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'they don't share all of our values. Nor should they be made to'

..so it's ok to enforce false imprisonment, violence and crimes against human and civil rights?

and do you support that in the process of the 2008 Olympics, it was ok for them to remove people from their homes, forcefully, and leave them homeless?

or beat to death residents who spoke to the media about the 'asian mind democracy' ?

sigh.

I'm content to allow the Chinese to figure this out for themselves. Very often the West ends up causing more harm than good with its "altruism." Recent history bears this out.

I agree 100%.
Democracy is just not for the third world or developing Nations where the decision of the voters is influenced by petty welfare just before the elections, since more than 70- 80% of the population is based in rural areas and agriculture is their main source of income. History here also bears witness that the rich corrupt families have assumed power through unfair elections and built huge assets abroad by stealing from the national treasury.
What is need in such nations is a strict and honest dictator.

I totally agree with you on this one.

Isn't that what USA is doing in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay?

The only complaint I have with your comment is that yes they have a communist government, but communism is not what is causing them to florish. Their adoption of a free market economy is what is allowing them to have a huge economic boom. If you look into the recent past, their economy was horrible under communist control.

Also, I don't think the Chinese population wants to have their news censored. I think the government decides what its people "want". Hence, communism.

Finally, if your idea is to let the people decide what they want in their government. Hmmm, what does that sound like? The people have the power. Hmmm..

Actually, the Chinese *didn't* adapt Communism. What the Chinese have today doesn't have the tiniest similarity with actual Communism - if you take a giraffe and put a sticker on it that reads "Tiger", it's still a giraffe.

What the Chinese *do* have is an absolutist rule, just as they had pretty much all the time before in the form of a Emperor which had the Mandate of the Heaven. After the last Emperor was forced to abdictate in 1912, there was just a short intermediate period, until Mao Zedong (毛泽东) got into power in 1949. He was just as much an absolutist ruler as the Emperors before, the only difference being that he refered to himself as President, rather than having the Mandate of the Heaven.

The growing economic success of China is certainly not due to "Communism" (which they don't have in the first place), but due to the economic reforms started by Deng Xiaoping (邓先圣) in 1978. If you want to read more about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform

And here I was calling that fascism all these years, thanks for correcting me.

You really are nieve, aren't you?

I think you meant naive and actually you're the one thats naive. No wonder Obama rushed to issue closure of Guantanamo within a year and no wonder Guantanamo and Iraq withdrawal were two major subjects on his campaign.

That's just what China wants you to believe, that we have just as bad human rights abuses as they do--that takes pressure off of them.

We were going to withdraw from Iraq around the same time whether it was Obama or McCain who was elected. Despite people who believed that McCain would keep us in Iraq for 100 years, it was never going to take 100 years to bring the situation to a close. Bush himself said the goal was to withdraw whenever the Iraqi government felt that it was able to operate on its own, and wanted the US to withdraw. Obama's policy will function on the same conditions.

Obama is having a lot of trouble with the decision to close Guantanamo, he's had to extend the time that its remaining open, against the objections of some anti-war progressives. Once it's closed, all he'll do is open up a military tribunal somewhere else, call it a 'national security tribunal' and act like its different from Guantanamo.

The problem that Obama is trying to address is US reputation and world image. He believes we can't give countries who hate us examples like Guantanamo or Iraq that they can use against us, and claim we're as bad as they are...

but I worry about people who actually believe what countries like Iran and China claim about us. Obama's campaign was more about a change in rhetoric than policy.

Last edited by brianshapiro on 23 Jan 2009 - 18:20

Unfortunately, the only type of government Communist revolutionaries have ever managed to achieve is a dictatorship.

It's justified in terms of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', and they try to act on Marxist principles, building their policies around class warfare---that's what happened in China under the Cultural Revolution, where the aim was to remove bourgeois elements from Chinese society so that the Communist revolution could move closer to completion.

The people who created the current government in China actually believed in Communism--it wasn't a charade to create a dictatorship---they just weren't able to be successful at anything other than creating a dictatorship. The same thing happened in Russia, Cuba, and everywhere else Communist revolutionaries have been successful.

China actually has always had more of a democratic system than the Soviet Union ever did, by the way, they allow multiple parties and you're able to become a participant in government through starting at the local level.

They claim that the economic reforms are simply a new development in Communism, and refer to it as 'market socialism'... to me, it looks like China is becoming more like a fascist state.

You mean, revolutionaries which called themselves "Communist" just to sound good and gain support by the general populace, while the only thing they were interested in is get into power.


No, not at all - they never followed Marxist or any other communist principles, they just claimed to in order to sound good and win the support of the general populace, just as I said.
The "Cultural Revolution" had nothing to do with Communism either, it was done because Mao felt that Religion was too powerful, and he wanted all power for himself alone and not share it with anyone. That's why he had countless monks hunted down and destroyed their temples etc. It was just to cosolidate his power.


No, they never believed in Communism. What they believed in was *Stalinism*: an inherently oppressive system of extensive government spying, extrajudicial punishment, and political "purging", or elimination of political opponents either by direct killing or through exile, and it involves a state using extensive use of propaganda to establish a personality cult around an absolute dictator to maintain control over the nation's people and to maintain political control for the "Communist" Party.


*falls off the chair and rolls on the floor laughing madly*
That must be strong stuff you're smoking there. The "Communist" (ahem) Party of China never allowed any other parties and doesn't have the tiniest intention of ever changing this. Your only chance at participation is becoming a member of this single party, and if you've been parroting long enough what comes out of Beijing, then you *might* get a bit of participation.


Just what I've been saying - by giving pretty names to what they do, they hope to get the acceptance of the general populace, even if what they do has nothing to do with the name.

Bolsheviks did believe in Communism, Communism under the Bolsheviks morphed into Leninism and Stalinism was the sucessor to Leninism. Mao did believe in Communist ideals--that's why he started the Cultural Revolution. Thats why Lenin spoke out about capitalist imperialism and the need for an international workers revolution fomented by agitprop instead of being isolationist.

And many people on the Left in the US kept on defending the Soviets also, until Soviet dissidents later revealed the horror of Stalin's gulags.

Multiple parties do exist in China,have you ever studied Chinese government? The Communist party is still dominant and has most of the control, and can effectively ban parties they don't like. But it gives them a charade that they're being democratic and that the Communist party rules only because the people want them to.

As for ideal communism, it can't exist or function, imo, without supression by military force, and thats why any attempt at revolution always ends up with dictatorship. What,are you waiting for a Communist revolution that suceeds?

According to Marx, that would also mean things like abolishing the money supply and taking children from their parents to be raised by the state and abolishing private property, so that will never happen. Marx's vision was that all the 'bourgeois' elements of society would be removed. That has nothing to do with practical reality.

Soviet Russia at first attempted to abolish private property, but then realized it was impossible to do, and had to reintroduce it. If you study the history of the Soviet Union, you realize they did in fact try to work towards a Communist state, but it failed, the wrong people came to power, and all they ended up with was dictatorship. Soviet propaganda blamed the failure of early attempts Communism on the idea that the revolution had to be international to suceed.

Last edited by brianshapiro on 24 Jan 2009 - 00:55

or the governments insecurity with itself

Indeed, I wonder if they even realize how bad it looks when they censor "to those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent". They are basically admitting that those words describe them. If they truly felt that they were in the right and were confident in their plan they wouldn't have any need to do this.

Actually it sort of works, at least so far. The effect is that most people won't even realize that those words existed in the first place. However the internet is making the censorship less and less effective, as rumors spread out so fast it is impossible to control them.

There'd be nothing left to buy.

sad but true

Hey I don't mind I'd rather have nothing to buy than chinese crap.

That would be an excellent first step in reviving the economy.

trash the keyboard you used to type the above! it's chinese crap

no,no, you've got it wrong. It's the other way around, Reuters puppets everything Obama says. Easy mistake to make though

Actually, what is wrong is the location of the second quote mark in the article. It should fall after communism, not after Reuters.

It's amazing how many grammar police we have on site where "UNPROFESSIONAL Journalism Looks Better"...

"Unprofessional" doesn't necessarily imply "unintelligible". Even unprofessional English journalists should not be exempt from having a basic understanding of English.

Short answer: yes.

not short if you add more than three letters in "yes"

Short enough.

Its just interesting that while the US is embracing change, China is censoring that same change to prevent its people from learning what is possible in other countries.

But China is huge and has so many people. North Korea is....well....puny.

China is not a complete communist country. As I stated before, they have adopted a free market economy, modeled after democracies. North Korea still have a strict communist control over everything, hence why their economy is almost non-existant.

I bet you they apologized to the public after; "Sorry ladies and gentlemen, it seems that we were interviewing the wrong people here. Here's the real interview with government approved people."