The need to see progress/failure in China
■"Retreat in China; The distant thoughts of democracy are being extinguished by the repressive regime of General Secretary Hu as this 'new generation' of leadership is resorting to the old tricks of oppression," op-ed by David J. Lynch, USA Today, 12 August 2005, p. 11A.■"Meet Jack Ma, Who Will Guide Yahoo in Chiina," by Jason Dean and Jonathan Cheng, Wall Street Journal, 12 August 2005, p. B1
■"In a Challenging China Market, EBay Confronts a Big New Rival: Yahoo Backs a Local Firm; An Online-Auction Duel Stirs Memories of Japan; Mr. Ma's Plans for Alibaba," by Mylene Mangalindan, Wall Street Journal, 12 August 2005, p. A1..
A pretty good op-ed on China that starts out all "dashing hopes that China's economic opening will produce greater democracy any time soon" and ends by noting that the Party's ability to control a society where now only a quarter of urban citizens still work in state factories is getting awfully weak.
Hard to reconcile huh? The Party seems to control less and less in China's economy and society, and yet it seems obsessed with maintaining as much control as possible in the political realm.
Not really. The more connectivity with the outside, the smaller the realm of Party control, but logically the greater the Party paranoia about losing its power grip, so the more vehement the effort. True to Chinese form, big showy displays of crackdowns are preferred, as in, arrest one dramatically and scare 99 implicitly. So plenty of renewed ideological discipline to cover the growing lack of its in all other spheres.
As the author notes, "Because of changes in society, though, Hu's crackdown is irrelevant to all but a small, politically conscious elite."
Hu gets away with it how? By emphasizing Party concern for rural poor left behind in China's economic boom. Can't have the leftist party return to power in China like Congress did in India or Lula and Co. did in Brazil. Can't have it because there is no such thing as a leftist party in China today, even though the ruling one calls itself "communist."
When only the labels remain, you obsess over the way such words are used. I mean, that's the essential struggle over certain wording in the Chinese version of PNM: if you criticize socialism in China you actually bring to the forefront the reality that there is no socialism in China-just single-party statism.
Me, I bet more on Ma than Hu, more on Alibaba than the CCP. The Chinese are more market oriented than most Americans-and hungrier too.
The world isn't flat, not so long as the Party rules in China, generating all that friction along national borders. But single-party rule there certainly faces an expiration date. At times, the progress along that path will seem plenty slow, even reversing in spasms, but the steps forward will likewise come in clumps, and outnumber the ones backward.