Word: evens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While stories like these are everywhere in China, few people but the most emotional predict the regime's imminent collapse -- or even want it. Most who do so live in Beijing, but in this respect at least, the capital seems as representative of China as Manhattan...
...very willing to take to the streets again. But we elsewhere are more cautious. It's not that the propaganda campaign is working. Most of us know full well what went on -- if not the details, then the essence. It is that we have seen how far even Deng, who we thought was a good guy, will go to keep power. It may seem strange -- we are used to executions -- but ten years in jail just for talking sends a powerful signal...
...describing a social contract, abhorrent to an American but understandable, even comforting, to many Chinese. In exchange for letting the rulers rule, the subjects will be permitted by the regime to continue the economic progress they have enjoyed for ten years...
...Korea's or Taiwan's. And while neither of those nations offers the political freedoms available in the West, both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm continued economic liberalism...
...long, exactly? The Chinese live in a cage. Some farsighted policies have expanded the cage beyond what anyone would have imagined a decade ago. But it is still a cage, and even if it continues to expand, how long will an increasingly modern nation be content to live behind bars...