"China, in the end, is a country
with more than a century of experience in revolution and social upheaval."
Try 25 centuries. The article does however, bring up an extremely valid point. In today's fast paced world, a country like China, with a severe dependence on centralist bureaucratic decision making mechanisms will find it hard to survive. The references to Japan and the US are valid in a sense, Japan in the context of its homogeneous ethnic and social make-up, and the US within the context of a federal structure backed up by numerous tried and tested "fail-safe" mechanisms.
Thus in the face of a severe economic and social crisis (and I believe there is one coming) the de-stabilising trigger can come from a "left field" movement such as Falun Gong. The name itself conjures up images related to the "Mandate of Heaven". Falun means "wheel of [heavenly ordained?] law".
On the subject of dialects, the Mandarin speaking Han Chinese number about 350M out of 900M, the rest speak a variety of dialects which are in everyday conversation totally incomprehensible to one another. Even the sentence structure is different between some dialects!
My $.02 worth, as usual.
Steve Yeo |
