Chinese Democracy: Happiness through Slavery

http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/671645

Much continues to be said about the Great Chinese economic 'Miracle'. Wondrous growth, unprecedented wealth production, and terrific everyday savings for you Walmart shoppers!

The primary reason that I believe that China is incapable of becoming a world power, much less a force for international stability, is it's inability to address internal criticism and the extreme levels of corruption that have manifested itself throughout the Communist Party and virtually all state apparati. An example of this behavior is illustrated in the above linked Toronto Star article. Jiang Weiping, a former Chinese journalist, served five years incarceration for the following:

Jiang published – in a Hong Kong magazine in 1999 – an expose of high-level corruption: The deputy mayor of a city had used state funds to buy cars and apartments for his 29 mistresses. Another from another city had gambled away $3 million from state funds at the casinos of Macau. A powerful provincial governor, Bo Xilai, the son of an even more powerful party elder, was covering up corruption among cronies.

Whilst we in the West are certainly not immune to criminality and public corruption, as this blog amply illustrates, the standard authoritarian model of jailing dissidents and punishing those who embarrass the ruling criminal junta, belies not a growing and tolerant state, but a petulant and unstable regime that needs to extinguish all criticism in order to persist. Despite what we are constantly told by propagandists on both sides of the Pacific, these are hardly the attributes of a flourishing and benevolent state.