Empire State Building to go Red for PRC 60th Anniversary

That republic is alive and well across the strait.

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the people's republic...well we're still waiting on the republic part...60 years and counting....

 

You seriously think the Chinese government under Chiang Kai Shek was a "Republic"? Seriously? Every non-elite Chinese living in that era would laugh and ridicule this notion so hard it's not even funny.

Speaking with the older people in China, I actually get A LOT OF flak for talking badly about communist government and Mao(a notion which I developed and never questioned under American education). The people who were alive back then are thankful to this day that the Communist government allowed them the basic necessities to live normal lives.

You might as well believe that Saddam was running a "Republican" government in Iraq.

 

The same is true of Stalin, and he was randomly picking people's names randomly out of hats and sending them to Gulags to die, litterally by the tens of thousands. Kim Jong Il recieves the same undying devotion from the starved and beaten-down people of North Korea, who litterally worship the "dear leader".

This is the power that state media control offers, irrespective of how you choose to objectively rate Mao's job performance.

 

Chinese communist party did many terrible and stupid things. But when they first took power they were much better and less corrupt than the KMT party which they replaced in 1949. The mess started in with the great leap and ended by the end of the culture revolution, since then the government has been very good at raising the standard of living of the citizens even though it has a huge corruption issue (but that has been true in many democratically elected governments as well, and they don't make the lives of their citizens better).

 

Maybe not then, but it certainly is one now. That's a lot more than you can say for the "People's Republic", which is effectively neither.

 

I'm in Midtown...uh, Midtown Houston. Yes, that's it.

 

Has communism really been all that bad of a thing for China? I think its funny when that word is mentioned and people squirm and act as if communism is the absolute worst thing in the world.

 

The communist party in China did some good things as well as some bad things when the got in power (it is not 100% bad as many in the US would like to believe), but China today has nothing to do with communism at all other than in name.

 

I haven't been to surfside in a while and I am tied up for a few more days, will be talking to Bob and getting back to you.

Chinese rock!

 

what ever China is, it is the choice of Chinese people, 1949 or today.

You might not agree "people's republic" part, but Chinese people feel they like their government and their current China.

I'd have to repeat this again: mind your own business.

 

Really? I must have missed the referendum on that one. I thought it was basically one army beat another army and to the victor.....

Again, I must have missed the referendum on that, just like you missed the definiton of Republic - which, in political science terms - means a representative democracy, in which popularly elected representatives govern. Examples of this form of government include: USA, France, Japan, ROC. Examples of this form of government do not include: PRC, DPRK, Burma

LOL, or what, netizens will inundate me on a Houston Rockets message board to "mind [my] own business" ? Maybe you should mind yours over on Yao Ming mania dot net or wherever.

 

If any a country was tailor-made for communism, as it has evolved, China was the one.

 

Yeah you thought again. You thought 0.5 billion Chinese people did nothing to dethrone KMT in 1949 other than watching the fight between two huge (>5 million) army ?

You are making absolutely no sense when it comes to China. saying mind your own business, I mean your are good at talking about basketball. and that's it. Stop your stupid thoughts on China.

 

One thing I think we should remember is that the establishment of economic prosperity in any large country is something that is extremely hard. I feel like that on the whole, China and the generation of newly industrialized nations are doing relatively well to build themselves up without committing too many egregious acts of destruction. Considering the scale of the number of people we're talking about, this is almost something of a miracle. It's been too long for us to remember that a large part of Western Europe and America had to rely on slavery, institutionalized discrimination, blatant genocide and other whoop de whoops to get to where we are now. China is becoming more moderate and slowly, as private assets outnumber state assets, there will be liberalization, it's just a gradual matter that no amount of "tsk-ing" will accelerate.

 

Well, China hasn't quite wiped out two continent's worth of natives, displaced half of another continent and exploited the ends of the earth.

But I'm not going into the whole condemning the West schtick; it's overplayed. BUT, I think we need to realize that to get to where we are now in the West, a lot of really terrible things had to happen. While some of China's tragedies are inexcusable and certainly avoidable (if Mao hadn't been in such a personal hurry to build on his own ego and maintained a more balanced form of growth, a LOT of people would still be alive today), I think that recently (within the last twenty or so years), things have really not been too bad. There's Darfur and Tiananmen and all these warts but to be honest, other then Mao's tragic mismanagement, China's history is just another example of a country going through a terrible phase just to grow exponentially into a prosperous society. Changes are happening, even if they're slight and gradual. To provide for 1 billion people is probably the hardest task a nation-state has had to undertake and I think people are really giving China a lot of flak that it doesn't deserve.

For example, how come the world's ire has not been drawn to India? Liberal democracy, sure, but the caste system has to be one of the worst cases of discrimination this world can offer. Yes, there's the UN resolution and all that crap, but NOBODY here would be constantly referencing India's shameful violation of nuclear proliferation and institutionalized discrimination if it came down to celebrating their Independence Day. China has done good and it has done bad but to constantly rant about the bad does no one any good especially when it comes to an event like this.

 

Welcome to Bizarro World.

 

Are your parents still anti-PRC?

I'm a child of KMT 1949 refugees too. My parents have largely become pro-PRC in the last couple of decades. As are their friends who are KMT refugees too. I would have to say the PRC's relatively rise to power has made them more "proud" of the PRC - even though it was the same PRC who took away our lands. For good or bad, "China" has pretty much come to mean the PRC.