China's obstacles to true economic success

I prefer listening to KPFK as opposed to NPR. I find NPR to generally be more generic type of information as opposed to KPFK which has more cutting edge type stuff. The muckraker/rebel in me seems to need that type of stimulation...

I remember when American radicals were sympathetic to Mao's supposed egalitarianism. It seems really stupid in retrospect. What were we thinking? Has anyone seen the film Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress? It's a fascinating recollection of the Cultural Revolution period from modern Shanghai.

Now, you can say Stalinist!

Millions died and suffered under Mao's reforms. But he did accomplish the goals of Sun Yat Sen:

Got rid of the foreigners
Brought Chinese rule and reform
began accelerated modernization

Then, there were the retarding moments, most significant of which was the Cultural Revolution. Ooops.

But hey, Mao is dead! So is Deng.

The CP is dying. New guys like Hu are even dressing snazzy like their Hong Kong counterparts and presenting those businessman qualities when visiting abroad, taking just a little time to chastise Japanese leaders for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine.

Foreign investment is on the rise as is Chinese entrepreneurship. Chinese buying power is also on the rise, feeding the economic engine.

What will disrupt Chinese economic success is the lack of any government watchdogs on that new business sector. All that money and power must be a ripe ground for corruption and mismanagement. Part of Japan's economic miracle was frequent business scandals in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars. China has a reputation for such activity, so watch out. Finally, Chinese banks are loaning to many people who should not ever get loans (sound like our American housing sector problem?). With billions of dollars at stake, China's economic leaders are playing Russian roulette, and, based on history, will probably screw up, taking many with them.

Adam Smith might call that growing pains, ne.

I think that it's difficult to categorize China today. Like every other country, it's the sum product of its history - in this case, a very long history indeed. To say that China is no longer Communist is to miss the point, I believe. Wherever Communism has been adopted as the ruling political system, it has always been adapted to the prevailing cultural expectations, in much the same way as has Islam - the treatment of women in various Muslim countries has less to do with the Koran than its distillation through the filter of previous cultural patterns (the same is true of Judaism and Christianity, in fact any system which relies upon the interpretation of a written scripture, be it the words of Muhammad or Marx).

So, what are the factors to be considered in deciding to what extent a particular political and economic system is Communist? A command economy? One-party rule? Strict adherence to the Communist Manifesto?

I'd say by those criteria, China is about half and half. Economically, it is more market-driven than directed by Party diktat, and that, it's true, may allow more liberal ideas to ride in on the coat-tails of capitalism, and even prepare the way for eventual democracy - although, again, that too will be shaped by the expectations formed by some three thousand years of imperial rule, Confuscian tenets, and perhaps the faint, lingering shade of Heaven's Mandate. It's hard to imagine that Western-style democracy will be an easy fit for a society which has yet to absorb the lessons of Locke and the legacy of the Enlightenment (something which Mr. Bush seems to have overlooked in his crusade to spread his God-given gift of Western democracy across the Middle East).

To say that the last vestiges of Communism died with Mao seems to be something of an over-simplification - as, I think, it is to equate China's grim pollution, its disregard for Western notions of human rights (rather spottily accepted in the West, by the way - witness the recent liquidation of habeus corpus), and its commonplace pirating of copyright-protected commodities, entirely with capitalism. Rather, it seems to me a continuance of the age-long tradition of a small, all-powerful ruling elite and a lack of regard for the laboring peasant masses (80% of China's population is still living on the land, often powerless against the excesses of local officials). The concept of "natural rights", much less the notion of environmental responsiblity and non-Chinese "fair trade" practices has very thin soil in which to take root.

To my mind, it's more accurate to describe China, no matter what it's political coloring, as simply an oligarchy, with real political and economic power wrested in the hands of the very few. Sound familiar?

Ray [Edit by="rrobinson on Jun 30, 3:00:52 PM"][/Edit]
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There is no doubt the at the CCP--Chinese Communist Party--is communist in name only. Marx and Engeles are turning in their graves. The very aims of all Communist revolutions are to lead to a semi-utopic society where all need for state control disolves in time. The polis is to absorb the aims of the revolution, work to attain equality and egalitarianism in the society, and in turn everyone will learn there place and what in needed to collectively move forward.

As we see in modern China this is far from what is happening. To me it seems China has become a semi-socialist state that puts the success of the nation at the forefront. Rather than abandoning the shackles of international markets and trade, the Chinese government has plunged head first into privitazation and capitalism since the mid 1980s.

As one of the world's last purportedly communist states, China's communism looks nothing like the Communism envisaged by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mihn, and--in his early days--Mao. The great project to bring equity and fairness to the Chinese population is a fading dream. Those in power, part of the party system, get richer and many od those those outside of it stay the way they've been since the cultural revolution.[Edit by="chellmold on Jul 23, 9:54:56 PM"][/Edit]
[Edit by="chellmold on Jul 23, 11:32:59 PM"][/Edit]