Response to Muhammad-Bin-Qasim
The problem however is that Communists kinda lost direction somewhere...
This is a Pandora's Box. You can argue it happened when Lenin, who may well have been financed by the Rothschilds, died and the leadership fell to Stalin, a disciple of Gurdjieff. You can argue it was when Stalin adopted a policy of "Socialism in One Country", effectively abandoning all serious attempts at world revolution. You can argue it happened when Khruschev and his generals lacked the imagination to find an asymmetric response to the US military buildup. There's more.
My personal hate for the system is because it seeks total control over people's lives, livelihoods and inhibits the human spirit at many levels...
Government is in business for itself. Everywhere. And leaders don't need longer workweeks than they already have. If somebody comes along with a widget or scheme that gives you a little more control over your people, you're going to buy into it. But more generally, stop hating anyone or anything, it burns too many calories for no ultimately useful purpose.[/I]
China isn't really a pure Communist State anymore... in economics it is... Capitalist... This is why China also is ultimately going to have problems eventually because they are relying on a failing ideology at present to carry on...
China has been a market economy since 1978 in theory but that didn't really get underway strongly enough to mess up people's savings until 1984 when inflation started running at 20% per year and folks had to dip into savings to cover daily living expenses. That inflation rate held up at 20% through to 1989 when the Tiananmen riot happened: the protest was about eroding living standards and eroded savings -- it was a "democracy" rally in the sense of "people's democracy" with a return to low stable prices for staples and daily necessities.
Whether the ideology is "failing" or not is another issue. Communist values overlap nicely with strong family values, which are a feature of any Asian society I've seen. They also tie in nicely with Confucianism, the traditional ideology that prevailed under the emperors. In fact, what you have in China today is "social democracy", i.e. where "democracy" means "open-ended market economy" and "social" means that government can operate profit-driven enterprises on the same basis as any private individual. One serious difficulty facing Beijing is the wealth gap: if you look at Chinese history, you see a cycle of (1) farmers with growing debt who revolt followed by (2) a new emperor who cleans out the corruption and (3) appoints his own set of civil servants who decline into corruption that slowly but surely piles up debt on the farmers who ultimately (1) revolt... and so on.
It is also important to note that Chinese Communism doesn't really have an issue with religion. Like any republic, it insists on separation of church and state, but Muslims get Friday off for example (they're supposed to work it in on Sunday but if they're civil servants, well who goes to the office on Sunday???). Indeed, the government has been encouraging a revival of the three main spiritual ideologies (Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism) because the shift into a market economy left lots of folks upset because the system of Communist moral values had been discarded ever since Deng Xiaopeng said "It is glorious to be rich."
There is however a problem with cults or sects and the last law regulating them was based on the equivalent French law passed in the mid-1980s. There is too an issue with the Vatican, which is also a political state with an embassy in Taiwan and Beijing policy is that there is only one China, so if you already have a Chinese embassy, you don't need ours. I'm oversimplifying a tad because popes get very possessive about their flocks -- as possessive as Beijing gets about its citizens and this won't get worked out too soon, despite occasional media articles that get upbeat about it.
The spin now is on a "Building a Harmonious Society", which means getting a bigger share of national wealth out into farmers' pockets and improving their lot. The success is uneven and slow. Notwithstanding, if you check out the PEW Global Attitudes Survey, 87% of Chinese respondents said they thought their country was "going in the right direction", against 30% of Americans and 45% of Indians (Pakistan was not surveyed). (Source:
http://pewglobal.org/database/?indicator=3&group=11)
The other vulnerability is that China has 56 ethnic nationalities -- and that's just the officially recognized quantity, but I have students who tell me they speak a "dialect" of Chinese which is hardly understood in the next village 10km down the road. If a village is locked inside its dialect, then it is a distinct culture for all practical purposes. If we count nationalities that way, any number between 1,000 and 10,000 looks reasonable to me. However, returning to the 56, the Han make up 90% of the total population, with 10% for the other 55. This might be no big thing except that this 10% occupy about half the entire territory and that makes the country vulnerable to secessionist insurgencies, especially when funded from abroad.
As for "purity", the chemist Primo Levi suffered years of guilt under Nazism and Fascism because he was Jewish and not "pure" like the Aryan role models held up for all to admire. Well, one day, he realized that God hated purity because after all, when man started digging, Nature presented man with all the elements in the Periodic Table either as compounds or mixtures. In short, any thought that purity is somehow virtuous is a pernicious lie.
