… and destroy the Pentagon's dream of finding a new peer competitor to replace the Soviet Union.
Can you give my son a job?
Slavoj Žižek
- The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
- by Richard McGregor
- Allen Lane, 302 pp, £25.00, June 2010,
- ISBN 978 1 84614 173 7
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What we have in China isn’t simply a combination of a private capitalist economy and Communist political power. In one way or another, state and Party own the majority of China’s companies, especially the large ones: it is the Party itself which demands that they perform well in the market. To resolve this apparent contradiction, Deng concocted a unique dual system. ‘As an organisation, the Party sits outside, and above the law,’
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A true 20th-century Communist never fully accepts the state: he accepts the need for an agency, immune to the law, which has the power to supervise the state’s activities.
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But China is no Singapore (neither, for that matter, is Singapore): it is not a stable country with an authoritarian regime that guarantees harmony and keeps capitalism under control. Every year, thousands of rebellions by workers, farmers and minorities have to be put down by the police and the army. No wonder official propaganda insists obsessively on the notion of the harmonious society: this very excess bears witness to the opposite, to the threat of chaos and disorder. One should bear in mind the basic rule of Stalinist hermeneutics: since the official media do not openly report trouble, the most reliable way to detect it is to look out for compensatory excesses in state propaganda: the more ‘harmony’ is celebrated, the more chaos and antagonism there is in reality. China is barely under control. It threatens to explode.
Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis added. Losing China as a fraudulent “peer competitor” to justify an outrageously incoherent Pentagon budget that is 60% fraud, waste, and abuse is the least of our worries. If China becomes “the perfect storm” of poverty, infectious disease, environmental degradation, and these spill over to accelerate the remainder of the ten high level threats within and outside China, there are not enough dollars, or trained personnel, or weapons, or anything, to put Pandora back in the box.
