Fareed Zakaria Talks to Minxin Pei on HK

choi

Fareed Zakaria, China’s Trapped Transition. Washington Post, Oct 2, 2014.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ ... 052086a0_story.html

three consecutive paragraphs:

“Given China’s level of economic, social and educational development, it is highly unusual that China, among Asian nations, has seen almost no movement toward political reform.

“Pei argues that perhaps what explains the Chinese anomaly is that the ruling elites have been united, confident and ferocious in their determination to maintain a one-party system. In Taiwan, after Chiang Ching-kuo’s death, the elites split, as they did in South Korea, Indonesia and, of course, the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev. That split, between a reformist wing and a hard-line wing, has not happened in China.

“There is another analogy to the Soviet case. The pressure for reform in Russia in the 1980s was real but limited. It was pervasive in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the most economically developed countries under Soviet influence. And that put pressure on the whole system and on Moscow. Hong Kong is like Eastern Europe, a rich but unfree outpost of the empire.

Note: According to Washington Post, “Fareed Zakaria writes a foreign affairs column for The Post.”