As I’m being a responsible student and typing this while I’m in class, a question was vaguely thrown around by my professor just now which kinda got me thinking, so I wanted to ask you.
What do you think would happen if the heavy-communist countries like China and North Korea suddenly had the same constitution/bill of rights et. al that we have here in America?
Would there be rejoicing? Would it be confusion? Murder and looting? What’s everybody think? I will abstain my own opinion because I am woefully unaware of these countries and how they work
There would be party officials and military/intelligence personnel grabbing vast swathes of China or N Korea’s wealth/resources and setting themselves up as oligarchs.
The average person’s life probably wouldn’t change much at all, new bosses being same as old ones.
Policy would be a lot more chaotic, like in the middle east; dictators could ignore popular opinion on tough questions (like Egypt-Israel relations) democrats have to listen to the crowd. Note the current turmoil over the Japanese/Chinese islands. Yes, legalized theft of the country assets would be a risk.
Korea would demand unification, I have no doubt. So see Germany(E&W) for an example. The North would expect the South to kick in the lion’s share of paying for actual roads, telephone systems, hospitals, and anything else. In Germany, easterners flooded into the west because there were no jobs in the east.
Confusion, murder, and looting. China might be OK in some regions, North Korea would be an absolute anarchy. The skill set needed to live under a democracy is very different than one needed to live under a totalitarian regime. People don’t go from being assigned a job and a place to live and relying on the black market, bribes, and personal connections to get ahead to suddenly figuring out how to compete for a job based on skills, find your own place to live, and figuring out the ins and outs of getting ahead in a capitalist society overnight.
Nothing really changes. To some extent, you can see that in Russia after Gorbachev. Anyone who was expecting free markets and open democracies in Russia overnight and forevermore wasn’t thinking rationally. There have been some changes, but not as much as you might think.
The more people who support the change, and the more power they have, the more likely it is to be significant. If there are only a few who are interested, you can count on the rest ignoring and abusing the new rules.
Because of this, I’m not even sure we could answer the question without knowing how the change came about. A change in government after 20 years of peaceful protests might avoid the worst violence and corruption… but an overnight change by government proclamation or peasant revolt would be ugly.
Well, certainly in North Korea the same people who are running the country now would win the first few elections before a serious opposition party got going and the brainwashing wears off. If the hypothetical is that the ruling regime themselves has all of a sudden decided to embrace democracy and free speech, that could mean a relatively orderly transition to multi-party politics and general normalcy as the ruling party’s other policies would continue for a while until an opposition group gets established.
I think China would be similar. The CPC would certainly dominate elections were they held tomorrow and, barring some serious economic upheaval, the electoral lines would probably end up being drawn between factions within the party as opposed to outside opposition groups. I think the continued repression of dissidents and restriction of free speech by the CPC is mostly just Nixonian paranoia at this point-- with the economic progress made in the past decades, the party is very secure in its power and would probably be just fine if they decided to become a fully open society. There might be trouble in Tibet and in the western provinces, but the actual heartland in the east is pretty secure.
North Korea is ruled not by communist philosophy but rather by fear, pure unbridled fear. If the government all of a sudden decided to relinquish their absolute power over the populace there, there would be a mass exodus. There would be few, if any, people left living in that disaster area. The only thing that would prevent that would be for the South Korean government to use its military to prevent North Koreans from coming to the South. And that might not be politcally tenable for the South’s government.
For years now, South Korea has been facing a delicate dance. It doesn’t want North Korea to get too far away that it starts a shooting war, but not so close that unification happens. Look how long it took Germany to settle down, and this was with East Germany as the poster child of communism and not a failed state.