Your average Chinese slum-dweller, if he looks at those empty apartments and starts thinking in revolutionary terms, will not be thinking “Give us natural market demand!” More likely he’ll be thinking something far more leftier.
“For”? Funny, I assumed an Irish riot would involve everyone assaulting everyone within reach and view indiscriminately, like Cuchulain in warp-spasm, or those soldiers in Jacob’s Ladder.
My family are from Northern Ireland, “These bastards are representational of the people who fucked my family over in the 20th century.”
I don’t really hate Orangemen but why they thought their anti-Catholic triumphalist pomp would play in Dublin is beyond me. The whole thing was a shambles.
The lack of civil unrest related to the property bubble etc. I put down to people being cowed, and a bit shellshocked by goings on. We’re led to believe that if we don’t let all this shit happen then things will get even worse. Also, public protest tends to be vilified in extremis by the mainstream press in both Ireland and Britain. I think only the Guardian would be pro-peaceful protest. Most papers/media want the money shot of hooligans acting the bollocks and act like thousands of people marching peacefully for a legitimate cause is somehow an existential threat to the state. Slight exaggeration on my part, but only slight. ETA: This seems in stark contrast to continental Europe where people protest at the drop of a hat in a lot of countries.
I fucking love Brit slang.
Freedom of speech, we let neo-Nazis march and assemble without rioting here.
Hey I do too, not sure if they actually say “acting the bollocks” over there.
I’m not even sure why I’m responding. What has freedom of speech got to do with rioting? 
Anyway, you’re not even right about what you’re wrong about.
2005 Toledo riot - Wikipedia for example.
Sablicious, I’m highly dubious of the estimate. Yes, sure there are some ghost cities and empty apartments in China. There is a lot of build it and they will come enthusiasm in the Tier 4 and lower cities. He wouldn’t be the first journalist to exaggerate or use hyperbole in China.
Second, as a parent of a special needs child, I would appreciate it if you could find a word other than “retard.” thanks in advance.
China’s state owned sector (command and control) has been less than 20% of the economy for more than a decade.
Sam Stone - as already pointed out, China since the late 1970’s opening has been the greatest rise of a populous country in the history of mankind. The whole country was in grinding poverty when I first lived there in 1985. It’s night and day difference. Sure, the per capita income is still low but if you bifuricate the population, there is a significant population that is much much higher and far overshadows say the Singapore or Canada GCP. There are still a one two or three hundred million people in dire poverty, but that contrasts with the closer to a billion in dire poverty of 3 decades ago.
The government crackdown on credit over the past 6 months has been very stringent. I know first hand as a property I was trying to sell had buyer after buyer that couldn’t get a mortgage even with 40% down. There are strong restrictions if you already own a residential property - even without a mortgage.
The economist in me certainly sees that China is frothy if not outright in a bubble. But the end of the world hyperbole of some bloggers is overrated IMHO.
Nearly entirely untrue. People have pretty strong memories of the worst of Communism, and can pinpoint pretty exactly when things started getting better. There is very, very little affection for the system.
But, you are talking about those Chinese – and yes, there are tens or even hundreds of millions of them – for whom things somehow started getting worse after the country started going for “economic incentives.”
I recall an old Soviet-era joke: Brezhnev proudly shows his mother his luxurious apartments and furnishings and everything in the Kremlin. She is suitably awed, but finally says, “But, Leonid! What will you do if the Reds come back?!”
That, rather than, “Communism sux!” is probably nearer to the attitude of discontented Chinese these days.
Tens of millions is a rounding error. Even a hundred million isn’t all that significant.
One of the big untold stories of today’s China is that there are between 100-300 million migrants. Stories focus on the hardship this causes, and I don’t mean to underplay that. However, for the first time in Chinese history, the peasants have wealth accumulation, are not tied 100% to the land, don’t get financially wiped out at least once or twice a decade and face starvation once or twice a generation, actually have some money to buy justice, their kids may have a chance for University (Even Sven can talk more about that), etc.
I’ve been in a bunch of the factories that are full of rural workers. I have not been to Foxconn but have visited smaller players. Heck, even Foxconn which is pilloried for the suicides probably has a less than average rate of suicide (search on a Wired Foxconn article). The workers have a chance to get away from the grinding rural property or at least help their families or save up for a rural house.
Don’t forget the cultural norm is that family and clan have strong ties. If the elderly got laid off and get their pension, it’s alright if at least one of the kids is part of the new middle class.
Certainly the faustian bargain is that life has to get “better” overall and the masses don’t get in the governments face. Revolution any minute now - no. However, as astrophysist Fang Lizhi there is always the risk of China devolving into anarchy. Thus far in the post Mao era, China has done a pretty good job given it’s situation.
The Chinese economy certainly appears to be perpetually on fire (especially when viewed relative to the situation in the West), but they suffer from a magnitude of latent mid to long term problems that cannot be quantified nearly as neatly as GDP, number of new millionaires/year, number of new aircraft carriers etc. Many of these problems have been mentioned on previously on this thread and on others.
Their demographic situation is a big one, IMHO. Not only are they aging quickly, but aging massively. Their environment is in really, really poor shape. The top leadership has a number grand policy schemes for such ‘big’ question that certainly rival the our best solutions, but it is tough…really tough to get all the provinces, municipalities and other big state organs (PLA etc.) to play ball on issues that are not really pressing at the immediate moment (in comparison to GDP growth figures).
There is an awesome post (it could have been on James Fallows blog, or perhaps Jottings from a Granite Studio,…but I can’t find it) that argued that one of the largest rifts and cause of angst in China that threatens their harmonious rise is the massively large division between the entitled (party members, their families, the super-wealthy, generals and their families etc.) and every one else. With everyone else including the majority of the so-called Chinese middle class. The entitled being able to get away with nearly anything they choose to do, with the situation of Li Gang being the poster case-study.
While it is a common phenomenon in most developing nations, China is obviously unique given it’s size and world political-economic power.
Still? I was wondering what effect (if any) 62 years of Communist culture has had on traditional Chinese culture on the ground. For instance, is there now a significant cultural difference – for that reason – between a Mainlander and a Taiwanese? Is a Taiwanese more, well, traditionally Chinese?
What was Gordon Chang thinking . . .
See, there you have a formula for, you know, class war. A concept with which all Chinese should be familiar at least in theory.
Of course, if there is a revolution in China, and there is no party or organization in the field to offer any alternative vision of socialism, then it will probably go like it did in Russia – go to capitalism as the default setting, as it were; disestablish the Communist Party; a pinata of privatization of state-owned industries, and CP members might well be first in line to scoop up the candy, depending on what form the revolution takes. And then, like Russia, a semi-democratic authoritarian kleptocracy. Or maybe something better, who knows.
This is all based on observation and second-hand knowledge, there is a noticeable difference. I think the general openness to the West and changes in land use/population distribution has had as big of an effect as anything else, though. Obviously Taiwan didn’t have the cultural revolution and the whole “anything old is bad” period, but it’s had its own influences and changes. They’ve kept traditional writing and I imagine religion is stronger, but western influence is also stronger. Probably, like any cultural divergence, they’ve grown apart equally in different ways.
I’d say it is difficult to pinpoint the effects of “Communist culture.” It has made some pretty radical changes- for example, functional atheism seems pretty entrenched. But in other ways it never really penetrated much- through a lot of the strictest Communist times people were just rolling their eyes, trading whatever they could on the black market, and hoping the bullshit would end and they’d make it out alive. I’m reading Mao’s Great Famine right now, and it’s surprised me how much trade was going on in even the bleakest times. I think China is so damn big and diverse that to really brainwash everyone is just not possible. Most people are just going to hunker down and endure until they can do something else.
He’s still around writing columns. I’ve read the book, and some of the arguments he made could still be true. IIRC, he argues that the party would have trouble surviving an internal split- something that could easily happen today. Plenty of notables are still pointing out China’s potential instabilities, from private intelligence guru George Friedman to East Asia expert Susan Shirk.
Extremely unlikely. The Soviet Union had nothing left that anybody wanted, and the party decided they’d be better off calling things off and stealing what they could in the chaos.
If China goes, the call will not be from Beijing, but from the coastal industrial cities that frankly couldn’t care less what Beijing wants from them. China’s East Coast is a pretty much fully functional industrial economy. They barely need Beijing, and Beijing knows it. The Party, in many ways, functions as a franchise, and there is always the threat that some other branch will become more powerful than Beijing.
Anyway, the point is that if all went to hell, Beijing would be on the short end of the stick- they have nothing to offer but some warmed over nationalism. They couldn’t steal anything even if they wanted to. Probably they’d find themselves in charge of the hinterlands while the coastal cities became independent. Meanwhile, what motivations would the coast cities have to become a kleptocracy? They are becoming rich, and it’s pretty obvious how that is happening. They are looking at Hong Kong, not Russia.
I would say there is a noticeable cultural difference. This is especially obvious in a university setting in the US, for example. It’s not uncommon to see ethnic Chinese students from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, etc, hang out together. It’s not common to see mainlanders in that mix. Off hand I can’t articulate specifically what is different, other than that something is just off…
Mmmmmnot so much. I hear the same thing happening all the time in India. Which is a close second to China in that regard and position.