I wrote in my post yesterday that I was confused about discussions on Scottish independence, which I’ve read on both sides or the argument, where the topic has been the viable size of countries.
Switzerland is a fairly small country, with lots of mountains, and no coastline, and is doing very well, but then Lesotho is also a fairly small country, with lots of mountains, and no coastline, and is not doing very well.
The world is big enough to find examples that can prove, or disprove, just about anything at all with respect to viability of countries.
The Cayman Islands are extremely small, and seem to do very well. That probably means that the Shetland Islands could do very well (especially if rights to oil are taken into consideration), if they they wanted to break from a future independent Scotland.
So where does it all end?
On another entirely different topic, I read in the Saturday Guardian about the Rural Reading Room project in China. There are some details here.
“How to ensure their access to books is an important issue. Central and local governments have spent a lot of money to help farmers gain access to books. The Reading Rooms in small villages have 1,500 books and 100 periodicals and newspapers, but in some of the larger ones, the Reading Rooms can have as many as 50,000 books. We are spending a lot of time and energy on citizens’ rights to know and to read.”
So – just when public libraries are being closed down in the UK to save costs, in China they are doing the exact opposite. Who’s got it right?
On another topic, here’s a short quote from Wu Shulin (邬书林), a government minister in China, on the situation of Liu Xiaobo:
“On the one hand we should protect the people’s rights to express their views; on the other, we have to ensure social stability in our laws.”
Having been through an immense amount of instability in the past 100 years, in China social stability is seen by the government and many other people as being more important than individual rights of expression.
This is something we in the West find difficult to understand.
Aristotle though the perfect number of citizens for a city state was 5,000. The bigger things get, the less an individual might count.
Fair point. If Aristotle was alive today, what with rapid transport, mass media, big bombs and the Internet etc, do you think he would change his mind, or not?
With respect to your second point, in China, the belief is still that individuals counting is not an important issue.
You can probably only recognise or remember about 5,000 maybe, so Aristotle might have stuck with 5,000. Of course, that’s citizens. He wasn’t counting women probably or slaves!
I think you’re confusing China with the Chinese government. Anyway, these revolutions always end up the same. You get Stalin, Napoleon or Mao, more or less the same thing. Emperors and imperialism. Authoritarian regimes never care about individual rights; they just care about power, which is power over other people really. Om Mani Padme Hung.
Aristotle’s theory is probably relevant to Twitter, then.
As I understand it, for centuries, stability rather than individual right of expression, has been regarded as the important thing in China, by the government and many (though obviously not all) of the people, especially the Han.
One person’s stability is another person’s compliance in the face of exploitation/expropriation.
Yes. And it matters less to some, than others, I think. If you have a generation that’s fairly rapidly much better off materially than before, then many of that generation will not want to jeopardise their newfound situation. Some folk reckon that the crunch will come later, when growth slows.
Without individual access to legal redress, it’s a brittle kind of stability. But there’s much to admire in China, as I’m sure we’ll learn after Rodders’ and Albert’s visits.
How about this for a potted history of revolution in the last 100 years:
The downtrodden rose up due to better education and communications. A baldy said “The downtrodden are too dumb to manage this. I can do better”. Once the baldy was gone, some nasties took his place and screwed everything up. After that, the downtrodden became fat, though not as fat as the fat cats did, though unlike the downtrodden, the fat cats didn’t actually become physically fat. In the meantime, the declining few who worried about any of this became Guardian readers. Then, the Internet happened, and this revolution in communications meant that everyone was now playing on a flatter pitch.