China: the way it has always been

This system remains the same today as it was 2,000 years ago when the first emperor “Qin Shi Huang Di” defeated the other warring states and united China under one system of government. A system which remains basically unchanged today despite a modern veneer of concrete, glass, and internationalism. It has never been tampered with (Communist revolutions notwithstanding).

Chinese people have never known a different system. Chaos, civil-war, invasion, and warlords, yes: but a different system, no. Remember this. There is no alternative template for political leadership of government in their collective heads.

Participatory democracy, although wishful thinking for a few, is a foreign concept for most. Today's leadership-government model is mixed up with culture. Conservative-thinking, stability-valuing Chinese people find it difficult to separate the two.

This is one reason why, whenever the Western media criticises some sensitive aspect of Chinese government policy, the reaction from the intellectual neophytes in China’s universities is often so vitriolically anti-western. Shoot the messenger is the dominant paradigm. How dare the West criticise us! The West is anti-China!

So these days we should not look to this segment of society for alternative leadership models. This group had the courage knocked out of it in the late 1980s. Idealism is dead now. Stability is everything. Everybody just wants to be rich. The older guys are the ones to listen to.

So what happened to youthful idealsim, the anti-corruption demonstrations, and the desire for western-style democracy which was so strong during that brief Beijing Spring?

Today's loud young defenders of the status-quo are the product of an education system which has deliberately controlled information. A system which filters out “dangerous” western philosophies and which papers over embarrassing cracks in China's history.

A forgotten history which recorded demonstrations by students against their own Qing government for corruption and incompetence, as well as against the foreign powers for their carving-up of the motherland. And don't bother digging too deeply into the Cultural Revolution either. All you will learn is that you know more about this painful period in China's recent history than they do.

The fact is, these days China's students have a history and a truth already interpreted and packaged for them by the leadership in Beijing. They are products of a system which rewards memorisation and regurgitation of facts rather than intellectual honesty. A cynical system which produces graduates who can’t separate culture from politics and government.

Criticise China’s leadership, and you criticise Chinese culture. Criticise China’s government and you criticise the Chinese people. Criticise government policy, and you are disloyal.

The loneliest people I have met in China over the last five years have been those few brave, independent thinking individuals, who are intimidated by their own culture and government into the saddest of silences.

Only those old guys who can't be intimidated anymore dare open their mouths. Most recently those who are either near death and don't care, or those who have already died and are published posthumously.