Igor Antunov wrote:India is a much sadder case. It has democracy and political freedom on the outside, yet the majority of people are too poverty stricken to participate in anything other than the quest of putting food on the table. The caste system still prevails, making democracy, liberty and political mobility only effective on paper for the majority of the indian population. India is a democratic paper Tiger.
Where in India the people worked hard to achieve development and advancement themselves (the government has certainly not helped them), in China development has been hefted upon the people by the state. This leads to two totally different mass psychological outlooks on development and success. The people of India take pride in their development, because by-enlarge, that development comes from their own initiative, where in china the development is the initiative of the government ruling class and not the initiative of the people - the people themselves do not have the psychological ownership of that development and success, it's not their success, its communist China's success. Thus apart from the pride in their achievements from a Chinese nationalist perspective, the pride in their development only goes so far as the direct benefit. Lose that direct benefit... and well....
Igor Antunov wrote:Literacy rate has increased greatly.
So? If you could cross reference this with an increase in the amount of literary works being published, books being translated (as is often a marker of development in middle-eastern states), or an increase in writers publishing books, then yes, increased Literacy is a boon.
Igor Antunov wrote:As for this dulling you speak of, we are victims of it ourselves. Addicts of mere luxuries that cannot last.
No disagreement from me about our addiction to material goods. But China is our modern day crack dealer, and you know what they say about dealers who are also addicts.