A Little Difficulty with China

I'm having just a little difficulty with China these days. I keep hearing how capitalistic it has become, with the free market dominating its economy. Many Chinese come to the U.S. for study and employment, and then return to their beloved homeland. I don't see here the extremism of the Cold War Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, where citizens of socialist "paradises" were shot trying to escape into supposedly evil, decadent capitalist nations across their borders. As a matter of fact, there is still one of these Cold War holdovers adjacent to China: North Korea (whose border is closed to China).

When I last went to Walt Disney World's Epcot Center, I visited the Chinese pavilion there. There was a large gift shop which contained "things Chinese". I saw a lot of traditional stuff, but strangely not a thing about socialism, communism, or the "revolution". Not a single picture of their bigshot revolutionary hero and leader Mao Zedong was to be found there. Yet, whenever the Chinese government comes out with anything, it is still clouded with all sorts of references to this clearly outmoded system that essentially collapsed on itself in the mid-1970's. So why...

Why is it a crime for a Chinese citizen like Liu Xiaobo to publicly advocate for a peaceful transition to a pluralistic, representative democracy that more appropriately reflects its newly found economic freedoms? Why is the Chinese government so uptight about Liu, who is in jail serving an eleven-year sentence, being picked for this year's Nobel Peace Prize...even to the point of pressuring other sovereign nations to boycott the ceremony?

The extent to which the Chinese authorities are going to quash any dissent or push for democratic reform tells me one thing: that like the repressive Iron Curtain regimes, their authority is built upon a "house of cards". No one believes in the Marxist-Leninist theory that the State still officially sanctions; it's just that for anyone serving within that government to condemn or even criticize it is taboo, a sure-fire formula for losing one's job or even freedom. But once the door gets jarred open a little and more and more people openly push for reform, an irreversible threshold may be passed and the ensuing torrent of freedom will be difficult for the repressive regime to withstand.