Author
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Topic: Is there anything "Communist" about China?
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Stockholm
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3138
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posted 17 August 2008 07:55 AM
It seems to me that apart from a bit of iconography around Mao-Tse Tung and the fact that the ruling dictatorship has the word "communist" as part of its proper name. There is really NOTHING about pfresent day China that is remotely socialist. Canada and even the US are probably more socialist than China is.There as an interesting article to this effect in NOW Magazine this week: http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=164466 quote: Getting information out is extremely difficult. Few people in the province have Internet access. No one has wireless. Internet cafés are some of the shadiest hangouts in Sichuan. There’s no drinking age in China, but to use the Net you need an ID card that proves you’re a Chinese citizen, over 18 and you’ve passed a test to show you’re “responsible” enough. The woman at the counter flatly refuses to let me in. You really don’t want to get sick in China. All health care is private, and hospitals are marketed as aggressively as soft drinks. Corruption is so rampant, people don’t feel safe unless they bribe their doctors. It’s dog-eat-dog. Ambulances don’t even get the right of way. I see more than a few, sirens blaring, stuck at a crawl behind a line of taxis. Sichuan itself is one of China’s richest regions, a major agricultural basin known as “the province of abundance.” But it’s also an example of the country’s growing income gap problem. A half-hour’s drive from China’s most expensive shopping street in Chengdu, skyscrapers give way to one-room shacks whose pell-mell bricks and patchy roofs would collapse like matchsticks in a quake.
From: Toronto | Registered: Sep 2002
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George Victor
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 14683
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posted 17 August 2008 10:56 AM
How about control of the exchange rate to favour export industries? OH, and a one child policy to maintain elbow room? (Sort of a "command" performance in the bedroom?) Centralized decision-making with some planning? Language. Talk of "peasants" still, rather than consumers and taxpayers?(Not sure here.) [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]
From: Cambridge, ON | Registered: Oct 2007
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unionist
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 11323
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posted 17 August 2008 11:08 AM
quote: Originally posted by George Victor: OH, and a one child policy to maintain elbow room? (Sort of a "command" performance in the bedroom?)
It shouldn't be forgotten that well within living memory, contraception and sodomy and abortion were all considered as criminal behaviour in Canada. Sort of a "command" performance in the bedroom. This thread topic is idiotic. Name one babbler that has ever said that China is "Communist". I can't recall any. How about a thread entitled: Is there anything "flat" about the Earth?
From: Vote QS! | Registered: Dec 2005
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George Victor
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 14683
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posted 17 August 2008 03:51 PM
It shouldn't be forgotten that well within living memory, contraception and sodomy and abortion were all considered as criminal behaviour in Canada. Sort of a "command" performance in the bedroom. (end quote)Exactly! And now that sexual practices are freer than ever - surely another indication of our march toward a true democracy - what government structure, we can ask, would be required to duplicate China's rigorously controlled birthrate? What modification of our apparently near ideal situation is required - because there will be modification required by some generation or other. Surely not old Pierre's "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation" idea of governing. But then, we learn in John English's biography on Pierre that he never lost the faith. And that church certainly would not countenance birth control just to maintain a country's ability to feed itself. Or limit CO2 emissions, etc. That would be all too rational. The collectivist ideal from the far left would seem to be superior to the jack-booted variety on the right, even though both require citizens given over to acceptance of the authoritarian leadership. So I wonder if, by a admittedly, rather crude process of elimination, we can say that it will ideally be a communist-leaning government that brings our population into a sustainable, zero-growth position as well. That is, if we accept the premise, to begin with, that it is a modified communist government that is holding the lid on population, while eliminating all restraints on economic growth in China, a la Bay St. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]
From: Cambridge, ON | Registered: Oct 2007
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George Victor
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 14683
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posted 17 August 2008 05:06 PM
Party central has just agreed to pay for the education (probably primary) of the poor.Looks to me like blood money for the deaths of so many in the quake. Is there no public medicine at all? [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]
From: Cambridge, ON | Registered: Oct 2007
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Frustrated Mess
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8312
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posted 17 August 2008 06:45 PM
quote: Put another way, China's unprecedented growth rates for the last 21 years in a row aren't a result of NeoLiberal Washington consensus.
I think it is certainly patterned on it. In fact, Naomi Klein makes just such an argument as she details Milton Friedman's visits there. Didn't Rupert Murdoch make his home there?In fact, China is probably a capitalist's paradise. McCommunism - "Stalinism meets global capitalism" [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
From: doom without the gloom | Registered: Feb 2005
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 17 August 2008 06:50 PM
quote: Originally posted by Stockholm: That sounds more like Mussolini or Franco style corporatism.
You mean fascism. Fascists also believe in extensive private property laws in addition to corporatism. Corporations aren't really allowed to own land in China by what I can tell. What they have in China are "special economic zones" Unlike NeoLiberalized Canada since we handed control of 36 key sectors of our economy to majority foreign ownership and control and mostly American, China actually disallows foreign control of key industries, like steel production, banking, manufacturing, energy and so on. quote: What is communist about a country with a gigantic and growing gap between rich and poor, no environmental standards of any kind, private health care that you have to pay for
Economies based on heavy and polluting industries are on the wane. The Chinese know and understand that they can't continue polluting like that forever and are actually ahead of the US and Canada wrt several areas of pollution regulations. They still use several million fewer barrels of oil every day than the most oil-dependent and most unsustainable economy in the world and born of false cold war era promises, the USA. The Chinese are using industrializing economy to build up the country for now. quote: and private education that you have to pay for?
I think Chinese were complaining last year or so that it take students two years on average to pay back student loan debt In Canada, repayment schedules for the avg male is something like 18 years. For females it's 20-25 years. No students pay higher interest rates on student loan debt sentences than Canadians do. Many Chinese are paying cash for homes as well. They have some of if not the highest personal savings rates in the world. Things in China are far from perfect though. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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Robespierre
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 15340
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posted 17 August 2008 06:52 PM
quote: Originally posted by RosaL: China's defenders sometimes invoke Lenin's N.E.P.ETA: No country has ever claimed to be communist. Some have claimed to be socialist. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
Wow! Political Affairs. From the snappy design of that blog site one would never guess how fossilized the ed board is---oh, wait, they call it an "editorial collective". I clicked on the About us section and read the names listed, and, frankly, I'm shocked that most of those Stalinists are still breathing. Interesting. Thanks, RosaL.
From: Raccoons at my door! | Registered: Jul 2008
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Ken Burch
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8346
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posted 17 August 2008 07:14 PM
One reason that some Babblers may be more sympathetic to the Chinese government than you'd prefer, Stockers, in addition to any belief in its lingering "left" traits, is that they see it as a counterbalance to U.S. imperial arrogance.Now, a case could be made that, were China to become genuinely socialist(and, consequently, genuinely democratic)it would be a far more effective counterbalance. But that hasn't seemed to be the case that, with all due respect, you've made. You might do better to actually try making that case, rather than letting your justified anger at the past crimes of the now-extinct hard-line Stalinist regimes make you sound like an old time "cold warrior" type right-wing social democrat...the kind that, too often, lets her or his hatred of "communism" overshadow any vestigial commitment to even the mildest form of social democracy. And the kind that, in Germany, armed the Freikorps in 1919.
From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 17 August 2008 07:20 PM
quote: Originally posted by Stockholm:
I'm talking about primary and secondary school - whihc are free in Canada. In China, no money, no school.
China now produces some 500,000 engineering graduates and 12,000 PhDs each year At that rate they will "bury the west" Chinese urban students will be free from tuition and other fees As I was saying, China is far from being a utopian society. They have significant problems with everything from pollution and overcrowding to a lack of basic rights and protections for workers. But China is not all capitalism in a similar way that the US is not all capitalism since the 1930's. Laissez-faire capitalism in the US ended after 30 years. One US commentator said it was "duller and greyer than Soviet communism"
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 17 August 2008 09:55 PM
quote: Originally posted by Stockholm:
Maybe if you are a leftist in Canada who thinks its good to have an arms race between the US and some other superpower as a way to prevent too much American power - it makes sense to long for the good old days of Stalin and Brezhnev. I don't know if the people imprisoned in the Gulag are feeling quite as nostalgic.
Vlad Putin said yes, the world is definitely more terrorized and feeling less safe today in a unipolar world since dissolution of the USSR. US cold war fiction author Robert Ludlum said that the decade of the 90's saw a loss of personal freedoms around the western world. I agree. US hawks have moved to annex Canada and remove our sovereignt through backroom deals with Liberal and Conservative governments ie. SPP and other secretive negotiations not associated with democracy in general. The US itself has moved to violate privacy in America with intrusive wiretap laws. And that country whose economy is dependent on war and military spending now owns the largest incarcerated population in the world. Election fraud? That would mean the current criminal admin in Washington is illegit, even by western world standards for limited democracy. quote: If China actually stood for something humanistic and represented values that represented some sort of "better way" than what we see in the West - then I might agree. . . it's just the US wanting to expand American power, Russia wants to expand Russian power, China wants to expand Chinese power.
It's always been the US and Britain wanting to expand empire. Frustrated Mess and posters provided information in another thread describing pax Americana maneuvering since turn of the last century. And the US., Brits, and Japanese tried hacking off pieces of China for each of themselves from the 1930's right up to 1949 when their very murderous proxy in China, Chiang Kai-shek, was chased from the country by Maoists and gangster associates fleeing to Formosa, and to Burma and all over South-East Asia and working with the CIA to deal drugs around the world. eta: I think it's a sign of just how much control is exerted over the world by the west when China is centred out for introducing their presence in Africa and South America etc. The US and Europe control or exert influence over most of Africa and what are the poorest and most war-torn countries in the world. If China is an alternative to the IMF and Wall Street and London jackals as a source of development funds in the Congo, Angola and Sudan, then maybe it is a good thing. Choice is what free markets are all about, and unipolar world empires tend to collapse at some point anyway. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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Ken Burch
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 8346
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posted 17 August 2008 10:24 PM
So that you understand, I don't actually AGREE with the China-as-counterbalance thing myself, Stock. I merely thought it would be interesting to see you address it.The primary cause of international destabilization and the marked increase in international militarism after 1989 has been the fact that the U.S. leadership has drunk deeply of the "world's only remaining superpower" koolaid. The U.S., in the international sphere, has operated with few or or any contraints and with almost no obligation to respect the values or sovereignty of any other country. There are legitimate moral and ideological reasons for honorable people of the left not to see China or Russia as counterbalances to U.S. imperial arrogance. But those who argue against that then have an obligation that to demonstrate there are other means to place checks on the ambitions and reach of The Great Spread Eagle, or to propose effective new methods of doing so that comport with your own sense of purity. At the moment, I don't know of any at all. Can you, Stocks think of any? The U.S., my own country, is very close to asserting itself as the next Rome. Only in this case a Rome with nuclear weapons and psychologist-assisted torturers. This will not only destroy the world, but drain the U.S. of the last dregs of its soul as a nation. Do you, Stocks, have any suggestions at all of how to prevent this WITHOUT making the kind of alliances you see as deals with the devil? Sorry for the thread drift, but this need to be able to hold back the Holy Texian Empire is not one you've ever seriously addressed. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: Ken Burch ]
From: A seedy truckstop on the Information Superhighway | Registered: Feb 2005
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 17 August 2008 10:43 PM
I think that during the cold war era, U.S. hawks and billionaire class around the world suffered from an inferiority complex in that they felt the need to maintain certain illusions of democracy. And that included propagandizing the world with false promises for middle class capitalism for the other 85% of humanity. We realize now it was a colossal lie. Englishman Gerrard Winstanley, leader of what was probably England's first communist movement, said to Oliver Cromwell that if life didn't improve for peasants, then they would not object to occupation by a foreign military. Cromwell acquiesced to their demands for about a year until Brits gained the upper hand on France and Spain militarily. I think US hawks believed they would have the upper hand on Asia militarily for what would be a brief window of opportunity after 1991. Hawks created a list of countries slated for regime change. And I think that window is closing now. [ 17 August 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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Stockholm
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3138
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posted 18 August 2008 04:10 AM
quote: The primary cause of international destabilization and the marked increase in international militarism after 1989 has been the fact that the U.S. leadership has drunk deeply of the "world's only remaining superpower" koolaid.
I actually don't see an INCREASE in international destabilization and militarism since 1989. To be sure there have been conflicts, but I don't know about you, but I would be quite happy NOT to have to go back to the good old days (sic.) characterized by the following: The Berlin Blocade The Berlin Wall Greek Civil War Korean War Vietnam War Invasion of Hungary Invasion of Czechoslovakia Invasion of Grenande Proxy wars all across Central America Vietnam War Cuban Missile Crisis Arms races and MAD Three major wars in the Middle east I really don't miss all that stuff at all....
From: Toronto | Registered: Sep 2002
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Michelle
Moderator
Babbler # 560
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posted 18 August 2008 07:56 AM
People, you know, if you don't like a thread, you can always ignore it. There was absolutely nothing wrong with Stockholm's opening post. He started a thread about the government system in China, saying that it's not really communist.I know that there are a handful of sworn enemies here who will slobber like Pavlov's dog every time one of their nemeses post anything at all on babble, but you know, some of us who maybe don't know as much about governments like China's just might be interested in exploring this topic. Not everyone is a world-weary expert on the subject. It's not "old hat" to everyone in the world. What IS getting really old is listening to the same people bitching and bickering at each other in every damn thread they enter. If you don't want to discuss this topic with Stockholm, then please, just stay out of the thread. The insults and derailing are not only against policy, but they're a type of trolling, too.
From: I've got a fever, and the only prescription is more cowbell. | Registered: May 2001
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George Victor
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 14683
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posted 18 August 2008 08:07 AM
If China actually stood for something humanistic and represented values that represented some sort of "better way" than what we see in the West - then I might agree. But instead we are getting into a pre-WW1 situation where you have countries vying for power for its own sake - there is no ideology, it's just the US wanting to expand American power, Russia wants to expand Russian power, China wants to expand Chinese power. Its just three imperialist countries just after power for its own sake and no one even makes the slightest pretention to doing the world any favours - its just three-way nationalist imperialism and I think that's pretty sad. The above post, by Stockholm, is indeed a return to fundamental thinking and away from labels. It demands comment. I hope that Jiajie can help us out on the details of any residual welfare and changes occurring in China. It is indeed important to know these things.
And humour, where appropriate, comes as relief among the accounts coming out of the vale of tears. [ 18 August 2008: Message edited by: George Victor ]
From: Cambridge, ON | Registered: Oct 2007
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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
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posted 18 August 2008 09:50 AM
China is not communist. The USSA's is not a purely capitalist economy either. Every time a country tries on full-blown capitalism, the leaders either have to bring the army in to prop it up, or its swept away by popular opinion. I appreciate Stockholmer's attempt to simplify the world in cold war era terms for our sake, but it's not an easy task. Too much for one person or one thread even.
From: Viva La Revolución | Registered: Apr 2004
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