Hu and Wen - China "moving towards democracy"

[welshTerrier2]

recent news about China is starting to sound a little bit like an Abbott and Costello routine ... China will clearly be playing a much larger role on the world stage ...

President Hu of China just cancelled his planned meeting with bush presumably due to the hurricane disaster ... "Hu offered sympathy for Americans "who are faced with a difficult time of severe natural disaster," the official Chinese news agency Xinhua said.

and in really big news:

source: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-09-05T125339Z_01_BAU546342_RTRIDST_0_INTERNATIONAL-CHINA-DEMOCRACY-DC.XML

China, where the Communist Party has enjoyed a monopoly on power since 1949, is moving surely toward democracy, Premier Wen Jiabao said on Monday.

"China will press ahead with its development of democratic politics, that is reconstruction, in an unswerving way, including direct elections," Wen told a news conference ahead of an EU-China summit.

"If the Chinese people can manage a village, I believe in several years they can manage a township. That would be an evolving system."

China has introduced direct elections for village chiefs in more than 660,000 villages, and many of those elected are not party members. But it has dragged its feet on expanding suffrage for the election of officials at higher levels.

[fujiyama]

1. This is what amuses me though:

" The Communist Party fears that if it were to allow full, direct elections in Hong Kong, which reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, democratic winds would blow toward the mainland and one day the people would vote it out of power, analysts say.
"

[still_one]

2. It is NOT that easy for China

The country is huge, and diversified. Prior to WWII, the West, and East was raping her

If you haven't watched CCTV I think you might be surprised by their news reporting

China has made tremendous progress, and will continue to do so

As far as Hong Kong is concerned, life hasn't changed much since the UK left.

[1932]

3. I just read in Graham Greene's book about Omar Torrijos

about a rally in Nicaragua to celebrate the revolution. At the rally, the Costa Ricn president, a social democrat, took the stage and called for early election. He received a cold reply. An archbishop took the stage. He called for early elections. Again, the crowd of 600,000 wasn't happy. The Sandanista leader took the stage. He said, "NO ELECTIONS UNTIL 1985!" and the crowd went wild.

Why? Because Nicaragua had elections under Somoza and they were all corrupt. Nobody wanted to jump right back into that. They wanted to make sure the country was working on every other level first.

Nicaragua ended up caving to international pressure and had elections sooner than they really wanted and a member of the very conservative Chamorra family won that election.

Joseph Stiglitz has a book, Globalization and its Discontents, and one of the central themes of the book is that Washington Consens economic policies (which Hugo Chavez calls "shock therapy" I believe) are extremely harmful because it can take decades to transform and economy to an efficient, decentralized market economy. No country can do everything Washington demands in one or five or ten years and expect to survive. In fact, no country ever has. The IMF's record is one of disaster after disaster, leaving misery in its wake every it goes. Stiglitz praises China's slow transfer to a democrratic market economy which is OBVIOUSLY working (they've reduced poverty dramatically and making a lot of money and building up a middle class).