Yes and No. Yes, you’re right, it’s something the CCP is/has been addressing. But it does still exist, and my understanding is that in some places it’s going faster than others. It is by no means gone, and China is miles away from a freestanding, independant professional military. My point was just that if the CCP were to fall, it’s not like warlordism is some ancient thing that won’t happen again; the seeds of it are still there.
agreed on all your points. China is a process. State Owned Enterprise reform was started 10 years ago and while by no means complete certainly some impressive gains have been made. Ditto with the Military. Banking reform is going slower than I had hoped. Individual rights, quality of life, etc have all been on an upward trend pretty much since economic liberalization. One can certainly argue with the speed of changes and reform, but significant progress is taking place and often overlooked in the scorecard of how China is progressing. Also, the speed of change when there is 1.4 billion people may not correspond with that of a smaller country.
[Hijack/Sometime in the next couple of months I will have to go to Chongqing - the industrial old economy heartland of China. I first went there in 1985 and thought it was definately the worst big city I’ve ever seen. I haven’t been back there since 1987, and will use that as a benchmark to see how far interior China has progressed…]
Just wanted to highlight that a lot of the views in this thread are a decade if not decades out of date. I don’t have a handy cite, but IIRC the last reasonably reliable estimate I saw put the government, State Owned Enterprises and military at less than 20% of the total Chinese economy. Please understand I might wildly mis-remember this figure, but I’m pretty sure at least gvt and SOE’s are less than 20% (and military might be seperate).
Of course, it’s all very fluid. I remember reading about PLA guys with business cards with “General XYZ” on one side and “XYZ, Chairman of 123 company” on the other. But wow, only 20%. Pretty soon they’ll be privatizing utilities while still swearing they’re communist.
On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see the increasing lack of central control.
On the other, it’s frightening to see the increasing lack of central control …
Think about it, at 8-10% annual sustained growth rate for pretty much the past 25 years, the Chinese economy has more or less tripled since 1989. Of course, 1989 is the image that most people today still have of China. Not the image of the number 1 mobile phone market in the world, or the number 3 car market for Volkswagen (soon to overtake Germany for the number 2 spot), etc.
Thanks, furt - I had no idea.
Regards,
Shodan