The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Thursday, 9 February 2012

INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (II)

Continued from:
INFORMATION ANARCHY IS GOOD - DEMOCRATIC VIBES IN THE MIDDLE KINGDOM (I)

Information empowers. Anarchy is good as there has been no order. Chaos is the perfect breeding ground to dimension the order.

But anarchy, in the geopolitical context, becomes a very subjective term.


THE SUBJECTIVE PRETEXT (IF ANY) IN THE PREVAILING CHINESE CONTEXT 



China has a huge middle class. 40 per cent of this middle class is urban. Recently China’s urban population surpassed its rural population.

Twitter is banned. Facebook is not there. But Weibo, China’s very own Twitter has seen explosive growth.  Over 500 million Chinese are accessing Internet now. Over 250 million users are present on Weibo. A report says about 90 per cent of the urban Internet users are microbloggers under the age of 30.

These two subsets of statements are going to have big, big implications for China in the days to come. Potent enough to push the country in a protracted civil war between the ‘have’s’ and ‘have not’s’, still most of the Chinese power elite barring few are not realizing it or probably are not in a position to realize it publicly.

The Chinese power elite have been in a comfort zone riding high on the apolitical priorities and complacent traits of this middle class, a significantly large population base.

The democratic thought that has been the way the Chinese power elite need:

1978, when China opened up its economy, its rural and urban per-capita income was $19.6 and $50.3 that shot to $606.2 and $2018.4, respectively, in 2007. According to latest figures available, the Chinese per capita GDP crossed the $5,000 level threshold last year. These figures compiled in a government report speak of a 23 per cent year-on-year growth.

Amazing, the common expression about this China story! What has made it possible?


Abundance of migrants - the cheap labour - the 160 million migrant workforce - compelled to work day-in and day-out to kill the memories of China's factory culture social construct. 


A large middle class, always on the lookout to earn that extra security and cushion that was like a distant dream in its previous generation. 


And a spoon-fed nationalist sentiment of China Pride. 

China’s per capita income was 2.52% of that of US in 1980 that improved to the level of 4.05% of US per capita income in 2005. Current per capita income of US is around $48,000, around 10 times to the per capita income of China. So the gap is huge.

Chinese rulers have been feeding its middle class base with a dream of life of luxury in the days ahead when China will be world’s largest economy. It is already the second largest when it overtook Japan when China’s GDP totaled $1.337 trillion ($1.288 trillion-Japan), 90 times bigger than what China had in 1978.

Though impressive growth, the perception about its prowess and mighty status, militarily as well as economically, that the world’s most populous country has been very deliberately developing since 1978, has an inherent risk.

The dream to chase and bridge this gap has been the prevailing nationalist sentiment among the burgeoning Chinese middle class. Their income is growing and no doubt, China has tried to distribute the gains to its rural areas, too, but there has not been much headway. Its corrupt system is failing it. Urban-rural chasm is getting viral. 

Characteristically, for the urban population, that directly reaps the benefits of models as being practiced by China, once people are fed-up of what they have achieved, they look for the next level. And the problem is, the swift pace of change in recent times ($2018.4 per capita income to $5,000 in just four years) has made the middle class sentiment change even swifter. Though controlled, they know the world outside China in much better terms now and are more prone to get agitated once they find the road to the economic empowerment is getting narrower. 

As already happening, China of the future will have a middle class thriving on technological sophistication, connected more to the world and to the Diaspora, and demanding for more and more.


The economy growth is bound to slow down and even stagnate in coming years. 

When such a huge and aspiring middle class doesn’t get its ends met, it starts questioning the state policies. And that phase of class-clash in the ‘classless’ Chinese society has already begun.

It has to have implications. Even by the most liberal estimates, China might fail in the coming future if political reforms are not introduced.

How this ‘layered-society’ China may alter the course of the history that the Chinese Communist Party is going to have?

Continued..


©/IPR: Santosh Chaubey - http://severallyalone.blogspot.com/ 
Posted by at
Labels: , , , , , ,