Yes and those Chinese who are moderately successful and can’t find Chinese wives will import them from the nearby less successful developing countries, like the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia. For women from poor villages in those countries a marriage to a moderately well off Chinese would be a huge improvement in lifestyle.
And to China massive importation of foreign wives/mothers will represent a significant factor influencing societal change. And there’s always those who wont be able to attract foreign women.
Focus, coremelt. Nobody is claiming “China is the only country on the planet with problems,” or “China has the absolutely shittiest government in the world.” I’ve been to Thailand, India and the Philippines. They absolutely do have their own sets of problems. This has next to no relevance to China’s internal political dynamics. The whole “Nuh-uh…there are democracies that are less than a perfect paradise” thing is a weak, weak, weak sound byte. There are much better arguments out there.
Also, you and I both know that an income distribution that ranges from basically nothing to solid middle income is planets different than an income distribution that ranges from high income to astronomical. Please, pick up some more sophisticated arguments. This is China Daily message board stuff. You can do better. When I talk about the geographical distribution of wealth, I am not talking about Qinghai villages. I am talking about the fact that Chinese people cannot move around their own country freely and have limited social mobility. You can’t up and decide you hate living in Zunyi and move to Harbin to try your luck.
China is roughly like the US and Mexico all smashed together under one US-focused administration with the border kept intact and illegal immigrants still being illegal. You can’t move to greener pastures without massive costs. You often can’t give up the farm and go start a restaurant. You can’t go back to college at 30. You can’t decide to change careers and become a school teacher at 40. You can’t make up for the failed exam, the unpaid bribe, the troublesome relative- if something screws your life, you are screwed and that is very likely just going to be it.
And this produces a lot of deep, seething, currently rather undirected rage. When, now and then, an unmarried jobless guy does something insane like stab school kids, the reaction is surprising. “Yes,” people will say, “He must have been under a lot of pressure.” People understand being under enough pressure, so hopelessly stuck, so socially irellevent, that you could snap.
What, exactly, are you basing your assessment of the undercurrents in the Chinese populace on? So far, I know you are really impressed with pictures of cranes. Got anything else? You know some expats in Shanghai? You can see China from your living room? You’ve been to Japan? I’m not an expert, by any means. But i do have some meaningful experience and I’m pretty widely read on Chinese history, culture and society. I know my view comes from a very deep view of a very small part of China. I fully expect others to have more to contribute, and that I can illuminate just one viewpoint of many valid viewpoints. I don’t claim to have the whole truth or the one right way to look at things. There are a lot of people with China experience on this board. Taken together, you will find a variety of experiences and viewpoints that lead to a more sophisticated understanding of questions like this.
But I’m not sure why you feel the need to tell me what I know is true is not. Unless everyone was lying to me, what I’m talking about is there. It’s not the one whole truth, but it is indeed a part of it.
Yes you are judging the Chinese government for failing to live up to the standards of some idealistic western democracy that doesn’t exist. There is entrenched power elites in all the countries I mentioned, and a severe lack of social mobility, but despite that, revolutions of the peasants rising up are few and far between.
People resent the rich and complain about corrupt politicians in every single country I know and I’m sure you heard plenty of it. So what, that doesn’t mean China is on the verge of collapse and turmoil, thats just standard run of the mill bitching that happens everywhere.
An no my impressions are not based on “pictures of cranes”, for one thing I took those pictures myself on a 32 km boat cruise from Shanghai to check out the industrial heartland of China for myself. Second they are on reading impartial third party reports from international financial bodies on Chinese development. Again you clearly don’t understand statistics, the graph that I posted of Chinese wealth distribution shows that China has a BIGGER middle class than the US does, what that means in simple terms to spell it out for you, is that as the GDP of China increases year on year it benefits a higher percentage of people than the equivalent GDP rise in the US. If you can’t understand that simple maths from an impartial third party then there is no point in explaining anything to you.
Sounds like it took the CCP a long time to figure out what so many emperors knew: For the purposes of whoever is in power, Confucius is the best official philosopher conceivable.
I never figured a “What If?” thread on what China might be would reveal such deep, fundamental, factual disagreements as to what China is now. I don’t know whom to believe. 
It seems nobody can even agree on whether China has a real sense of national identity (the one question I would have thought well settled), let alone whether its government is efficient or inefficient, effectual or ineffectual, compared to India or whatever.
Of course, China’s government is wasteful, inefficient, and prone to nepotism and corruption like all governments. But they are doing several very important things right, namely taking their massive trade surplus and re-investing it infrastructure. Their stated goal is to turn the rural areas into the factories and cheap labour areas and the coastal areas into IT, R&D and creative services hubs.
To bring it back to the relevance of this thread, I don’t believe a democratic China that started in 1989 could have achieved the same result. Whether it’s worth giving up your “freedom” of speech and religion for economic growth is a philosophical question which will vary to each individual. I can only say in my experience of Asian cultures, they are NOT americans and given the free choice most people from asian cultures do choose growth over absolute freedom.
Eh? How often have they been “given the free choice”?
I have a different perspective than most people since I spent about 3 years in the Chinese countryside before Tian’anmen and about 2 more decades after in Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai. My wife was born and grew up in the cultural revolution, and her broad family were not priviledged and I won’t recount their story here suffice to say I’ve got relatives sent to the countryside, did hard time in a “reform through labor” prison camp, benefited from opening to the West, got fucked over from opening to the West, ad nauseum.
One thing that most people and the western press completely miss is the peasant story. For the first time ever in recorded Chinese history there is wealth accumulation in the countryside and peasants are free to leave the land. Estimates vary but there is at least 100 million if not 200 million migrant laborers in China. They make your iPads, are nannies, build buildings and are a key component of the entire China Inc export machine. Their life kinda sucks but the key point is that it generally sucks less than being a peasant. They send real trickle down money back to the countryside that pays for homes, microbusinesses, education and at least on occaision justice.
Since time immemorial, the Chinese peasants have been fucked over left right and center, and then every decade or less for much of China a natural calamity wipes out whatever they had that counted toward getting ahead and famine ruled the land. There has not been wide spread famine in the past 4 decades, which is a historic record for China. Today, those same peasants can work hard and “get ahead.” Their kids can go to 3rd rate colleges in tier 4 cities, which is an unprecedented opportunity that Even Sven’s students had, millions have permanently settled in Tier 1 cities.
But like any country, even if you aren’t getting more pie, you want to have the realistic expectation that your kids will get a bigger piece of the pie. So, when the growth stagnates below a certain point for long enough, that will break the ruling party’s contract of “we let you get rich, and you don’t question our right to rule.”*
*“Rich” being loosely defined. Right to rule means don’t rock the boat and we won’t interfere with your life to a large degree.
To Even Sven, you see a snapshot of the CCP today but don’t have any historic context or understanding of just how far China has progressed since Mao met Nixon. I thought much the same as you did in 1985 when I first went to SouthWest China for months and months, eg there was no way China could modernize and the government had “lost the mandate of heaven.” I give the Chinese government a lot of credit for getting this far and the people’s lives many magnitudes better than 1985 (the highest aspiration then was to have a watch, washing machine and a sewing machine and not face starvation). Not to say that they are a benevolent ruler per say, but they’ve done reasonably well with the massive population and other challenges they face.
Back to the OP, I don’t the peasantry would have been liberated to this extent had Tian’anmen been successfull and most likely the country devolved into a warlord state or worse. I don’t see the kumbaya outcome.
Why not? Improved farming techniques?
Well in general famines no longer happen in even remotely developed countries. Evan the Great Leap Forward famine was largely due to political and economic incompetence.
Opps, I meant a watch, bicycle and sewing machine (substitute bicycle for washing machine). In the 1980’s, parents were putting their babies on the wait list to buy a bicycle with the hope they would get one by the time they were adults. 
!!! It’s not like they’re hard to manufacture!
Too many people, not enough factories and a command-and-control central government plan that controlled all the resources.
Let me be clear too, the bicycle, watch and sewing machine was what Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou (tier 1 cities) aspired to. It wasn’t what the countryside hoped for.
EvenSven, where you lived everyone would have worn blue or green one-size-fits-all baggy suits, rice was rough and full of pebbles, few people could afford the baijiu that is ubitquitous now, everyone was skinny (except for maybe 10% of the cadres), a tuolaji was teh epitome of having it made, loudspeakers would blare at 6:00 am to wake everyone, there might be 1 TV per 1000 people, light bulbs were maybe 20 watts and rarely strong enough to read by, there were no street lights, for 6 months a year the only vegetable was napa cabbage, and Shanghai was not much better. This was the situation circa 1985 and I’m not exaggerating.