December 18, 2006
MAY NOT BE ABLE TO STOP MOSES, BUT YOU CAN STOP THE MAOISTS:
In Chinese Boomtown, Middle Class Pushes Back (HOWARD W. FRENCH, 12/18/06, NY Times)
When residents here in southern China’s richest city learned of plans to build an expressway that would cut through the heart of their congested, middle-class neighborhood, they immediately organized a campaign to fight City Hall.Over the next two years they managed to halt work on the most destructive segment of the highway and forced design changes to reduce pollution from the roadway. It became a landmark in citizen efforts to win concessions from a government that by tradition brooked no opposition.
And it was no accident that the battle was waged in Shenzhen, a 26-year-old boomtown that was the first city to enjoy the effects of China’s breakneck economic expansion and that has served as a model for cities throughout the country.
Increasingly, though, with its growing pains multiplying, Shenzhen looks like a preview, even a warning, of the limitations of the kind of growth-above-all approach that has gripped much of China.
There's a ludicrous notion afloat in the intellectual ether that China is a forerunner of a new kind of totalitarianism that can achieve national economic success yet retain absolute political power in an undemocratic central authority.
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 18, 2006 8:39 AM
There is an equally ludicrous notion that Taiwan's young democracy is sowing its own destruction because its president and his wife are being implicated in financial corruption. In actuality, the truly remarkable thing is that Taiwan's president hasn't tried to silence the growing demands and mass public demonstrations for him to resign by mobilizing the army to murder Taiwan's citizens. In fact, even if he wants to, he can't.
This reveals how much more stable and how more free Taiwan's political system is than China's. In Taiwan, you can now express your poliical opinion and opposition at the very highest level and with public methods rooted in fundamental civil and political rights, without the fear you will be arrested, tortured, or killed. Moreover, no one in Taiwan doubts that, sooner or later, the island's president will have to step down from power, either because the public pressure will become too great or because his term of office has run out. In Taiwan, the full institutionalization of democracy has become fact for the first time in a Chinese society.
What does Taiwan have to do with Shenzhen and China? Although many mainland Chinese intellectuals and their Western fellow travellers continue to worship the Party and the authority of big brother, Taiwan shows one possible face of China's future.
Taiwan is demonstrating in full high-definition brilliance that a society based in Chinese culture need not be addicted to authoritarian and totalitarian solutions to political issues. In its own small way, Shenzen's middle class is discovering this truth.
Let us pray that in time and sooner than later, they and their fellow mainland Chinese will come to understand, as the Taiwanese and as many people in Hong Kong have found out, that their self-proclaimed "leaders" are nothing but giants with feet of clay and that they themselves should be the true masters of their own political destiny.
Posted by: X at December 18, 2006 9:44 AM