The Chinese state is booming: Didn\'t notice this comment for a few days ...
Now I think about it \"booming\" could go be interpreted more than one way, but I mean primarily that the economy is growing and the government isn\'t making a mess of it.
As far as coherent goes this is mainly by contrast to the previous century. No civil war, no serious threat to the power of the Communist Party, including self-inflicted amputations like the Cultural Revolution. State enterprises owned by the army are being unwound or sold off, so the the state can focus on what in business terms might be called its core competencies.
I was there for about seven months, and I spent a little time reading and getting a working ignorance of the language beforehand. I\'m fascinated by the place but I\'m not a guru of any kind. We worked in a regional centre of Shandong province (between Beijing and Shanghai) and travelled around a fair bit on the Inner Provinces tourist trail and saw some justly famous sights.
As for robber baron activity. I wouldn\'t be surprised if this happened, there\'s a sadly long tradition of it in Chinese government especially under the late Qing and the Republic. I didn\'t really see any of it. The Communists cracked down quite effectively on corruption by comparison, though family and friend connections are still crucial, in a way that would be labelled corruption in Australia.
There were lots of stories about corrupt or dodgy officials getting caught and prosecuted in the papers when I was there. They\'ll even execute high-level officials for white-collar crimes like stealing millions of yuan.
The China that I saw outside my flat was not a straightforward tyranny at all. I think it can be easy to forget, living in a rich democracy, the other ways that people and their government interact. There seemed to be a few cases where the discretion of local officials softened the impact of strict laws on the books. These people are their neighbours, after all.
For instance, on the main road outside the school there was an informal market where farmers from the nearby villages would come and sell their vegetables. Periodically it would disappear. It was an illegal market and the police would tell the vendors to clear off. It would usually clear off about two hundred metres up the road to a less conspicuous spot.
The state will still pry into or force you to change your life if you go against a big policy, like proselytising for a disagreeable organisation, or being a civil servant attempting to have a second child. Grand liberties are not currently on the table. But the China I saw left space for small liberties of seeing friends and working hard to build a living.
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