pearwaldorf | Jun. 5th, 2006

What makes the situation [of Wal-Mart flourishing in China] exceptionally weird is that this is happening in a country that still professes to be Marxist. And the new Chinese capitalism feels like it was introduced by people whose understanding of it came solely from reading Marx: it is ruthless, exploitative, and contains the seeds of its own destruction. The only hitch is that the inevitable finale - proletarian revolution - is supposed to have already happened. In theory, in Communist China, the working class exploits itself...

The deal cut after Tiananmen was shrewd: urban Chinese were offered a path to prosperity in return for staying out of politics. The results are now visible in every Chinese city, most noticeably in those (like Shenzhen and the east of Shanghai) that have sprung up out of nothing in the past twenty years. They are a direct rebuttal to the Reaganite belief that free enterprise opens the way for democracy. So far China has proven that if you can grow fast enough, democracy can wait.

—Maciej Ceglowski

(cf June 4, 1989)