Free The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt the World by Shaun Rein

decades, but China has strict term limits and retirement ages for even the most powerful officials.
    Enforcing retirement ages and distribution of power has allowed for peaceful transitions of power and competing interests within the Communist Party, even as it remains one party. Most senior leaders do not come from the most powerful families; their offspring go into business to cement wealth, instead of staying in government like the Mubaraks did to make money. No single person, family, or small group has the power to plunge the country into chaos as Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four did.
    Corruption, especially at the local level, remains a concern, as it causes dissatisfaction and undermines legitimacy. Chapter 6 will explore how corruption is a problem that needs to be fixed, but is not serious enough to cause revolution. There is also no focus on a single ruling family, onto which the entire population might vent. They might dislike the system, but with over 60 million Party members, nearly everyone in the nation has a friend or family member who makes up part of the bureaucracy.
     
    The government sometimes overreacts to potential threats of instability. To Americans, especially those with a limited knowledge of China, these measures can seem brutish. Critics like Richard Burger, a U.S.-based blogger who lived in China for less than three years and who lasted less than a year working for the government mouthpiece newspaper the Global Times , wrote on June 26, 2011, on his blog, The Peking Duck, that the government is “a giant squid, tentacles reaching across the nation to restrict all aspects of life in the land it liberated, silencing opposing voices and existing solely for its own perpetuation. Celebrate away, while people who know real freedom snicker . . . and once again [it has] made a laughingstock of itself.”
    Undercutting Burger’s claim that the government is the “giant squid,” the nonpartisan, Washington, DC–based think tank Pew Research Center found in 2009 that 86 percent of the Chinese population supports the direction in which the Chinese government is taking the country. In a 2011 survey of 18 countries, the World Health Organization found Chinese are happier overall than any other population, including those in America and France. My own firm’s survey results echo those of the WHO and Pew: Chinese are generally happy with most measures implemented by the government.
    If government policies were overly harsh, surely they would not garner such a high rate of support. Even if Chinese disagree with certain rules and take issue with widespread corruption, the Chinese people, as tracked by objective metrics, clearly support the overall direction of their government. Support is high not because people are brainwashed or cowed into submission, but because their interests are mostly aligned with the government’s goals, and they see how much better life is than during Jiang Qing’s reign of terror. Bloggers like Burger are cultural imperialists , as defined by Edward Said. Rather than understanding what Chinese people themselves like, they pedantically write off supporters of the government as being apologists, tyrants, or dimwits who just do not know any better.
    In 2003, I was sitting in the drawing room of a large Beijing home in one of the main leadership compounds. Next to me was a senior government official, one who is often lambasted in the Western press. He had jet-black hair combed straight back and thick glasses.
    We were both peeling oranges and sipping hot green tea. I was a little apprehensive. If this official was as bad as Western critics made him out to be—and rumors about him abound—he might be pure evil. Undoubtedly he was one of the most powerful people I had ever met. Pictures of visiting heads of state hung on the walls behind him.
    “Little Mountain,” he said, calling me by my Chinese name, “you are American. Can you explain to me why the Western press is always