The Secret Behind China's Economy

[Argus]

For you BD, I'll recount briefly the long conversation I once had with a Sudanese student on a Yugoslav train. The conversation concerned whether democracy was a necessary condition for economic development. The Sudanese argued that people living in autocratic regimes feel uninvolved and will not make the effort to work.

I disagree. Perhaps he was thinking of the old China or the Soviet Union. Why work when you got nothing out of it? But now people can work and benefit, gaining more prosperity, better houses, cars, gain status and comfort for themselves and their families. They'll work, in other words, for the same reasons the rest of us work. You can go back through time to autocratic monarchies where the people didn't have a clue what their government was doing, much less have any control over it, but they worked hard regardless, for they needed to work hard to survive and benefit their families. The idea that I would stop working because I have little or no say in what the government does is the kind of thing only an academic would embrace.

[August1991]

My point is that we decide things differently from the way people in China decide things for the simple reason that we are far richer. Our choices seem senseless to many Chinese and their choices are just as senseless to us.

Not at all. The Chinese guy chooses not to criticise the government because he'll be beaten and arrested if he does, and possibly sent to a slave labour camp to make cheap t-shirts for Wal-Mart fourteen hours a day.

I understand completely.

In Chinese terms, the guy is already rich because he lives in Shanghai. I suspect that the local government offered him a place elsewhere but he's angling for better - and using the appearance of foreigners and a camera to do it.

There are many Chinese who want something better for their society and they take risks to oppose the regime. The guy in the video didn't strike me that way. He's just angry that he lost his apartment.

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Slave labour camp making Walmart t-shirts? You got a link to that one?