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A foreigner’s view of China

The Chinese are an extremely clever people and unlike the old USSR, saw that communism failed everywhere it was tried. They therefore changed their economy to a capitalist one, but kept the communist party leadership. Those who think a revolution is in the offing fail to realize that just about every person in China might not love the system they live under, but would fight to the death to defend it. No anti-war protests, they’d lose 500 million and not even blink – and if it ever comes to it, they would.

The social system

How do you maintain such a system? Here lies the clue to China’s success. Unlike the centralized Soviet system, China spreads power to the individual. There is a system of ‘leaders’, each person has responsibility in their own sphere and each has a leader above them.

An example: The man who sweeps the street might be an illiterate peasant, but he can tell the most powerful man where to park his car on his ‘patch’. He is the ‘leader’ of his allotted part of the street. He will not be able to tell you where to catch the number 21 bus as that’s not his job, for that you have to find the man whose job it is to provide bus stop locations. Above him he also has a leader and should there be a problem the first question the police will ask him is, “Which leader told you to do that”? A reply of, “Well, I thought that . . .”, will land him in deep trouble – it’s not his job to make decisions, he has a leader to do that for him.

Each leader also has a leader and your leader is very reluctant to tell you anything, as then you’ll have as much knowledge as s/he has, which defeats the purpose of having a leader. Everyone operates on a need to know basis and no one wants to lose their bit of power. That’s the key! Depending on your abilities, you rise through the leadership and become powerful by what you know, which others don’t.
It’s a perfect system to control 1.3 billion people through a shared power structure.

The economic system

Firmly under party leadership, there are no shareholders or Bernie Madoff’s, which means no one individual or group can bring down the economy and so it fluctuates, but doesn’t collapse. Like the west, people grab what they can, but unlike the west people aren’t allowed to destroy the goose that lays the golden egg. It is seen as in everyone’s best interests to keep it all going.
The banks are under State control, prices for basic necessities are pre-determined according to wage levels and taxes are kept artificially low, or non-existent to encourage spending. According to western economics it should all collapse, but it doesn’t because it doesn’t use the free market laissez-faire capitalist model by which the west judges.
It’s why in the middle of the biggest recession in living memory, now in its seventh year, China’s economy is predicted to collapse every year, but doesn’t.

Of course there is corruption; knowledge and leader permission cost money, but every corporate leader and the whole of Wall Street would face a firing squad in China and that’s not because they’re capitalist, but because they’d destroy (and have done), their country in a personal quest for profit. Individualism, which helped build the west, without some form of control, could also be said to be its greatest failing.

The reason for Chinese individual investment in the west is because the State has the power to access bank accounts; having too much money means corruption and so people spend and invest instead of accumulating monetary wealth. The Chinese are just as interested in seeing the west return to pre-recession days as the west itself is. After all, the west were the main buyers, hence the Chinese government loans and investment in a future potential customer.

Summary

What all this does is produce a very dumbed down but generally happy society. It’s happy and nationalistic because it doesn’t worry about the future, that’s your leader’s problem. People don’t care where India is located on a map, it’s not necessary in their daily lives to know that. This ‘togetherness’ and everyone pulling in the same direction is what makes China so powerful. A minimum of dissent, no arguments, no cartels; the police are the final arbiters in daily life and follow the party line in a huge police State, which keeps it all on track.
 
The reason that most Chinese are okay with living in this type of police state (which it is), is that they simply have no history of representation, democracy, or individual rights. They understand all these concepts, of course, but they view them as alien.
 
DifferentDrummr;bt3120 said:
The reason that most Chinese are okay with living in this type of police state (which it is), is that they simply have no history of representation, democracy, or individual rights. They understand all these concepts, of course, but they view them as alien.

True. They do have property owning rights, a system based on law, but they don’t want western style democracy or liberalism. Not many outside the west do, which is a difficult concept for westerners to understand.
 
I suspect it's more accurate to say they "don't care" rather than that "they don't want it."

There's no particular reason for them to care, either.
 
DifferentDrummr;bt3140 said:
I suspect it's more accurate to say they "don't care" rather than that "they don't want it."

There's no particular reason for them to care, either.

Of course everyone cares about the type of society they live in, do you think caring about where one lives is only applicable to the west? They don’t want because they also see the failings of a ‘free’ liberal democracy. The majority of the world don’t want it either, including me, it’s simply a choice.
 
John V;bt3146 said:
Of course everyone cares about the type of society they live in, do you think caring about where one lives is only applicable to the west? They don’t want because they also see the failings of a ‘free’ liberal democracy. The majority of the world don’t want it either, including me, it’s simply a choice.
Nobody in the world is likely to choose something they have zero experience with. It's simply human nature to go with what you know.
 
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