And All that Pain Just to End Up Longing to Become Capitalists?
Nanning, China, April 11, 2010
Salaroche


So here we are, April 11, 2010, and the Chinese government is finally hinting that it will soon allow the Yuan to appreciate against the dollar and other currencies. That’s highly welcome news, at least from my point of view.

The Chinese have invested billions of dollars in the past two years or so acquiring dollars to keep the Yuen’s price artificially low. Now it seems they’re willing to yield to the call of the rest of the world and cooperate a bit more in stabilizing the world’s economic situation.

China is everyday increasingly integrated to the world economy and with the leaked suggestion of a soon-to-happen partial freeing of the Yuen, China is giving signs that it’s now willing to accept its responsibility as the major world player that it now is.

And the Chinese people are pretty much aware of this general trend.

To talk in capitalistic terms is no longer anathema in this country. The students at the University, for one, don’t talk to me about politics or ideology (at best, they tip-toe around those subjects) They just talk to me about money and about getting an education so that they can get a better job. They talk to me about their dreams of eventually living lives with as much comfort as possible.

They talk to me about their future in terms quite similar to those in which any western University student would to talk to me.

So, I think, and these people went through all that pain across the past 60 years or so, only to come back around and slowly but surely join the western capitalist market community?

Boy! Was that guy Mao wrong or what? He might as well have worked out a few more trade pacts and some strong cultural exchanges with Nixon back in 1972 and China would probably be a flourishing capitalist semi-democracy with a very large middle class by now.

But no, they had to cling fast to the stupidity of a senseless communist ideology! The misguided belief that human nature can be changed by sheer will. What an aberration of a concept. Human kind longs to be free. No people in this world have ever embraced the communist ideology out of their own will; it has always been imposed on them by self-righteous, power-hungry murderous thugs.

All that anti-capitalist rhetoric that for decades fed Mao’s doctrine took hold in the Chinese people's conscious probably only because of some kind of existing mass deep social resentment. But give the Chinese people the freedom and the means to acquire riches and they will do their best to acquire them. The hell with ideology! That’s what the Chinese people are telling us with their pro-capitalist dreams and attitudes of today.

China: All that pain they inflicted on themselves with their communist regimes just to end up longing to be capitalists. And all that middle-kingdom anti-western rhetoric just to end up longing to embrace western ways.

Salaroche