China a democracy in a generation?

[Colonel Sun]

[Azrael]

[Tinker]

[Ibrahim]

[Tinker]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Azrael]

[Azrael]

[Torchwood]

Let's face it, Sun Tzu was a notch above The Prince, and everyone forgets that Machiavelli wrote a lot of idealistic naive stuff about republics in another book...

Pleading about international law and morality is the typical recourse of the economically strong and militarily weak - Europe and Japan today, but certainly not a century ago. In those days the USA waxed lyrically about international law, especially the Law of the Sea, while the Royal Navy contemptuously ignored it (and as far as the slave trade went, a good job too). Hysteria about the UN and supporting some dodgy right wing dictatorships apart, the US has actually been not that bad.

China has to learn that neo-imperialism, American model, is so much less hard work that the old European/abortive Japanese model, and that demands at least lip service to rules. Given historic insularity/racism/Middle Kingdom complex, that may need some painful lessons, yet the demand for resources and trade means they cannot do hermit empire any more. Let's see how they like running Africa.

[Tinker]

Torchwood The Chinese seem to be doing just fine not running the place where they extract resources. They pay their baksheesh and as long as the violence doesn't come to their holdings, they don't seem to give a shit. A much more rational model than America's.

[Azrael]

It appears that the three of us agree on Chinese foreign policy. "Economic imperialsm" tends to work better than militarism and the Chinese seem, in general, to agree.

[Colonel Sun]

[Azrael]

[Milo]

[Torchwood]

Is this the same Slavoj Zizek who openly describes himself as the last Communist, and writes post-modernist rubbish on deconstructionism, and is a pin up of the radical left? If you can understand his , let alone critique it, well done.

That is a good article, however. Forget the laughable "real socialism has never been tried" cant which I suspect he adheres to (Endo, where are you?). There is a plausible argument, however, that in the brutal realities of the world, democracy is a façade and the choice is between the tyranny of money and the tyranny of administrative power. So it is not surprising, in this view, that the bankers emerged unscathed and unpunished from the recent debacle in the West.

Despite that, the tyranny of money has proved far less oppressive than the tyranny of administrative power, and more efficient. It does not care greatly what you say or think, and as for challenging its power, it is very effective at co-opting and absorbing. China is trying to walk the tightrope of using the power and flexibility of money while retaining the privilege of administrative power. The latter certainly won this past round, as money overreached itself.

The tightrope can be walked - it is called the social democratic state - but to do so the latter must be subject to the rule of law. That is pretty imperfect in democracies, but its absence in China implies inevitable gross corruption. China has never been a state of law in the Western sense, only of administrative justice, compatible with its Confucian past as well as its Communist one. They are well aware, however, that one of the great victories of money was over Japan during the bubble economy . No wonder they resist currency appreciation, capital liberalisation etc., but then they started playing money's game, didn't they?

[Milo]

[Endovelico]

[Torchwood]

[Endovelico]

[YMix]

[Tinker]

[Azrael]

[Azrael]

Interesting comments from , who disagrees with me.

* * *

from the column:

Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is told that the future will resemble a boot stamping on a human face forever. China’s future will be a well-polished pair of black Oxfords padding diffidently across the Great Hall of the People’s deep-pile carpets forever. The guys with the boots will be kept discreetly out of sight except when needed.

The Chinese Communist Party has it figured out. After 62 years of blunders, horrors, and reversals, they have pulled off a miracle of statecraft, a Staatskunst Wunder. With their 77 million members distributed in hundreds of thousands of cells, they have turned Lenin’s crude power cult into a robust, adaptable apparatus of total control that, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible—or is visible only, as with that photograph, in a form so bland the eye turns away in search of something recognizably human.

* * *

Perhaps I was overly optimistic.

[Ammianus]

[Azrael]

Thanks for your words of hope and encouragement. For the sake of the Chinese people and the World, I hope it is sooner rather than later.