horse of george

China celebrated the 60th anniversary of the birth of the communist state yesterday with a huge, huge military parade [odd that Western styled democracies don't feel the need for grandiose military parades - we've got Santa Claus - a Sino cynic may wonder what that means [what?]] - but what struck me is how Chinese nationalists here were running round the city in cars [largely Japanese models - the irony lost on them it seems] with Mao's red flag fluttering proudly from windows. Since they've chosen to live in a democracy and since China was actually born many centuries ago which means what they're really celebrating is the advancement of communism under the dictatorship of a megalomaniac responsible for the deaths of millions of people, which seems odd given the choices they've made, ya know, living in a democracy, driving Japanese cars - I would liked to have asked them what the hell they were thinking, but realized their answers would not have untroubled my mind. And we would have argued, tempers would have flared, punches would have been thrown, all ending with me no doubt being arrested as an intolerant agitator. The world baffles.

related: from Financial Times via Marginal Revolution blog, as just one fact of many adding weight to my question 'just what in the hell exactly did they think they were celebrating with those bloody Mao flags?' [to be fair, it's a little hard to celebrate being Chinese and avoid the whole Mao thing - yes, but that's because China is still a communist oligarchy! - so were they celebrating being Chinese or being Chinese communists? or do they not note or care about the distinction? was it just mindless nationalism then? which, sure, every state and culture indulges in - but that thought still doesn't exactly warm my cockles because most states and cultures cannot lay claim to more than a billion loyal citizens all more or less under the control of an elite cadre of ideologues! that's not cockle warming]:

Today's Financial Times writes about the Central Organization Department of China:

To glean a sense of the dimensions of the organization department's job, conjure up a parallel body in Washington. The imaginary department would oversee the appointments of US state governors and their deputies; the mayors of big cities; heads of federal regulatory agencies; the chief executives of General Electric, Exxon-Mobil, Walmart and 50-odd of the remaining largest companies; justices on the Supreme Court; the editors of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post; the bosses of the television networks and cable stations; the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities and the heads of think-tanks such as the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation.

All equivalent positions in China are filled by people appointed by the party through the organization department.

I would not want to be on the bad side of the Central Organization Department. The full article, which is interesting throughout, is here. It's also related to why I don't see China just evolving into a normal democracy.

If China can't or refuses to or avoids through twists yet unknown becoming a 'normal' democracy, or can only approach such by means of a significant social upheaval that may in fact result in a more threatening, more reactionary, less progressive dictatorship than the one currently in power then it's to make a rather indulgent assumption to conclude economic concerns will continue to placate and render ostensibly irrelevant the ideological strain between it and America. I'm thinking history offers none or few examples of facts on the ground tolerating such an optimistic view of things.