In your speech you said Xi forced through the amendment of China’s constitution to abolish term limits in 2018, giving him the ability to stay in power indefinitely. Why was that such a turning point?
He forced the third plenum of the national congress to swallow it like dog shit. He first completed it and then forced everyone to accept it. This is obviously going backwards politically. Even with these two major issues, no one came forward to oppose it.
When no one can oppose him, that means that his power is unchecked. Under the Chinese system, starting with Mao, no one can restrict or limit the power of the highest leader. That is why you had disasters like the Cultural Revolution.
Because of the power he holds, he can punish whoever he wants so no one dares to give him different opinions and no one dares to report the real situation to him. Since people don’t tell him the truth or hide it from him, he doesn’t necessarily know the truth. So it is inevitable that he will make wrong decisions.
It is a vicious cycle. After a wrong decision is made, the result is not good. But those below are too afraid to tell him and wrong decisions continue to be made until the situation is out of control. In this vicious cycle, there is no way to stop the country from sliding toward disaster.
Third, the disciplinary code for party members [adopted in 2016] contains a measure that says you cannot distort the policies of the party. As long as you express a different opinion, you are in violation of party discipline, and he can use that to deal with you. Before, you could still speak out and you would be subjected to enormous pressure, but they couldn’t prevent you from speaking.
China is bound to go through political transformation, toward democracy, political freedom, rule of law and constitutionalism. This is the inevitable trend of modern human political civilisation. China will enter this stage sooner or later.
Because the CCP has been in power since 1949, they have made many mistakes and even crimes. Between 1959 to 1961, nearly 40 million people starved to death. The anti-rightist movement of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution hurt almost all Chinese elites and intellectuals. Also the Tiananmen protests in 1989 when the CCP used its army to shoot the people. No matter what, this is unacceptable to Chinese people. It is the People’s Liberation Army, right? It is the people’s country
#china #ccp #politics #democracy
The most miserable Brazilian is happier than the happiest Iranian.
#money #happiness #income #nigeria #brazil #mexico #usa #russia #britain #germany #france #japan #italy #india #china #iran
The New York City group with the highest percentage of high school graduates isn’t Chinese or Indians; it’s Ukrainians (94.4%). But rarely are we treated to encomiums about the cultural superiority of the Borscht Mom.
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And culture is rarely either an unambiguously good force or an unambiguously bad one. Thus, Confucian values of education and family fealty certainly are one factor in explaining why Chinese students from low-income backgrounds do better than their peers. But as we’ve seen, that’s not the whole story. Meanwhile, many in China would like to see less conformity in their culture, believing that it inhibits much of the freethinking that powers creativity and innovation in America and that it results in a citizenry that passively tolerates suppression of dissent and censorship of the Internet.
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It’s not conformity that makes this country great; it’s an individual striking out against the expectations of his culture, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard, Miles Davis coming out of heroin addiction to produce ‘Round About Midnight, the 14-year-old Billie Holiday turning the pain of her childhood into the bluest beauty, Sylvia Plath taking on death with pills and poetry, William S. Burroughs writing from the bowels of his addiction in Naked Lunch; it’s Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Cheever and Carver drinking and writing, writing and drinking through their demons. Imagine what American culture would be if American artists had kept a tight check on their impulses.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2163555,00.html
#conformity #freedom #democracy #culture #usa #india #ukraine #hemingway #fitzerald #cheever #carver #writing #education #suppression #censorship #china #freethinking
http://gyrovague.com/2012/04/30/why-e-books-will-soon-be-obsolete-and-no-its-not-just-because-of-drm
#ebook #drm #e-book #epub #kindle #apple
Does this sound ridiculous, a perverse #fantasy of some balkanized #Web of the #dystopian #future? Nope: it’s all true, except that my #laptop is actually an #iPad and my #browser is #iTunes / #iBooks.
On the Web, the very idea that the right to read a website would vary from country to country seems patently absurd. #Cyberspace is flat, after all, just computers talking to computers. You, the reader, do not need to concern yourself with where these electrons on your screen are coming from, and neither do I, their publisher, need to care where they are going. And when somebody attempts to artificially block those #electrons — say, #China and its #Great-Firewall — it’s the kind of the thing that the #US #Congress and the #World Trade Organization get worked up about
