The communist party is alive and well in China. The party still is in control of the nation’s banks and through them extends loans to China’s important companies. Government bailouts are highly controversial in the US, but in China it is the norm for major businesses to receive interest free loans and in general be propped up by the party.
The Chinese government still heavily censors the amount and type of information available to the Chinese people. Look at the huge Google/Internet controversy that has gone on there. And China’s record on human rights is still dismal. Communist China continues to enforce its one child policy which has resulted in the disproportionate abortion of female children and has lead to a major imbalance in the number of elderly versus the smaller proportion of the young population.
From the Boston Globe:
Quote:
China’s Communist Party has turned the conventional wisdom on its head. Rather than economic growth undermining the regime, the party has used that expansion to strengthen its hold on political power. Instead of the Internet opening up avenues for dissidents and bringing freer flows of information to the People’s Republic, the party has harnessed the Web to reinforce nationalism and bolster its control over the information Chinese have access to. Through its success, the CCP forces Western nations to question whether democracy is truly the inevitable end state of political development - and whether the party’s model could work elsewhere.
By sparking growth, liberalization has made the urban elites, who are critical to any political movement, less interested in pushing for political change that might upset their standard of living. But even as it has opened the economy, the party has maintained enough control of economic levers - banks, key companies - that the urban elites see the party as part of the creation of wealth, rather than an impediment to it.
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http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/id...munism/?page=2