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| Watching UK politics blow by blow |
In the online comments at the SCMP are echoing this line. Look how well, how orderly, China is getting in with business! Compared with the mess and chaos of the UK! The mess an chaos in the west!
But do we really think that Chinese politics is any less brutal, any less cut and thrust, just because it’s hidden?
Well, no. We know from accounts of the court of Mao Tse-tung that it was deadly. Machiavellian. The swords were no less sharp, no less bloodied for being hidden. Why expect Xi’s regime to be any less scheming, any less riven with internecine fights, just because they’re hidden?
For all its historical messiness, for all its “chaos”, isn’t it nice that we can follow the UK vote? As I’m doing now. Vote by vote. Openly. Isn’t that nice? Well, yes it is.
And consider: the UK has had three female prime ministers and soon the first Prime Minister “of colour” in Rishi Sunak.. While China's allegedly superior system gives us seven identical Han men. In these days when diversity is so important? It’s hypocritical, especially for those who profess to care about such things, to say China’s system is better.
[ADDED: Hong Kong markets plunged 6% today, in broad response to all this. And: “It’s a bloodbath !”]
That said we could learn from China: choose leaders with executive experience. The Chinese leadership have all had executive experience. There’s also a leaning to leaders with STEM backgrounds. That’s something we in the west could do more of. The opposite is often the case in the west. Although, again, I wonder. Was Obama so bad for having had no executive experience? Kennedy?
Anyway. Bottom line. I still prefer “our” system. The Democratic one. It’s nice to know, as Aussie Democrat Don Chipp famously observed, that “in a democracy you can always kick the bastards out”.
You can’t do that with these “appalling old waxworks”:
