-----Original Message----- From: Charles Brown <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
>I still haven't quite managed to figure out why its different in China.
>
>Scott Martens
>
>^^^^^
>
>CB: One hypothesis might be that there isn't that much fundamentally,
systemically wrong with the current system , and it is as the government
portrays it, poverty left from the past system that is the main problem.
It's hard for me to believe nothing is systemically wrong in place where the air is so unbreathable, or where disparities in wealth and power are so big, or where the most basic procedures aren't followed in blood collection. China is talking seriously about sending a man to the moon in the next few years, while rural villages still have mud huts. There are so many things that are obviously wrong in China that it's hard to put your finger on the subtle, underlying problems, at least given the short time I had to look.
That China's growth has had huge real social costs is the unavoidable conclusion of spending even a short time in China. I can't help but think at least some of those costs were avoidable. But my working hypothesis is that people in China don't see how any of the price they pay for progress is avoidable, so they consent to it.
Perhaps it's my own background as a coddled academic leftist showing through. In Vietnam, even though I wasn't there as long as in China, I saw what was clearly a critical, active, living culture. In China, so much seemed repressed. It was like a nation of yuppies and aspiring yuppies and poor people who accepted that the yuppies deserved their privileges. I hated that about China, while I loved seeing so much of the opposite in Vietnam. But a more comfortable life is plainly to be had in Shanghai - or even lesser cities like Chongqing - than Hanoi. It would be stupid of me not to expect the desperately poor to respond to those kinds of differences.
Scott Martens