China?Follow

Also, this:



That's quite a piece of Mooglefuckery there.

Because that photo sums up everything folks think about when they consider an oppressive militaristic government suppressing the rights of the individual. Tiananmen Square is a powerful symbol because that image is a powerful symbol.

You made a sweeping generalization about the ignorance of 'general populations' everywhere. You can now qualify that statement anyway you want, but, it's still a very short-sighted 'ignorant' statement.

I was about to respond, but I just realized that it's off topic for a thread about China. Also, it's 3:41 AM here in Osaka and I should really get to sleep. Should I feel up to it, I'll start an Asylum thread tomorrow concerning the nature of ignorance. Night.

Even when you gather a mass of relatively smart people together they tend to act pretty stupidly. Law of large numbers and all that.

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The Chinese Gov't has a rather effective propaganda machine, and while it's by no means foolproof it manages to influence the mindset of a large segment of the lower-mid echelons of their society. I've met many people there who genuinely like their gov't, most certainly a higher percentage of the populace than the U.S. can claim. One party elections are rather boring, but it does minimize productive energy lost to political turbulence. Unfortunately, with any system built like this it is very easy for the upper-class politically connected segments of society to abuse those they rule, leading to some frankly disgusting stuff. But, as I said they've got an effective PR team. (Qualifier: Obviously such abuse isn't limited to their system, it's incredibly pervasive in any indirect political system ) In the interests of fairness, it must be said that their gov't isn't all bad, they have been able to make some very big leaps in modernization in such a short period of time. ~10 short years ago city transit was mostly bikes, and now their cities resemble those of any other major power.

You don't think that the mass of people is necessarily, definitionally, average?

Exactly!

Just don't refer to it as "white noise".

Trust me on this.

Sure. I'm not worried - you'll develop a healthy, cheerful cynicism one of these days.

It's true, I often struggle to hear people over the sound of how awesome I am.

So I have some personal experience with Chinese students. I have an advanced degree in a science area. There were Chinese students in our department. They were all very, very good students. They scored very, very high on the exams used to judge entrance to our department. I got along very well with them. However, it was a difficult program of study and most people did not finish. There are departments (not mine!) in which a strict cutoff is used and X% of all admitted students will be failed out. In such cases, you can imagine there is some resentment. It is misfounded, of course.

Further, having hung out at Universities for a long time, I overhear a lot of complaints against various faculty due to unintelligibility. While not unique to the Chinese faculty, these complains seem more prevalent about Chinese faculty.

With politics, I can only give my personal take:

1. The most startling fact about China is the scale on which it's economy is growing and the degree to which a significant fraction of the total human population on Earth is escaping poverty. Amazing.

2. China is not a very politically free country. If we are to very roughly divide the world's people into "free" and "not free" in terms of political freedom (and nothing more then that) then I think it is safe to put China's population into the latter category. And generally, for example, India's population would fall into the former. In fact, glancing over the list of most populace nations, I think it is likely most (or at least nearly most) of the people in the "not free" category are in China.

I'm no expert, but here is my inexpert take on matters: There is no clear path for China to complete freedom in a short time. The parallel model would be the soviet union and now Russia. It is not clear how free Russia is right now, politically, and undoubtedly there was great strife getting even to this point. It seems China is going slow. If there is a solid free economy, problems similar to those of the Soviet Union might be avoided. I really don't know the intent of China's rulers.

3. So the US has huge debt (due to cutting taxes and waging wars and other vast spending on the military). And a good little chunk of this is owned by China, the EU, Canada, etc. Since any large scale military action is going to require lending, these lenders effectively have veto power over US actions. But in the case of the vast majority of the debt, it is owned by individuals, not governments, and it would be difficult to see them dumping all their debt in hopes that the US will be unable to finance a war effort. China is the exception to that - not that I think China will, or that the US will give them cause to do so.

The real solution is for the US to pull way back, after of course stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense spending is just way too high and our allies should pick up the slack, or just allow far less total world military spending. Of course, our allies do not speak with a unified voice and this is a good thing! Tragic mistakes such as invading Iraq under false pretense were seen through by so many of our close allies (Canada, France, Germany spring to mind) and requiring more nations to get aggressive military action going will ultimately end or at least suppress future military misadventures.

I think it got sub-defaulted, alter your filter settings at the top if you want to try and resurrect it.