kyser_soze said:
Cool thread indeed folks - pretty much confirms what I thought, that China is the same as everywhere else with it's own unique cultural variants on internationalised stuff, as well as some interesting to hair-raising local customs, and that one thing that needs to be remembered about China is that it should be thought of like the US - one nation of many distinct cultures and identities.
Aye!
However, it does little to 'counter' my opinion of China as being in a nascent stage of becoming an imperial power in the same mould as the US - use of soft power (companies, markets, culture) coupled with back channel use of hard power, or hard power thru proxies to achieve it's strategic aims of securing basic resources.
It's
very difficult to predict whether China's stated goal of "Peaceful Rise", recently softened to "Peaceful Development" so as to avoid the use of any language that might alarm any westerners, is merely rhetoric. At least for the time being, however, and under the current leadership (Hu, Wen, et al), I think we can take China at her word.
Given China's meteoric economic development, the leadership's attention is clearly focussed upon managing the corresponding social problems engendered.
Currently sitting on a trillion US$ cash in the bank and with little qualms about dealing with obnoxious regimes in order to secure energy and raw material supplies, China is
very well placed to continue on her current path (with the usual various caveats thrown in about the dangers of uneven economic development, a rising Gini Coefficient, environmental degradation, social disorder, endemic corruption, failing healthcare and welfare/pension services, etc, etc,) and to go from strength to strength without the need for external aggression.
Over the longer term, it's difficult to say, but I see no reason why any gigantic superpower should be any less belligerent than previous claimants to such status have proven to be.
What does interest me more however are the posts on Chinese culture - it fascinates me to look at a country that was basically Confuscian for 2500 years, was then wrenched apart by wars and the attempted regeneration based on a Western European's philosophy that had been around (then) for about 100 years, and now to see it in a bizarre and fascinating phase-space - not communist (or even Mao/Stalinist), not a democracy, not a Confucian society (altho as I understand it the legal system is still largely based on confucian principles?) and one that it once again having it's 'business spirit' re-awakened (from the histories I've read the Chinese have long been an industrious, hard working lot) is now undergoing huge economic growth of the kind not seen in Europe since the industrial revolution. So it intrigues me as to how the Chinese see themselves now - what are the bedrocks of the Chinese identity.
It's an intreguing question that is being addressed both within China and by external commentators.
It's important not to underestimate the importance of the cultural revolution in shaping the modern Chinese psyche. During this decade, nobody went to secondary school or university, a whole generation of children lost their education. Pretty much all existing art, literature and "culture" was destroyed. Traditional bonds of kin and clan were shattered. Traditional values, religious and/or spiritual values, moral values, any fucking values, were virtually obliterated. The country was wracked with poverty, hunger and death. Millions were murdered and tens of millions brutalised.
The Cultural Revolution left China in a national state of shock, stripped of the values built-up over thousands of years. A nation bereft of history. A nation where friends and family could not and did not trust one another. A nation that was starving.
Two years after this utterly disasterous policy of Mao's was formally abandoned in 1976 saw the beginning of China's opening and the instigation and implementation of the Socialist Market Economy.
The only thing that mattered was the modicum of freedom that permitted an individual to earn enough money for food.
Nothing else.
Oh. Except for the ongoing impetous to flee China - ususally to HK, we soaked up about four million hungry migrants between 1937 and 1982.
Now - a single generation later - China is churning out more than 4 million university graduates a year (5 million expected next year) and only creating enough jobs for 2.75 of them (there's a million fresh graduates trying to get jobs as roadsweepers at the moment.
The impetous to make money has grown and grown as the chance to do so has spread from the core beginnings in Shenzhen, up the east coast, to about half of the population today. There are some 300 million "middle class" in China now.
This singleminded worship of the Yuan, unfettered by traditional, moral, religious or spiritual values, is a potent force. Whether it bodes well for China's sustainable development is another question entirely.
More importantly, and especially given the cover ups over bird flu, do any of the China lot think the government will be competent to deal with things like climate and water crises? China occupies a LOT of land, so global warming will start to impact on it more than many other countries - will the govt adopt a 3 Gorges approach and just say 'fuck it' and go all Katrina on people or are there the infrastructure and social controls to deal with the massive environmental problems the country will have to - indeed should be - dealing with at the moment, examples: the drying of the Yangtze and the massive pollution of the Yangtze and other major watercourses, a current problem; the estimates by some geologists that approximately 1/4 of the water table is now contaminated with heavy metals at levels that could be deemed as dangerous to the public.
The leadership is belatedly waking up to the looming environmental crises facing the country.
One of the "benefits" of dictatorship is the ability to "mandate" things quickly and the latest five-year-plan has emphasised
sustainable development.
Ten thousand heavily polluting factories have been closed down in Guangdong Province over the last six months (although that leaves hundreds of thousands more ad those worst offenders that were closed will simply move to less developed, interior provinces) and the leadership is getting tougher on a whole range of environmental issues.
Unfortunately, the aforementioned corruption that goes hand-in-hand with the single minded pursuit of weath acts as a severe drag on attempts by the Central leadership to clamp down on nefarious environmental practices.
Running China is an extremely delicate balancing act and the leadership is paranoid about a free media reporting on economic, social, environmental, health-issue and, in particular, corruption problems. There is no doubt that such reporting creates social tensions and fosters social unrest - rightly so. Unfortunately, suppressing the media (again, particularly corruption reports since they piss-off the peasantry and the working and middle classes more than anything else - after all, corruption means less for them,) makes it that much easier for corrupt cadres and business owners to ply their destructive trades.
China remains a spectacular success story - the creation of a middle class of 300 million and the rasing from poverty of a further four hundred million, all within in a single generation, is not to be sniffed at.
As to whether the strains that the rate of development is placing on the environment as well as the psyche of the people can be managed in a sustainable fashion remains to be seen.
There will be many,
many slips and falls as China rumbles forward and there's no guarantee that the country won't implode and enter another dark period for a decade or more. The (relatively) good news is that
nobody wants this to happen and the vast majority of today's Chinese value stability above all else.
After all, you need stability in order to make money and it is
this goal that pervades today's Collective Chinese Conciousness.
I'm an optimist on China. It won't be an easy path and there will be many, very difficult, setbacks, but it's difficult
not to stand and wonder at the rate and depth of transformation the country is undergoing. The Genie is out of the bottle and China is headed where she is headed - fast! Managing the transformation is the key - and the most challenging - task.
Woof
