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Eh. I think we'd like to believe that, mostly because we don't want to face the possibility that China's system might work out fine.
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
Eh. I think we'd like to believe that, mostly because we don't want to face the possibility that China's system might work out fine.
- golemotron 9y agoI wish I knew more about Chinese history. They have about 4K years of institutional memory to draw on and they likely are more aware of their history than we are of ours in the West.
- microcolonel 9y agoThe CCP is largely defined by rejection, destruction, and denial of the majority of that institutional memory.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThat's the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is the one aspect of Maoism that everyone in China today, including the government, will admit was a terrible idea.
- imron 9y ago> They have about 4K years of institutional memory So does Greece. That doesn't appear to be doing Greece much good in the modern era though. Also, large swaths of China's institutional memory were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
- bjshepard 9y agoThis is not true.
- _h_o_d_ 9y agoDon't mistake institutional and cultural memory, which are not the same thing! A memory in the intellectual elite sense, and a political cultural memory, and a widespread low-cultural set of norms and understandings are also different things. All apart from the institutions of state, or religion, or bureaucracy, or commerce, and so on, which may have traditions and functional memory going back decades or millennia, depending.
- imron 9y agoThat being the case, modern China has an institutional memory going back decades, maybe a century at most. It's nowhere near 4k years.
- toronson 9y agoFor the past 30 years, pundits have been saying China will fail. If they keep saying it, maybe they'll be right eventually.