Brown in China

Most people know very little about China.

Over at Iain Dale, a very good comment popped up around this post of his.

I reproduce it here in full. It is a corker. I concur with it. Unless something serious is done, we are going to be royally stuffed. Our hope, IMHO, is both ourselves and India.

The comment goes as follows:

m rhistov

I believe that the liberal democracies face a real problem with China. It is a problem that the BBC are currently ignoring. Such ignorance is demonstrated by childish news reports, which say that Great Britain was a minor country in Marco Polo’s day and that China was great power then and “the wheel has come full circle”.

The problem is that modern day China represents a triumph for state communism and a defeat for liberal democracy.

In the late 1970s state communism suffered a severe crisis. The Soviet Union and China represented the two greatest communist powers. The former was running out of money and could no longer rely upon the myth that everyone was building communism and had to suffer now to make gains in the future. In addition, it had proved impossible to maintain the level of coercion that had been used to subdue its enemies. Senior party officials in the satellite communist states were openly embracing Christianity and getting away with it. China had suffered the cultural revolution. An overt attempt to subvert the Confucian tradition of seniority. The Chinese were also running out of money.

The Chinese communists decided that the way forward was to liberalise the economy. There was a strong communist tradition of trying to do this. Lenin had authorised the New Economic Policy, which was a neo-capitalist system but it had been sunk by Stalin. In addition, some of the Soviet satellites were effectively running systems which allowed minimal elements of capitalism. Notably, Zhivkov’s Bulgaria.

The liberalisation of the economy was a huge success and helped China to ‘blind’ the liberal democracies to the fact that they were still an authoritarian communist regime. They were helped by the fact that western politicians were increasingly influenced by multi-national companies, who could only see benefits from such liberalisation.

The medium term result of the liberalisation was to make the Chinese communist party enormously rich.

The Soviet Union chose the route of political liberalisation. This was a complete disaster, from a Soviet viewpoint. In a very short time: the Soviet Union lost its empire; split up into its constituent parts and lost major state assets to individuals, who were chiefly former communists with connections which allowed them to effectively rob the state.

Now the liberal democracies face a real dilemma. China is to be the future superpower. Yet there is no way that the Chinese communist party is going to emulate the Soviet example and initiate their own destruction. We will have a communist autocracy as the most powerful country in the world.

There are currently two ways that the liberal intelligentsia in this country are dealing with the problem. The first is to ignore it. This is what the establishment is also doing. The second is to produce idiotic theories that Chinese communism will collapse under its own weight. The sort of ideas retailed by Will Hutton in his latest book “The Writing on The Wall”.( remember that book that lauded the coming Blair Revolution, “The State We‘re In”. Well, we are definitely in a state now, Will).

Rich institutions do not collapse under their own weight. They buy up poor institutions, just as the Chinese communist party is buying up large parts of Africa. They are also investing in western countries.

By the end of this century we will know if increasingly impoverished liberal democracy can triumph against a seriously well funded communist state, which owns large parts of the world, including many of our own major companies. I wouldn’t hold your breath, if I were you.

I haven’t even mentioned what will happen when ordinary Americans realise that they are no longer “top dogs” (a position that they seem to believe is theirs by divine right) and the ‘commies’ have come back. We can expect fireworks.

If the world still exists in 110 years time then you can expect British schoolchildren to be reading hagiographies to communist heroes, such as Castro. There will have been a ceremonial reburial of Karl Marx in Beijing. Mao will be the great helmsman and Simon Heffer, Iain Dale and, indeed, myself will have been erased from the pages of history. Capital punishment will be back and career politicians will be having a “field day”, in our own communist party.

I hope this doesn’t happen but someone had better realise that we are “sleepwalking” into Chinese world domination and the corollary of that is communist political domination . If this happens then Lenin‘s world revolution will have succeeded.

Other posters point out the truth that people in our Government and establishment are determined to deny - that China is only interested in our technology and know-how, not our products. Given their attitude to intellectual property, do not expect us to gain anything out of "technology transfer".

Nightie night, children...