Absolutely seems a bit strong. I wasn't actually speculating about what they are doing or a planning to do so much as - a more interesting question - what they will in fact do, in the future. It is just possible that I follow the culture and politics of the PRC more closely than some readers, and my opinions about their behaviour might be more informed than some. But it's hard to know that unless we articulate those ideas for discussion. Hopefully, the best-informed and most soundly-reasoned ideas will become evident, and help us all to have a clearer view - if only marginally so in cases where the S/N ratio is unfavorable (such as this one). I can certainly observe what I consider to be the rational self-interested choices of the various tiers of China's highly stratified class structure. A more nuanced view would game-out the choices we can expect from each of the 5 or 6 major classes, rather than making a naive inside-outside group distinction.
I withdraw the adverb 'absolutely' m'lord
I am sure you are well read on matters of the PRC but never-the-less, that is no substitute for experience of the place or the people; the number of
gweilos who claim great insight from behind a desk on the other side of the world is as long as the great march.
I'm interested in your description of the 5 or 6 major classes (a traditional view would be 4, a contemporary view that social mobility is increasing) - could you expand?
As a quid pro quo I thought you'd be interested in this interview with American Sidney Rittenberg who first met Mao in the 1940s and he spent decades living in Communist China - very insightful and poignant.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0468lw7Sentimental insight and bourgeois poignancy aside, Mao hasn't been even remotely relevant for a very long time. He's forgotten (except for the trendy Che t-shirt crowd), and spinning in his grave since Deng's "To get rich is glorious" mixed capitalism paradigm emerged decades ago.
Mao's Marxist idiocy caused 100,000,000+ Chinese citizens to starve to death and resulted in the demographically disastrous one child policy.
The one child policy, wildly unpopular everywhere and unenforceable outside of urban jungles, is being abandoned in yet another "FUCK YOU" to The Chairman and his communist impracticalities.
Anyone with an education knows his agricultural/riparian polices were an unprecedented disaster of mass murder, but also understands why it is impolite and impolitic to speak of that fact within CPC's zone of influence.
Please leave the long-ago miasma of Soviet revolutionary bluster and undergraduate armchair socialism, then join the rest of us in the real world of supply and demand, as the bulk of the nothing-if-not-practical PLA did around the time of Nixon's visit.
