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0 pointsw1ntermute11y ago0 comments

> you can in fact have heavy social control but small-government in terms of economics ala Singapore and have a country make rapid economic process.

Singapore's rapid economic progress is due to anything but small government. If you read Lee Kuan-yew's memoirs, you'll see the lengths to which the Singaporean government went to kowtow to Western (and later, Japanese) multinationals. They rolled out the red carpet over and over, for years, before any of those companies made significant investments in Singapore.

Also, there are several reasons why generalizing the Singaporean experience to Sinosphere countries doesn't work:

1. Although Singapore has a lot of ethnic Chinese, the country is inherently multicultural and has adopted many British cultural traditions and practices.

2. The country is very small, making social control much easier than in a country the size of China.

3. Lee Kuan-yew himself has said that the Chinese government won't be able to maintain social control as the Chinese population migrates to the cities[0]. The system will have to change, and that will be very difficult.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlkPuamwrlg#t=2m52s

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dmix11y ago

Regarding #3, he said that the reason they can't control people as they move to cities is to:

a) the use of cellphones/internet spreads information

b) their ability to collectivize and locally share information in high-density cities

But have you read any recent books on China post-internet? They have largely succeeded in maintaining control of the peoples perceptions of vast amounts of issues. They might not be able to stop CNN/Tweets from getting out but they have an incredibly powerful propoganda machine that makes sure all the citizens distrust Western dissent.

So even with access people question it and

Second, the government employees a massive '50-cent army' to sway opinion all over the internet. Thousands of people who endless comment on websites in highly deceptive ways.

Third, the party co-opts popular influencial youth such as Han-han [0] and Zhou Xiaoping [1], and makes sure their message is anti-western and pro-state (with degrees of restraint to make it non-obvious).

Fourth, those cell phones have nothing but helped the Chinese party pick up and 'disappear' any dissidents.

So I disagree with Lee Kuan-yew that China can not maintain control. They have and are.

1 out of 3 people in China work for the party, how can they not maintain control?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Han

[1] http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/21/is_this_the...

seanmcdirmid11y ago

The government's ability to guide public opinion is quite limited, especially in the cities with the urban aspiring young who are already quite cynical. They get their best influence by pushing nationalism buttons, but this doesn't work very well for domestic issues.

I would say rather that the CPC manages to hang on to public opinion because they are quite stable and the economy does well enough under their leadership. But all the stuff that they do to control the minds of the public (censorship, wumao's, controlling the bloggers) is pretty much a failure, they hang on despite this.

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