This is the sixth in a twenty part series. Click here for an explanation.
6. Nearly 40 percent of the world's population lives in China and India. Who are those countries' leaders?
China is an authoritarian (although not totalitarian) oligarchy, broadly Communist in spirit, but pragmatic in practice. The current President is Hu Jintao, who's a fairly boring Technocrat. China's leadership is relative stable and should remain so until the Chinese Miracle wears off. What happens at that point is anybody's guess.
India is the world's largest Democracy, with two large ideological parties, a Hindu Nationalist party and a pragmatic Socialist party. They map fairly easily onto the Republicans and Democrats, if you replace all the crazy Christian BS with crazy Hindu BS. There are also a host of regional parties that make Indian politics fairly impenetrable. The Socialists are currently in charge, as they were for most of the 20th Century. The Nationalists had a brief stint in power during 1999-2004 wherein they almost nuked Pakistan but decided not to at the last minute due to pressure from the business class. As the Socialists appear less likely to nuke Pakistan (or China), I would prefer that they remain in power.
Monday, September 15, 2008
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2 comments:
The way I see it, China's overtures of Communism have been on the way out since their re-acquisition of Hong Kong in the late '90s. The influence of HK's economy has been rapidly wiping out any sort of service but lip Beijing may be paying to Communism as a form of rule.
By the end of HK's 50-year deal as a special administrative region, they may even have abandoned some of their more egregious human rights abuses (this is me being optimistic). The important thing for any prospective foreign-policy architect to remember is that the export of western political culture is the most powerful weapon we have against dictatorship, and it doesn't grow out of the barrel of a gun.
Strangely, socialized professional athletics is one of the most prominent hold-outs from the Great Leap Forward - this may change now that China's finished with its Olympics.
Eh, I tend to think that our most powerful "weapon" against dictatorship is that living in a country that is a dictatorship really fucking sucks.
China, by the way, is not a dictatorship. It's an oligarchy, and the difference matters. There are multiple channels in Chinese society and government for interests to align, barter, and reach political synthesis.
Your emphasis on Hong Kong is a bit misplaced, IMO. Hong Kong exists as it does because Beijing allows it. If they wanted it to fall in line, no piece of paper would stop them. And neither would we.
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