China: Vote as I say

http://www.economist.com/node/18836744

by bchjam • 15 years ago

64 32 15 years ago

tokenadult• 15 years ago

Genuinely independent electoral candidates in Taiwan, who in some cases won executive offices with substantial decision-making power, first ran decades ago. Even when Taiwan was unmistakably a one-party dictatorship (the first time I lived there), there was more contesting of more consequential elections than there yet is in China. China has a LONG way to go to all of its talented, diligent people opportunity to shape the policies they live under.

cubeboy2• 15 years ago

China is interesting. It's not like USA with just a population of 310,000,000, it has 1,330,000,000 people.

If one group successfully causes enough political unrest, and 5% of the population supports and follows this group, that's a total of 66,500 000 people, the current population of the UK. Its astounding when you start looking at numbers like this. USA, UK, Europe and the Western world will just be a distant memory when China and India start becoming major players.

How can a democracy successfully emerge when you have the potential to introduce great divergence and even possibly civil war?

netcan2• 15 years ago

"Great divergence" is not necessarily a problem for democracy. Any specific manifestation of democracy is a tool for governing despite them.

Civil war is not more likely in a democracy than a non democracy. Civil wars (I'm perhaps controversially excluding revolutionary wars such as the current Libyan or Syrian wars because they are usually wars between a regime and the The People) are rarely over political disagreement.

Most civil wars are a result of either: (1) two or more competing elites competing for power (eg James vs William; Augustus vs Anthony). (2) Ethnic/confessional divides that supersede everything else politically. For example, Lebanese Maronites are politically Maronites. They will not vote for a Druze Social-Democrat even if this is their political belief because that identification is much weaker than the Maronite one. Lebanese politics is about dividing political pies between sects.

China is probably in greater danger of 1 today than it would be if democratic and it probably wouldn't be under greater danger of 2, Chinese minorities don't want to be Chinese but they are too small even if they do identify politically entirely along ethnic lines.

cglee2• 15 years ago

Re #2 of your point. The divide isn't along ethnic lines; it's along economic/cultural. Huge divide between rural farmers and urban yuppies. The yuppies are like the HN crowd. But historically, China goes as the peasant class goes.

Most of the time, the government is trying to appease the peasants while encouraging the yuppies. It's a tough balance.

shareme• 15 years ago

It could always go the way of the 30 year civil war in Mexico or Egypt..in which case you will see a marked increase in both protests and crack downs

code_duck2• 15 years ago

> USA, UK, Europe and the Western world will just be a distant memory when China and India start becoming major players.

As individual entities, perhaps. As a bloc? NATO member countries total population is about 800 million, if I'm not mistaken. The Western world is hardly going to disappear.

vorg• 15 years ago

Not just a bloc of NATO countries, but also with Russia, which seems to be eagerly invited into organizations such as G8 (= G7 + Russia). With Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan, the total population of such a bloc is 1 billion. I can forsee the US, France, Germany, and Russia soon forming a proto-military alliance, to give them the option to counter-balance China if they need to one day.

And of course the US, unlike China, has immigration as its foundation. They could accept, say, 20 million educated and/or wealthy immigrants from China over the next 20 years, with no shortage of takers ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2660178 ), which would strengthen America and weaken China.

bane2• 15 years ago

Don't forget the rest of the Americas! (And Australia/New Zealand!)

afterburner2• 15 years ago

One potential result is that you end up with... two democracies. Revolutionary divisions in Europe just ended up more permanent than the ones in China.

But I don't think population totals tell the whole story. One thing I like to quote is when a friend of mine visited China and noted that the "small towns", which still had 2-4 million people but were smaller than the big cities, still felt like small towns. They were less culturally interesting, less alive. The point is the cultural dynamic of "cosmopolitan centre" against "sleepy provincial town" exists despite multiplying the populations by 10; it's more about where the "centre of culture" is I imagine. So maybe democracy can survive scaling as well.

wisty2• 15 years ago

Well, I think difference between China and Europe is geography, and now a common language. Mandarin is spoken basically everywhere, except Hong Kong. Even the border provinces like Tibet (Xizhan) and Xinjiang (formerly a Turkic country) have a lot of Han migrants (or colonists, as some might say). It's easier to hold a country together when you share a common language. There are local dialects and languages, but school kids learn Mandarin, and the writing is all the same (though obviously the grammar, phrasing, and idioms will be different).

As for geography, China is very flat. It was flat 5000 years ago, and peasants (the occasional ruler with a civil engineering fetish) have been making it flatter for millennia. There's nowhere for an army to hide. Dissenters can hide in the concrete jungle, but you can't make any real strongholds. Also anyone who holds the Yellow River and Yangtze River will have strategic control of most of China, and the two rivers have been linked since (IIRC) the Qin dynasty.

As for the "small towns" being a little, well, dead, that's partly a result of rural poverty (and taxes redistributing wealth to the capitals); but also (as you said) of the bigger cities being of interest to young ambitious people.

rospaya2• 15 years ago

How do you explain India then?

known3• 15 years ago

Unlike China, India is a heterogeneous society. And Indian regime successfully injects hope into the society e.g https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/NREGA

known3• 15 years ago

Voting in elections != Democracy

China: Vote as I say

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