When All Else Fails...

Return to the dogma that got the party started in the first place. Whether those golden words will obscure what is perceived of economic reality, or not, is another matter. At the end of the day It's still playing with fire when you are now a market economy, management team, more than a cadre of revolutionaries filled with revolutionary spirit. 

The problem they face, however, is that the peasant born collectivist fervor that brought the Communist part to power may still be out there; festering among the majority who still haven't gotten the full benefit of modernization. And remember, this is a majority that has had to endure an array of mass relocation’s, industry disasters, and growing pollution that was suppose to lift all boats. Arbitrary decrees of power that all too often benefit corrupt local officials, but helped the farmers, and cottage industries very little.

The problem we face is that what happens to the Chinese will affect us as well, whether we like it or not. Instability there is indirect instability here. Simply put it would be a disaster for us, as well as the rest of the world, if they fell into another cultural revolution. And how we react to this is of utmost importance. 

First and foremost is that we cannot afford to indulge in any more of our usual condescending criticisms. Simply demanding that they open their markets, or institute democratic reforms will only make matters worse. The fact of the matter is that we have our own forms of corruption, restricted information flow, and economic injustice. The moral high ground is not ours to be preaching from here at all.

What we do need to be doing is to start looking for ways to build common ground. And chief among those would be to recognize that cost based, market economies, are inherently flawed; especially in as much as ever increasing competition for various markets, as well as the resources that fuel them, is no longer serving any of us very well. And we can approach this not from the tired old nostrums of collectivism in the Soviet mold, but from the technological reality that Capitalism was never intended to operate in an electrified information environment.

This would be where we use collaborative efforts to solve common problems, and setting aside for the moment that each of us conducts politics in quite different ways. And in this we have to be honest about what actually is; as in the fact that they stem from a completely different culture than we do; as in the fact that our supposed "Democracy," though mostly a very good thing for us, despite the obvious problems it has, is not necessarily an approach that would be good for them. 

I have already mentioned in other posts that energy would be a good place to start; especially if we could take money for more arms to do it. Collaborative space exploration (see the movie "The Martian") is another. The bottom line, however, must be the realization that collaborative economics, as opposed to the current competitive mode, is absolutely mandatory if we are to avoid internally driven, or externally driven, disasters. Everything is connected now. Everything. Conflict anywhere all too soon becomes conflict everywhere. The Chinese people are not our enemies. Old ways of doing things that do not work any more are.

China’s President Sets All Party Members Homework to Read Old Report by Chairman Mao