Commissar, with all due respect, you’ve never even been to China. I spent 3 years in the Chinese countryside before 1989 happened. Back then, it might have been true that Chinese peasants, which make up the vast majority of the population, would have just soldiered on. At this point in time, the genie is out of the bottle and the masses want their piece of the pie. There is no loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party these days, and those that remember the bad old days before the revolution are a small percentage of the population and dying off.
OK, you’re ruling out the possibility of Tienanmen Square leading to a peaceful transition to democracy, and that’s a defensible position. But, for purposes of this thread, please swallow the hypothetical: If it had achieved what the protesters wanted, what would be the practical results on the ground?
(What transition to democracy now would achieve is a related but different question.)
So? How does that make Japan a non-democratic state?
Breakup of China or at least huge autonomy to the peripheral regions.
ANd no econmic growth.
Why no economic growth? Does it all depend on a centralized and at-least-dirigiste national state?
I answered this question. I think economic progress would have stagnated and that the country would have devolved into warlord type factions and probably splintered.
Look at what happened between 1966-76, the so-called 10 years of the cultural revolution. The economy was probably only double that size in 1989.
Ha! The Chinese people are loyal and dedicated to the party in the way you are loyal and dedicated to your asshole abusive uncle who cuts you a nice check on your birthday. You arn’t going to tell him off over Thanksgiving dinner, but when he finally runs himself into the ground with hookers and blow, you probably arn’t going to visit him in rehab.
There is no almost no emotional affection for the party. Modern party membership is basically the equivelent of joining the freemasons- it is a pricy social club good for making business contracts. The bullshit “political meetings” students and workers have to sit through is a joke. Nobody takes it seriosly. The Party is a means to an end, tolerated by the Chinese pople only as long as it is serving their purposes.
And don’t forget, it was in the 1960s that people were eating the corpses of their dead children to stay alive. In the 1970s, college kids were fighting each other in random impromptu armies in the street and the government had basically collapsed. This is not ancient history- this is people’s parent’s stories. The wounds are healing, but the idea that people are going to have much trust in the goodwill and generousity of the party is laughable.
Te US does not rise up during economic setbacks because our national myth is intact. We basically believe somthing like “In 1776 America gained independence and started a new expeeriment in democracy. Their bravery and dedication to freedom gave everyone a single familt home and a car. And we saved Europe from Nazis.” Most Americans have to some degree internalized a version of this. In periods where our national myth was threatened- slavery, the great depression, Vietam- we did indeed experience widespread social upheaval. Don’t forget, we has our own civil war.
China’s national myth is a bit of a mess. There is 5,000 years of history, but a generation ago China’s history was considerd a shameful story of feudalism. There is China’s political continuity, except that periods of factional warfare outnumber periods of peace and prosperity…and wern’t the last imperial leaders, uh, not Chinese? Hmmm. Chairman Mao has been a useable myth, but one that has some obvious baggage. WWII and fighting the Japanese is a pretty big winner, and everyone has fun manipulating anti-Japanese sentiment. But whn you come down to it, China was in a pretty messy civil war then, too. Deng Xiaoping and economic reform is a good bet, except it requires facing up to the fact that basically everything the party was founded on is wrong…
In the end, China’s sense of national identity- the thing that unites the Chnese people towards a common purpose- is relatively weak. This makes it hard for a nation to weather shocks.
Don’t get too caught up on the “everyone is Han” thing, ether. Han ethnic identity is a political creation of the (surprise!) Han dynasty. A quick trip to Chengdu, Harbin and Guangzhou will reveal these are not people who share a common language, genetic stock, political history (beyond being occassionally annexed into the same empire for a bit before falling apart), customs or reallyany of the things that mark a shared identity. A sense of “Han”-ness does exist in a very real way, but it is kind of a forced fit. Kind of like how being “European” or part of the “Western tradition” or even “former members of the Roman empire and now the EU” doesn’t really mean much in practical terms when it comes to uniting Belguim.
AK, those are things you wantedin university. Unless you were spectacularly immature, what you actually expectedwas probably more along the lines of: a sit-down job, a new compact car every 7 years, to own some kind of property, two weeks of vacation, health insurance, and a spouse of approximately the same social class as yourself. This is a sort of minimum that college educated Americans expect. Almost all can basically achieve it, and those that don’t usually have some other priorities. It works.
If college educated Americans were ending up in flophouses, working the mines, riding the bus to work and seeking relief from aging whores, damn straight we would see some social unrest. Likewise if people genuinely thought they were going to get the things you mentioned and got what I listed instead, we would indeed see some free floating social anger
Perhaps, but don’t you think you’re moving the goalposts just a bit here? Seems to me that there is a slight difference between being forced to work in the mines for sustenance, on the one hand, and not being to upgrade your motor-scooter to a car as quickly as you would like, on the other. Once again, I’m not buying the doom-and-gloom predictions. Chinese people are human beings, and I fully expect them to react to everyday disappointments in normal human fashion. Taking up arms and killing people because you’re not able to buy as much crap as you would like to does not seem like a rational human response to me. It doesn’t matter whether or not the average Chinese person feels loyalty towards the Party, it still takes a bit more than that to start a revolution.
Is that happening to college-educated Chinese now?
What else is any Communist revolution about?!
College educated americans are leaving in their parents basements, working at McDonald’s, riding the bus to work and seeking relief from camwhores and websites. But are they taking up arms against the US government?
Best case scenario if there was a peaceful transition to democracy in1989 is economic growth being substantially less than it was and China being 5-10 years behind it’s current state, with the outer border areas being allowed to peacefully secede and core Han China left. Why? Transitions and new governments make foreign investors nervous, a lot of money would pull put and wait 5 years to see if the new government would survive at first. If the split away of border areas wasn’t peaceful, or there was rapid changes of government and factional political infighting then it would be much worse.
Look Sven, I’m sure there are plenty of 19-21 year old university students that want democracy at any cost but to make out that they are the majority of China is just wrong. When they get older and own a business or have gotten to some middle point in the hierarchy they have a vested interest in keeping the current system. That inertia and the “better the devil you know” is what keeps most people content even in hard times.
The current generation have also seen what happened after Russia’s attempt to instantly transition to democracy.
China has a stronger ethnic cohesion, and a stronger work ethic than India.
What makes you think China has a stronger work ethic?
Confucianism and all that. The Chinese are quite industrious and dominate many SE Asian economies.
Having done business in both India and China and having travelled widely in SE Asia there is truth to this. In fact in Malaysia and many other countries there is problems because Chinese immigrants so dominate local businesses they have (usually futilely) passed laws favoring Malay owned businesses.
There has also been anti-chinese riots in both Malaysia and Indonesia due to the immigrants perceived dominance of business and trade.
Thai, Indonesian and Malay culture just doesn’t put the same emphasis on work ethic and entrepreneurship.
Confucianism? Wasn’t Communism supposed to uproot all of that?
You don’t get it. The potential to take to the streets is not because of minor economic woe. People take to the streets- as they always have- because they have a shitty government.
The CCP is objectively shitty. It is utterly Stalinist is structure. It perpetuates a corrupt, entrenched elite. It expresses its weakness and insecurity through paranoia and control. It fails to provide basic services like safe drinking water, even bare bones worker and consumer protection, universal access to quality schooling, police and fire protection…all the things modern governments are at least supposed to try at. It can’t project power in its own border regions. It is, by nearly every level, a failure at governing beyind a few select East Coast cities.
But, they got something good with the economy. And that will buy you a lot of time.That will keep people very quiet and still as long as you keep delivering the goods.
You missed the communique. For the last three years or so Confucious is cool again. He’s been rebranded from a backwards, misogynist, supersticious feudalist into a CCP approved hero showing how the Party is the logical continuation of 5,000 years of Chinese Glory ™ and is totally hip to what it has branded as Traditional Chinese Values which are now OK and that the Party has Always loved and supported harmoniously. Thousands of Confucious statues have been raised at universities and in cities and China’s soft diplomacy institution is the Confucious Institute…which has a nicer ring than “the Commie Club” overseas.
Your take on China is wildly out of wack with reality. China’s government is on average no more or less shitty on each of those things than the free democratic governments of India, Thailand, The Philippines or Indonesia. Each of those countries has long running active insurgencies, rampant corruption, lack of universal safe water and poor records for worker safety. But they are all democracies.
However China is doing vastly better than those countries at economic growth so overall I give them a “less shitty than the governments of India, Thailand, Philippines or Indonesia” rating.
And your idea that the wealth is only benefiting the elite in Shanghai and Beijing is also wildly inaccurate. There has been rapid development and rises of median incomes in all coastal cities and river valleys which is where 83% percent of the population lives.
Every western country has followed the same model of development along coasts and navigable rivers, its simple fucking logistics, how can they develop the rural areas with no fucking transport first?
Lastly China’s wealth distribution is more evenly distributed through the middle classes than the US, source is creduit suisse global wealth data book, see here:
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/shirakawa/Global%20Wealth%209.jpg
But I expect you’ll ignore that just like you did in the other thread I posted it in.
Which implies that they are expecting wives. China needs women.