Sunday, May 6, 2012

Bo Xilai and the return of Politics to China

My source for this article was written by Fareed Zacharia in the May 14th 2012 Time Magazine. It is on page 32 and is called, "Bo Xilai and the Return of Politics.

I am going to paraphrase for those of you who don't want to read the full article. Basically, he says that Mao Zedong in order to keep himself in power basically killed or put in prison anyone who had a different idea about how things should be done from him. So, when Mao passed on Deng was his successor. Because of the hyper political and murderous times (regarding China's leaders) during the  reign of Mao Deng decided to create the Chinese Communist party into Technocrats who were not political. He required that they be the top engineering students having shown an aptitude for practical  problem solving. He even changed party policy to become "If you don't have anything to say, save your breath......The only reason to speak at meetings is to solve problems." This transformed the Communist Party in China from a Political party to a group of Technocrats solving the problems of China as if it were a corporation. This has gone on until today.

 But the problem now is that eventually politics had to re-emerge. Begin quote from page 23 top right "China has reached a level of growth and development at which the big questions it faces are not technical engineering puzzles but deep political and philosophical ones." end quote.

So, in this article you have outlined both how China succeeded in regard to Capitalism and business practices as a country and you also see how Mao eliminated all his political potential enemies before they could become powerful enough to topple him. And you see how both Mao and Deng brought China to where it is today both for good and for ill. But now you also see how politics has re-emerged in the form of the necessity for ANY large respectable nation to also be respected in regard to human rights. If any nation does not come up to the world's standards regarding human rights it will never be trusted by most nations. And this is the exact problem that China is facing right now.


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