Do you live in china?
Yes.
If so, where at?
Jiangsu province, about 20 km from Nanjing.
It sounds like really bad conditions there, and I'd recommend moving ASAP. Hell, I'd recommend doing it tonight, before the internet is taken away from you and your beaten for posting anti-china propaganda online. If anything we hear is accurate, then you're endangering your life.
I've been living here and posting online for three years. The stories you read about are not usually actions take at a state level. The central government is more interested in anti-government people trying to organize or take action, and in censoring anti-government opinion. If I were posting in Chinese on a Chinese forum, I'd probably get censored. The stories you read about people getting arrested tend to occur at a local level. Someone posts about how their mayor or governor is corrupt or something, and then the mayor or governor sends the police to deal with them. I'm not revealing any secrets - if you come here, you'll see the exact same thing. I'm not stepping on anybody's toes either. Nor am I making Chinese people dislike their government. I don't think anybody really cares that much. So far, I haven't even been asked to stop posting. If I did get beaten like you suggest, I think that would cause the very sentiments the government wants to prevent.
Now that that is over with, when we're looking at the development of countries, it's better to not have only a single country in mind, but rather all countries. It's also better to know how we're rating a country. I am not judging a country by how clean it is. I am not judging a country by their healthcare. The ONLY thing I am judging a country by right now is how well it conforms to the will of its own people. I would assume that there would be general consensus
China, regardless of how right or wrong I was about their financial system, does not follow the will of their people. Can we agree on that much?
To some extent, that's true. For example, it seems to me like most young people don't agree with censorship. The influence of western culture in China does seem to be growing. However, in my experience, Chinese people are usually close to unanimous on just about any topic. Guns? No, they're too dangerous. One child policy? Well, it's bad for individuals, but it's important as a society because the population is too large, and it would be bad for everyone if the population kept increasing. Usually, Chinese people do not have any opinions that disagree with official policy, or, if they do, they're on minor topics (like traffic laws).
There is one exception, which is the hukou policy. Basically, everyone in China has a document called a hukou, which registers where they live. They can only use their health insurance and send their child to school in the city where their hukou is registered. If they want to get married, or apply for a passport, or do just about anything official, they have to do it in the city where their hukou is registered (or in the capital of the province where their hukou is registered). It's extremely difficult to move your hukou. You can only move your hukou if you get married (and move it to where your spouse's hukou is registered), or buy a home (and register it where you bought the home), or get a job (assuming you're working for a large state-owned company that can do it for you). You can also move it back to your hometown, but once you get married, you don't have that option anymore.
Hukou is very annoying to have to deal with. In practical terms, it means that peasants can't go to the cities to send their children to school. Peasants have to send their children to school in rural villages. For everyone else, it means that it's very difficult to move to another city unless you have enough money to buy a home there, and getting a mortgage doesn't count. Homes are expensive in China; just as expensive in the United States in a lot of cases, and in some big cities, like Shanghai and Beijing, homes are more expensive per square meter than a home in the United States. Most workers who aren't doing a very skilled job get paid about 12 RMB/hour, which is a little less than $2/hour. Skilled white-collar workers typically get paid about 30-40 RMB/hour, which is about $4.5-6/hour. Of course, prices are usually lower in China, so they have about twice the purchasing power that the exchange rate would imply. Even so, I think you can see why it would be frustrating to be unable to move unless you can buy a home (which might cost the equivalent of $200,000), and to only be able to earn $12/hour.
In turn, the government has said that it will look into this policy and try to get rid of it. The government has also been making moves towards reduced censorship. I have no idea what will happen in the future, but it seems to me that China is making progress.
So, it's a bit of an oversimplification to say that China doesn't follow the will of its people.
There's certainly a large impact from propaganda and indoctrination on shaping popular opinion, but the same is true in every country. In the United States it's very uncommon to hear about US supported the
genocide of East Timor, or how the United States tried to
assassinate Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and blew up an airplane killing innocent civilians in the process. We don't talk about the United States supporting terrorism in Nicaragua (the
Contras were attacking hospitals, raping women, and indiscriminately killing innocent civilians while the US air force helped them avoid the Nicaraguan army), or how we
illegally sold guns to Iran to fund that terrorism.
I've barely
even gotten
started here.
So, on
this matter,
we can't
criticize China
without also
criticizing the
United States. I'm certainly willing to criticize both, but are you?
China's not strongly democratic. There are elections, but no one participates in them except candidates selected by the local governments, which are in turn selected by the People's Congress, which is composed of people elected by the candidates elected in local governments. There are other parties in China, but they have little influence. Of course, I can make similar criticisms of the United States on the grounds that you only have two parties to choose from, and third parties are unable to gain any influence regardless of how much people may agree with them, because people are afraid that they will "waste their vote".
There are certainly some groups in China which are not treated fairly, but, again, in the United States, there are plenty of groups that aren't treated fairly either. We could equally criticize the United States on the matter of the Iraq war (which both American and Iraqi citizens overwhelmingly oppose).
Basically, my point is that I think you're trying to make an accusation against China for which you could blame the United States
just as much, if not more so when it comes to terrorism and violence. Sure, your accusation is valid, but you need to understand that it's hypocritical to criticize one country for something without also criticizing your own country when it does the same. I'm willing to criticize both countries, but the way you've written this implies that you're only willing to criticize China, and then turn a blind eye when the United States does the same.
Also, for the data you've given...
You should really learn how to measure things fairly. If you bounce around time frames, then you are picking and choosing data to fit your theory. First there is a statement of "since 1980", then a statement "from 2000 to 2009". If you want to compare them or use them, they HAVE to be from the same starting year, and preferably a MUCH longer time frame. How long? try since 1900 or so.
It has nothing to do with the fairness of measurement. The statement changed to "from 2000 to 2009" because that's what the graph data supported. We can show that wages only increased slightly from 2000 to 2009, when we adjust for inflation. For the "since 1980" claim, the
Wall Street Journal wrote on December 17, 2010 that our current real wages are at the level they were in 1974 (excluding perks), and that since 1978, productivity for non-farming industries has increased 86%, but hourly compensation, including perks, has increased only 37%. When he says that our real wages are at 1974 levels, he means that, when you adjust for inflation, our current wages are basically the same as they were in 1974.
@ opt-in government
This sounds like the extreme example of what I was asking for. A group of say, 10 people could opt-out though, and then wreak havoc on the rest of the population. Mini-governments would pop up as an easier solution to compromise, choosing to ignore dozens of even hundreds of laws in the process. The problem here is that it would be chosen by personal preferences. Thus I can see people who don't own children to choose not to pay for schooling, and living right next to the childrens school anyways.
There are stores where you can buy children now?
In all seriousness though, your objection that 10 people could opt-out and wreak havoc is kind of pointless. It would be quite feasible for 10 people right now to simply get guns and wreak havoc. Saying they could
also do that with opt-in government doesn't really say anything about whether opt-in government is better or worse than mandatory government.
Regarding schooling, well, firstly, it's not particularly expensive, and secondly, I don't see a problem with someone living next to a school, and not sending their children to it, and not paying for it. If they think schooling is not important, let them see how they fare without them. As it is, I can see plenty of good arguments for why schools in their current form should be abolished.
For example, math education tends to leave people unable to do math. Sure, you learn sin, cos, tan, and a few years later, maybe you remember the names, but you don't remember how to use them or what they mean. Math as it's taught in school is devoid of all creativity and purpose. It's boring, and it's not because mathematics is boring. Mathematics is awesome. When you have some interesting information you want to get, and you creatively figure out how to get it, it's a lot of fun, and you learn a lot from it. When you do math because you are interested in it, that kind of math lesson stays with you for life. There's no point teaching it any other way because, no matter how you justify whether or not it would be useful, the fact is, it will be forgotten unless people are interested in it. The math classes we teach now are more harmful than simply not teaching people math, and letting them learn it as their own interest guides them.
Lockharts' Lament is a good read on this subject.
Take PE classes as another example. Children love to go outside and play. They like to ride bikes, dance, go hiking, play sports, etc. You do not need a PE class if you simply let children do what they do. Just make sure they don't watch TV all day long and you're set. They'll find things to do, and they'll either learn or gain exercise.
For one final example, English classes are, for the most part, a waste of time. Children like to read. Just find them a book they like and they will read it happily. Children like to write, too. They love sending messages to each other and talking with their friends. They're also curious about English rules. When they write messages, they always wonder where they should use commas and semicolons and such. As long as they have a parent around to answer their questions, they'll learn English rules all on their own, and develop their own writing style.
Children will quite naturally teach themselves if you make the information they want accessible to them, and, what's more, when they teach themselves, they will never forget. A a quarter of most people's lifetimes are wasted because so much of the information they learn is uninteresting to them, and immediately forgotten. If they spent all of their time learning whatever they became curious about, they would remember all of it, and they would be much better off for not having had their curiosity destroyed by institutionalized schooling.
However, for people who like schools, let them do it. Schools are not very expensive. Most of your taxes go to war. Even if half of the population decides that they won't have children, and selects a government without formal schools, everyone else would have plenty of money and reasonably low taxes provided that they don't squander their money on killing people halfway around the world.
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Topic: Political theory (Read 16429 times)