china no longer believes in equality for all
and fearsomely so
not many people can remember clearly and state truthfully "when i was 4 years young ..." but given the nature of my experience, the somewhat jarring ups n downs, i can ...
when i was 4 years young, my parents spent some weekends and summer on the island in the middle of the summer palace arts.cultural-china.com , during a time when there essentially were no tourism in china and so shared the lake with few, especially in the early mornings when my dad and i tended to wake up and get about.
i remember the early morning swims, and the picnics in the back lake amongst the foliage.
i would not have termed the life 'equal', now, but back then i did not think much about it - didn't have to. i mean, golly, within a civilization state of several hundred millions, i could have guessed that not everyone had this place for weekends with a few other families ...
later in that year (1964) we spent about half a year in hong kong and stayed with my uncle yuantsungchen.com percy in spiffy locale kowloon tong and uncle was a big shot barrister google.com . everywhere we went together, by his cars or his boat, or just walking his dog in the neighborhood, people bowed and fussed around him.
i liked equality as i knew it.
when back on the mainland, i told my little friends at the kindergarten about hong kong, its refrigerators, cars, boats, weekend homes, pools, restaurants. remember, i was in china mainland of 1964 youtube.com
my parents got a visit from the kindergarten director who asked that i not talk about hong kong, and so, at age 5, i was censored.
that was china of equality.
with above referenced background, and suitably weighty, i can say with modicum of authority that china is no longer faithful to equal, and the people more rather than less subscribe to the new regime, where all must strive, for more, better, faster, longer, more often, ...
i find the new faith at times scary, other times unsettling, alarming, energizing, enervating, ...
but all-in, i believe a good faith, and when so widespread, forces folks to strive by working, because generally striving by stealing brings not good outcomes when so many folks are on the same playing field striving and exacting occasional but very severe punishment on folks who break the rules.
the bad science fiction propagated by western corporate press re china corruption is simplistic, but for another discussion.
and the genie ratio spun for china vs usa is misleading, especially when the underlying data supposes that china sports only 350k odd millionaires - i believe the number could easily be 20x higher. the reflexologist who comes to hk from shenzhen and work on our feet once a month is easily a dollar millionaire, sports four daughters, one son, a van and a driver, and has set his country-folk parents in his own neighborhood of spiffy living space. how many reflexologists are there in china?
america is already set in its inequalities, and the few have won big, not by producing more, but by stealing, via rule by making up rules and thus broke no laws.
how the two, one a civilization state, and the other a pop culture, evolve is a matter for our watch n brief. we are fortunate to observe, and at the edges, exercise our being.
am, all-in, very enthusiastic about the changes happening, even as i am alarmed and so re-double efforts at bringing up my kids. i have not yet figured out how they might deserve a ??x difference in standard of living vs a lot of others. they must try, else they would have to become reflexologists - nothing wrong with reflexologists but maybe a bit too dry a state of is.
amen.
otoh, amongst the threaders of si, i could be one of very few who lived through any sustained period of tyranny, terror, and degeneration of social order achamchen.com and so i may be better at spotting the onset of same , and i see onset of same but not in china, for china is on a different trajectory, and the second derivative is increasing. |
