The headline of this post comes from a man who’s family has lived in the same house for hundreds of years, and he is being forcibly removed to make room for progress. China’s rapid growth, forced and centrally planned, is brutalizing the very people whose parents brought the Communists to power. We have experienced a few thousand miles of China at 12 miles per hour on a tandem bicycle. We have seen the decimated villages where the young have all gone to the eastern cities to seek riches. The government dams the rivers that provided the fish for those left behind, poisons the rice paddies, and the very air, that are their life blood, and ends a way of life thousands of years old.
Planting Garlic in a Beijing Hutong
The hutongs of Beijing are being torn down. They are thousands of years old. The people are left to find their own way in a world they do not understand. Thousands grow rich at the expense of the millions. Does this mesh with your idea of a Communist state?
Our world is becoming complicated. Cold War ways of thinking about Asia in particular are useless, damaging to our foreign policy. I wish more Americans would use their wealth to see, really see, our World, and understand that it is not as we were taught in school. Go and experience for yourselves, the lives of people, who except for accident of birth, are not that much different from you. Remember that; not that much different from you.
“Thousands grow rich at the expense of the millions. Does this mesh with your idea of a Communist state?”
A study of history shows that a very few have exploited the very many since…ever. This is irrespective of styles of government. Though adherents of communism long touted how it would equalize wealth, eliminate poverty, etc., it never did, not anywhere.
I’m not a student of sociology, but I have a theory: any society can be seen as divided into three population classes. We have a small group at the top of the social and economic ladder. They are very talented, very driven, very ambitious people who move and shake, who build and run things and become very wealthy. In some cultures, they exploit everybody else.
In the middle is the bulk of people; they are less talented, etc. But they constitute the people who keep a society functioning. They sell us groceries, teach our kids, fight our wars, drive our buses and cabs, tote the barges, lift the bails, etc.
A small group at the bottom contribute little to nothing. They are the crippled and the mentally incapable. Somehow the remainder of society organizes charities to help these folks to exist.
There is another class: the criminal. But its members can be found in all of the other three classes
All-in-all, democratic republicanism seems to be the best system for organizing a society, as messy as it sometimes seems. Here the talented and driven may have humble origins, but they have the greatest opportunity to rise to the top.
Yes.