Here are some serious issues needing your attention:

1) ePub support: This is the mp3 of the book industry. It’s pure corporate selfishness not to allow me to read this format on my device. Don’t be Apple and tell me how, and under what conditions, I can use your hardware. How about building a machine that unabashedly “just works”?

2) Better PDF support:

• I want to be able to read most PDFs in portrait mode without needing a magnifying glass
• To do this, you need better zoom tools. 120% would work nice.
• Being able to highlight text while zoomed in would be nice.
• Actually zooming in on the area I selected would be very helpful. Why provide me the option then not perform the function?
• Even better, build a script that zooms in to the text margins automatically.
• And why, exactly, do PDF’s I email my Kindle never arrive?

3) Decripple the browser: Why, exactly, won’t you let me open PDFs from Dropbox or anywhere else on the web? This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

4) Decripple WiFi: I know you want to sell more 3G units, but it’s unbelievable that I can neither connect to my work WiFi network nor ad-hoc WiFi from my phone or computer. This is not a hardware or software limitation, this is intentional crippling.

5) I know this one is crazy – but how about controls for the music player? Like choosing an album. Or going back. Flagging it as “experimental” is not an excuse.

6) Open your code and let people fix these mistakes in a timely manner or let them build a better OS than what you have now. There’s nothing innovative in this code worth protecting. Learn from Nokia – open weak code to save the platform.

Regards,
- Trey

It does not matter who is running for office. It matters how they vote when they get there. Those are the things that affect you and your family – and trust me, they do.

The Economy – Jobs

Clearly America has an employment problem. People living in Asia, like me, tend to think it’s structural and most of those jobs aren’t coming back until America reinvents its economy to be more competitive globally. Luckily, smarter people than I have argued persuasively that the job problem is a demand problem. If demand rises most of the old jobs will come back.

What’s important, statistically, is that there is a very real job recovery with Obama’s policies. Short of a new Works Progress Administration, I don’t think anyone has any idea how to create as many jobs as we need without an even bigger (and politically impossible) new stimulus or GM-style bailouts saving more manufacturing jobs.

There have been fewer job losses since Obama came into office with job creation out-pacing job losses since February of 2010. We still have a long, long way to go. It is not for lack of progress that we’re in this awful employment situation – it is a testament to just how bad things got in the last year of Bush, where 800,000 jobs* were lost in his last month alone.

* the 7-county Jacksonville area has a workforce of 750,000

The Economy – The Bailouts

I hated them. You hated them. Socialized risk with privatized profit is no way to run a country. I was 100% opposed to them at the time. In retrospect, it looks like it was the least worst option available. Like most government programs designed in the middle of an emergency, it could have been designed a lot better. However, the TARP (bailout) loans are being paid back with interest. Not letting corporate America implode turned out to be a good idea. Pessimist like me who thought they’d implode anyway and the money would disappear were wrong.

We’re still waiting for the money back from GM. Whether it was worthwhile to save some of the last bit of rust-belt industry we have left is up to your own values and judgement. I can assure you that the Japanese and German governments would have done the same to save their automotive manufacturing sectors.

The Economy – Taxes

First, taxes are not nearly as important to economic growth as the some like to claim. Looking at this chart from 1930-2010, you see there is no correlation. Second, tax rates today (and under Clinton) are historically low. The “top marginal tax rate” is how much is paid at the highest bracket of their income. Remember the first $20,000 or so of everyone’s income is nearly untaxed.

Top Marginal Tax Rates

Even if you do worry about the effects of higher taxes on GDP, there’s an important question: where is that money going? Overwhelmingly, we see it’s been going to the economic elite without trickling down. For instance, 41% of business profits from 2000-2010 was in the financial sector (compared to 16% in 1986) . So that’s good for bankers, but what about common people? In many ways, even before the Great Recession, 2000-2010 was a “lost decade” for income growth.

What was a Lost Decade for most Americans wasn’t at all for the economic elite. The Y axis is a percentage of total household income in America – meaning the top 1% own almost 20% of the income to be had. The left side  where it starts dropping is at the end of Clinton years when the government had budget surpluses and a governor from Texas was campaigning for the top job in the land by promising to give it back to the people. The spike at the very end is the Bush Tax Cuts. Tax policy and income inequality are very much related.

Perhaps what makes this problem all the more frustrating is that most people have no idea just how bad income inequality has gotten. Try to spot the bottom 40% of our country on this graph. The bottom 20% are completely invisible. Our income inequality is far worse, apparently, not only than we imagine but what even Republicans and the wealthy say they’d desire.

Real vs Imagined Income Inequality

For reference, this is what the Democratic tax plan looks like compared to the Republic tax plan, using pre-Bush Tax Cut rates as a baseline. I can tell you this fits with my own ideals fairly well.

A final look at trends to see where the burden for taxation is falling as we lift weight off the wealthiest. The answer? The middle class (and future generations).

Tax Burdens on Various Americans

The Economy – The Deficit

While tax rates don’t appear to have much correlation with GDP growth, they have a fairly strong historical correlation with surpluses and deficits, especially over the last 15 years.

Despite what many Republicans preach, tax cuts do not pay for themselves. The Bush tax cuts made a huge dent in our economy, as seen below. The dark blue “economic downturn” section represents lost revenue during the recession – when the economy is bad, tax revenue goes down.

Our national debt is bad. It’s huge. But it’s not the most important economic problem right now. Keynesian economics, which arose out of the Great Depression and is the root of the common explanation that WWII got us out of the Depression, says governments should be saving during good times and running deficits during bad.

The government, because of its size, can take out loans and “stimulate” demand when private demand slacks off. If demand in the private and public sector both fall it becomes almost impossible to get the economic engine running again. Thus, government orders for hundreds of thousands of planes, boats, guns, and uniforms stimulated the economy out of depression in the 1940s. Instead of saving during the good times we were giving the cash away to the wealthiest in our society via the tax cuts, now up for expiration or renewal. Curiously, at the time, Republicans sold it as a Keynesian stimulative policy once the tech bubble burst and the surpluses they wanted to “give back” disappeared.

That said, anyone really interested in cutting the deficit needs to look the Tory budget plan. Overall nearly 20% spending cuts everywhere but education and health with a tax increase. That’s what serious fiscal conservatism looks like – making decisions, like they did, to retire aircraft carriers to save schools and hospitals. The problem, though, is that “it boldly goes in exactly the wrong direction. It would cut government employment by 490,000 workers — the equivalent of almost three million layoffs in the United States — at a time when the private sector is in no position to provide alternative employment. It would slash spending at a time when private demand isn’t at all ready to take up the slack”

Republicans don’t have a plan anywhere near as comprehensive, nor do they use numbers when discussing their budget plans. The Pledge to America leaves the Bush Tax Cuts unchanged and promises to protect all military and entitlement spending on the senior citizens, making it looks like this if enacted [methodology here].

Federal Budget Deficit as a Percentage of GDP

What we have, then are Republican policy proposals that objectively make the deficit worse while creating more income inequality and having almost no stimulative effect at all.

In a few years we’re going to need a very serious discussion deficit and debt reduction. Like “socialist” Europe, we’re going to need to make some adjustments in our social safety nets and entitlements. Social Security will need be means test (meaning Warren Buffet would no longer receive his checks) and we’ll likely need to raise the retirement age a year or two. Once Afghanistan winds down we’re going to need an evaluation and discussion of our security needs and which weapons systems and bases around the globe are needed and which aren’t. We’re going to need more  health care reform to copy Europe’s success in spending half as much as we do and getting very similar, and much more equitable, public health results vis-a-vis infant mortality and healthy life expectancy.

I think an honest discussion, without the ideologies of tax cuts and militarism, will show that we can have a healthy, growing, equitable economy with a balanced budget and comparatively low taxes by international standards. If we can have the discussion, we’ll see carbon taxes can replace business taxes. Right now, I can’t see that discussion happening for at least another five or ten years.

Before I go on a rant let me say what I loved about living in China. I love the food, the food culture, the flavors. Muslim Noodles has a place in my heart next gongbaojidin and… well, a lot of dishes I can’t eat now so don’t want to think about. The friends I made there are with me for better or worse. I wish I could be there for them as much as they are for me. I love the people – well, not all of them (there certainly are a lot) but most of them. There’s an indescribable curiosity in the youth, a joy at being invited into a Miao villagers house in Guizhou for a tour and a bowl of rice wine. There’s a thrill jumping into a river next to water buffalo with your motorcycle/taxi driver afterwards. We were given a good lifestyle, more than we perhaps deserved. It was comfortable. Too comfortable. This is something that could never translate to my students and friends.

Professionally we learned the ESL game enough to make a lot of money and have a comfortable life. We traveled a lot. We had a life I think we’ll never have again where for about six months we just didn’t worry about money. We had more than we needed. Once I got my Master’s something important happened. Nothing. My employer paid me 300元 extra a month. I was still teaching nearly 1500 students a year for 45 minute weekly increments in classes the school couldn’t bother to separate by ability or need. Students independently studying the TOEFL to study abroad sat alongside Tibetans with 50 word English vocabularies in the same classroom.

The lesson was this: a 外教 (foreign teacher) is a 外教 is a 外教. Watching my former Spanish professor, an American, work alongside me with his two doctorates plus twenty years of language-teaching experience in American collages make the same hourly rate I did showed conclusively that no amount of seriousness, professional development, or teaching quality would ever elevate the job above what it was. What it is isn’t much if you’re looking for a sense of purpose in your employment.

Personally, I also stopped developing. The first year was exploration, the next two years were the M.Ed at HKU studying Chinese civil society and getting married into an Asian family. The last year was making money and expat friends. 70% of my Chinese learning had been in my first two years, the last two years I think I was in linguistic decline even if my vocabulary expanded to include words like NGO, civil society, motherboard, and 暴发户. Most of my Chinese friends left the neighborhood I lived in and slowly I made some amazing, but almost all foreign, friends after the Chaozhou/Hakka clan left Baishizhou. My life was 98% English. Other than for the comfortable lifestyle, what the hell were we doing in China?

We’ve met a lot of expats in China who had been there seven or so years and seemed fairly miserable. They got stuck. It’s difficult going from that quality of life – comparatively high salary mixed with extremely low cost of living matched to low, low working hours. It’s a job whose skills don’t transfer out so easily. If you don’t have credentials like a PGDE or state certification very few educational institutions take your four, six, ten years in China teaching English seriously. And to an extent, rightfully they shouldn’t. The strongest skill you acquire most is cultural adaptation – not pedagogy. We didn’t want to be there longer because we saw how easily two years became three, three became four. We didn’t want to be there five years and watch it turn into ten. Not unless our Chinese was progressing, not unless our careers were progressing. And that’s just the thing – they weren’t.

The final reason why we left is I’d had enough of the weird. I wanted to live somewhere I could trust doctors, police, government bureaucrats. I wanted to live somewhere where we didn’t have to worry if the food was poisonous. I wanted to live in a place not run by the Communist Party of China – a place with free speech, free press, and a vibrant civil society. I wanted to live somewhere where I could pick up a real newspaper in the morning, somewhere where Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging weren’t considered existential threats.

So we left. I’ll talk about where we landed next.

Take that idea and look at this New York Time’s article about the iPhone supply chain. It’s a discourse that reinforces, uncritically, the global capitalism discourse. The title, alone, is striking: “Supply Chain for iPhone Highlights Costs in China“. We’re told that the bill of materials, the cost of all the parts that goes into an iPhone, is $187.50. The phone retails for $600, “though the cost to consumers is less, subsidized by AT&T in exchange for service contracts.” The total cost of labor at assembly is thought to be about 7%, but everyone depends “on Chinese factories to hold down prices. And those factories now seem likely to pass along their cost increases.” So now companies like Foxconn are planning to abandon Shenzhen for poorer provinces where they can pay even less to worker.

First things first, correct the inaccuracies: the cost to consumers is NOT less than $600 because they’re forced into purchasing over-priced contracts. The up front cost is less, but Apple is getting their $600 from AT&T (and other companies), and those companies are getting that money back from customers.

Now, let’s do the math. So the labor cost of assembly an iPhone is $6.54 on a phone that Apple gets $600 for. So the New York Times writes an article not about the obscene profits Apple is making – somehow making more money selling gadgets than Wal-Mart makes selling, well, everything – but about how 1% of the retail cost, the labor, is getting more expensive. The article, afterall, is about “the costs of China”, which eat into the profits of Apple. And those costs they refer to are labor.

You don’t need to be a labor rights activist to see the issue with this. The problem isn’t Foxconn, the problem isn’t Chinese labor. The problem is that we’re comfortable with the idea of Apple sharing 1% of the retail price of their product with the people that make it. This is the world we choose to construct and live in. The “Newspaper of Record” will even write an article about their plight of rising costs and the steps they’re taking to combat having to share, god forbid, 2% of their retail price with the workers who make the phone.

I should acknowledge my own blind spot by not writing about the cost of labor mining the materials that go into the iPhone. If the Chinese factory workers are only getting 1%, the cut the Congolese miners who pull the raw material out of the earth get must be sickeningly small.

our common point was that ethics is about responsibilities toward others in our lives. we differed in the groups we chose as our ethical point of reference. more interestingly still was my friends’ idea that care of the self (by not smoking pot) was in fact an ethical question because one’s body belongs to family and friends and not primarily to some self.

I don’t so much disagree as think there’s a different level of analysis that explains things easier. Mary Ann is absolutely right that ethics towards others explains the difference, but I don’t think we need to go so far as to say that in modern urban Chinese society there is a limited idea of “self” and that your family owns your body.

What I’ve been saying about the “Confucian Blind Spot” seems to apply here perfectly well. The issue at play is that in Chinese society the rest of society, both individuals and any idea of a “Greater Good”, are ignored at the expense of help those in your own “circle”. Confucian, and post-Confucian, society is modeled in a way that someones relationship to you defines your responsibilities to them. Others are necessarily people you know, there is no other “Other”. That cheating on a test hurts somebody else who you don’t know, but deserves it more, means less than getting into a good college and later supporting your family at a higher level. It’s a collective, rather than individual, selfishness.

I want to write a belated response Stan Abram’s (from China/Divide) thought-provoking take on the SkyPeaceDoor Incident of the last year of the 1980s. They make what I think is a fundamentally profound point that everyone, everywhere should consider about the things they deem deeply significant – which is that the an event’s significance is a social construction of “selective attention.” This goes for 9/11, terror attacks, SkyPeaceDoor and other political or symbolic events that have meaning to us. More people die every year from industrial accidents in China than did all the Americans who died in the Vietnam War – so where is their Memorial Wall or any acknowledgement of their sacrifice? We choose to dwell on, glamorize, and remember the thousand or so who lost their lives in the SkyPeaceDoor but we choose to ignore other deaths. Why?

The rebuttal deals with intention. I often ask a rhetorical question – how do you judge who was worse, Mao who starved 30+ million Chinese citizens during the Great Leap Forward out of incompetent megalomania or the Japanese who killed 30+ million Chinese civilians with modern weapons of war? If I were St. Peter, both would be punished equally but I’d venture to say most people instinctively feel that the Japanese committed a greater evil. I don’t think I’d be going too far to say this is a normative value, existing across most cultures. It’s getting into the indescribable heart of ethical judgments to do something intentionally bad. Sending the tanks and troops to open fire on unarmed hunger strikers demanding a change from precisely that sort of governance is an intentional evil on a scale entirely different from a cheap baofahu boss skimping on safety at the coal mine – even if the collective negligence of those bosses create a much, much higher body count. There’s something to be said of workers voluntarily working in unsafe conditions versus young idealistic students making a stand for a better, more pluralistic, future and taking a 7.62 millimeter bullets in the backs of the heads while escaping down a hutong alley as a result.

My second rebuttal concerns Abram’s larger point that Western media has constructed the significance of this incident in a way where it’s deeply important to understanding China outside of China, but almost completely ignored inside of China. It’s a curious point that ignores the way media works in different contexts. Sometimes events are manipulated by mass media in a way that truly “produces” an important event (instant thought: Elian Gonzales), sometimes they’re genuine collective expressions of emotion, and sometimes they’re actively suppressed by a ruling class actively involved in rewriting history. But sometimes they’re just important too. Consider 9/11 – the media helped make 9/11 become what it was remembered but they weren’t “manufacturing” it – they were delivering (on loop) what really happened. That terror, panic, anger, sadness that most of us felt were real even if those feelings were amplified by watching the crashes and collapses two hundred times an hour. That 3000 people and not 10,000, as most of us fear, died does not heavily detract from the power of the event itself on society even if it did reduce the negative impact on individual families and social networks significantly.

The SkyPeaceDoor Incident did not deeply affect families, individuals, and social networks in China. Those thousand dead students are a bad flu season in a country of over a billion. It did,however affect the socio-political fabric of China in very important ways that CNN or BBC doesn’t really understand. It is not just “selective attention” or a social construction. Those who stood up for change at that moment in time either surrendered to power, hid, were sent to labor camps, or were killed. You don’t forget that kind of thing if you’re a person who likes to make in impact in your community . Those most primed to affect change in China today know enough about what happened and to embrace timidity as the only way to deal with those with powers. Jesus, if they’d intentionally murder hunger strikers in public, what would they do to a rights lawyer? Disappear them? The NGO and civil rights leaders, lawyers, free thinkers, and democratically-minded Party members know their place. Even if they don’t all have helpful visual aid of a picture of a man standing in front of a tank holding grocery bags, they know that’s what happens when you stand up to be heard saying what everyone already knows. And it’s frightening.

….are we monsters who pay people to throw away dead babies, give children poisonous vaccines, eat food cooked with gutter grease, and kill people out of revenge, however justified? As we are becoming more powerful in the world, we must ask ourselves: what are our values?

I want to jump off a cliff and straight into something out of my league and try to explain what I feel, sometimes, is a a lack of morality in China. Now, this is a difficult thing to say. The Chinese are often some of the most moral and honest people you could ever hope to find. To parents, for instance, the Chinese I know would stop at nothing to ensure their happiness. What those parents expect from their children, however, might be a different issue. There’s something deeper and fundamentally flawed about Chinese society today and I think it’s been around for a long time. That something, I think, is a call to a conform to a Greater Good.

Fei Xiaotong once described the structure of Chinese society as being like the ripples from a pebble thrown into a lake. Each ring is a different layer of guanxi (relationships) with the closest being the strongest. For those in the innermost ring you stop at nothing to help them and they for you. My Chinese friends are the most loyal I could ever hope to find. They (seriously) offered to have someone beat up my wife’s boss when I first met her years ago. Today a student showed me an Armani watch a friend gave him upon returning from America. Likewise, children in Shenzhen often give almost all their earnings to their parents back home after deducting for basic living expenses.

But then there’s the darker side. A friend of a friend – an American – went to an ATM in Luohu late at night and was approached by a gang of robbers. He took his card and fled. He ran into a parked taxi and screamed “go go go!”. The taxi driver turned off the car, took the keys, and walked away. The gang beat and stabbed the man who continued to resist. I had another friend attacked outside the gates of his college while the guards who knew him stood by and watched. He had stepped in to help a woman being attacked by a drunk boyfriend. My Chinese friends told him he should had never have gotten involved. There are also multiple stories of bus robberies where the robbers wait till the next stop to get off. Even though everyone knows what just happened, they let them off. To stretch the issue, it’s not to difficult to imagine the Japanese taking the country so easily – nobody stood up to them. It was someone elses problem, no theirs, ad infinitum. Chiang Kai-shek/蒋介石 couldn’t even be bothered to fight them.

The issue, then, is that outside those rings – those relationships – there’s nothing. Meiguanxi, as the Chinese would say. It’s not unimportant that the first time the Chinese ever donated money on a massive and collective scale was in 2008 after the Wenchuan Earthquake. My research on civil society/NGOs in China has led me down a similar path – that there is almost no civil society here. The core institutions of China are those guanxi circles – business, relatives, and friends – and the Party.

Instead of complaining about, I want to attempt to answer the question of why it’s like this. Here’s my stab. Confucianism is fatally flawed by a gigantic blind-side that has forever plagued the Middle Kingdom. Confucianism preaches responsibility to another, but not the Other. The Greater Good, for Confucius, was byproduct of everyone was doing what they were supposed to do. When kings acted like proper kings and sons acted like proper sons everything would flow along harmoniously. Bear in mind that Confucianism isn’t just some patriarchal moral philosophy it’s sometimes made out to be. Husbands and kings had a great deal of responsibility to the people under them. These were not the Lord-Serf relationships of Europe. So with the king/father paying tribute to his people/wife and the people/wife paying tribute to him what could go wrong?

The Blind Side. Outside of those relationships there are no other responsibilities to other people. How are other kings supposed to act towards other kings? Other fathers to other men?

Where Jesus, Buddha, et all summed it up with “treat others as you’d like to be treated”, Confucius took a different road, “treat others the way they’re supposed to be treated” but with a fairly limited definition of “other.”

This is not to say that all “Westerners” follow this path, only that this is a bedrock philosophy of Western Civilization. Some of the greatest progressive social changes of our time have come from simply confronting the issue, are we treating the Other right? The long battle for civil rights in America came by identifying the descendants of slaves as an equal other. From there, the rest of the equation was simple.

She ends her essay with,

I sincerely doubt that the all Chinese hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

I think my answer, likewise, is no.

Well I can’t do that because I don’t have the transcript, but I’ll just tell you what he said during an NPR interview about his new book “China Road.” A listener called and asked what the social life was like for the millions of young migrants pouring into the new boomtowns of China. Hessler responded that the first thing you notice in these cities is the lack of institutions. There is no church, no volunteer groups, no libraries with reading groups, no coffee shops with a subculture hanging around them. It’s really just the Party and the businesses and millions of individual people and (sometimes) their families. Strong social groups would form at workplaces and would outlast that particular job, but there weren’t many friendships being formed outside that because of the aforementioned lack of institutions.

It reminded me of a recent conversation I had with a student about why I wanted to leave China, and I mentioned the suffocating political situation. He blew that idea off at first saying that it didn’t pertain to me  as a foreigner, but that’s precisely the point. I’m a political person. I want to be involved. Hell, I’ve entertained the idea of trying to be the first American to join the CCP just to have a place where I can talk politics! Wherever I wind up after this I want to be involved, not just an observer. That’s impossible in China. It’s even difficult to be an accurate public observer without having to be careful about what you say.

And that gets us back to NGOs. I’m an amatuer student of Chinese history and I can say with confidence that, outside religious and anti-government groups, there just isn’t a precedent for civil society. In fact, there’s no precedent for “society” at all in the macro-sense before Mao Zedong (or maybe Sun Yat-sen for the elites).

This is where I remember Fei Xiaotong arguing that China’s is, in it’s own way, more deeply selfish than some Western cultures. In traditional, and modern, Chinese society ones web of responsibility doesn’t extend past those who you have a relationship guanxi with. Traditional (and modern) Chinese society is modeled like a the waves of a pebble thrown into a lake, with you stopping at nothing to help those closest and vice-versa. Beyond that, though, you might as well be from Mars. There’s no room for a state in that model, much less society. Follow this thought through and you can see a rationalization for Mao Zedong’s basic political arguments and the fenqing nationalist youth today. It’s a country that doesn’t hold together well without a lot of prodding.

What we’re left then are NGOs that don’t have roots in some Toquevillian notion of civil society. No. They’re more like foreign companies with local branches. This was something I heard a lot from people working in the field when I did research. Real civil society is reaching from ground up, people with real needs collectively reaching up and out for help. That’s not happening in China. In fact, it’s actively being prevented.

Hence the great trade off of government. To paint in broad strokes and risk some coloring outside the lines, or to paint in fine strokes, which results in cleaner work, but at a bigger price? To let each pull in a different direction, or to have leadership and one decided direction, even if it may be an incorrect one at times? To afford the inefficiencies of debate, consensus and minority interests, or to address the greater good in a utilitarian manner, even if at the risk of alienating the minority?

America was once the greatest experiment in government in the world–the shining “city on a hill.” Today, Beijing’s running the next great experiment in government, a gradual evolution from classic communism to a social democracy with Chinese characteristics. Have recent events made Americans so nervous about our “city on a hill” status as to wish failure upon China, and fault-find its every step?

My best contribution to this idea is this: if the Chinese Communist Party allowed all of it’s members to vote for the top leadership, China would be roughly as democratic as America was in 1776. To wit, that would be 79 million people in a population of 1.3 billion or about 6% suffrage. Remember, in America’s most enlightened age only white land-owning men could vote in most states. That would mean ~60% of white men could vote, men counting for half the population, meaning only 30% of white adults could vote. My Google-Fu is failing me at finding the post-colonial demographics were of white, Native American, and slave populations but you get the picture though. Perhaps more Americans could vote in 1776 but it was anything but universal suffrage.

A second observation is that I prefer the Chinese government to the Filipino government, though I prefer the Philippines more open society (The Inquirer is one of the best newspapers on the planet!). A free press, civil society, and rule of law, for me, are the foundations of good governance that can approximate the positive effects of voting. Voting, in and of itself, does not make a democracy or good governance, lest anyone forget Hamas in Gaza. There is a culture of democracy and I think China and the Philippines fall far from it. Voting means understanding the issues, respecting honest debate, and voting for something more than tribal/clan or economic loyalties. I would argue that America, right now, is losing this culture. When a majority of Americans oppose a piece of Health Care Reform while also supporting the policy contents inside it, something is seriously amiss. I don’t see a lot of difference between the Tea Partiers/GOP Two Minutes of Hate and poor Filipinos being bought off with a bag of rice by parties with no platforms (really, go look at the political party platforms there – there are none!). Neither are terribly fit to vote when you’re voting on personalities and instead of real policy.

My final submission is this. China/Divide is far too optimistic about the scope and possibilities of reform. The problem with my thought experiment at the beginning is that this is a very safe idea not being considered. China has a lot of governing institutions that could be reformed with just a bit more accountability and transparency but they’re it’s just not happening, nor is it even being talked about publicly. Class and village elections are cheap glaze over some very deep structural problems. There are no real reform proposals on the table. Though the CCP’s ideas and goals have changed over the past 30 years, there has been almost no change in governance. The simple truth is that other levers of democratic governance – civil society, rule of law, and a free press – are being constantly weakened. When lawyers stop disappearing, when world-respected NGOs aren’t being accused of “infiltrating our interior”, and when the press stops getting memos like this, I’ll start believing that there’s anything shining about this example. It’s fine that someone wants to stand up in lead the boat of squabbling people, it’s another thing to throw dissenters to the sharks.

I taught for a year in America but left before I was a certified in Florida. I decided, on that boat, to do whatever the hell I could to get certified or otherwise value added. Stay in China, pick a good EFL job, and a pave a road somewhere else. Within a month I had applied to Hong Kong University for their Master of Education program. Almost three years later I’m in those high rises with my wife and we’re both making those salaries, I’ve got the M.Ed, but I’m still an EFL teacher.

That’s where a new chapter in my life begins. I want out. I want out of China, I want out of English teaching, and I’ve set a deadline to be out by the end of this year. We’ll see. It’s harder than it seems. In the meantime I’ll be blogging about it. Why I want it, what the prospects are, what I accomplished in China, what my future is with China, and all the rest.