China, Communism, the Soviet Union

I was talking to someone from the former Soviet Union and he was astonished at the way we deal with our teams in Communist China. Something like that would have never happened under Soviet Communism, he explained. Only vetted Party members were allowed to interact with outsiders then, not mere engineers, unless said engineers were top professionals who had been especially vetted. He asked, who is the ideological monitor from the Communist Party making sure nobody says anything that is ideologically incorrect? I replied, maybe the office manager, she's a real dragon lady, but really, they mostly are non-ideological and self-correct. They're just a bunch of nerds / geeks who love working with computers and want to do a good job, just like any other nerds / geeks I've ever worked with in the end. And besides, China is mostly Communist only in name nowdays, they have embraced what they call "market socialism" with a passion and practice free market economics (but still with major government involvement) big time.

He asked then how do they reconcile Communism and free market economics, surely they are getting twisted into ideological pretzels. I said something about Confucianism and respect for elders, but I'm not quite sure that's it. I do know that I get more automatic respect from my Chinese teams than I get from a typical American team (don't get this wrong, I get a lot of respect from my American peers too, but it is a respect I have to earn the hard way by going in there and kicking rear solving problems for the team and showing them where we're going, there's nothing automatic about it). Anyhow, I think basically my suggestion was that Communism was always just a thin veneer upon Confucianism despite Mao's attempt to make it otherwise, and that most Chinese really don't care what ideology their elders espouse but will follow their elders regardless of ideology. If their elders say they are a Communist nation, fine. If their elders say they practice market socialism, fine. They don't question, they just follow, because what is, is, and what will be, will be.

Somehow, though, that seems rather facile. I do think, however, that China is attempting something similar to Singapore. Singapore is majority-Chinese, and basically ruled as a Confucian dictatorship with free market economics. But most Singaporians are quite happy with that. They view the rule of their ruling family as being enlightened, having taken them from being an impoverished fishing village to one of the great city-states of the world. They are proud of their shiny spotless city. They work hard and are prosperous and have an orderly and peaceful city and it is good, as far as most people in Singapore are concerned. The only question is whether the Chinese gerontocracy is going to be able to pull it off -- China is multiple orders of scale larger than Singapore. We shall see, I guess. We shall see...

-- Badtux the Sociology Penguin