Communism vs. Democratic

Through conversation, I found out that China is a ‘Democracy’ at present. They have officials who get to ‘vote’ on issues, but votes are usually cast in the recommended (dictated) direction. Even though this is a democratic country, I now feel I understand what a communistic government is like.

            When I studied abroad the summer of ’07 in Prague, I learned from a professor why Czech citizens act and respond they do. According to their history, they don’t want to move for work because they have been on the family land for hundreds of years and are currently dealing with two generations that were under a Communist government. In fall of ’07 I took International Relations 1400 and learned that historically, U.S. citizens have never felt a major loss. We were granted our freedom from Britain because they had to decide to keep India or the US and chose India so as we were growing and developing we were overlooked as inferior to the rest of the world. We entered WWII just before it ended and came up on top. As history repeats itself, the US is about to encounter a leveling where our International power goes from absolute control to shared international control- the mighty Roman Empire fell and U.S. will eventually lose it’s place as the hegemonic country.

I am coming to the conclusion that the Chinese act and have government they do because of their history. For over 3,000 years the nation has used a feudal system which did not end until 1911 and only became democratic in 1949. This country does not have the mind set or background to really know what democracy is and even in the U.S. democracy is only what we have made it. This is a major change for the Chinese government and way of life and I don’t see this as being quickly changed in 50 years, this is going to take hundreds of years. By then, who knows what this world is going to look like then? Will be all still be headed towards ‘democratic’ governments? A definition is what your personal history and cultural perception have led it to be. Different people and cultures will view democracy very differently so using the one word can mean different things to different people. I know this is a lot, especially since I just threw in the Language Convergence Meaning Divergence theory I learned from my Conflict and Communication 3525 class from the Spring of ’08. It’s a lot of concepts and I hope I explained it clearly here but I am very secure in what I am suggesting and if anyone would like some further explanation or me to make my explanation more clear, please ask- I would love to go into greater detail on this. I bet you got more out of this blog posting than you were expecting, I know I did!