China's "middle class" and democracy

Excerpts from the Ted Koppel series, The People's Republic of Capitalism. These two scenes are designed to illustrate the attitude of China's upper and middle classes to the prospects of political change, especially democracy, in China. The key point is obvious: the middle and upper classes prefer authoritarianism to democracy and will continue to support the Chinese Communist Party as long as their economic interests are protected.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• China
• middle class
• democracy
• Koppel

[loveforchina]

This man is a businessman from Hong Kong

[jia2001]

@eastern2western If you want to argue you need to talk like a more educated and civilized person and study some more

[redwhitedude]

@rangergxi By itself not much, but that mixed with monopoly on power like the CCP leads to crony capitalism. Basically capitalism that unfairly bends the rules to their favor.

[rangergxi]

@Drednots Meanwhile in Scandinavia, Canada and certain small collections of people...

[rangergxi]

@redwhitedude What's so bad about capitalism, free enterprise and personal responsibility?

[willliu8944]

In china its the older generation who wants change for the system. The younger the generation, the more pro government and antidemocracy the get, especially as more and more Chinese are going abroad to see the world themselves. I don't see china adopt this so called democracy in the near future.

[alfredzlee]

China is just not like any western civilazations now and it has its own way to solve the problems. If sounds to me that in the video the government doesn't want to solve it but this is apparently not true. Imagine that a population more than that of EU and USA combined is undergoing such a big change, and I believe now the PRC is doing far more better than that in the West 50 years ago... People always tend to forget their past, actually democracy is also evolve with other factors in the society

[redwhitedude]

Vincent Loo is being a bit shortsighted. Maybe he is just being a communist mouth piece. The PRC has some serious governance issues. There are many thousands of protests because of this. CCP officials are responsible to the party no to the people. Unless there is a more effective political system to make officials be responsible to the people I'd say democracy is the way to go. Maybe Vincent Loo has become a crony capitalist. This form of capitalism will have serious consequences.

[Drednots]

Koppel goes in there lecturing how China needs to be more like us when we are more disenchanted than EVER with our own deeply corrupted government...We warmonger and kill innocents for decades and we lecture them.... The older I get the more I realize everyone is full shit in this world.

[redwhitedude]

@ireneismad we'll see how that plays out my guess is that certain people may not want that because the corruption has allowed to enrich themselves.