If this reflects the thinking of the PRC leadership, these guys are even scarier than our current neo-liberal overlords: they want to get rid of the one redeeming feature of neo-liberalism - its consistent support (or at least tolerance) of popular democracy. And replace it with "state-enforced harmony". Is that Mandarin for Fascism?
Change without movement, Harper’s [6/09], Kevin Baker Excerpted from The Dragon Rising, Vol. I of Li Xian’s The Chinese Century, HarperChina. Translated from the Chinese by Peter Moore. ---------------------------------------------------snip Yet the iron laws of logic that foretold its fall were ignored in the enthusiasm of the moment. Barack Obama’s election was originally hailed as a great reversal of that decline. His rhetorical (if vague) insistence upon sweeping “change” in the way the national government conducted its business, his mobilization of many younger voters, and his utilization of advanced communications technology to conduct the campaign all contributed to the idea that a genuine people’s “movement” had brought the young leader to power. These were, in fact, the most superficial of reforms. The pampered youth of the American bourgeois classes came to believe that their mere attendance at rallies and the symbolic choices they made between factions in the election booths constituted a movement—even a sort of revolution. Sincere though their intentions were, they lacked the historical knowledge of the sustained sacrifice that revolutionary struggle entails. They could not see that their efforts had brought “change” without any real political movement behind it, and therefore no true change at all. The new president might have better heeded his predecessor’s first, prudent steps toward silencing political opposition in time of national emergency. Instead, his glasnost-like policies met with that idea’s same ruinous results. A gesture of openness to the frivolous American media was only met with the usual anarchic outcries for still more information. Overtures of friendship toward leaders of the opposition faction in the Congress, such as Senators McConnell, Bond, and Cornyn, and Representatives Boehner and Hoekstra, were viewed as signs of weakness, and merely solicited further demands for power-sharing. It will seem strange today to many in Asia, or even in the “Failed World” of the West—where nation after nation has of late moved away from the constraints of the multiparty state—that such individuals were not summarily charged with high treason. But such were the logical endpoints of American-style “democracy.” [....] The traditional martial values of self-discipline, delayed gratification, and the sacrifice of the individual on behalf of the group are likely at last to teach Americans that the people may move a mountain, but only if they work together. There can be no change without movement, and no movement without state-enforced harmony. -raghu. -- Really ?? What a coincidence, I'm shallow too!! _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
