|
and their ilk, tip toe around Bejing's nasty record of denying basic human rights that the West supposedly cherish over all else...
I was sitting in a room while CNBC was playing on the tube. On the show, an excitable investment type of guy was hyping China. At first I didn't think anything of it, but then it hit my why this guy was different, way different, from the continue stream of hypemysters that make up about half of the yak time on CNBC.
He was pushing this company that controls media access in the top 100 Chinese airports, I believe he stated. You know how we have CNN on at a lot of shopping areas here in the USA. Only there, the media is provided, canned form, surrounded by commercials the company selects not CNN.
Okay, so why is that different?
Well for one, China is purportedly on the road to a capitalist economy. No more five year plans or cultural revolutions. Once, it seems, you taste a Big Mac, you can't get them back on the farm or, for that matter, the local reeducation center. So all these budding consumers are fueling a, by all accounts, booming economy. The rub here is that they are turning capitalist, I really think so, even though they heavily control the consumers in how they interact with the government.
With me so far? Good, cause here comes the juicy stuff.
One of the reasons capitalism burst out from the pages of stodgy text books written by and for the elite and into wide spread practice in the west was because of, so the theory goes, a democracy of sorts fueled the people toward choice and desire. You can't really have a capital based consumer society if there is no demand and demand is created by people wanting stuff. Here in the west, the consumer bubbled up from the bottom and neatly coincided with the industrial revolution. The fairy tales went, and still go on today, that anyone with the gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps could make it. Or that anyone who can make a better mouse trap will prosper. People behaved just like old Adam Smith believed and went for the gold. Big Time.
So what is happening in China? A grand experiment is being conducted by the Western Capitalists with full participation from the pragmatic thugs who run China. These capitalists convinced the Chinese government to open their markets to western style consumerism. The Chinese agreed to open the door but only if the government in China was still in charge of the media and all message related aspects of this new economy they were going to build together.
I firmly believe that this grand experiment conducted by Western Capital interests, the guys who grease the wheels of, for instance, the Bush/Cheney political machine, in order to see if capitalism can survive if there is total control of the media. They want to see if they can get the West to the same place as China where, it seems, just a spoonful of consumerism makes the repression go down.
My rant.
Peace out.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
