disagree with two points, one inconsequential.
The irrelevant first:
"... market capitalism and democracy are the best organizing principles of a society, then you tend to believe in their eventual predominance across the globe."
Behind you 99%. One of my top ten favorite quotations comes from Churchill, that democracy is the worst form of governance, except all that we have so far tried.
Maybe not the best, certainly not perfect, but I am not smart enough to come with something better.
The second point, which I have already stated, is to answer the question "How long?"
Longer than I'll be around.
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