The Endless Wait For Chinese Democracy

China's rise out of poverty has been good to see, but the way it has played out has been a little depressing. If you're my age, you remember the Tiananmen Square protests, which seemed to be - along with the freeing of Eastern Europe - part of a global revolution against totalitarian governments. Although those protests were ended by force, the people's desire seemed so strong that it would not be denied.

And yet it was. In the twenty-five years since then, the Chinese government had delivered only token democratic reforms, and yet their popularity is high. Of course, it's all because they've delivered prosperity.

And that's why the whole rise of China has been so depressing: it's demonstrated just how little we humans care about abstract concepts like freedom of speech.

On the one hand, it's understandable. According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, people will want to be lifted out of poverty before they concern themselves with intellectual freedom. And a big mistake in the rebuilding of post-cold-war Russia and post-gulf-war Iraq was delivering on those abstract freedoms first with little consideration for building a system that would get people the necessities of life.

But China has, in many regions, gotten to that middle class level, and there still doesn't seem to be much push for democracy and rights. It looks like the government has succeeded in buying the complacency of the populous. Of course, many totalitarian governments try that, but few have the economic growth to pull it off. So although I could understand the starving giving their complicity in return for sustenance, it's shocking to see people knuckle-under just to get the same middle-class lifestyle we're starting to find so soulless.

But apparently there are some people who do care about this, and they are predominantly young people from Hong Kong. That makes sense: these are people born around the time Hong Kong was handed back to China. So unlike the rest of China, they have had a constantly good standard of living, and unlike the rest of Hong Kong, they haven't had any joy at being reunited with the rest of their culture. In that case, we might see more Chinese dissatisfaction with their lack of democracy, but it will have to wait for a generation that has grown up in the current Chinese economic success.