Ditchdoc wrote:If the Chinese government can stop people from talking and stifle free speech, they could certianly stop counterfieters in their country IF they wanted too. Don't you think?
Ditchdoc, I don't want to be nasty with you..I really don't. I apologize for calling you names. The disagreements might stay but I'm serious. Please take what I'm going to say in that light; I'm not trying to make excuses for the Chinese or be in your face in any way. I'm just trying to give you an answer as best I know how...
You've asked a serious question and I'll try to give a serious answer. It might get a bit long, but it's not a simple problem or situation.
First, some context:
If you read the article regarding the rescued dogs that Hawk brought up...
China Dog Rescue: Hundreds Of Animals Rescued From Slaughter By Activist Road Blockade
...you'll notice (besides that's possible to quickly gather a number of animal lovers willing to spend considerable money and take political risks to rescue animals) that the rescue was organized using a Chinese social networking app called "Sina Weibo, a popular Twitter-like microblogging site".
That's because, thankfully, there actually is a great amount of speech and social activity the Chinese government
can't control. And also, many times, doesn't really care to (that's why Sina Weibo exists at all).
But the government is in a very tricky (read astonishingly complex) situation on a number of fronts, including but certainly not limited to dogs or counterfeits, and I think that's what many in the western world fail to fully appreciate.
Here's a quoted paragraph from a very insightful article from Slate magazine, regarding an interview with "Xu Kuangdi, a veteran apparatchik, engineer, manager, and leader...an academic who served as mayor of Shanghai from 1995 through 2001, is vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and president of the Chinese Academy of Engineering Sciences.":
http://www.slate.com/id/2236703/
the article wrote:Of course, in China, Marxist morality shifts over time. And today, the most moral thing that Chinese policies and people can do is promote economic growth and development, regardless of the distributional outcomes.
In our time in China, we heard several reasons why the massive country simply couldn't adopt Western-style democracy. The population is too large and too diverse. Democracy promotes the sort of arguing that hinders growth. The performance of other Asian countries seemed to have suffered when fractious democracies emerged from authoritarian or military rule. Xu added a new one: It would promote unhealthy class warfare.
If elections were to be held in a large geographical area where gaps between the rich and poor are wide, and in which people have different educational backgrounds, "it might cause turbulences to society," he said. "If somebody just went out in the street and shouted, 'I will divide the property of rich people into poor people,' I think he would be elected. But it is useless, as parity will not solve the problem of economic development." (emphasis mine--AT)
Yes, the creation of wealth in China has been wildly uneven. But this, too, is consistent with the party's goals, doctrine, and history, according to Xu. "Sometimes when we have the faith we have to take different approaches to realize our beliefs. The ultimate goal is the common prosperity, but we have to let a group of people to get rich first."
Now, leaving aside that it's a huge realization for a Marxist to say anything like that, Xu
isn't wrong. It's also clear that he is intelligent and that he cares about the results for his people.
And the last thing the Chinese government (even as it wants to see things get freer because it
knows that will lead to greater prosperity) is a quick uncontrolled and chaotic slide into huge ethnic strife (like Chechnya or the Bosnian situation), or strife caused by increased economic disparity and poverty due to chaos, or strife caused by other more purely political divisions, that could easily result in---given just the sheer number of people---the worst, largest human disaster in history.
So here's some choices, using just the example of counterfeits: The Chinese government---instead of taking things slowly---could simply leave other priorities so they can instantly crack down in a really huge and as effective as possible way on counterfeits.
Looking at the issue in simple terms, it's obvious that just for starters, that would unemploy lots of people leaving many already poor people in even worse poverty (also causing even greater internal social friction) but which would simultaneously look to the world
and their own people like the government was being even more of a police state.
What would you do if you were in control? How would you balance things, and how quickly would you do what, if you truly cared about your people? How would you get from where they are to where you'd like them to be?
And understand, we've only thought about one problem, and we've barely scratched the surface of even that problem.
Here is Xu's full bio from Wikipedia (and, Ditchdoc, it might give you an idea of the complexity of issues and getting things done even just from reading his bio). I'll
emphasize a few things.
wikipedia wrote:Xu Kuangdi KmstkNO (Chinese: 徐匡迪; pinyin: Xú Kuāngdí; born December 1937 in Tongxiang, Zhejiang, China) is a Chinese politician of the ruling Communist Party. He was mayor of Shanghai from 1995 to 2001. He supervised the transformation of Shanghai during his administration into a center for international investment and trade that helped lead the intensive development of China's economy. He was demoted in 2001, to a far more obscure and powerless position as party chief of the Academy of Engineering in Beijing, apparently as the result of an intra-party power struggle between President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, both former Mayors of Shanghai. Xu was replaced by Executive Vice-Mayor Chen Liangyu, one of Jiang's followers later arrested for corruption. He continues as Vice-Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Xu graduated from the famous Hangzhou High School. He graduated from the Beijing Institute of Iron and Steel Engineering in 1959, during the midst of the Great Leap Forward, and was a professor there from 1959 to 1963, then at the Shanghai Institute of Engineering from 1963 to 1971, through the height of the Cultural Revolution. He did not join the Communist Party of China until 1983. He studied in Britain in 1982 and 1983 and worked in Sweden from 1984 to 1985; he also won a national award for his design of a stainless steel pipe for use in aircraft production.
He held a number of other academic positions through 1991, when Zhu appointed him as director of the Shanghai Municipal Planning Committee, allegedly because he had remarked that he hated central planning. That position led to a number of increasingly powerful positions within the municipal government of Shanghai. He was an alternate member of the 14th CPC Central Committee and member of the 15th and 16th CPC Central Committees.
Xu is currently a Vice-Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference,[2] Party Chief and President of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He is a professor and doctoral supervisor at Shanghai University. He retired on June 11, 2010.
(as an aside and I don't mean this as a slap at you...I think this might show that I try to bring a little more than "All (I) got is to whimper and call everyone a racist". I've spent lots of time trying my best to learn what I can about China, from as many sources as I can. That's one of the reasons I can put together this post moderately quickly.)