Archives for posts with tag: intellectuals

Translated interviews from the authors of Unhappy China (中国不高兴）

April 21, 09 //
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（4）中国想真正成为超级强国，首要的条件是不是军事的强大？造航母是不是我们成为强国的一种指标？
Is being a military power a necessary condition to China becoming a superpower? And would be making aircrafit carriers be a benchmark of that?

　　那不是首要条件，但肯定是不可缺少的一环。一个超级强国，经济上要很强大，话说过来，经济上不强大军事上也强大不起来。科技上也要非常先进，这个世界上应该是科技创新层出不穷的，但我们确实就差得很远。在文化上面也要有影响力，这点美国就有这个架子，不管好莱坞大片水平高低，全世界人民都在看，我们就需要这样的东西。但我认为，文化的东西可以放在后面一点，但经济科技军事肯定是少不了的。

No, that isn’t a sufficient condition, but it is definitely necessary. A superpower has to have economic strength, and you could say that without economic strength you could never develop economic strength. You also need to advanced in scientific research, although there are scientific and technological innovations in the world, in this regard we still lag behind. In terms of culture, we also need to have influence, and America has this trick down, no matter how good or bad Hollywood’s films are, people around the world will still watch them; we need something akin to that. However, I believe that we can put these cultural things on the backburner a bit, but economic and military strength are things we simply cannot do without.
　　
造航母不够成为强国的指标。泰国都有航母，印尼马上要造，应该说我们不造是比较可笑的。联合国常任理事国里面就我们没有，像英法，现在都不敢说自己是世界强国了，尽管都有航母呢。但说回来这个东西不是一个世界强国的指标，但如果没有这个东西，那肯定就不是世界强国。
That said, having an aircraft carrier is not a sufficient benchmark for military strength. Thailand has them, Indonesia is going to build some soon, you might say that it would be a joke if we didn’t have our own. Out of all the countries in the Security Council, we are the only country without any. England, France, they might not be superpowers anymore, but they still have carriers. Again, they are not sufficient conditions for saying a country is a superpower, but are necessary—you could not imagine a superpower that didn’t have them.

　　（5）金融危机给中国带来的警示意义是什么？未来中国进行坚定不移的产业升级是不是有效抵御经济动荡的最有效手段？
What kind of warning has the current financial crisis sounded for China. Will China’s commitment to increased productivity be enough to counter the current instabilities?

　　最大的警示意义，就是“搞金融是最高级的”这个观念是错误的，中国这次之所以受到的冲击比较小，就是因为金融方面比较落后，落后反而占了便宜。这次金融危机告诉我们制造业永远是最重要的，郎咸平所谓的“中国实体经济受到的冲击会更大，美国只是被冲击了一个金融”屁话，你看看通用汽车现在啥样了？当时跟工商银行差不多的花旗银行，现在市值是工商银行的二十分之一。还有，到华尔街抄什么底？要抄也要去底特律去西雅图，我们要工程师而不是那些所谓的金融人才。美国赌场现在出了大问题，以后赌场肯定就没有啦，他们做的那些特殊金融产品，等金融恢复了之后肯定不再有了，美国人也在反省，他们会取消掉这些特殊金融产品，那些金融人才都是废物，中国人干嘛要去招聘这些废物加骗子回来？

The greatest warning to us is that “doing finance is a higher form of economic activity” isn’t necessarily true. This time around, the impact on China has been relatively small, and that’s precisely because we, in terms of financial markets, behind the rest of the world. And that has redounded to our benefit. The crisis has demonstrated that manufacturing is still the most important, and Larry Lang’s argument that “China’s manufacturing and product industries will get hit hard, while only the financial industry will suffer in America” is clearly bullshit—have you seen what kind of shape GM is in? Citibank, which used to have market valuation close to that of the Commerce and Industry bank, is now only worth 1/20th of that. Also, why are we going to Wall Street to find people? If we are going to find some talented people we might as well go to Detroit or Seattle, what we need are engineers and not these so called financial wizards. The American “casino” has encountered some major problems, and in the future, they might just eliminate many of the financial products and instruments from this casino, so that when the financial system recovers, all these financial wizards are going to be useless, and if that’s the case, what would China want with them?

　　不能说单指望这一项，经济问题很复杂，但是对于中国最重要的，显然是产业升级。
You can’t simply hope for one aspect to improve, economic questions are quite complex, but what is most important for China is to improve its manufacturing capabilities.

　　（6）“解放军跟着中国核心利益走”，索马里护航是不是就是体现了这样一种主张？
The PLA will always follow China’s vital interests—does the protection of Chinese ships in Somalia prove this point?

　　这是很小的一个体现。虽然很多人批评索马里护航这件事，但起码有象征意义，起码对这三艘船是个锻炼，不经过实践，你的问题是不知道的。像宋晓军说的，你的钢板是不是适合远洋的需要，那得开出去试试才能知道。
This is only a small example of that. Even though many have criticized the Somali naval protection incident, it at least has some kind of symbolic value, and at least was some kind of training for those three ships, because without that kind of experience and training, you will never know where the real problems lie. It’s like Song Xiaojun said, you won’t know if your ships are fit for distant seas until you take it out and test it.

　　（7）绵延数十年的逆向种族主义将会对一个国家的精神品质造成什么样的伤害？我们应该如何阻止其滋长和蔓延？
What kind of impact does ten plus years of reverse racism have on the intellectual or cultural life of a nation? And what can we do to stop it?

　　伤害特别大。从国家来说，是国民不团结，愿意为外国人效忠。从个人说，到了外国之后，觉得自己不是个人。比如说女孩子，相信外国人特别好，嫁出去倒了大霉。这样的例子何止成千上万。
The damage is quite serious. From a national perspective, you see that the people are not united and are also willing to be loyal to foreigners. From an individual perspective, once you leave and live in another country, you feel like a second-class citizen. For example, some girls think that foreigners are really nice and marry them, only to find out it wasn’t so great after all. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of such cases.

　　最近还有个例子，就是绿洲乐队演出取消。本来我对这件事情不是特别认真，只是支持下环球时报而已，事实上我都不知道绿洲乐队这些事。我没想到有这么多绿洲乐队的粉丝跳出来骂，我才觉得这个真的是个问题。就有这么些人，说他一定要去国外，然后加入国外的军队打中国。如果真的中国要跟外敌打仗的话，你说会有什么样的结果。就算是他们的音乐再好，哪有怎么了？不听能死啊？就能被外国乐队的那么几位迷成这样，就能驱使着中国歌迷这么抽风，我都怀疑绿洲乐队在英国美国这样的地方有没有这么疯狂的歌迷。

Recently, there’s been another example, which is when the Oasis concert was cancelled. Before, I didn’t really care too much about this, I was just supportive of the Global Times and didn’t really know much about the Oasis situation. However, I didn’t expect so many Oasis fans to come out and start arguing, and it seems to be a real problem. These are the types of people that would to to another countrym join their army, and attack China! If China were really to fight a war with a foreign country, can you just imagine what would happen? Even if their music was super, still, so what? Are you going to die if you don’t listen to it? I can’t understand how a foreign band can have such an effect on people and make their chinese fans go into convulsions, and I somehow doubt that Oasis fans in the UK or the US are as rabid as the ones here in China.
　　这很可怕，这肯定是跟中国这么多年逆向种族主义大环境是有关系的。这些搞逆向种族主义的知识分子，虽然没有直接介入这件事，但是绝对跟他们这么多年的教育有关系的，凭什么说我听周杰伦就是个下贱的事，听英国人的歌就是高贵的事？这帮人能听得懂那些英语歌词我都画上问号。那帮歌迷挺可怜的，他们自己本身肯定没有什么可以炫耀的，他们把这个作为自己唯一的价值所在，现在一旦受到打击便受不了。其实能听得懂又算是什么啊，又能怎么样，但是却被中国高级知识分子说成听得懂很高级，听不懂就是土鳖。我就喜欢二人转怎么了？绿洲乐队在英国皇室眼里，也就是个二人转的地位吧，为什么英国的二人转就高水平？中国的二人转就低水平？这就是这个大环境造成的。
It’s a scary thing, but it has much to do with the reverse-racism that has been going on for years. These reverse-racist intellectuals might not have been directly involved in this matter, but it has everything to do with their education and influence—why should listening to Jay Chou not be seen as somehow lower than listening to an English band? I doubt that these intellectuals can even understand the lyrics in the first place. And these poor fans, well, they probably don’t have much to be proud of themselves, so they link their self-esteem to this band, and when things like this happen, they feel slighted and injured. And so what if you can understand these lyrics, does that somehow make you better than the rest of us, who are just bumpkins? And what if I just like errenzhuan (type of dongbei/Northeastern folk performance)? TO the royal family, Oasis isn’t much more than errenzhuan, so what’s so good about them? Just the fact that they are English, which makes them good, while Chinese ones are no good? This kind of thinking is endemic to our environment.

　　至于政府为什么取消音乐会，我不知道我也不想知道。可是为了这个小事你们就抽风，就说拿枪拿炮打我们，这事值得重视。

As far as why the government decided to cancel the concert, I don’t know and I don’t particular want to know. However, if something as little as this is going to put you in convulsions to the point that you say you’re going use guns or cannons to attack us, then this is something that deserves serious attention.
　　我以前常常把文化的事情给低估了，但是看你们这么疯狂地来了，取消这件事就是对的，我现在觉得文化这件事真的很重要，我理科出身常常重视硬的科技的东西，现在看文化真的很重要。
I’ve often underestimated the importance of culture, but seeing how crazy these fans are, I think it was good to cancel the show, and now I understand that culture is important, and people like me that come out of the sciences tend to have that bias, but now I see that culture really is important.

　　传播我们的书，就是制止他们蔓延的重要一步，我为此奋斗了20多年了。我们过去没有机会出这种书，当然我们希望以后能在电视上辩论，传播效果更大，但是现在我们还没有掌握电视报纸话语权的时候，像南方报业集团，肯定不会让我们说话，这个时候，这本书起码还能代替我们传达。

Promoting this book is part of the efforts that I’ve put in over the last twenty yaars to stop people like that. In the past we didn’t have the opportunity to put out books like this, and we also hope that in future we’ll get the chance to take the debate onto television and thereby reach a wider audience, but we have yet to really develop a strong presence and voice in TV or print media, such as the Southern Newspaper group, they definitely would not let us speak our minds, so at this time, so for the time being we will just have to speak through this book.

Pirouettes on the edge of madness: Bertrand Russell, me, and other fucked up peeps

November 23, 08 //
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With my own sanity and mental health at greater peril than ever before, i start reading, for some inexplicable reason, about Bertrand Russell’s personal life. I have read some of his books before, on happiness, marriage, etc. and of course the classic “On the History of Western Philosophy”–but I find that while i am obviously not of the same level, there are various personal similarities which i can’t help but noticing. If you go to the Amazon page for Ray Monk’s biography of Russell’s early middle-age years you find the following blurb from Publishers Weekly:

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, “Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity.” His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk’s first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell’s own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell’s compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) “whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth.” When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, “It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood.

This revisits a theme that i;’ve thought about continuously for much of my adult life: which is what you want out of people in your personal life and what you hope for for humanity at large–and if there is any sort of psychological connection between the two. People–biographers, or just people who have had substantial contact with the man, have said that his love of humanity was abstract–that he was afraid of flesh and blood, that he had problems dealing with real people. And then there is talk of the compensatory nature of logic, and i find that *compensatory* to be quite illuminating. Why? Because logic and the disinterested pursuit of truth in science and mathematics allows one to dwell in rarefied world, away from the messiness and inconstancy of human life. There is a real sense in which someone with an IQ as high as Russell’s is also just not going to be able to “get” other people. sure he will need other people–I was reading about Conrad’s wife and Joyce Carol Oates described her as offering “maternal solicitude”–and I’ll be damned if there aren’t a bunch of male intellectuals who go for women like that…in any case, these uber-intellectuals and writers need regular people sometimes–they project their own fantasies and needs on them. I bet that the reason that Russell was a pacifist was because he believed that the nuclear arms race was a form of irrational madness based on lies that the government tells the people to get them into acquiesce–and this offended his deepest intellectual instincts. Human beings are mad, they are stupid. And yet you must love them so you try to steer them in what you consider the right way.

And what about Russell’s personal life, his compulsive womanizing? Again, echoes of my own life, except that I am not that compulsive and not that much of a womanizer–but again, the vector points in the same direction, just with lesser magnitude. The need to stave off madness and loneliness–i know that all too well.
I would go as far as to say that a man’s deepest redemption from loneliness–the loneliness brought about, in part, by his intellectual and existential instincts. Therefore, there is always this balancing act going, because the intellectual and artistic pursuits drive you in one direction, drive you in a direction that could conceivably lead to madness, or at least, shall we say suboptimal mental health. And that is why you need a woman, to assuage and ameliorate the pain that is brought on by that very pursuit.

somewhere else i read about Russell’s “unyielding” type of personality–another word which sent the flashbulbs off in my mind, because I believe that is why I have such problems following careers such as journalism and filmmaking, things that I ostensibly am in love with and respect–because I have something in me that predisposes me towards logic and mathematics, same as Russell (though obviously not on the same level). But the same proclivities are there, and the same political leanings–which means that whatever “advice” I could glean from his writings or writings about him could really be quite useful and therapeutic for me. And that’s perhaps, why, in times of extreme, duress, articles such as this and the thoughts they contain “find” me.

Books I’m Reading: Paris: The Secret History

September 29, 08 //
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I looked up the word “flaneur” in the index of hte boojks and skipped straight to it: I’d heard this term first in books by and about Walter Benjamin, and the idea of these urban wanderers–poets, wastrels, misfits, outsiders, rebels–was always appealing to me. The rich cultural life of Paris in the 19th c. cannot be understood without the historical context in mind, meaning the incredible, mind-boggling political tumult of that century. Dotted with revolutions and restorations, burgeoning capitalism and urban planning, riots, battles, and all out international war, many of the figures of this century are larger than life, in a way that somehow, in my mind at least, exceeds those of the last century.

Regarding the flaneurs: Here’s a passage from the book:

One of the new pleasures avaialble to those city-dwelling bohemiens, who, like Gautier, sought the strange, the uncanny, the poetic and the mysterious that lay around them, was the art of wandering pointlessly through the city. This activity, termed flanerie — a word that dated back to the sixteenth century and which had originally been used to mean ‘wander’ or ‘drift’ — was already apparent in the seventeenth century…

The author then talks about Balzac and Baudelaire as flaneurs par excellence: and of course this had to do with the hugely transformative nature of Haussman’s new design for Paris…the urban landscape changed, opening up new potentialities for how people interacted with physical urban space and how that urban space constrained and made possible new forms of (collective) social interaction. Back to flanerie: there are times when I wonder whether or not street photography for me, is at base, just a form of flanerie. I believe the spirit and impulse is the same, at least in the way that in lives in me. There’s another telling phrase in the book: the flaneur is always “detached from hte pleasures that he observes and takes part in.” That phrase was perhaps more striking than anything else I had read about the flaneurs. Because the stock definition leaves you thinking that a flaneur is a kind of hippie, dandy type person that believes in creativity and art, not 9-5, pensions and mortgages. Their lives and their art–if, that is, amidst all the debauchery they could sustain the effort it takes to make lasting art–were conjoined and were, to put it a bit too crudely, a fart in the face of the bourgeoisie. However ephemeral it was, there is something eternal about that, but at least to we who have come into the world so much later. Sure, we all love cities, but the fascination must have been different for them, for modern urban planning, and that entire ethos of rationalist, scientific, Enlightenment progress was gathering steam and changing things in a way that we could not have imagined. They were at the brutal front lines of that epochal shift in human history.

Sure we have our own epochal changes: the rise of megacities, the BosWash thing, southern CA, the Pearl River Delta Region, Lagos, Mumbai: all of this suggest that flanerie ought to be alive and well. Though we might be well-advised to engage in flanerie from within the safe confines of a bullet-proof SUV, where we can cautiously gawk at people, our glances and stares masked by a tinted window.

Maybe this is how we ought to describe urban rappers (and I mean Tribe Called Quest, not Ice Cube or 50 cent) and street photographers. There is, in their respective mediums, a restless search for something in the streets, the nooks and crannies, desolate parking lots and anonymous malls, parks with their anodyne family sculptures, etc.

Street photography is attached, via some unseen umbilical cord, to my visual hunger for a place. A new city offers that kind enticement and that kind of fascination. The city itself might not be inherently beautiful or unique, but I am just fascinated by the fact that I have not seen it before. There is copious room for investigation, which you do with your feet, mostly, and your eyes. And the camera is almost ancillary, it just becomes a capture too, albeit one that you try to use artistically and intentionally with the hopes of some aesthetically pleasing result. Unfortunately, I realize now, after years and years in Shanghai, that I thrive on this kind of stimulation, you could even say I’m addicted to it–and that must explain why I am constantly on websites, looking up travel deals and checking airplane ticket prices and planning in my mind the next great escape.

Traveling and wandering seem, to me, much more “natural” a mode to be in. I think it might just be this heightened aversion to boredom, this constant thirst to see things, explore. There is a phrase in this book or perhaps somewhere else, that springs to mind: “reservoir of electricity”–I think many people who come to Shanghai feel this kind of “buzz”, this ineffable quality that somehow swims above and around and can’t quite be expressed by economic indicators. Even when markets take a dive: there’s still that buzz, that creative license to follow your own gods, make your own identity, shape your own destiny. That’s a romantic view of Shanghai, no doubt, and it’s very subjective because half of the time I don’t feel it at all; I think that this place is hopelessly crummy and inferior, very noveau-riche. Sometimes it feels like everyone is a benighted bumpkin and other times they strike me as arrogant parvenus. And sometimes they just appear as regular people getting on with their lives. Of course, it’s not that they are in someway chameleonic, this is just, in psychobabble terms, what I am projecting of myself onto them.

Cafe life’s intimate connection with politics, satire, revolution, literature, cabaret and general licentiousness in Paris is fascinating for me. What do the sociologists call it? The third space? Well it was alive and kicking in the Paris of the 19th century. I don’t know if I feel any electricity anymore, anywhere: in Paris there were cafes that were popular with journalists and actors, while other groups flocked to other places. This milieu was actually many micro-milieus, niches, and I don’t know if anything analogous really exists here in Shanghai. I keep thinking it must because it is, or ought to be in my mind, some kind of invariant of human social life. These are niches that you bury yourself in, and by doing so embed yourself in history, live history, not outside it. And somehow that is connected to the idea of authentic living, or just really living. Because although we all live in history most of the time it seems to me to be more like a truck whizzing by you very fast that you have to jump out of the way for lest you get flattened by it. The flaneurs are somehow removed the pleasures they observe and indulge in. They are participant-observers. Some of them are quintessential outsiders (in Colin Wilson’s sense of the word).

In any case, as exciting as it is to read about these things, there is always the collateral cost of reading any kind of history: the heightened sense of ephemerality of things, and the analytical impasse that the mind comes to when it reaches beyond the author’s guidance. That is to say, when you take the author’s writings and analysis as a point of departure for your own thoughts about that period in history or worse yet, meta-reflections in history itself, you feel disoriented, lost. You don’t have the moorings that historical facts (or what we take for fact at present) give you. There’s the Faustian hope that if you know enough, you will have solved the problems and saved your own soul, but you’ve got a sneaking suspicion that this is just flat out impossible. For example, what can we extrapolate about France and the French from its illustrious 19th century cultural history? So many of the great writers, novelists, poets, intellectuals, and painters of the world all walked the earth at this time, and to be specific, walked the boulevards and alleyways of Paris. That’s just plain anomalistic by any standards, and reminds of me that famous line from Carol Reed’s The Third Man, where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) says to Holly Martins that the tumultuous years under the Borgias produced Michelangelo and the Renaissance greats, while 500 years of peace and democracy in Switzerland produced…the cuckoo clock. It’s a great monologue, for one, but it does make one think about how these unusual and intense bursts of cultural activity happen…highly nonlinear for sure.

More as I come up with more…if anyone is even reading…

BBC Chinese on the “harmoniousness” of the Olympics

August 12, 08 //
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/newsid_7550000/newsid_7553600/7553611.stm

BBC 中文网 | 中国报道 | 奥运外围：当“和谐”被重复千遍 via kwout

BBC Chinese journalist Meng Ke tells it like it is in the above article. He roasts some of the sacred cows of Olympics propaganda, like the “100 years dream of the Chinese people” (he says: did Chinese people really care about having the Olympics way back in 1908?）as well as the whole thing about “fire and water can mix, why can’t people be equally harmonious” (he says: sounds like a good metaphor, until you realize that it doesn’t make much sense).

Meng is critical of opening ceremony director Zhang Yimou’s attempts to cram in all the best parts of China’s long history and vast cultural depths into a few hours: he wonders whether or not cultural elites are not just like political and business elites in desiring a “harmoniousness” that is derived from and sustained by the power to control.

In the last section, Meng says that “harmoniousness requires decoration”—though “decoration” is the literal translation of what he says, what it means is a certain “dressing up,” which the more critical among us believe lies on the slippery slope towards outright falsification. He talks about Beijing’s rebuilt and cleaned up streets with the faux-ancient buildings (a la Shanghai’s Xintiandi) as a “Disneyification” of Beijing.

Finally, Meng mentions that one of the more well-known BBS in China, the Qiang Guo BBS (强国论坛), has been under tight supervision and monitoring: some netizens are complaining about how fast their posts are getting deleted, making it hard for them to reply to others and engage in any kind of conversation.

China, universal values, democracy

June 24, 08 //
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Skimming the Chinese media, I’ve seen a lot of cyber ink spilled on the issue of a
debate on “universal values” that erupted between the Southern (Nanfang) group
newspapers (don’t know off the top of my head which one of their publications
ran that essay first), and some of the Beijing-based newspapers. The debate
has gotten rather heated, and since it’s about one of my favorite topics, that
universal values, human rights, democracyand whether or not any of that could ever
find its way into China (in a substantive manner)I am going to have to blog about it
though in small phases since it’s already blossomed into something quitebig.

What I mean by that is that everyone is offering their two cents’ worth, and so I will translate
some of these “secondary” debates going on in the blogosphere.

Here’s a blog post and the first reply from June 22 on a CCTV blog thread.

1. Author: In the Next Life, I will still be Chinese.

Text: My view of Sima Nan’s “Southern Newspapers universal values debate”

This debate has become really intense, and although it seems on Phoenix Web that there are more supporters for Sima than there are for the Southern Newspapers, it’s this slight gap that shows how
drastic is the difference in opinion between these two camps. The debaters on both sides are pulling
no punches, to the point of calling each other “remnants of the Cultural Revolution” and “running dog of the West,” “ass-kisser,” or “clearly out to get a promotion,” etc.

I believe that the real focus of these debates isn’t on “universal values” but is rather a clash between Chinese civilization, its traditional values, and the beliefs that undergird our political system versus
Western values. In fact, those that are so opposed to “universal values” are in fact just reacting against the rapid influx of western values into culture as well as other realms. China has its own
traditional values, and in that tradition we have our own concepts of how the state relates to the
people and to the entire world, we have our own concept of “compassionate love (ren ai)”, and to say
that the love, compassion, courageousness, and loyalty that was displayed in the aftermath of the
earthquake was the result of some recently introduced western values and not the crystallization of our own values could really make one mad.

Democracy is a good thing, but the problem is,what if our country doesn’t have the appetite for democracy? Don’t forget, the west has already been through centuries of development to get to what they are today, and us, we’ve just only started, and what we need now more than anything is to be united and stable, and only when we are tied together into one long string can the Chinese people hope to close the distance with the developed countries. Furthermore, I believe that “democracy” is more than just than the multi-party system used in the west, which I have always felt is just a matter of which candidate has the most money to make themselves look good, which is just like people have said: it’s like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. I think that we Chinese can work and develop, and after a certain point can develop our own kind of democracy. What we need right now, is to reform the political system, severely punish corruption, only then can we be completely unified, and only then can our country ever achieve our past glory.

*Replies*

Democracy is a good thing, but the problem is,what if our country doesn’t have the appetite for democracy? Don’t forget, the west has already been through centuries of development to get to what they are today, and us, we’ve just only started, and what we need now more than anything is to be united and stable, and only when we are tied together into one long string can the Chinese people hope to close the distance with the developed countries.

OK, then please explain Taiwan’s democracy, how is that Taiwan can have a democratic system, and we cannot? We have already had 60 years of rule, should we wait for another 10,000 years? Is it that our “qualities” are not up to the level of the Taiwanese people, or not up to the level of the Americans of several centuries ago? A few centuries ago, the American people decided to set up a democratic system.

At the moment, Shenzhen is in the midst of political reform, and Xinjiang is starting a “sunshine” legal policy, isn’t this the beginning of democracy? Doesn’t Comrade Hu Jintao know about this? It was he who agreed to it. The highest officials in the Party know the reality of this country and know that political reform must be implemented for the long term stability of the country. It’s a pity that you “five mao Party”* are still messing around (and you don’t even deserved to be called a Party Hack because you don’t even qualify), because these reforms will no doubt be spread to the rest of the country in a matter of years.

So to all those “five mao Party” who say that China cannot implement democracy, please step aside. I really pity you, after you graduated from university you couldn’t find a job, and you don’t have a good daddy, which means that no one was there to help you get a good job and enjoy life. You can’t afford a house, you can’t afford to see the doctor, you are the lowest of the low, you aren’t even up the level of a migrant worker, because at least they can use their abilities to earn their bread. You, on the other hand, have to rely on the alms of others, you turn a blind eye to your conscience, and say a bunch of big, empty, and false things. It’s not that you don’t understand the good aspects of democracy, or that you don’t have any conscience, it’s that you don’t have any food to eat, and have no way of earning your bread, so the only thing you can do is sell your own conscience and beg others for a bite to eat, so that you can survive, the kinds of arguments that you come up with aren’t even worth replying to, besides instigating, scolding, and inverting right and wrong, the “five mao Party” isn’t really capable of coming up with anything. You are victims of the system. You are victims of corruption. You are the products of this strange system. Once there is democracy, there won’t be any need for people like you. At that time, you won’t have any place to earn your bread. So my advice to you is to learn some real skills and think more about your own future.

Whereas we, we are the beneficiaries of the system, and we speak on behalf of the future of this country. We hope that the country can remain continue to develop in a stable fashion and avoid social turbulence, and will not be fragmented and split like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, at which point it will be too late to salvage anything and the people will suffer, as will the economy. We hope that through political reform and curbing corruption that we can ensure that the country develops in a stable manner, ensuring the people their livelihood and way of life. Only this way can we hope that our hard work will be able to sustain our currently good standard of living. These are my personal thoughts and wishes, and this is why we participate in these debates.

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Poet Billy Collins: the theme of poetry is death

January 31, 08 //
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