China defends some of their repressive policies as important for social stability. This includes one-party rule, muzzling the press, etc. Now clearly this goes against commonly held values in most of the world and I'm not saying that repression is a good thing.

But what if there is some merit to the argument that allowing freedom to rush in will destabilize the country? Look at how many countries slip into disorder, civil war, or just general instability once they try to introduce open elections for example. For a most recent example, think about Ivory Coast in Africa. China had been weak and divided, ruled by ideologues and warlods, for at least 150 years. Now that they are getting their act together (relatively speaking) is it really good a time for the current regime (of the post-Mao period) to loosen its grip?

[Edited on December 12, 2010 at 4:51 PM. Reason : .]

12/12/2010 4:49:43 PM

As of recent years, China as a state would work just fine under whatever political system they tried.

12/12/2010 5:00:59 PM

I've actually had this conversation with some Chinese students while I was in China this past summer. Their perspective was quite interesting and shed some new light to me on their internal workings. Most Americans, when they think of China, it's this suppressed society with this indoctrination that Amurrica is bad and Mao is God. Or they think that the people can't do anything and the police are overbearing.

The students basically put it like this, the reason the government does it is because of the uproar from the uneducated public. As you said, for social stability. But I honestly think our perception the average Chinese intelligence is highly skewed. Most Chinese people we interact with in the US are often going to be the brightest and smartest from China. Not to mention that during the cultural revolution, intelligence was shunned. Doctors and the higher educated were persecuted (they were a threat do Mao). It's only been about 34 years since the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death, and only about 15 years since they've gotten their infrastructure to be half way decent on the education front. They still don't have enough schools and anything post middle school has to be paid for by the parents. Think what would happen if we were only provided with education up to 8th grade. That's what it's like over there.

Also consider that about half their population resides in the West, where much of it is largely uncontrolled by the government. There is very little wealth and the education level is quite sporadic, with many of them illiterate.

Anyway, the student said that the government doesn't really care if people go through the firewall and access whatever they want. Partially because they don't have the resources to do it. But I don't think that it's a matter of not having the resources, they just don't devote the resources to doing it, because they figure that if you're smart enough to get through the firewall, you're not going to get up in arms over what happened under Mao or what happened during Tienamen Square.

I think what many of those countries have in common that have fallen into disarray when going to a democracy in a relatively short period of time, is that it was done suddenly with a small transition period, and much of the population was uneducated. I think before China can safely go to a democracy, they need to improve the education of their citizens. They need to expand HS education and cross into unruled areas and establish education systems in those areas. And if you monitor China closely, their media is slowly opening up. But it has a LONG way to go. China isn't going to suddenly loosen up. It will be gradual. Change in China comes slowly, but once it has happened and is accepted by the people, it usually won't change back.

And just to show you that the government is opening up information, they are allowing people to have Satellite dishes. About 2 years ago in Shanghai, you might see one or two, which was probably the home of a high ranking government official. When I went to Shanghai, they were everywhere. And you might think, "so what?" But the satellites are easily modified to use a non-Chinese signal. I know that as a fact, as I met with an Alumni from NCSU who owns a satellite and "cracked" it to use it with like a Thai or Vietnam carrier. Basically, he gets to see any of our channels and it goes around the Chinese restrictions. Some of the journalists in China have gotten a bit more ballsy, if you followed the aftermath of that Chinese guy who won the nobel peace prize.

12/12/2010 7:31:46 PM

^ /thread?

It’s difficult to see how a country of ~2 billion people is going to have different needs than a country of .3 billion i guess.

12/12/2010 7:40:01 PM

that's definitely a classic "the illiterate masses don't know what's good for them" argument. It's a back-and-forth that's been going on for many centuries.

Quote :

"But I honestly think our perception the average Chinese intelligence is highly skewed. Most Chinese people we interact with in the US are often going to be the brightest and smartest from China."

This is a good point. There was just a report in the media about how some Chinese highschool students (probably elite kids from Shanghai) were scoring highest on some kind of international test, far higher than American kids.

12/12/2010 8:54:08 PM

Quote :

"is that it was done suddenly with a small transition period, and much of the population was uneducated"

No. Militancy and unrest are not products of a lack of education. If anything, it is education that breeds militancy. It was the highly educated elites in 1959 Cuba, 1917 Russia, 1979 Iran, and 1776 America that fermented revolution and violently overthrew their government.

12/13/2010 1:51:12 AM

^ So you're comparing government overthrows by the people to a government that suddenly relinquishes power voluntarily? Sorry. But your examples aren't applicable to China, given that there is no other military or militia by the people who are plotting to overthrow the government. arghx is asking why China is not democratic and would it destabilize the region. Currently, the intellects in China aren't really pushing or driving for change, whether it be because they have no power because the government suppresses them, or because it's simply a different culture and there's nothing to really motivate them to drive for change at the moment.

Also, we're talking about democracy destabilizing a region. Of the examples listed, the Russians went from a czar, to essentially a strong-handed police state, Iran went to a dictatorship and Cuba went to a dictatorship. Typically, under a dictatorship, they will be relatively stable governments, as they intimidate and kill anyone to retain their power to to keep "peace." In the US, we went from a weak Monarch to a weak Democracy, and even then, initially, we were a very loose democracy with little central government. I would not categorize the US as being stable. And when we drafted the Constitution and implemented it, it was NOT done through social unrest and militancy. It was done peacefully out of urgency for a stronger central government. So the US, isn't a very good example of a government relinquishing power from a repressive government to a democracy, as we went from an unorganized loosely bound country, to a more central managed country.

[Edited on December 13, 2010 at 3:44 AM. Reason : loose]

12/13/2010 3:43:12 AM

Quote :

"Sorry. But your examples aren't applicable to China"

Reading comprehension. My examples were meant to assert "Militancy and unrest are not products of a lack of education." I did not once mention the word China. I already gave my opinion on China earlier in the thread, that at this point in history China would be stable no matter what form of government it tried.

[Edited on December 13, 2010 at 10:12 AM. Reason : .,.]

12/13/2010 10:11:21 AM

Rather timely article on the AW&ST Ares blog about this topic.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a7fb26425-bc6a-4daa-8531-cd5be6709a7d

The article makes two points:

1) Contrary to what people may think, Chinese repression isn't simply an army of brainwashed automatons but a much more complex mix of calculated and aggressive restraint on a near uncontrollable mob. Simply put, the country is so large that the actual control the central government has over the populace is surprisingly limited and decentralized.

2) Ironically, the repressive government acts sort of as a "heat shield" that tempers the strong and aggressive sentiments of a population that calls for an even more aggressive and violent foreign policy.

My own take is this: talks about how democracy would destroy China are a bit too much because it assumes that the current government has a tight control on the populace. It doesn't, and despite initiatives like the Great Firewall, China is hardly a complete blackout of the outside world. In some ways, I think the "ignorance" of the Chinese masses is not too much different than an ill-informed American from a rural or inner city environment. They consume the information that feeds their own predisposed world view, and for the Chinese, that view is that they're in the ascendancy, and its time to throw around their weight.

Nor do I think that a Chinese democracy would be some sort of violent, psychotic entity versus the Communists. Most democratic governments, despite being "of the people," don't always follow the whims of their populations in all but the most extreme situations when it comes to foreign policy; this is bad in some instances for questionable foreign policy decisions (particularly for our nation), but overall, I think its a net benefit as it acts as a safeguard for those heated surges of emotions.

I think the Chinese will have to shift to at least a partial democratic system for two reasons: one is to bring more accountability to officials, particularly at the local level, where the central government has utterly failed in bringing in line its regional governments. Also, as China's economy evolves, the growing middle class will demand for more public goods (health care, environmental issues, social safety nets, etc.) and a greater say in decision making at least at a local level. A democratic system will be much more responsive to those needs than the current autocratic system geared toward heavy industrial development, and I can see existing organs such as the regional People's Congresses evolving this way.

Quote :

"The Communist Party of China as a heat shield Posted by Bradley Perrett at 12/13/2010 7:35 PM CST Readers may have seen the Economist's set of reports last week on the challenges that a rising China will bring. The writer, Edward Carr, did a good job. Although Ares is a defense technology blog, I'll add my tuppence on that issue. (I'm Aviation Week's Beijing correspondent.) People who live outside of authoritarian states often imagine that the governments in such countries are in control of everything and that those states’ firm or aggressive behavior internationally stems from the hard attitudes of the people in charge. But in China the average person probably wants much stronger defense and foreign policies than the government has. This attitude is rooted in intense and rising nationalism, which is itself encouraged by the ceaselessly nationalistic propaganda of the media, even the media that the government does not strongly control. Chinese children are also taught at school to be nationalistic. Even without propaganda, Chinese people would probably be highly nationalistic, anyway, because of their grand and ancient culture, the size of the country and knowledge that it is becoming great again. As a result, the idea of extraordinarily aggressive foreign policy, or even war, comes up in ordinary conversations with ordinary people. So, while the Chinese government was badly criticized abroad for the strength of its reaction in the recent flare-up of its dispute with Japan over the Senkaku Islands this year, at home it was widely criticized as gutless. From casual conversations with several Chinese friends, I got the impression that war with Japan would have been a perfectly satisfactory policy to them. Obviously they were not thinking things through. But the point is that ordinary Chinese believe in strong measures to protect China’s interests. And it must be stressed that most of them only have those thoughts when China’s interests are at stake. Readers in Western countries might remember the 2008 street marches by Chinese students studying abroad who were angry at what they saw as Western bias amid riots in Tibet. The anger that you saw was a good insight into the strength of nationalist feeling here. This leads to a surprising conclusion: the Communist Party of China is to some degree a heat shield between the rest of the world and the Chinese people. A democratic China would have no such heat shield. It might be a lot hotter to handle. If the party gradually loses its control over China, we can probably expect it to listen more to the people. I expect that they will demand better public services, less corruption, lower tax, more social security—and a more aggressive foreign policy. The party, if it felt it were losing its grip, could also be active in exploiting nationalism to rebuild public support. An attempt to recover Taiwan would be a wildly popular move. The Falklands War is an unsettling precedent. One senior Western diplomat put it to me this way: “The party basically relies on economic performance and nationalism to keep itself in power. My worry is that if the economic performance weakens badly, it will only be able to rely on nationalism.” Despite the dangers, I see no sign that the Chinese government is easing its nationalistic propaganda. Nationalism in this country, whose importance will rise with the relative strength of the economy, will probably become one of the key issues in international relations this century."

12/14/2010 2:04:33 PM

I suspect it would. There are very, very stark divisions within China -- rural/urban, rich/poor, Han/not-Han -- that from what I gather are more pronounced than what we see many places. Throw in the fact that there are some regions dominated by ethnic groups that decidedly do not want to be part of China nor to have Han Chinese shipped in by the trainload, and you've got a recipe for problems. Plus, the country has exactly zero experience with democratic rule.

12/14/2010 3:38:14 PM