A trade embargo (aka cold war) would be a lot worse for everyone involved.. Leads to arms race and threats of war, even less freedom and more injustice for the people (eg North Korea).
> we are trading our values, for which people freaking died to win, for short term convenience ..
Yeah, we do that with Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq and many more. That's the essence of business - trade one thing for another. We trade our "freedom to do whatever we want" for a salary. We trade our "freedom to party" for the happiness of raising a child... It's one of those laws of life which we might not entirely like, but cannot escape.
> people freaking died to win
People die - that's the only absolute we can rely on. Don't get carried away with "dying for .. something", most often this is not true - most died because delusional leaders sent them into battle ... only after the fact their death got dressed into "honorable cause"..
In the end, the higher morals are dictated by whoever managed to seize power..
Which, by the way brings us back to the censorship thing..
And on people dying, that's just another way of saying that great sacrifice has been made for us to enjoy the lifestyle and freedoms that we do have, so we can't trade those so easily, because then our children will have to repay that price.
In international issues, it's important to not lose sight of the possibility that there are multiple correct ways to solve political problems.
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01651/tiananmen_...
I think China is lacking in some important rights, but I think being vague about them to the degree that we say they have "less freedom" only muddies the problem, and allows people to use the rights they do have as a counter-argument. Being clear that China's suppression of free speech allows them to shape discourse, suppress ideas they don't like, and propagandize their citizens easily makes the dangers clear. It does also open up the discussion for how the west attempts to accomplish the same things through the media, but that's not necessarily a bad thing have have brought up.
No, there's a fundamental difference between living in a country where you have recourse against the government and living in one where you don't.
In the US, I am not allowed to say things that are considered slanderous, but I am allowed to say that I should be allowed to say things that are slanderous. This makes it at least possible to change the status quo.
The same is not true in countries without free speech protections.
I'm not convinced. I've seen plenty of (presumably) US citizens complain here that Europe doesn't have free speech, because we have laws to curb hate speech.
Still, we are very much free to discuss and organize against our government.
Just like the Chinese have the freedom to denounce US imperalism. Now, try something more serious, like calling for actual Western war criminals, and those of Western allies, to be brought to court. You won't go to jail; because nobody (who matters) will listen to you. And what would happen if you managed to actually start something that had a real chance at getting people in front of a judge and behind bars, that we can just guess at, since nobody has done it before.
It's easy for people to embrace the rhetoric that China is a bound society and the West is made of free societies. In reality, the shape of the bindings is different. A free society wouldn't have forced a man to flee because he knew he wouldn't find justice after revealing an uncomfortable political truth to the public that is oppressed by it. America's methods are different, but being a superpower and an empire demands supreme authority in key areas.
I thought he was claiming in the US it was possible to be a dissident without censorship or repression. My mistake!
Also, one must not confuse the US with "the western world". I live in Germany, and I believe that you could be a dissident here w/o censorship. I also believe this is true for most other European countries.
My original point was that the statement: > And what would happen if you managed to actually start something that had a real chance at getting people in front of a judge and behind bars, that we can just guess at, since nobody has done it before.
Is simply not true. Mentioned Mr. Snowden as an example -- but there are more, like the huge leak of the panama papers.
I'm less familiar with Germany, but I'm willing to bet that while people in principle can say whatever they want (with some exceptions), there are other, less visible forms of repression and/or means of neutralizing those opinions. That they are less overt than in China doesn't mean they are not there.
Just don't say "The Nazis are great and I really wish they were back in power." That'll get you straight-up jailed under section 86a of Strafgesetzbuch, if I understand correctly. Everything else is on the table. ;)
The question is what happens if you break the rules. Are there rules on how to handle individuals who break rules? Do the ones who have the power also have to follow the same rules? What about those wo make the rules? Do they have to follow the rules? How is the process of rule-making, rule-checking and punishing separated?
I'm pretty sure that in most european countries this is pretty OK -- yes there are gaps, holes, and sometimes just plain unjust or unfair processes.
I'm also pretty damn sure that for some countries this is way off. China is IMNSHO one of them.
() There are still people wandering about who say this and similar things who are not in jail. You much more likely would get in trouble if you call someone a "goat-fucker" (google erdogan and jan böhmermann).
I do like freedom of speech just about as far as I have the freedom to not have to listen to it (or, Goddess forbid, take it seriously).
Russia and China were on the same side as the US and UK in the second world war.
> Seriously, please learn some actual history (or at least don't spout the ignorance)
OK...
EDIT Not sure why this would be drive by down voted?
My comment was not about one specific war, but about the general concept that some societies and ways of living are qualitatively and quantitatively better than others, and that people will willingly sign up to fight to preserve those societies, even knowing that being killed is a likely outcome.
As a simple quantitative measure, Google "Dictator Death Tolls", and you'll find Hitler in third place variously counted at 17-30 million, Stalin in 2nd at 23-40 million and Mao topping the charts at 60-78 Million -- people killed by their leadership.
As much as we complain about the inequities of our governments, every possible complaint utterly pales on contrast to those societies -- at least we can complain, or wear glasses, or be born into an unfavored family without being killed for it.
More to the point, when threatened with living under one of those regimes instead of ours, many sane people would eagerly sign up to fight, with full knowledge that they could die.
Signing up to fight for such a cause is considered noble far outside the bounds of Christianity cited by the GP, is the furthest thing possible from the "not knowing the consequences" and "following their naive emotions" cited by the GP, and the contempt with which the GP writes of those actions is simply wrong.
" we in this island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have suffered we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye. And freedom shall be restored to all.
We abate nothing of our just demands—Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, all who have joined their causes to our own shall be restored.
...the Battle of France is over ... the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire.
The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour. "
This was Churchill, June 16, 1940, when it was not at all obvious that there was any way to win the war. My grandfathers and great uncles volunteered anyway, as did tens of thousands of others. They did not want to, but knew they had to. As Churchill said, it was '...let us brace ourselves to our duties...'.
As for China, it is our duty to show that there is another way to organize a society. Give them full exposure, through trade and visits. Then, as they figure things out, be there to help them through the process.
My point is just that facing an existential threat to your country, and by extension most of the people and places you've ever loved, is clear and highly motivating – and unusual for western countries in the last 60 years.
It's very different from the Korean War, Vietnam War, Falklands War, Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, etc. Those were not existential threats; they were mostly geopolitical posturing. I'm not making a statement on whether those were good or worthy wars (posturing can be necessary), but it's at least an arguable position that most casualties in those wars died "because delusional leaders sent them into battle," not because they were choosing to fight and die for some grand idea.
The surrounding point in this discussion is that if we're going to talk up the values of freedom and democracy we have to live them as well. That would include the US giving up its little gulag in Guantanamo and applying the rule of law there as well, among many other things.
The issue is not to let perfect become the enemy of better. Just because we fall short of an ideal of freedom does not mean we are therefore not in a free society. Just because our society in the WWII era was not as free as our own, does not mean it wasn't dramatically freer than the alternatives.
Even Churchill's promise to fight until all Europe was free was only half kept, for half of Europe fell behind an iron curtain until nearly fifty years after WWII. It was the right decision not to continue to war to free the other half of Europe. Time and exposure to another way to organize society did the job, without millions more dead or nuclear weapons.
It will be the same with China, with Cuba and even with North Korea. All we have to do is stand fast with our freedoms, and advance them where we can. Time and exposure will do the rest.
And in the other half minorities such as homosexuals were persecuted. Including Alan Turing, who in WW2 helped break the ciphers of the German military.
>All we have to do is stand fast with our freedoms
Yes, our freedoms (see above)...
However you are missing the bigger point, western democracies are almost always leading the way with more rights than any one else. For how homosexuals were treated in Germany see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_...
There is a broad spectrum of (personal) causes that leads one to follow an order which inherently brings with it the risk of dying. Many deaths were of people that did not had any real choice other than avoiding prosecution (which sometimes involved certain death). Many where brain washed by propaganda. Maybe not that many actually trusted in their war masters if not understanding themselves what they are fighting (and dying) for. Some, however, might have had an understanding of the cause behind the fights they were involved in, and being seduced by pure ideas/ideals rolled on as true volunteers. It's not that nice to make this distinction when talking about the dead and for the sake of it they choose to elevate all the victims to the last category, of heroes (in ideals).
Not knowing what nightmares you sign up for, plus the group pressure of a replacement tribe/family, those are the ingredients cooked with in hells kitchen.
The scary truth is that humans can't handle proper free speech, just like they can't handle guns. They should be able to but they can't. It would be nice if they could but they can't. Unless and until we embrace actual eugenics, and can weed out that crazy segment who always ruins everything, we can't have nice things. But we can't face that possibility, so we either get censorship and gun control or the good ol' USA massacre of the week and Trump.
I am not against democracy, but I think the current western liberalism, where it is perfectly OK to spread outright lies and counter-social messages on mass media in the name of "free speech", is doomed.
I've mentioned Trump twice and for good reason. I think Americans underestimate just how bad their political situation looks from the outside. Not only the gridlock in congress, but the United States, supposedly and self-appointedly the shining light of democracy for the entire world, is about to elect this idiotic, unqualified populist blowhard. It is really hard to make any kind of defense of that. The USA is currently and enthusiastically proving every bad thing the CPC said about it, free speech, and democracy in general, absolutely right.
I will have to disagree here. In my view, freedoms require training to wield them correctly. Part of that training is social (and hence requires good role models), and part is educational (and requires a good education system). When either of those fail, you can expect problems (extremism in the former, and Trump in the latter case). But that doesn't mean the freedom itself is harmful or even unattainable, it just requires constant maintenance.
I think the current western liberalism, where it is perfectly OK to spread outright lies and counter-social messages on mass media in the name of "free speech", is doomed.
I think the current Chinese propaganda is equally doomed.
The Greatest Firewall blocks those who are less educated and does not know how to use technologies for the good, block those who can be manipulated easily by other politicians.
A lot of techies in China are able to get through this, in fact, there are special routers for setting up the network linked with Google/Youtube/Facebook or you name it, it's privately giving consent by the government, they sometime installed in large firms to ensure that smarter people can use information for the good. Now, again think about the gun scenario comparing to the US.
From national point of view, blocking or censorship is not only about freedom. They are protecting citizen's privacy and information for the nation. If you are the president, of course you do not want majority of the citizen's information held by a US company that is very good at machine learning; you also want to think about how to protect or help to shape the technology culture slowly without being disrupted by foreign countries.
Mostly of the time that people talking about things went wrong, but once you are in that person's shoes with the limitations/stresses he/she's facing, you probably start to see the reasons.
And of course the wsj or any US media is going to troll it as an outsider. It's also under US's national interests.
At least that the news in China never troll about other countries. I rarely seen any, most of the time they are thinking about what's good in other countries (creativity, tech, startup).
Now, try run a startup with about 100 people and maintain a good culture there - scale it 100 Billion times and think about maintaining it - it's not an easy job. It's nice to observe it, I won't complaint about it.
I had this totally naïve idea that EU could introduce higher tariffs and trade restrictions using a score based on political freedom, social security, etc, and the goal would be to tax but not remove too much of the cost incentive for trading.
Part (or most, or even all) of the money should then be used to fund education and healthcare back in the country the money came from, while avoiding too much political campaigning.
Maybe it's totally unrealistic, but I can't really see any other way of protecting the rights that we have fought for.
Interestingly, this would be virtually impossible in Russia as they more or less have legislated against "foreign agents" to minimise the opportunity for the west to meddle with their affairs.
It could work in China, and most likely in India and countries with large groups of poor people.
It would also be virtually unacceptable for USA, unless the social component was removed. As it is now, EU would have to increase the tariffs to compensate for the poor social security in US...
Well said. It's ridiculous we enforce labor and environmental laws in the US, then buy products from countries using slaves, sweatshops, and polluting without any regard. We sell out our ideals to save a few bucks.
Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a lot more complicated than you might think at first glance.
https://ourworldindata.org/world-poverty/#declining-global-p... - look at the second graph here, trade with China and other developing countries has simultaneously brought more people out of poverty than ever before.
The problem is that when autocratic state have new wealth (via taxing the people you are talking about) they almost always invade their neighbors or at least try to annex some land or settle an old dispute via force. Saddam with Kuwait, Russia with Ukraine, and China with the Spratly islands are obvious examples. It doesn't matter that some Chinese bureaucrat can afford an iPhone if it means we get world instability, war, and unneeded aggression in exchange. The West is probably looking at another shooting war with either of these countries sooner or later due to their unilateral aggression against our allies. Is a precious, precious iPhone worth that to you?
It seems like we lifted them out of poverty too quickly. They didn't develop democratic institutions, legitimate multiparty politics, a fair judiciary, human rights, international cooperation, etc. This is like handing a 15 year old a brand new Ferrari and acting surprised when he manages to crash it and kill someone.
The idea of committing to a trade policy which would have left them living in extreme poverty sounds horrendously evil. Likewise, pulling trade now could do great harm.
If the worst interpretation of your fears comes to pass, and we get WWIII, then yes. Maybe you're right. However, can you back up your claim with enough certainty to justify harming so many people so greatly?
And the alternative where we try to economically suppress them works so much better? It's not like the cold war didn't lead to it's own share of nail-biting episodes where we worried there would be full nuclear war.
> It seems like we lifted them out of poverty too quickly.
It's not that we lifted them out of poverty, it's that we took advantage of the favorable market forces present to our mutual benefit. If we didn't someone else would have, unless we tried to get widespread support for an embargo.
> This is like handing a 15 year old a brand new Ferrari and acting surprised when he manages to crash it and kill someone.
Or, you know, it could just be a nation of smart people and statesmen doing what they think is best for their country, based on their beliefs (which could include slow reform).
In any case, I'm sure your likening of China to an irresponsible child is useful, warranted, and even if widely believed, wouldn't in any way help to cause those shooting wars you are talking about. /s
Such sentiments are not strictly limited to China. If a government acts like an irresponsible child, talks like an irresponsible child, and trades like an irresponsible child, it is probably finally ready to get drunk and have a drag race with the big boys down in the flood control culvert behind the high sch-err... U.N. building.
Many nations have done things that shock the conscience beyond the normal human capacity for moral outrage. Some of those things were based on sincere beliefs, and a desire to serve a greater good, as defined by those serving it.
I'm not even exactly certain what is required for a government to not act like a sociopathic, immature, hormone-crazed teenaged boy.
Yes, an offhand comment on HN is going to start a war.
There's a historic basis to my comment that autocratic systems with sudden influxes of cash become violent/agressive/annexing. The reality here is that's exactly what happened in Ukraine and in the Spartly's. I don't think you can just smart-ass dismiss that and whatever future conflicts we're in for. There's certainly a relationship here. Empowering autocrats has never worked well.
As far as the Cold War goes, isolation led to the downfall of the USSR and communism, in general, which was a horrific system. Those tactics certainly worked and freed millions out of tyranny. No nuclear war, no WWIII, etc. At worst a handful of proxy conflicts that had a death toll that matched perhaps one or two good sized WWII battles. Meanwhile, communism led to the deaths of almost 100m people via internal violence and mismanagement.
Sadly, HN has a "anyone but the US" bias to it and comments like your reflect a fairly biased and uncritical "China can do no wrong" attitude.
> Yes, an offhand comment on HN is going to start a war.
Of course not, but that's obviously not what I was saying.
> I don't think you can just smart-ass dismiss that and whatever future conflicts we're in for.
Where did I do that?
> As far as the Cold War goes, isolation led to the downfall of the USSR and communism
Do you think China has learned nothing from that? Do you see China as isolationist? I think equating China to the USSR and using the same tactics would be a grave mistake.
> HN has a "China can do no wrong" bias and your comment is further proof of that.
If you truly read my comment as evidence of of a pro-China stance, then I suggest you step back and take a critical look at your interpretation. I suspect it was colored by some assumed preconception of my stance, which my comment did very little to illustrate, so I'm at a loss to explain how you would know what it is.
All I did is question what I believed were overly simplistic explanations of global power dynamics and call out your equating of an entire nation to children.
What I find most upsetting though is that much of this comes at the expense of the american middle class while the american upper class benefits. So less unrest in one country leads to more in another.
Personally, I wish values drove foreign policy more than business. And trade doesn’t equal peace. Connections lead to conflict. The USSR and US never fought despite the tensions of the cold war, while Europe, with all it’s interconnections and trade has blown apart in a world war twice in the last century.
That's a fair point. Hopefully the internet and easier travel helps mitigate future conflict.
Some politicians have suggested externality based import duties and I have to agree. We don't need import duties on goods from Germany or other countries with strong regulations, but companies in the USA cannot compete with third world countries with no labor or environmental regulations.
A lot of people view trade, tourism and internet communications as a means of fostering diplomacy and preventing war.
I wouldn't say we have traded our values. Companies with bad work environments overseas aren't immune to negative perceptions from home.
Not to glorify our own revolution, because there isn't much to glorify about it, but the spark triggering a revolution is never conscious and it's by definition a violent process, so of course people do not want revolutions. It's not like they were speaking about it on forums, it's not like they woke up one day and decided to have it. And yes, you'll always have people satisfied with their lives, or ignorant. Doesn't matter though and you know as well as I do that Radio Free Europe was the most popular radio station, as a form of civil unrest, in spite of people actually fearing the secret service for listening to it. What happened in Bucharest wasn't an isolated event. It started earlier with Brașov in 1986. It was bound to happen, trying to hide the events from Timișoara being just what broke the camel's back.
> some older people that I have met even say they liked it better back then
Old people always say that. It's an inherent bias in how our memory works. We tend to forget the bad and our attention deficit only grows as we get older.
Did you know that in the past years we've had the lowest levels of sickness and that global poverty is at an all times low? We are probably living the best years in history and when I'll be old I'll be able to say that as well and regret year 2016 and say to youngsters that "in my days not that many people died of hunger".
Maybe it's nowadays politically correct in the West to bash China. Though I do think you're being overly zealous here by promoting boycotting China economically. China has been making huge progresses for the past three decades both financially and socially. Hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants got out of poverty and started enjoy more freedom in education, living, migration and social upwardness. On that fact alone, China should be praised instead of being scolded on.
that's not true, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War , CCP didn't do anything really. later in civil war, CCP used some dirty tricks to win and took control of China.
>China has been making huge progresses for the past three decades both financially and socially. Hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants got out of poverty and started enjoy more freedom in education, living, migration and social upwardness. On that fact alone, China should be praised instead of being scolded on.
well, the real fact are that all economic progress are made by Chinese ordinary people selves rather than by CCP. CCP are a bunch of dirty gangsters.
one example:
due to poor supervision to food, we have to buy imported milk powder because milk powder in China would make babies sick. and we have to pay high tax for imported milk powder.
http://www.voanews.com/content/china-expands-mass-re-educati...
http://www.tibetjustice.org/reports/children/detention/b.htm...
I won't pretend the US is peaches and roses, but our human rights abuses (CIA black sites, Guantanamo, etc) don't even hold a candle to many of the atrocities that happen in China. There simply isn't much of a comparison.
In the west you'll find it common to think that Chinese Communism caused the famines and decades of failure and it was their integration of Western Capitalism and reduction of communism that led to their massive increase in industry and wealth.
Which is the same narrative you'll find for the falling of the USSR and Putin's magical rebuilding of Russia.
So many Westerners instead of praising Chinese communists for the success they have, they scold them for waiting so long and killing so many millions before _finally_ listening to what the westerners were saying a hundred years prior: private markets and private control of capital is the only way to build a modern industrious economy and lift subsistence farmers out of abject poverty at efficient scale.
I'm not here to bash China, I just want to express the common views and opinions that I hear on the subject.
Considering that the most advanced economy in the world did not even exist at the onset of the colonization era (and did not catapult to its status until the past century), I think you're over-reaching!
>Though statistically that is not very convincing: the ingredients of capitalism, i.e., market economy and democracy would lead to prosperity
Really?
Can you name a single modern large scale society at all that experiences prosperity without market economy? I did not say 'democracy' -- this is an economic discussion of how capitalism, and not communism, creates prosperity. I struggle to find a non-market-economy communist system that creates mass prosperity.
We Americans sometimes look back to Boris Yeltsin's infamous trip to America in the late 1980's: http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...
It wasn't correlation to Mr Yeltsin, whose faith in communism was destroyed by walking through an American grocery store: it was causation. “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the American" and I'm willing to bet there are those in China who agreed prior to the liberalization of the economy and the introduction of market capitalism.
You're right on this one. I shouldn't have put words into your mouth by mentioning it.
> Can you name a single modern large scale society at all that experiences prosperity without market economy?
I think you does have a point. Though I would agree with a bit conservation. If we are talking about market economy itself, I consider it a necessary but not sufficient condition for economical prosperity.
I understand a will to change a threatening country, or to get rid of a really evil tyran like Pol Pot. But a country having a different level of censorship of the media is not, to me, a casus belli.
We can be proud of many parts of Western values and culture and even whish more people adopted them, but then it should be like with a friend with some weaknesses, you'll be more friendly and show by example how to handle things differently, instead of taking distances or lecturing constantly.
So either you use brute force, against a major threat against your people or a tyran, or you try to promote the soft way your best parts, by showing their good effect on your own society. In this case, with all the very worrying problems we have, I would understand other countries like China to be sceptical.
And by the way, China has already embrassed many of the good (hear: useful) parts of Western culture, like science and law. But it takes a lot of time to implement and get the positive results, around 50 years.
The bit about China "embrassing" (I assume you mean embracing) the "useful" parts of Western culture is neither relevant to this discussion, nor particularly constructive; it comes off sounding defensive more than anything else.
I've been living in China for over ten years, and I hope this admirable continent-sized country will never become like the USA or Europe. My wish for these people is that they continue to find their unique way to be happy.
Whether China needs to be improved or not, and who needs to do that, is actually irrelevant to this discussion. I just want to encourage people to work together instead of starting Cold Wars.
If you really care about people, let them move into your comfortable safe country and share it with you. I mean all of them, not just the few highly educated and wealthy.
Second, boycotting isn't as effective as demands. When consumer bases set labor, environmental and other standards on imports, historically speaking, compliance follows.
Lastly, I'd welcome lots of immigrants. No problem. I want more of them.
It's an interesting discussion about taxonomy, membership, identification, and language.
Broadly speaking if we are to define "human rights" as a "floor" of respectability that should be respected - different political leanings (e.g., neoliberalism, collectivist anarchism, libertarianism etc) paint their picture differently while at the first blush level, are all advocating for the same principles.
When rights becomes a question of membership and dynamics, the linear two-dimensional political narrative of left-right break down into a multi-dimensional set-membership identity.
I'd love to go into more details with you about it if you'd like to have an ongoing intellectual discussion.
You can hit me up on google chat at my username @ gmail or just email me if you want.
This hardly just applies to China though. I listened to a great talk by Tony Judt yesterday, this bit seems particularly relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNE83HXfGXo&t=28m28s
What you experienced were people who know they were oppressed by other people who know they are oppressing. Which is bad, but it's still a visible prison you can break out of, or you can at least hate it while you're stuck in it (don't think there are no unbreakable prisons). The free fall that follows the death of critical thought is much more sinister IMHO. It feels like there is nothing happening, because there is no friction worth mentioning, but it's still free fall.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for standing up for principles and not taking crap from any nation over it. I just am not of aware of a major nation that could do it credibly, they would have to clean their own house first.
It's... more complicated than that.
China has a rich cultural history of collectivism that extends back several millennia. Eastern values are not the same as western values -- something Americans especially struggle to grasp. For better or for worse, eastern cultures (and China especially) emphasize the collective (company/family/country) over the individual. So I wouldn't bank on that social dissent being as strong as it was in the former Soviet bloc.
The wild card here is what happens when an entire generation has to suffer because of the mistakes of their parents. That's the situation that is quickly looming in China -- they've had many years of strong growth on the back of a rapidly urbanizing population, but they have an aging population and have been below zero population growth for decades.
They may very well come to see their former leaders as corrupt and self-serving -- but any revolution will likely be slow and happen through established channels. That's the Chinese way; it's impossible to change direction quickly in a nation of 1.3 billion people. The harmony of the collective is valued over the needs of any individual, so while change may need to happen, it will happen in an orderly and controlled manner. Chinese leaders would privately admit that their country is not perfect, but that change in China happens more slowly than in the west. But ultimately I think they also believe that a society with more freedom and creativity is the only way to effectively compete with the western powers.
> Money trumps everything, great thing to teach our kinds, kudos folks.
Name a time in history when this has not been the case. The US won the cold war not because our democratic ideals were better or more just, but because capitalist competition is the only self-equilizing solution to the tragedy of the commons. Which is basically the same as saying "money trumps ideals".
In fact, human rights issues in the US only get solved when they become a threat to our economic interests. See desegregation, women's suffrage, the LGBT movement, etc. They only get addressed when American economic interests realized that being more inclusive leads to economic growth by creating more members of the consumer class. Unjust discrimination creates market space from which a potential competitor could gain a foothold, so it's a strategic advantage to not divide your customer base on any dimension other than market segments that align with your product portfolio.
Just leaving this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...
From the slave trade and colonialism, to the holocaust and 100s of periphery proxy wars, what would those be? The almighty dollar?
I don't care much about what the Chinese do within their borders. The far more aggravating thing is that we tolerate China, choose to do business with Chinese companies and buy Chinese products.
Now that's fucked up, because we are trading our values, for which people freaking died to win, for short term convenience, also sending the message that it's OK as a country to violate basic human rights, as long as you're powerful enough. Money trumps everything, great thing to teach our kinds, kudos folks.