A carrot without a stick is just a free carrot. - Edit 1
Before modification by Joel at 02/03/2010 08:04:35 AM
Maybe I'm wrong. I honestly hope so, because if not, and we continue on the same course we have since about the time I was born, we are well and truly screwed.
I used to think the same thing at your age.
Tack on another twenty years of watching and you'll start to see the progress. It's not FAST progress, but it's there.
Indeed, the very fact that it isn't fast is probably healthier. Fast progress doesn't last. Small steps, slow progress - that becomes culture which becomes the default expectation and sticks.
As you so correctly point out, China has been an autocracy of various sorts since before Christ. The Maoists didn't really change that, just substituted one group of "Mandarins" for another and chose to dress less snazzy.
The internet and overseas education is what will change China. That and the influence of Hong Kong which is disproportionate.
It'll come and if it comes more slowly, hopefully it'll stick. But trying to club the Chinese into change won't work - they're a thousands of years old culture that has never changed quickly. The have to do it themselves.
I don't see the progress. Granted I'm largely going by the Wikipedia article on the subject, but the aftermath of the Tienanmen Square protests seems to have been a great deal MORE repression, with the promptest and most energetic totalitarians catapulted into leadership positions while the few reformers were disgraced, seen as enabling the rabble who shamefully provoked the Peoples Army into regretfully busting heads. China seems a lot less rather than more open now than when I was a kid, and from their alliances with Russia and Mongolia to their seizure of a USN plane in international airspace, a lot more belligerent. That seems as well to be reflected in the general populace, who are perfectly happy to accept American industry, goods and wealth but view even the POTENTIAL for any Western culture as evil American imperialism against the Peoples Republic.
We don't (necessarily) have to start WWIII with them, but we can at least stop subsidizing a government that's openly stated its intent to compete with and defeat us economically, politically and strategically. Again, given that stated intent, in the face of them playing nuclear arms dealer to the world (and I still say North Korea doesn't wipe its nose without Beijings permission, never has, never will) and committing clear acts of war against US military craft and crews, why haven't THEY already started a shooting war? Could it just possibly be because it's more advantageous for them to fight that war later rather than sooner? Hitler was satisfied to gain his demands diplomatically so long as the Allies were willing to grant them, but just as satisfied to go to war when they no longer would; in the interim his ability to wage that war grew dramatically, because his inevitable opponents aided and abetted him.
What's changed in China? They won't kill the goose that laid the golden egg in Hong Kong, but otherwise they only changes I see are the growth of wealth, industry and technology at the expense of arable land when food is already at a premium. The country is no more open, the government no more engaged, the diplomats no more reasonable, the military no less bellicose and the public no less nationalistic. Put it this way: I'd be more inclined to give them the benefit of a doubt if they weren't building new models of nuclear subs and talking about aircraft carriers. As my mother likes to say, "If nothing's changed, nothing's changed. "