"the worst enemy of the Chinese masses"


The Communist Party leadership has done nearly irreparable harm
I just hope that the Chinese people figure it out in time. Christopher Lingle lays out the case.

As such, there is no illusion that the principle motivation of the Communist Party is to maintain power. Mao's adage, "power comes from the barrel of a gun," took on new meaning when those guns were pointed at the heart of the Chinese people and triggers were pulled.

While the actions of June 4, 1989 were brought into sharp relief through a TV lens, greater tragedies have been recorded under the watch of the Communist Party. Ill-conceived agricultural and industrial policies during the Great Leap Forward led to the death of tens of millions by starvation. Although the Cultural Revolution did not cause so many fatalities, it certainly ruined the lives of many millions of Chinese citizens. By any calculus, this is a terrible and unbalanced price to pay for an experiment that now relies on slogans like "socialism with Chinese characteristics".

Outrages against the Chinese people continue. Corruption and mismanagement by Party cadres are sapping the life out of China's deeply-conflicted "socialist market" economy. Those parts of the modernization process that delivered remedy from suffering are now at risk of being undone.

The reversal of the irrational economic policies allowed the Chinese people to direct their boundless energies and impressive skills towards enriching themselves. Yet now in a cruel twist of fate, those who trusted their hard-earned savings to the state-managed banks are in for a most unpleasant surprise. Somewhere between 25 and 40 percent of their assets were squandered on supporting failed state-run enterprises.

Support for state-owned enterprises has always been directed principally toward urban industrial workers. This is quite ironic since the Communist Party gained power through a peasant-based revolution. Nonetheless, there has been a consistent policy of neglect of the interests of the peasantry. Under collective farming, farm prices were purposely kept low to provide cheap food for urban workers. As such, Communist-inspired agricultural polices assured that farmers would remain poor.

Give me the free market over government bureaucrats every time.

I still think the Chinese people will figure it out. Hong Kong was the greatest concentration of practical capitalism on the planet. With time, I still think it will be the City That Ate A Country and China will move inevitably towards the free market. It's the only way to provide for all those people.

And freedom will follow.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - June 11, 2007 at 02:27 PM  Tag


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