人质与绑匪同庆

（本文作于2009年10月）
   国门不幸遭毒手赤党恶魔强入侵，
   丧尽天良灭中华不择手段无人性！
 
   血流成河为"共产"饿殍遍野称"解放"，
   市井沉沦皆冤魂乡村破败哭悲情！
 
   谎言毒手污神州华夏从此变地狱，
   国破家亡流氓横豺狼当道恶令行！
   世道不平谓"翻身"窃国大盗掌大印，
   民族败类人中渣弹冠相庆行酒令！
 
   不堪回首中华民族误入歧途受尽蹂躏六十年，
   统治者粉饰太平用的正是奴隶的血肉与生命！
   熟玩洗脑术的魔鬼已使人民将地狱误作天堂，
   深患斯德哥尔摩邪症的人质与绑匪欢呼同庆！
 
   请听听自由世界的声音:
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   (http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2009/10/01/beijing_birthday_spin_distorts_reality_97226.
   html#)
 
   Beijing's Birthday Spin Distorts Reality
 
   By John Lee
 
   As the week-long celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of modern China roll on, the message coming out of Beijing is that China's evolution into a confident, strong, just and prosperous country under the Chinese Communist Party might be gradual, but is assured.
 
   Many Western observers agree. One is former MP for Parramatta Ross Cameron. In a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece published yesterday, he says China under Mao Zedong's rule was terrible, but now "the Chinese people are basically happy".
 
   Commentators such as Cameron are correct in one respect. China has changed a great deal since Mao passed away in 1976 and Deng Xiaoping assumed power as paramount leader in 1978 and began reforms in 1979.
 
   Yet, on October 1, 2009, the reform period since Deng Xiaoping took power will be nearing the completion of its 30th year - exactly half the age of modern China. The reform period will have exceeded Mao Zedong's 27 years of terrible rule. Assessing progress in China today by comparing what it was like under Mao is a much less useful and convincing yardstick than it once was. Assessing the speed and direction of reform since Deng came to power is a better measure.
 
   While Western commentators are rightly sceptical of their own government's spin, they too readily accept the carefully constructed propaganda put out by Beijing and targeted at both local and foreign audiences.
 
   China's GDP numbers are indeed spectacular. But we frequently need to be reminded that the health, wealth and wellbeing of China and the party are not the same as those of its people. Indeed, the rise of China is deliberately designed to benefit party interests, increasingly at the expense of its own people. Partial free-market reforms have been used to entrench rather than dilute the party's power. 
 
   After the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Beijing realised that authoritarian
   regimes become irrelevant at their peril. By controlling the most
   important industries, the bulk of the country's capital (through state-owned banks), and overseeing an extensive systtem of awards, promotions 
   and regulation, the government dispenses a dominant share of the most valued economic, professional and intellectual opportunities.
 
   More than 90 per cent of the richest 10,000 people in China are CCP officials or members. Only about 50 of the largest 1000 companies in China are genuinely privately owned and controlled. More than 1400 of the 1500-odd companies listed on China's two stock exchanges are state-controlled. About a dozen key segments of the economy are reserved for state-owned enterprises. The state still owns more than two-thirds of the country's fixed assets and receives more than three-quarters of the country's capital. More than 95 per cent of the recent $US586 billion ($665bn) stimulus package went to SOEs.
 
   Built on rising state-controlled wealth, the CCP has conducted a tireless and largely successful campaign to co-opt, and in many respects create, the rising educated and economic classes. This means that entrepreneurs, professionals, intellectuals, academics and journalists are better off doing business as a "partner" of the state. Not surprisingly, the most influential and successful within China's 50-200 million-strong middle class (depending on how we define the term) are the greatest supporters of the party. These are Cameron's "happy Chinese people".
 
   Far from being an independent class and the harbingers of Chinese democracy, these privileged middle classes are unlikely to jump political horses midstream and put their new-found economic and political power at risk.
 
   It gets worse. A little-known fact is that 80 per cent of poverty reduction in China took place in the first 10 years of reform (1979-1989) - a time when the party was releasing its grip over the economy. After Tiananmen, poverty alleviation slowed dramatically. Since 2000, those in absolute poverty have doubled. About 400 million people have seen their net incomes stagnate or decline over the past decade.
 
   Within one generation, China has gone from being one of the most equal to the most unequal country in all of Asia in terms of distribution of income. Extolling the modern wisdom of the CCP ignores the one billion people who are missing out on the fruits of prosperity. China's "bottom billion" are outsiders in China's state-led model of development. They have little prospect of rising up and suffer under the yoke of frequently corrupt and incompetent rule. Nor is there "order" throughout the country. In 2006, according to official statistics, there were 90,000 instances of "mass unrest". Observers in Hong Kong believe the true figure is closer to 300,000.
 
   When Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China, he declared "the Chinese people have stood up". Sixty years later, and after 30 years of reform, the truth is that the vast majority of its people have not yet been allowed to do so.
 
   (Dr John Lee is a foreign policy research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney and a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is the author of Will China Fail?)
 
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   (http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Overcoming-Chinas-past-pd20091002-WESM4?OpenDocument&src=sph)
 
   China's Historical Whitewash
 
   By Alan Kohler
 
   Watching the pictures of China’s celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Communist Revolution on TV last night was a deeply unsettling reminder of just how communist and armed to the teeth China still is. 
 
   The perfectly coordinated goose-steppers, the phallic military hardware, including 52 new weapons systtems, the thrusting statues of big-chested workers holding flags, the line of identikit party chiefs, with numero uno in a Mao suit: it was all there – North Korea on Imax, in 3-D. 
 
   Never mind the Great Leap Forward that starved 36 million people in 1958, or the nasty Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 or the 10-year Cultural Revolution that nearly destroyed the country, or the massacre of dissidents in Tiananmen Square by Mao Zedong’s successors. 
 
   The present day Chinese Communist Party remains one the most enthusiastic and systtematic history-whitewashers in the world and has generally succeeded in keeping China’s younger generations in total ignorance about their unsavoury past. 
 
   Clive Palmer will probably call me a racist, but I thought the 60th anniversary march-past yesterday was worse than kitsch – it was an unapologetic statement by the leadership Communist Party that they are still profoundly Marxist and they’re not going anywhere. 
 
   There’s no doubt that the survival of the Chinese Communist Party despite 60 years of crushing incompetence is a huge achievement. 
 
   And the past 30 years, since Deng Xiaoping got control of the Party in 1978, has seen average economic growth of 10 per cent per annum, taking per capita GDP to about $7000 – still a low income country on that measure, and well below Australia’s $44,000, but China is now passing Japan as the world’s second largest economy and is still growing at 8 per cent. 
 
   But imagine if, instead of the lunatic Mao Zedong taking power on October 1st, 1949, China had got someone like Konrad Adenauer, who was elected the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany three weeks earlier, on September 7th, 1949. 

Like China, Germany was a ruined nation, destroyed by an aggressive external war rather than civil war and Japanese occupation. 
 
   Adenauer was 73 when he became Chancellor and, amazingly, led Germany for 14 years, until 1963. He founded and led a stable democracy and integrated the FDR into NATO and OECD while reconciling with France. 
 
   He established a unique economic model that rejected the free market capitalism of the United States and instead combined it with extensive social welfare and regulation – not exactly socialism, but not exactly capitalism either. 
 
   While Mao was purging the capitalists in 1957 and then again in the Cultural Revolution of 1966, having slaughtered millions of his citizens with the incompetent economic policies of the Great Leap Forward, Germany was enjoying its Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle). 
 
   Now Germany’s economy is going backwards because of its reliance on trade and debt, while China’s own economic miracle gathers pace despite last year’s collapse in exports because it had become a vast creditor, not a debtor, thanks, in turn, to having a currency pegged to the US dollar at an artificially low rate. 
 
   Yesterday’s absurd preening by the Chinese Communist Party can’t change the fact that at least half of the 60 years they are celebrating were disastrous and much of the rest of it has been focused on covering that up, so that the Communists can stay in power. 
 
   Yes, imagine if China had got Adenauer in 1949 instead of Mao. Then they would really have had something to celebrate yesterday. 
 
   (Alan Kohler/Editor in Chief: Former editor of The Australian Financial 
   Review and The Age, former business editor of ABC TVós 7.30 Report, former Chanticleer columnist for The Australian Financial Review and a former columnist for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He is currently finance presenter on ABC Television News, host of Inside Business on ABC TV, publisher and founder of Eureka Report and Business Spectator.)