orange dave

And terrorism doesn't effect international relations as well?



I don't buy that. I've already given one suggestion for a (partial) solution.

Besides, the article I linked to was out of the Islamic University of Malaysia, not oil territory.

The Cultural Revolution was about Islamic fundamentalist economics?

No, what I meant was that the terrorists are perfectly willing to play China off of the US, by not attacking them...the Chinese of course won't care about anything that doesn't happen on their soil.

smallpox

You're just trying to get away by deviating into your own tangent, I'm not going to follow you there..

Yeah, Islamic world view is so functional, virtually no state adheres to it.

Again, trying to get away by creating your own tangent doesn't look really smart.
"China does not need liberalism"
"Liberal policies has helped it in the past"
"Let's inexplicably lump that into our conversation of Islamic fundamentalism just so I don't have to acknowledge that fact."

You're still not making any sense. You have no proofs terrorists have anything to do with China. If Saudai Arabia can't harbor terrorists, I can't imagine how hard it would be in China.

orange dave

See, that's the thing about these Ivory Tower theories and ideologies, complex interdependence and what not. When you're so comfortably removed from the world, you can reasonably assert that all non-market ideologies are the same. Chinese Communism is basically the same as Islamic fundamentalism, which is all derived from Soviet Communism. (That last part may have actually been a reasonable working assumption during the Cold War.) But these two ideologies are not the same thing, actually on an ideological level they're each more opposed to each other than to liberal economics. It may be possible to put the two in the same category and still be self-consistent, but at the expense of the utility of your analysis. If you really want to use your knowledge to help the world, rather than just appoint yourself as a referee to decide which government policies are good and bad, you have to get a little bit more involved in your subject matter than that.

Let me go quote...
So, China left the cultural revolution, therefore they're supposed to have a reason to fight Islamic fundamentalism? This just doesn't mesh with anything in Confucian culture (a culture shared by several market economies of course, not just Communist China.)

smallpox

I never stated that, but they're not at all functional. It's not like Burma or the DPRK has proven a viable alternative to the market and yet they're both different ideologies. You'd have to kid yourself to think autarky is at all valid, regardless of your political ideology.

You admitted yourself you knew very little about Islamic Fundamentalism, now it's basically the same, although opposing to each other to greater extents than other ideologies....you're not making any sense at all. Not only are you contradicting yourself in this very post, but you have absolutely no basis to say any of this. I think you have a misconception of how the Chinese government works (it is not in the least communist) and the natural assertion of religious law, but because these two seemingly oppose liberalism (although that would assert that China and the Middle East does not participate in the world market, which is entirely false) you made the over-simplistic rush to put them together and now are attempting to involve China in some terrorist plot just for that end. In other words, you're wrong on all level of your analysis. You are the one that is removed from the world.

Surely, I won't be taking knowledge advices from you.
I don't know how much harder you have to ignore knowledge to prove to yourself liberalism is not the working ideology anywhere in the world.

Funny how you added that referent into your post, while in the original, that sentence responded to the need for change to liberalism and you responded that China had no interest in doing so [changing to liberal ideologies].

That's just a strawman and you know it. At least you could attempt to make some sense within that strawman, oh well.

orange dave

Go back and read what came before that - the substitution was valid. The context was specifically about how China could help fight Islamic ideology, not just liberalize themselves.

Do me a favor, and if you're interested, read this article http://anonymouse.org/cgi-bin/anon-w...ew/issue23.htm from a guy that clearly understands Confucian culture. (from the same journal as the above article - this article is what led me to the other one.) I apologize for doing this, but this piece helped shape a lot of my understanding of Confucian economics. Though it is not anti-market per se, it is clearly also not an economic model that originated in the west.

Now, though they will move the earth to deny it in their public relations, China and Japan (and the other Confucian countries) are essentially carbon copies of each other. Really just about all of the most offensive elements of Chinese culture are present in Japan as well, if you know where to look - after all, there is a small (equivalent) neo-Nazi segment of their political spectrum. So I think it would be most reasonable to call China's economics Confucian - it shouldn't be liberal ideas that get the credit. Or the ideas that have helped China grow shouldn't be considered liberal ones. Confucian Asia has created a new economic model, which has only coincidental convergence with Western free market ideology.

smallpox

I skimmed through the article and concentrated on his claim that Japan is a central economy. That is simply false. While Japan still has elements of centralization such as agriculture, like many "western" countries, its economic growth does not depends on these industries. The bulk, if not all viable Japanese industries are privately owned and ran, like Toyota (see how well Toyota's nationalized counter part, Hindustan Motors is doing).
You say carbon copy, because all economies are diverging towards the same fundamentals of neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism is not at all an ideology yet achieved, even in the "west", it is a progress little by little and those who have embraced it more, get its benefits.

orange dave

What the author said was that

The point is not that these state-owned operations are more sucessful than their larger free-market counterparts, but that the government has more control over these 'free-market activities' than most people realize, because it's not done in the way Westerners would usually expect (direct ownership.)

smallpox

The nationalized industries, in the West as well as in the middle East, are usually the same: natural monopolies with high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. So water, electricity, railroads and so on. This is nothing new to anyone and even Adam Smith acknowledged that.

orange dave

okay...

smallpox

In other words, state involvement in some aspects of the economy is not restricted to Japan or the Middle East and surely does put their economic theory into a different category. Market failures do exist and the state is suppose to fix them.