Harold Myerson of the Washington Post is shrill about our new economic overlords’ skill at learning from America’s Best Capitalists(tm):
The military units that rolled into Beijing 20 years ago today came chiefly from the sticks. Isolated by geography and indoctrination from the liberalism flowing through Chinese cities and packed into Tiananmen Square, they were the perfect shock troops for Deng’s murderous reassertion of authoritarian power.
…
Two decades later, however, the troops who pulled the triggers have reason to wonder who won and who lost in the class-and-culture war in which Tiananmen was but the bloodiest battle. Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China’s cities — socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square… In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation’s economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven’t demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they’d be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth.
Mandatory disclaimer: I understand it is objectively & patriotically ten thousand times better to be a rural American citizen than a rural Chinese citizen. (Believe me, every time I spend a couple hours failing to make much progress in my pathetic urban “garden”, I give fervent thanks to my late grandparents for getting the heck out of rural Connemara.)
On the other hand, it would be nice if America’s most popular business export was something other than MBA seminars on “How to Fvck Over Your Working Class While Ensuring They Blame It All on the Urban DFHs”.
Twenty years since Tiananmen Square. Damn, I am old.