The Hermanator telling it like it is!

[Christians4LessGvt]

China has existed for thousands of years, it is true.  COMMUNIST China has existed only since 1948. 

Yes but that's not the point.

The larger point is the country has existed for thousands of years & the people still live a pitiful life.

Most Chinese are still poor in 2011.

The only reason the life for the average Chinese has improved is because some freedom
has been realized when China decided to introduce a market system enabling free enterprise
and business to take hold.

You think it's an accident? as soon as China opened up allowing some freedoms
& business unheard of during Mao and BOOM....the economy takes off and incomes rise.

And as time marches on and China becomes more and more free, more democratic,
more and more capitalist the more the people of China will see even greater rises
in quality of life. The quicker China can be like the top performers (Capitalist&Democratic)
in the Human Development Index the better off their people will be.

You can pretend the internationally recognized Human Development Index is
"meaningless" but the standards of living for those on the list in the Top 20 is
astounding and guess what? NONE of them are Communist!

The 2010 Human Development Report :
1. Norway
2. Australia
3. Sweden
4. Netherlands
5. Germany
6. Switzerland
7. Ireland
8. Canada
9. Iceland
10. Denmark
11. Finland
12. United States
13. Belgium
14. France
15. Czech Republic
16. Austria
17. Spain
18. Luxembourg
19. Slovenia
20. Greece 

[Michael Tee]

CU4,

NOBODY can turn around the accumulated problems of 4,000 years in a country the size of China in 63 years.  Nobody. 

The index of human development can't measure things like hope, pride and optimism.  It can't measure satisfaction, except from the materialistic POV of a spoiled Westerner who thinks the square footage of his apartment or the horsepower of his car are measures of his "development."  But a Chinese peasant, working hard every day on his collective farm to build socialism has a spirit and a purpose that you aren't going to find in the slums of America, among its unattended sick and its jobless, among all of the people left out of the society of wealth and greed.  China is building a society where all can share in the benefits, and however painfully slow the process may appear, when compared to the levels of development attained after hundreds of years of capitalism, who gives a shit? 

No other society on earth has reached the scale of development that China has reached under communism in the same 63 -year span.  The leap from where they were then to where they are now could not have been accomplished under any other system but communism.

And where are they headed now?  The US is fucked, my friend.  Capitalism has failed there, just as it has failed in Europe.  You think that your situation is bad now?  LMFAO.  The shit still hasn't hit the fan.  Five years from now, the whole house of cards will really have blown apart.  And where will China be then?  Still struggling with all those poverty rates you mentioned, but every year by every material index available, still climbing that slope - - as in the past, so in the future, more and more engineers graduated (already more than the USA can produce,) more cars, more housing, more and better jobs - - what's really funny is that even as their primary export markets collapse, their domestic market - - yes, all those folks living in poverty in China that you think is their weakness - - that domestic market will still be there for them to satisfy.

Don't be fooled by whatever "freedom" or "capitalism" the Party has allowed to date.  It's all got its place in the Party's plans.  Just like Lenin's New Economic Policy ("NEP")  in the 1920s, sometimes the economy needs some capitalist practices, then for limited purposes those practices will be allowed, when those purposes (quick-start factory development) are realized, the NEP shuts down.

It's not a perfect or fool-proof system.  Nothing is.  Nothing can be.  I'm still trying to come to grips with what happened in the USSR - - the biggest political catastrophe of the 20th century.  Millions of good revolutionary communist lives lost in building and defending the system, the greatest military victory in the history of the world, only in the end to see it all pissed away with a few pen-strokes.  How did it happen?  What went wrong?  These are my fears for China - - the evil wrecking crews of the capitalist world, always looking for ways to kill or sabotage or weaken the march of socialism, the forces of greed versus the forces of altruism, and so many times in the past, the forces of greed win out in the end.  Because they are persistent and relentless, they never sleep.  Will the same fate befall China?  Honestly, I don't know.  But so far, it looks like they are doing great and it is capitalism that is destroying itself in both Europe and the U.S.A.

[Xavier_Onassis]

NONE of them are Communist!

=======================
You mean none of them IS Communist. NONE is singular.

But, much more importantly, none EXCEPT for the US lacks universal health care, and NONE is anything like as reactionary as any of the candidates the Republicans have running for President. France, the Scandinavian nations, Germany, Slovakia, Benelux, Germany and several others have all had Socialist governments for varying amounts of time.  To attribute their success entirely to capitalism is simply inaccurate.
 
China was a Third-World country in 1950, mostly devastated by war and the Japanese occupation. Chinese village society has ALWAYS been collectivist. And Confucius and the T'ao were powerful and philosophies that merged with Communism. China has some minorities, but they were never as divided as those of the old Russian Empire. The coastal part of China is becoming quite developed, and not entirely due to Capitalism, either. The Chinese are more conformist than most Europeans, and you get rebellion mostly when people are hungry. The current Communist rulers if China have managed to merge revolutionary China with some degree of capitalism, and since they can suppress unions and dissent rather easily so long as they keep the boom going, they have a lot less dissent than they would in any of the 20 developed nations you mention.

[Michael Tee]

Well said!

I'm not sure about the origin or development of village collectivism in China, but by the time of the Revolution there had certainly developed a village landlord class (not unlike Viet Nam) which was to some degree an active counter-revolutionary force or factor.  In Viet Nam, they were alternately placated and rebuffed, as changing circumstances required.  In China, I believe that they (village landlords) took a more active counter-revolutionary role, and ultimately had to be liquidated.

As far as Confucianism goes, I can easily see where it would fit into the authoritarian side of the Chinese CP, but Taoism?  I'm thinking of my Taoist hippie friends now - - can't see how "go with the flow" is going to fit in with Communist discipline and materialism, when the time comes to dam that river or level that mountain.  Where do you see Taoism in the New China?

[Xavier_Onassis]

  Where do you see Taoism in the New China?

Well, not in hydroelectric projects, but the government proposes a program, and most Chinese seem to "go with the flow" unless it deliberately affects them. There was some resistance to the Three Gorges Project, because it dislocated hundreds of thousands of people, but to build it in the USSR and dislocate the same number of people would have been possible only under Stalin. Khruschev and Brezhnev Putin could never have pulled it off.

[Michael Tee]

Thanks, got it.  I was thinking of Taoism in the CP leadership rather than amongst the people.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I would not say the CP is T'aoist at all. But they do count on T'aoist conformity: the CP sets the flow, and the people go along with it.

I recall a Chinese film I saw several months ago where three city kids were sent to the Three Gorges area to learn from and teach locals. Then they return after 30 years have passed, just as the water is rising, and talk with the locals, who are preparing to move. One of the city kids becomes a concert violinist, another a bureaucrat. It sort of showed the attitude of at least some of the locals in that area to the project, which was not rebellious, but not all that optimistic, either. It was called Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. Netflix has it.

[Michael Tee]

Thanks, I'll check it out.  I've got Netflix, but haven't used it for awhile.  Was actually thinking of cancelling my subscription.  I've seen all the films I wanted to see with them, and they only had about 40% of the ones I was looking for anyway.

[Plane]

  If the paradgn is how the government handles the people , then I shall always have reason to pity the Chineese who are aflicted with a domineering government.

    Our own government is in a harness and the people are supposed to hold the reigns, every bit that this proper relationship gets reversed is a step twards the more primitive government (top down) we had as colonies.

     Thomas Jefferson and Voltaire had it right, mankind is made up of individuals, all systems that pretend otherwise are fraudulent. Society serves individual needs , government serves individual needs and the consent of the governed is the prerequsite of legitamacy for any government.

[Christians4LessGvt]

they can suppress unions and dissent rather easily so long as they keep the boom going, they have a lot less dissent than they would in any of the 20 developed nations you mention.

well of course there is less dissent when you don't have freedom
but lack of dissent due to the barrel of a gun looking @ you is not a good thing
China will never reach it's full potential until is free/democratic/capitalistic
It's no accident..whatever their specific histories... that NONE in the Top 20 are Commies!

[Michael Tee]

It's no accident because capitalism has been around for centuries and the first communist government only since the end of WWI, within living memory.

No country other than China can show the kind of progess we've seen there from 1948 to the present by any reasonable metric you choose, whether it's GDP, number of engineers graduating yearly, increase in military power, export markets, balance of trade, etc.  Without the success of the Communist Revolution, China would be where it's been for hundreds of years, feudal, under the thumb of foreign imperialists and exploited unmercifully by foreign capitalists. 

At the very same time, anyone who has followed the rise and decline of the USA since the end of WWII, can only be impressed, if he's reasonable and impartial, at the total failure of capitalism even in the wealthiest country in the world. 

I don't think capitalism's over . . . yet.  IMHO, it's just on its last legs.  It can limp along for a few years more, but it'll need a police state  to preserve itself even a decade or so after that.  I figure from now to the end, you've got about as much time as the Third Reich had, maybe even a few years less.

[Xavier_Onassis]

China will never reach it's full potential until is free/democratic/capitalistic
It's no accident..whatever their specific histories... that NONE in the Top 20 are Commies!

Nor are any even close to being mostly capitalist.

At the present time, the coastal part of China is developed or rapidly becoming so, but the interior is still very Third Worldish. Whether China ever becomes fully developed depends on obtaining energy and raw materials to do so. This is more important than the "freedom" of the people from government oppression.

One individual's voice counts for a rather a lot in Costa Rica, where one is one in three million. It is 100 times less influential in the US, where it is one in three hundred million. But in China the individual's voice is four times fainter than in the US.

There are distinct disadvantages to a country having 1.2 billion people.
 
What might be true in a nation of 1.2 billion "Christians4LessGovernment" is probably NOT true for a nation of 1.2 billion Chinese.

In China, it is customary to see an entire village out in a rice paddy, replanting rice together, happily singing traditional songs. They do it now, and they did it 100 years and 500 years ago.  I can't imagine an American village turning out to work in such a way or even having anything like such a collectivist attitude. And that attitude did not come from the Communists, either: it has been around for centuries.

[Michael Tee]

<<I can't imagine an American village turning out to work in such a way or even having anything like such a collectivist attitude.>>

Sure you can.  Think barn-raisings.  Think quilting bees.  Think clam digs and clam roasts.  It's very American, just not lately.

[Plane]

<<I can't imagine an American village turning out to work in such a way or even having anything like such a collectivist attitude.>>

Sure you can.  Think barn-raisings.  Think quilting bees.  Think clam digs and clam roasts.  It's very American, just not lately.

     The American bit of it is that the activity is volenteer.
     The principal can be applied anywhere, we don't hold a patent.

[Plane]

It's no accident because capitalism has been around for centuries and the first communist government only since the end of WWI, within living memory.

No country other than China can show the kind of progess we've seen there from 1948 to the present by any reasonable metric you choose, whether it's GDP, number of engineers graduating yearly, increase in military power, export markets, balance of trade, etc.  Without the success of the Communist Revolution, China would be where it's been for hundreds of years, feudal, under the thumb of foreign imperialists and exploited unmercifully by foreign capitalists. 

At the very same time, anyone who has followed the rise and decline of the USA since the end of WWII, can only be impressed, if he's reasonable and impartial, at the total failure of capitalism even in the wealthiest country in the world. 

I don't think capitalism's over . . . yet.  IMHO, it's just on its last legs.  It can limp along for a few years more, but it'll need a police state  to preserve itself even a decade or so after that.  I figure from now to the end, you've got about as much time as the Third Reich had, maybe even a few years less.

   Only selective blindness can explain your opinion.
    Japan was burnt to the ground in 1945 and became the worlds second largest economy in twenty years with 1/45000 the resorces availible to China.
    Russia and China have been hobbled in development by Communism , capitolist nations both free and tyranical outpaced the sorry progress that comitted Communists brag about.
      Germany went from the Weimar Wreck to the Facist machine in less than ten years so freedom and fairness was not apparently a necessacery component.

       But from my stand point ,whether the standard of living  is high or low the nations that don't feature freedom are pityfull.

        I wouldn't move to Cuba if it would tripple my buying power.

        I have had friends who contracted to work in Saudi Arabia, they make very good money and come home to enjoy it.(and breathe)

        I know one guy that was offered a job maintaining air force one for the Shah of Iran, he was going to live in a manse , draw a rediculously large paychecke and have servants care for him constantly, catch was that he had to give up his American citizenship. He couldn't do it.