丁工闩门闩门川巨门

[liukaiqin]

The Chengdu Evening News has been in the news because its June 3rd issue included a tiny, one-line ad deep in the classified ads section, saying "向坚强的[six][four]遇难者母亲致敬" - "Honour the strong mothers of the June 4th victims." It could equally mean "Honour the strong mothers of the sixty-four victims," (i.e. implying some traffic or mining disaster

Comments

[goreism]

If you were to press me I'd have to admit I've never been to the mainland, but does it matter who'd win? Across the straits, the "temporary provisions" (動員勘亂時期臨時條款) were abolished in 1991, and the KMT still ended up controlling both the Legislative Yuan and the presidency for nearly another decade. But the important thing is that process matters, and that's why that decade was far more benign than any of the preceding ones.

And anyway, the question of who would have won an election isn't exactly exogenous to the factors that would have determined whether there would have been an election in the first place.

[liukaiqin]

Mm! That's what I'm saying, it's all about the process and the relationship of accountability that it creates. It's not so much to do with who wins. As it stands the CCP would be secure for as least as long as the decade you just mentioned, don't you think? But God knows how they would approach the problem of censorship that they've dug themselves into. That's something the Harry Potter fanfiction analogy doesn't touch on: between popular anger at leaders' past wrongs and anger at their efforts to cover up those wrongs with increasingly visible and annoying internet censorship, which is more dangerous to a government?

[goreism]

I don't know if the CCP would be secure for a decade. Anti-communist parties did pretty well in Eastern Europe. And anyway, the factors that determine whether the CCP wins are also the same factors that decide whether there would have been elections in 1989 in the first place.

[liukaiqin]

Oh, do you just mean that they're more likely to relinquish monopoly if the people visibly love them more? Because surely that in itself means it's less bleak now than then, after the economic policies of the last twenty years and the ongoing efforts to numb the "80后" generation.

Mind you there's probably also something to the argument that a healthy free market economy can't be developed indefinitely independent of the raucous multi-party democracy that tends to accompany it. I mean, it's not easy to reconcile an economic system which depends on making people want more and newer stuff with a political system that depends on convincing you you're already satisfied.

Good point about Europe... How far can China in 2007 be compared to Eastern Europe before 1989ish though? Even just in the population's size and level of education and the nature of the 'communism' at hand, it's pretty different.