From Zhu Zhe in the China
Daily:
The latest revision to the country’s Electoral Law, which grants rural residents the same rights as their urban counterparts to elect deputies to people’s congresses but does not expand direct elections, shows China will adhere to its own mode of development instead of adopting Western-style elections, a top legislator has said.
“Different countries have different election rules and a socialist China won’t follow Western election campaigns,” Li Fei, deputy director of the legislative affairs commission under the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s top legislature, told China Daily following the adoption of the latest amendment to the Electoral Law last Sunday.
Li, who has been leading the revision, said some people want to expand direct elections, but the current priority is to perfect existing direct elections at county and township levels.
Whether in terms of justice or fairness, a society must pay more attention to “substantial democracy”, which in China means that there should be representatives from all areas, ethnic groups and walks of life, Li said.
The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb believed the West — in particular the United States — posed an existential threat to Islam. He feared that globalization, spearheaded by the American colossus, might eventually destroy Islam by tempting pious Muslims with freewheeling capitalism, the separation of religion from government and the unleashing of decadent “animalistic desires.” Qutb, in word and in deed, took up the sword against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular government. Nasser hanged him in 1966, but Qutb’s ideas transformed the world by inspiring Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda theology.
In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union, and also much higher than that of India and Japan. In other words, the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman when China goes from a poor country in 2000 to a superrich country in 2040. Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth, according to my forecasts, China’s share of global GDP — 40 percent — will dwarf that of the United States (14 percent) and the European Union (5 percent) 30 years from now. This is what economic hegemony will look like.
One of the odder, more complicated moments in the history of architectural symbolism will arrive Monday with the formal opening of the Burj Dubai skyscraper. At about 2,600 feet high — the official figure is still being kept secret by developer Emaar Properties — and 160 stories, the tower, set back half a mile or so from Dubai’s busy Sheikh Zayed Road, will officially take its place as the tallest building in the world.
From George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, in Project Syndicate
A Morally Bankrupt Dictatorship Built by Slave Labour
From Johann Hari, in The Independent
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