Next up for China: National socialism?
Two years ago, one of China’s most successful investment bankers broke away from his meetings in Berlin to explore a special exhibit that had caught his eye: “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime.” In the basement of the German History Museum, He Di watched crowds uneasily coming to terms with how their ancestors had embraced the Nazi promise of “advancement, prosperity and the reinstatement of former national grandeur,” as the curators wrote in their introduction to the exhibit. He, vice-chairman of investment banking at the Swiss firm UBS, found the exhibition so enthralling, and so disturbing for the parallels he saw with back home, that he spent three days absorbing everything on Nazi history that he could find.
“I saw exactly how Hitler combined populism and nationalism to support Nazism,” He told me in an interview in Beijing. “That’s why the neighboring countries worry about China’s situation. All these things we also worry about.” On returning to China he sharpened the mission statement at the think tank he founded in 2007 and redoubled its ideological crusade.
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How would you tell?
Count to 10 on November 16, 2012 at 5:42 PM
What exactly is wrong with nationalist socialism?
Look around you in America… the GOP’s nationalist capitalism is decaying and dying… and will lead towards internationalist capitalism… which will lead towards internationalist socialism.
ninjapirate on November 16, 2012 at 5:44 PM
From what I understand Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” has been a best seller in the Arab world for decades.
SC.Charlie on November 16, 2012 at 5:54 PM
Sorry, but liberty and democracy are not “universal values”. They emerged out of a group of people and now that group of people is losing their liberty and democracy because their elite believe these values are “universal values”. These elites want to control the world and in order to do so they have to sell out their own people…
Europe and America are dying because they have party based representative democracies. The problem with these types of democracies is that too many people put their personal identities with the party above the country. This makes these types of democracies too easy to hijack. The biggest problem is that one party always figures it can win the next election by “electing a new people”. You see this in almost all western countries but especially in the US, Sweden, France, and Great Britain.
China can make itself more “democratic” without repeating the problems of the west.
1. Ban political parties completely so that one party doesn’t feel like it has an advantage in betraying their own people.
2. Go with direct democratic system… with limiting suffrage to university graduates.
ninjapirate on November 16, 2012 at 5:56 PM
Please define “nationalist socialism”, so that I may respond to your question.
Xasprtr on November 16, 2012 at 6:20 PM
Chinese communism has been indistinguishable from national socialism for decades.
Nessuno on November 16, 2012 at 6:31 PM