here is my reply, Amy,
I read that BBC had an interview with an Indian PM (not sure which one and do not have a link now), and asked him why the economic development in India is much slower than that in China, the PM said there were two major reasons:
1. Thanks to Mao Zedong, China has built a complete set of industrialized system;
2. Thanks to the free education, including higher education, during Mao Zedong era and that supplied a great number of talents for their economic construction.
In other word, the reason for the fast development in the last 25 years in China has everything to do with the foundation built by Mao during 1950-1978. Without it, there would be no those so-called miracles.
This is why the West is surprised at the scale and the speed of the economic development in China. They wrote off that entire 28 years as "chaos" etc... The matter of the fact is, the GDP growth during 1950-1978 was on average 6%, which by any standard was high.
>>Below a certain $ per capita, Democracy is awfully inefficient.<<
I beg to differ. Above your magic number of per capita, democracy is still not necessarily more efficient. Look at what have been happening in the US. Efficiency is the last word people want to use to describe it.
Although I do agree, democratic system does make individuals feel good, feel empowered, even though often times it is just an illusion and nothing more.
>>So-called freedom is nonsense when people are starving and would much prefer the "freedom" to eat<<
I quite agree. That is why the human right in China is the freedom to feed everyone first, freedom of some other aspect has to come second. More than 2000 years of Chinese history has shown that, and most of Chinese understand that.
As for the system in China, Mao Zedong was the only one can ever be described as a “dictator”, not even Deng had that kind of power. Certainly not Jiang, as much as he would like to be. And yes, Mao had earned himself the “right” for being the one and only genius who correctly commanded CCP and won the revolution.
When the West talks about Mao, they tend to forget Mao became a leader through a democratic process, and he commanded for most of his life through the democracy within CCP, and he only became a dictator after late 1950s, and his intention was good, not for himself or his family members’ personal interest. So his profile of being a “dictator” is pretty special. He had 7 close family members and 27 extended family members gave up their lives for the Chinese revolution. And one of his daughters now has kidney disease, but cannot even afford to have regular treatment. Do you know any so-called dictator like him?
BTW, China now is not led by one “dictator” but a group of leading bodies, whose members are career politicians for most of their life. Unlike the US system, where a movie star or a baseball star can all of a sudden become the president or a high ranking gov. official, in China, high-ranking official positions are only for professionals. What did Ronald Reagan know about politics? Could he be a more efficient and a better president and know-how than a career politician? I don’t think so. Who knows, maybe that is why democratic system actually tends to be less efficient. |
