Sunder wrote... "Not that I've been there, but the last I heard, China was still an almosttotalitarian communist state and free travel in China is not possible." Your information is almost staggeringly out of date. Even in the late 1980s when I lived in China it was easy to move about freely (well, easy isn't quite the right word when you couldn't book any rail tickets remotely or in advance!). Now of course, things are even more "free". As for "totalitarian communist state", there's not much communist left about it, except for the name of the ruling party. Right now, most of mainland China is about as capitalist as you can get, with the Army one of the biggest capitalist enterprises around (in the early 90s the central government informed the army they were going to have to find a way to raise money to pay a lot of their own bills!). As for the totalitarianism part,as long as you don't complain too loudly about the government, you're fine for the most part (particularly if you have lots of $$$). (Although every now and then Jong Nan Hai will decide to crack down on something and you may come under fire.) If you want to call it "totalitarian", fine. But like all western terms applied to China, its relevance only has a very limited meaning. -TD
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At 11:02 AM 05/01/2003 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:
Interesting. I've recently been reading a book by a guy who spent much of the mid-90s illegally tramping around the ethnic areas of western China (particularly the Tibet/Burma borders with Sichuan and Yunnan) trying not to get thrown out of the country too often. He was a broke trekker crewing for a crazy French photographer who wanted to document some of the minority cultures that Westerners had never seen before the Han government and Western television homogenized them into history, so perhaps that didn't make things easier; sometimes they were able to get permits for some of the areas (though not usually where they really wanted to go...) and sometimes they were able to bribe officials into ignoring them, but they kept getting caught and jailed and kicked out, because foreigners weren't allowed there.
At 2003-05-02 00:25 +0000, Bill Stewart wrote:
Is that sort of like documented immigrants (not undocumented _citizens_ like Mexicans who live within earshot of the border, speak no english, pay no taxes, and think they're part of Aztlan - perhaps there's an analog to this class of _citizens_ in China; I'm no expert on politics in East Asia) who are being jailed and kicked out of the United States, also for just about no good reason at all? -- Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. --Rumsfeld, 2003-04-11
At 02:27 AM 05/02/2003 +0000, Justin wrote:
No, it's more like the US in ~1870 or 1890 - the big neighboring territory had pretty much been conquered, though a lot of them still spoke Spanish, and the other big neighboring territory had been reconquered, but a lot of larger minority ethnic groups like the Navajo hadn't been totally wiped out, though the smaller tribes were gradually getting killed off or having their land stolen and getting forced onto smaller reservations and having US military forts put in the middle to govern them (which was bad) or whatever the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent out to "help" them and "civilize" them (which was ultimately more devastating), and there was a deliberate attempt to wipe out the local economy (there's no real equivalent to killing off the buffalo, but periodically "taxing" all their livestock is sort of similar.)
On Thursday 01 May 2003 11:02, Tyler Durden wrote:
I recently tried to explain the American first amendment to my soon-to-be stepson, who arrived from the PRC last September. He told me that China has freedom of speech, too: if you say something bad about the government, you won't go to jail for too long, maybe a few months, maybe a year. It's not like in the old days when people would get in trouble for that. -- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel Guns will get you through times of no duct tape better than duct tape will get you through times of no guns. -- Ron Kuby
participants (4)
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Bill Stewart -
Justin -
Steve Furlong -
Tyler Durden