Capitalism and freedom are contagious. I know, how’d a thunk it?
For Communist Party officials, their worst nightmare is becoming reality. The new middle class often own their homes, and when property values are threatened by some government policy, these middle class Chinese organize and show their displeasure. There have been several recent mass demonstrations by middle class Chinese, usually protesting efforts to put factories, or other property value destroying facilities, in the middle of newly built middle class communities. Local government officials, who control the local police, find that they cannot just use force to disperse the middle class demonstrators, as they do farmers, or poor, working class protestors. The middle class crowd is better organized, and have useful connections themselves. The middle class have cell phones and Internet access. The middle class also has access to the upper reaches of the Communist Party, which relies on middle class administrators and technocrats, to make things happen. If the middle class turns on the Communist Party, the communists will lose. The revenge of the bourgeoisies, so to speak. So far, the Communist Party has a deal with the growing Chinese middle class. The latter can get rich, as long as the communists remain in power. But when that power, now corrupted by all that money, interferes with property values, who prevails? Historically, the protectors of property values prevail.
I can forsee a time in the near future when the left actively and openly protests the US puchase of products, not because of the labor and human rights issues that China has, but because we are giving the burgeoning citizens (currently though, still subjects)Â there the tools to put the boot to communism.
Maybe after the Olympics the government there will begin cracking down on these folks organizing, but I’m not so sure.
But if this trend continues, history may show that giving Hong Kong back to the ChiComs was the best thing the west could have done?
Too bad that the Chinese middle class only has connections, cellphones and internet access. If they had guns then the Chinese government would either fall or have to be responsive to their rightful demands.
With connections, doors to armories can be opened for the middle class. China’s Communist bureaucracy is full of corruption which can be exploited with money. A few bills to the right man, and another AK gets “lost” into the hands of someone else.
And there has been a few shootings in China -including a school shooting, IIRC- that happened with home-made guns. Even with China’s control on internet access, there are ways for information to be found and spread. Falun Gong hijacked a major Chinese TV station for 17 minutes; just imagine if someone had done the same but played a video on home gunsmithing instead of Falun Gong.
My dad, who is a HUGE fan of our former POTUS, Slick Willy, was extolling the virtues of granting the Chinese the most favored nation trade status, as a way of fighting communism.
I kinda laughed at him at the time. This was over ten years ago, now. The old man is a learned fellow, and he knows his history and holds an MBA, so I knew he had grounds for his thoughts, but I just couldn’t see, at the time, how it was going to play out to our advantage. He told me that the best way to make the Chinese (the people), and China (the political power of the Poliburo) less of a threat was to make them our biggest partner in business. The theory, of course, was that the Chinese would prosper by doing business, and a lot of it, gain personal wealth, and therefore move to protect that which they’d worked to save. Over the last decade, I slowly began to see what he was getting at, and this anecdote helps prove that he was right.
China is far from perfect, and I still hate to buy products that originate from China, as I’ll always view the political power structure as being rather corrupt and self-serving, and buying their products serves the needs and whims of that power structure as surely as it does their new middle class. It’s almost impossible to avoid purchasing things these days, anything you want or need, really, that isn’t produced in China, and I really do try to buy American made, when I can, but that simply isn’t possible with some things these days and definitely anything in mass-produced consumer electronics, which is, of course, a huge market here.
I’m keeping my eye on the whole thing, like a hawk, but it seems that the old man was right.
The interesting part about this is that most of the people that are becoming the business owners and “new” middle class are actually the children of the current rulers. The statistic I read/saw is that of ~3000 privately owned companies in China, somewhere north of 2900 are owned by these folks.
The problem is that there are no controls over product safety or reliabilty yet, which makes for things like poisons getting into the foodstuffs being shipped to other countries from there. And you don’t even want me to tell you about the chicken slaughter houses I saw in business over there.