I had provided information on China‘s emerging unrest and the subsequent crack down on comments on the internet by blocking of the Microblogging service providers.
Additional information is seeping in which I am providing here below.
Refers to:
For the Diplomat, Minxin Pei argues that the CCP Standing Committee should be very concerned about an “intellectual reawakening” which is increasingly resonating with the Chinese public and may be creating the conditions for another pro=democracy movement:
Of course, one is unlikely to find the discussion of such sensitive issues in most official publications (although some media outlets affiliated with official publications have been particularly adventurous in carrying articles on these topics in the past few months). The range of issues is wide and diverse. Despite disagreement among participants in this incipient post-1989 Chinese intellectual renaissance, the discussion is fast converging on three critical issues. First, there appears to be a widely shared consensus among China’s thinking class that the country’s economic reform is either dead or mired in stagnation. Second, those who believe that economic reform is dead or stuck argue that only political reform, specifically the kind that reduces the power of the state and makes the government accountable to its people, will resuscitate economic reform (some advocate for more radical, democratizing changes, although the consensus on this particular point has yet to emerge). Third, the status quo, which can be characterized as a sclerotic authoritarian crony-capitalist order, isn’t sustainable and, without a fundamental shift in direction, a crisis is inevitable.
Such signs of an intellectual awakening are worth noting for many reasons. Its timing is certainly significant. Many people would connect this development with China’s pending leadership transition. In China, as in most other countries, pending changes in leadership usually stimulate discussions among the intelligentsia about the future of the country and the accomplishments or failures of the departing leadership. Chinese intellectuals, mostly liberals, may want to seize this once-in-a-decade opportunity to reignite a debate on whether the existing political system serves the country’s long-term needs of economic development, social justice, and national unity.
Another, perhaps more important reason, is that more than two decades after the Tiananmen crackdown (and after Deng Xiaoping famously admonished his colleagues there should be “no arguing,” essentially ending the ideological debate among the ruling elites over whether post-Mao China was embracing capitalism), members of China’s thinking class have come to realize that the post-Tiananmen consensus, which might be characterized as giving economic reform and development a chance to solve China’s political problems (one-party rule and poor governance), has basically broken down. In other words, the post-Tiananmen model, all but intellectually bankrupt, provides no useful guidance in the coming decades
Venture capitalist, frequent English language op-ed writer and rising public intellectual Eric X. Li warns us that a constant focus on the sacking of Bo Xilai is distracting from a much more menacing problem – China’s widening ideological division. From the South China Morning Post via Huff Post:
[…S]peculating about Bo’s downfall or future is less productive than understanding the two ideological forces that form the political context in which the Bo incident could be at risk of becoming a perfect storm. So far, neither has gained dominance. But if one of them should occupy the center stage of Chinese politics, the consequences for China and the world would be disastrous.
Two extreme ideological forces have been dismayed by China’s tremendous achievements since Deng Xiaoping launched his reform. On one side are the leftists who believe China has lost its socialist way in its head-long pursuit of market economics and want the nation to go back to its past of a completely state-owned economy and dogmatic Leninist rule. On the other side are the liberals who just cannot live with the fact that China is succeeding without multi-party elections and a Bill of Rights. The noises they are amplifying seem, at the moment, to be deflecting our attention from the extraordinary progress China has gained in the last three decades and the underlying consensus that made it possible[…]
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/04/eric-x-li-on-chinas-ideological-rift/
Related articles
- Will China Experience a Military Coup? (socyberty.com)
Leave a Reply