Mr Lorrimar, I recently asked my wife if she thought China would have a revolution in the near future. She said no, because the Central Government’s policies are skewing more and more in favour of the peasantry. If, by the above quote, you mean that China should continue moving in the direction the Hu-Wen administration has set, then I agree whole-heartedly.

May I dip a virtually irrelevant oar into the pool of discussion ?

In attempting to encapsulate the underlying issues in your discussions in the terms you have been using thus far, aren’t we simply picking over the bones in an elephant’s graveyard ?
After all, this is the 21st century and the models of Communist Theory etc. conceived by Marx and Engels et al were fundamentally projections of “cutting edge” theories and technologies belonging to the 19th century ( i.e, largely Darwinistic and Mechanistic ).
Surely, the greatest challenge today for young, commited, socialist-minded thinkers is to rejuvenate the legacy of ideals which defined not only Marx and Engels but Kautsky, Luxembourg, Guevara and all past generations of social-justice practitioners through brand new conceptions of what I call “Neo-Materialism”.
It would necessitate the great challenges of including so much of what we live with today; Einstein’s legacy, Cyber-space and I.T, String Theory and Superstring Theory, the “Bill Gates Phenomenon”, resource depletion, Enviromentalism……. , and informed projections of what your children will be living with tomorrow.
Certainly, it seems to me that so many of those who profess to adhere to Marxist ideology nowadays deserve the response given to the smug, rich old lady who had been the recipient of innumerable face-lifts and body-tucks: Basking in the attention of her admirers at a party one evening, she proudly declared; “Do you know, I’ve had sixty-eight years experience ?. And a young man in the group replied: “Is it that you’ve had sixty-eight years experience or one year’s experience sixty-eight times”.
More optimistically, there are the words of the famous General Desaix who, upon arriving late with his division upon the battle-field of Marengo, was asked his opinion of the situation by Napoleon: “This battle is lost, sire” he replied, “but there is still time for us to win another”.
Politically, attempting to provide a “rice-bowl” and hope to a population of 1.3 billion people is analogous to attempting to control a Sunday newspaper whilst outdoors in a hurricane ( hence Tian’anmen Square ). Such an exercise is unprecedented in political history and I can’t do otherwise than salute the CPI on its gargantuan efforts to husband its population from the raw material it inherited coming out of the Opium Wars and the Qing Dynasty to the positions it occupies today.
Greece, the cradle of Democracy, was only able to implement its selective virtues within a population of not much more than a million people ( not counting its slaves ).
Despite the delusional fantasies of so many other countries around the world, true Democracy has never existed since.
In any case, Communism, Marxism, Socialism …. call it what you will, is less an economic than a moral/ethical imperative to those who judge the modern-day division of resources as nothing less than obscene.
So to the Chinese I say, what you are doing right now may not be perfect and draws its critics, but for everyone’s sake, please keep doing it.

To reiterate what Chris said, there’s no need to imply that we say what we say because we somehow lack experience in China. Please argue our points on their merits rather than resort to silly claims of superiority.

I’ve read your comments over again and since neither of us seems willing to budge, I’d say we’ll have to agree to disagree on this one.

But please don’t try to insult myself or any of my other readers by implying that we aren’t as experienced and knowledgable as you simply because we disagree on this subject.

Exactly how did I compare China to the US? I have said it many times there are no comparisons since China is a third-world developing country and the US is a developed, first-world superpower.

I don’t know where you come from (maybe the average joes in your country are extremely well-informed, which I find hard to believe, whatever this country is) but in the US it is extremely common that average folks know very little or nothing about science, history and geography. I remember reading something saying the majority of American high school students didn’t know where the state of Louisiana is on the map. Watch “Jaywalk” on “The Tonight Show” hosted by Jay Leno.

I don’t have any attitude, but I have seen enough expats telling people how much they know about China and making a fool out of themselves after staying a short period of time here.

But forgive me for expecting university students to have more general knowledge of their home country and the world around them than average regardless of which country they are from.

And access to education and access to quality education are not so different. Access to any education is better than access to none. Once you’ve established an education system accessible by all your citizens, the next step is to improve the quality of that education.

“Of course that’s my own opinion as a long-time China resident (I think I know China a little bit more than the average expats or “China experts”).”
“It is easy for foreigners to offer their opinions and getting preachy without actually acknowledging what the government and people are up against in China.”

You can drop that attitude. None of us arrived here yesterday.

Having access to education is completely different from having a robust, high quality education program. These are two different things. Thanks to the Chinese government, more Chinese kids now go to school than ever before. I have never said Chinese education is excellent. I think it is average. I am sure in the US or wherever you are from, there are millions of people who know very little about science, history and geography.

I agree that China has a long way to go, it is a developing country for God’s sake. It is no mighty United States! But China also has come a long way. It is easy for foreigners to offer their opinions and getting preachy without actually acknowledging what the government and people are up against in China. I have a friend from British who is a long-time China hand (but hardly a fan of the Chinese government) who once told me: Being in Chinese government’s shoes is extremely hard.

Of course that’s my own opinion as a long-time China resident (I think I know China a little bit more than the average expats or “China experts”). I have said it many times that one’s opinion on whether a government is doing a good or lousy job is completely subjective (of course you are entitled to your opinion that the Chinese government is lousy) and there should be no comparisons, especially comparisons with foreign government. If you are asked whether the Bush administration is doing a good job, do you ever consider how the Chinese, French, Japanese government etc. are doing respectively? I don’t think so.

Why would anybody want to compare one government to another? I have explained that different countries have different situations which warrant different approaches etc. How can you compare China, or for that matter any country to other countries? I’d argue it is a lot easier to govern a country like Switzerland than China and the US. How can you compare say China to the US, for example? We are talking about a third-world developing country vs. the world’s lone superpower here. By your logic, government in developing countries will ALWAYS be considered lousy as long as they remain developing countries. The Chinese government will no longer be lousy only when, and if China becomes a first-world developed country like the US or its G7 allies. Yeah right!

I don’t quite understand your last sentence: Am I correct to believe that you are saying the Chinese government is lousy because it professes communism? Wow!

I don’t think China is a “failed state” but this shows you certain criteria that can be used to compare governments.

I still don’t follow. Are your grades based on how China compares to other countries, or are they based on how China compares to its own past, or what, exactly?

If the former, I’d say off hand your grades are way too high. If the latter, well, how China’s current government compares to past Chinese governments is not relevant to the point I was making in my post. China’s government can be improved and still lousy, as it really could not have gotten much worse than it was during the Cultural Revolution.

I’m not sure what else I can say on this topic to convince you, and besides: the fact that China’s government is lousy was rather tangential to my original point about Communism, anyway.