If Indonesia under the Suharto era counts, yes.
Well, for the first six years of my life South Africa was ruled by the Nationalist party. I don’t know if that counts, since they had started winding down the repression by then. MrDibble and our other SADopers could probably say more about that. (Incidentally, my first memory of an identifiable event is going with my parents when they voted in the 1994 elections.)
I haven’t, but one thing I was always curious about in college was my professors. Many of my professors came from countries that were dictatorships back in the 70s and 80s. I had professors from Russia, Iran, Ukraine, South Korea, Hungary, Poland, etc. They never talked about it but many grew up under various dictatorships around the world.
Nothing that dramatic. Dad was sent to Germany in 1933 to help build an oil refinery in Hamburg, and took us with him. Stayed until the end of 1934, job finished, came home. Came back on that great German liner the “Bremen”. Still remember some things about that trip. Those ocean liners were the way to travel. And I still remember once seeing both the “Hindenberg” and the “Graf Zeppelin” flying over Berlin. Never met Adolph, though.
During all this Dad was working for the Winkler, Koch company. Some of you Kansans are undoubtedly familiar with the Koch name.
Are you the oldest member here?
Half the fam is still in Indonesia, they’ve been there for five generations and counting.
And yes I would say that Suharto counts. There’s a reason only two of my paternal grandfather’s children still have their original Chinese surname.
My mom remembers her life in Germany during the Third Reich very well. Nothing very exciting according to her. Lots of things like food and clothes were rationed, and she hated being in the Hitler Youth because it was so boring. A good deal of it was being taught propaganda about how great Hitler was, and her response was, “So what?” She was smart enough to keep those thoughts to herself though.
She said things were a lot worse after the war for civilians than during it.
Let me see, Panama under the dictatorship (side trips to Paraguay in the Old Days, Brazil probably some other places), and of course more than a decade in Saudi Arabia.
I knew a few Romanians who lived under Ceauchescu. I asked them what it was like. They said it wasn’t bad, it was like living your life where you work. You always have someone watching over you, like a boss watches you when you work.
What about Kansas?
Spent some time in Libya, Angola, Gabon and visited Equitorial Guinea before lasts years significant visa restrictions. All of the those places are beautiful. Angola was a honeymoon destination before the civil war!
While not particularly effective at being “repressive,” Biya’s Cameroon is an authoritarian dictatorship. He’s been president for the last thirty years, the “votes” are a joke, and while opposing parties are grudgingly allowed to exist there is widespread political violence against them and their power is limited to their regional strongholds. The government doesn’t usually command enough power to participate in wide scale social control, but the nature of the regime is the major factor in Cameroon’s failure to grow, which has left millions in poverty. In any case, if you find yourself on the guy’s bad side there is not a thing in the world that will save you (except maybe a large enough bribe,)
I would argue that modern China is still pretty authoritarian. While personal freedoms have increased dramatically, in my opinion that doesn’t really show a change in the nature of the regime as much as an understanding that repression makes people angry and unproductive. The social controls that are left are still fairly effectively enforced, and anyone who has the balls to seriously question the legitimacy of the party or seriously call for democracy and reform is going to end up in real trouble. But even among normal people the government plays what we would consider a huge role in basic life decisions. I’d say China is a mature authoritarian regime, who has learned that backing off on some of the less important stuff can actually help them maintain a tighter control of the essentials.
Nope, KlondikeGeoff has longer mileage.
I lived in Spain under the last years of Franco and the Transición, and in an area which had its own specific flavor of conservative provintialism. But I was only 7 when he died, so I remember more about Destape for how scandalous every adult in my circles found it (with the exception of Uncle M, who was all for titty movies) than from any interest in what it meant about Freedom of Expression; I remember the glee in my family when “that nice fascist boy” a distant cousin had married was chosen to cut the “well-tied ties” Franco thought he was leaving and the discussions over a single punctuation mark in a single sentence in the proposed Constitution (Dad’s parents, brothers and first cousins, and their spouses were all Carlista, PNV or other children of Carlismo; they considered “throwing rocks at the fascist cousins” a perfectly cromulent and healthy sport which helped you grow a strong arm for Jai-Alai), and who in Dad’s side of the family was voting which way (of those who said it during the discussions). I’ve got stronger impressions of Carrero Blanco’s murder and its interpretations from reruns and anniversaries, and from seeing older generations still get angry over it, than from actual memories.
Are you kidding?! :eek:
I had a census guy at my door recently, but beyond that I can’t think of any role at all that the “government” plays in influencing my life decisions, those of my family members, or any of my friends. Yes, I am not Chinese, but I am a member of a Chinese family and that is, basically, as close as any non-Chinese resident of China will ever come to being “Chinese” without naturalizing.
What role does the Chinese government play in, say, selecting a marriage partner, choosing a job, buying a car, buying a house, raising children, etc? I would certainly consider those “basic life decisions” but can’t figure out at all where the government would factor in.
Well, the government says that women cannot marry until 20 for women and 22 for men, and forbids children outside of marriage. They only recently began allowing college student sto marry, and I believe some (government) schools still forbid students to marry. Marriage, of course, has a big effect on what sort of residency permit you hold, which plays a key role in what jobs you can take and where your children can go to school.
if you don’t think the government plays a role in what job people choose…I’m not sure what to say. Party membership status is till a meaningful thing. Getting in trouble with the government- or even having a family member that gets in trouble with the government- will have an effect on your ability to get a job. People whose jobs make them ineligible for residence permits where they work cannot get access to social services in that area. And there are tons of random little rules- tour guides can’t be older than 35. WTF?
I don’t know much about raising children, but the one child policy is a pretty heavy intervention in what we consider a personal decision…as is the abortions and sterilizations that come with it.
None of this is particularly horrific, but it is a heavier hand than we are used to and does speak of the government having control of personal lives in a way they don’t in most countries.
Setting an age limit for marriage is considered the government “playing a role” in people’s basic lives? I guess technically it might be, but I figured that was just commonplace is pretty much every country.
Maybe in the 1980’s. You realize a hukou basically means nothing now, right? And that pretty much anybody can choose any job that is available and they’re qualified for (or that they have guanxi for)?
Even though the majority of Chinese citizens aren’t Party members? "In my own experience"® I’ve never heard of Party membership being useful for anything other than a government job.
I would agree to that even though the OCP applies to less than 40% of the Chinese population:
It’s not really the extent that the Once Child Policy that demonstrates authoritarianism, as much as the fact that they can enforce it if they choose to. They maintain the power to create such social controls, even if they strategically choose not to exercise it. The power is still there.
Likewise, most governments maintain some rules on marriage, but generally aim for a bare minimum. Most countries aim for something between 14-18, which is a time when few people are very marriage-minded anyway. It doesn’t really affect people. I think there are plenty of people, however, who might want to marry at 21. The particular way that China makes it’s rules- especially the differences between men and women- hints strongly at social engineering. Other countries may have different rules for men and women, but these are largely vestigial and in any case are set so low that they rarely affect anyone. China’s marriage rules go beyond simply preventing child marriages and into molding marriage to suit state purposes.
Houkou does still affect people in the countryside. My students were terrified of ending up teachers in a rural school, because they knew that short of marriage they’d probably never have a chance to get back to the city. Job mobility is still pretty low, and a rural first job can be a life sentence in a way it is not in other countries.
Anyway, just because they are not using their power to make people miserable does not mean they are not authoritarian. For fuck’s sake they make you show your ID to the police to use the wifi at the Beijing airport. They cut off my buddy’s text messaging because a word he used triggered the filters. People who want to travel or study abroad have to apply to the government to get permission to leave they country- and it’s not automatic. The government decides if they think you should be allowed to get a passport.
They arbitrarily tried to prevent me from joining a perfectly legit official tour group in Tibet- run through a government agency- for reasons I still don’t understand. A friend of mine leaving one day earlier, who was also a Peace Corps volunteer doing the same thing I did 30 miles away- had no problems with the exact same tour through the exact same agency, so it’s not like there was some good reason for it. Someone, somewhere, for some reason, just decided I shouldn’t go.
People in America NEVER get a mysterious phone call saying for undisclosed reasons someone in an undisclosed office decided that they cannot go on the tour they booked. That never happens. Nor do they then have to appeal to supposably unrelated people to use their shadowy contacts to pull strings until they get another mysterious phone call saying their trip has arbitrarily been approved. That never happens.
In non-authoritarian countries you know the rules, you know who is in charge of enforcing them and there is a transparent process for filing complaints (ones that won’t land you in a “black prison.”) The government can’t just randomly decide to intrude on your vacation plans, censor your drunk texts or track you as you surf the Dope while waiting for a plane.
Does the US under Bush II count? 
Ummm…Hukou? If you don’t think that is a control…you need to live there longer. Hukou..despite what you may think is incredibly important (I spent the summer of 2009 on exchange at Fudan University with a bunch of urban planners…Hukou is the hot debate in Chinese urban policy at the moment)
The Tibet thing…it’d be different if they said “The Ministry of Tourism has ruled that travel by Peace Corps volunteers during the month of July presents a security risk. If you have any questions about the policy call this office” would have been different.
But a mysterious phone call, through unofficial channels, saying “Somebody, somewhere, says no.” doesn’t cut it.
Actually, first they told me that my school objected, which was an outright lie. Then it came out that everyone involved had been involved in these negotiations for some time and I was the last to know. Eventually I learned that it was someone in the provincial Department of Education that was holding things up- why they have to approve a vacation that my school, the Peace Corps, and presumably the government (given that I booked through the extortionist state travel agency) approved of is beyond me.
Clearly this ordinary vacation request had been on many desks. Who knows what bizarre and arcane channels a basic thing like “I want to go one a legit government tour during summer break” go through.
All of this happened conveniently immediately after I paid the non-refundable $800 USD deposit. The only explanation I ever got was "it’s not a good time,"which was clearly BS since there were several volunteers an similar tours in Tibet on those same dates. Someone suggested that I might have upset someone somewhere without knowing it. I’ll never know who was involved, why it happened, or how it got reversed.
That is authoritarianism. That doesn’t happen in free countries.