>>14
Thanks. I just looked at some statistics on Wikipedia(I know, a questionable source)that places 80% of all the assets of the USA in the hands of the top 10%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States
See what I mean? Meaningful reliable statistics are hard to find, and I know, "There are three kinds of lies...", but I swear, sometimes I think that this kind of shit is deliberately obfuscated.
>>6 The Great Fire Wall, eh? Yeah, I ran into it. There were even times when I was there that Google was blocked, but it's not terribly effective, and many of the people are pretty computer savvy. They know how to use mirrors and tunnels and all kinds of stuff that I know nothing about. Most of the computing is done in internet cafes, and if you want to do stuff that's dodgy, it's a pretty simple matter of not staying in one place too long. It's not like they could ever possibly monitor all the activity, or that there are "spies" in the cafes. I'd add this: I'm a bit of a shithouse sociologist, and I've noticed that the Chinese people know how to mind their own business more than any other people I've ever lived among. I don't know whether it can be attributed to having to live in such close proximity to others, or lessons learned during the cultural revolution, or a combination, or what, but if you fulfill your responsibilities within your community, they don't give a damn what you do behind closed doors. They're also not the kind to call the police. I think that's because the police there are kind of like mean Andy Taylor's. As I've said, they are far more highly socialized, and the cops are members of the community who are more concerned with fulfilling their proper Confucianist bureaucratic role. The Chinese know that if you call the police, they're just as likely to kick
your ass for bringing a problem into their field of view. Kick the shit out of everybody, and let the Magistrate sort it out seems to be their motto. Someday maybe we'll(Americans) figure out that the police are not our friends. Back to your question, what I'm trying to say is if I posted something critical about the government there, and was loud and obvious about it, I'd get a visit, maybe a beating, and certainly most of my punishment would come from my own community. If I kept it up, then things would get worse quickly until I was completely ostracized by my community, and I was taken away. But it's pretty easy to do what you want if you keep a low profile. Oh, and the Banner(sort of a flag) is a pretty powerful thing there. I wouldn't write anything on a banner and start waving it around. That would bring 'em down hard and fast.
>>18 An "honest to god empire"??? First of all, China is over 90% Han. I lived in an ethnically divers area in the north that had many Koreans, Uyghur's(the people you called Muslims), Mongols, and Manchus, and you're just wrong. The Uyghur's causing the trouble are few, and far in the northwest, and the only thing I'm going to say about Tibet is that the arguments the Chinese use about Tibet sound remarkably similar to Great Britain talking about Northern Ireland. And the USA cohesive? That's pure nonsense. The entire history of western civilization and America has been geared towards making us
more individualistic. It's our greatest strength, and our greatest weakness, and representative of the greatest difference between us: They have a culture that has been developing for at least 4000 years that binds them together. They know that governments and laws come and go. We, on the other hand, have sacrificed the social cultures of ethnicity for the law. It is our laws that bind us together as a people, and if you believe that it's created a society that's as cohesive as China, then, well, I can only wonder whether you've ever been there, or anywhere else to have a frame of reference.