Freedom seems to be realtive.

[AnnaG]

I was just curious about what China meant when he said he was leaving the freedom of China and heading into the democracy of Oz. So I snooped a little in google and found this:

The hardest place to understand what the lack of freedom means is China, which is nothing like the Stalin model or Cuba or North Korea. It’s by no stretch of the imagination a totalitarian society. In post-Mao China, Chinese travel abroad in huge numbers. The country has the fifth largest tourist population in the world, on its way to being number one. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students are abroad; in internet use, China is about to overtake the U.S. as number one in the world. It’s a market society, brutally competitive; the economy is less state-owned than France or Austria’s, for example. Life is not dominated by communist block units; you can buy your own house or car, there’s no forced labor. You can choose your physician freely; most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.

But:

First, it is a brilliant system at making people complicit with the unfreedom. For days after the June 4, 1989, massacre in Beijing of democracy supporters headquartered in Tiananmen Square, there was great tension in the city between people who live there and the occupying army. How did the party respond? Teachers were ordered to teach their students a new song: “The Army loves the people, the people love the Army.” Parents couldn’t say the song was untrue lest their children repeat this back at school. You can’t bring up your children the way you want to. This is true for many lies the Chinese are forced to let stand uncontested. There still are committees for the defense of the revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren’t complicit, maybe you won’t get a passport. It may be held against your child when s/he applies for college. You and your family will be shunned in the neighborhood. You could be committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Living Without Freedom in China - FPRI

So who is more free, those that live in NorthAm, Oz, etc. or those that live in places like China?

 

[Dexter Sinister]

Did you notice this in that linked essay?

I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.

Written in June 2007. Pretty good call.

I'll take NorthAm, Oz, etc. over Chinese-style freedom any day.