links for 2007-09-17

• Democracy in China: They Just Say No
  "The United States and China can form a symbiotic relationship, one that benefits mankind and stabilizes the rest of the century, but only if the U.S. rejects cultural absolutism."
  (tags: china u.s.a. democracy u.s.policy humanrights diplomacy)
• Ethan Zuckerman at Idea Festival: Internet is not flat
  "The central question of Zuckerman’s presentation is why do we walk away from opportunities to talk to each other that Internet facilitates?"
  (tags: china internet freespeech media activism globalvoices globalization blogs blogging)

Comments

[Charles Liu]

Can you blame them? Look what is happening in Iraq.

In all the zeal and focus on stuff like 2008 Olympics and Yahoo China, the "corporate responsibility" crowd, in all our first world freedom and superior western sensibility, has manged to ignore the state-sponsored wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians by corporations like Blackwater USA:

http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-09-17T145232Z_01_L17538057_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-IRAQ-SHOOTING-COL.XML

Even the puppet regime we set up in Iraq can't take it anymore.

[mahathir_fan]

what do you mean chinese people reject democracy? China is already the world's largest democracy.

The most compelling criteria of a democracy is whether the government belongs to the PEOPLE.

What is the name of the country?
PEOPLE'S republic china

What is the name of its army?
PEOPLE liberation army

The constituion also states:
Article 2. All power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the PEOPLE.

Also,
The constitution says so.

There are elections held every term.

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Proof constitution says China is democracy:
Article 34. All citizens of the People's Republic of China who have reached the age of 18 have the right to vote and stand for election, regardless of nationality, race, sex, occupation, family background, religious belief, education, property status, or length of residence, except persons deprived of political rights according to law.

--------------------------------

Proof of elections held every term:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2007-09/11/content_6098180_2.htm

--------------------------------

See, China has DEMOCRACY written all over it.

China is also Communist and according to Hitler must be rejected because Communism is too democratic (Mein Kampf chapter 2):
"The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture. As a foundation of the universe, this doctrine would bring about the end of any order intellectually conceivable to man. And as, in this greatest of ail recognizable organisms, the result of an application of such a law could only be chaos, on earth it could only be destruction for the inhabitants of this planet."

Src: http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv1ch02.html

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WE just don't understand why people think we are not democratic. We have been democratic for a long long time.

[Evelyn Atkinson]

Re: “Democracy in China: They Just Say No”

Tom Doctoroff poses an interesting question – whether the inability of China to become democratic is due to the inherent nature of Chinese thought and history. His argument, however, has one big flaw. Taiwan, which shares the same cultural traditions and historical background as China, has already become democratic.

The foundations of Chinese culture and ideology are just as strong in Taiwan as in China – stronger, because Taiwan preserved its traditions whereas China destroyed them during the Cultural Revolution. Yet Taiwan has incorporated these traditions while embracing democracy, and the result is an effective, energetic democratic polity. In 2006, Freedom House rated Taiwan as the freest country in Asia.

What’s more, Chinese philosophy and history extend much more broadly than Confucian ideas of social hierarchy. Before Confucius, and long before notions of democracy had surfaced in the West, one of the dominating systems in China was a government and civil service based on merit, rather than aristocracy.

There is no reason to suppose, then, that China cannot democratize simply because it is “Chinese.” If anything, the force standing in the way of China’s democratization is the decades of brainwashing the PRC government has imposed on its citizens. As long as Beijing continues to have the power to control what Chinese citizens think as it mollifies them with an expanding economy, Chinese citizens will feel content with their lot. The issue preventing China’s democratization is not the nature of Chinese people; it is the power of the Communist regime.

[mahathir_fan]

Before you guys go on rambling about theories for why Chinese are not democratic, you need to first explain why it is not a democracy. how can it not be democratic when the government belongs to the people and they hold elections every 5 years and anyone can participate and run for office? see my posting above.

which reminds me rebecca. have you submitted your candidacy for the 2008 us presidential election? please dont tell me you have a hard time getting your name on ballot or you dont want the job.