Ed. My Chinese friends, probably defensively, say that China is building a democracy in its own, eventual way. I am skeptical. It seems to me that China’s system is a lot closer to Mussolini style fascism than to any sort of liberal democracy. China, in my opinion, may be the corporate state that Mussolini;’s advisers wanted him to create. He (and Italy) failed because of Hitler.
Will China become a democracy? With its legacy of Confucian order and Dung’s fusion of the party with a corporate state, I rather doubt it. Megacorporations, e.g. GM or TWA, can fail in our system because we they live within a democratic shell where other companies can take over.
In China, it seems to me, the shell IS the megacorporation.
From Firedoglake by Bill Egnor Excerpted.
(China has taken) strong steps to crack down on pro-democracy activists for a couple of weeks. They have been preventing text messages from being sent to an entire list and have blocked all websites with key words like Jasmine Revolution.
This combined with flooding the urban areas where the protests were proposed with security forces and actually placing pro-democracy advocate under house arrest and even disappearing more than one attorney for these groups apparently is not enough for the Communist Government in China. … NPR is reporting this morning that the Chinese government is saying that(foreign reporters) must have pre-approval to talk to any one in Beijing in advance. Think about that for a second; this means that if you wanted to do a “man on the street” interview about anything even say the weather, you would be in violation. …
China is not an Arab autocracy. The sheer number of the people at the top of the Communist Party keeps them from making the mistakes of a Gaddafi or Ali, and while there are orders of magnitude more people in China than any Arab nation, there is also a multiple security forces who are well paid, well trained and well equipped.
As long as that is true, the size of this giant Asian nation will work against the cause of popular uprising. If there can not be millions on the streets of not only the Chinese capital but several of its major cities, there is no chance that the people in the countryside and distant provinces will even know that there are people protesting.