China may not be democratic, but it's no evil empire. Boycotting Chinese products or freezing them out diplomatically won't fix corruption problems; in fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect. China has improved a great deal since Nixon went to China, and there's no reason to believe that continued engagement won't further the same process.
China has progressed economically tremendously. But in terms of freedom for its citizens, it looks like it hasn't progressed much and in some cases has worsened. In fact chinese govt. now uses technology to hamper free thought and expression by its citizens.
It is still an evil empire and a draconian state. Just because some (a lot?) of its citizens lives have improved in the last decades does not mean that the govt. has become any less draconian
China's freedom seems to come in cycles, but the general trend seems optimistic.
In the 50s after the revolution, to justify the new regime on ideological grounds, Mao sanctioned freedom of speech against the state. But after a few years when the party failed to deliver some of its promises, criticism began to pile up, and the party responded with a massive crackdown of the witch-hunting and labour camp variety. This lasted through the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, and was enforced by the cult-of-personality campaign initiated by Mao's wife.
After Mao died and his rival Deng took over, there was quite a bit of freedom during the 80s in reaction to the economic reform and the end of cultural revolution, where pro-democracy activism accumulated that eventually led to the Tiananmen Square protest. The government again responded with a crackdown.
After the crackdown, government became more paranoid in the 90s, "patriotic education" were ramped up in public schools, though it paled in comparison to the Mao era (no more witch-hunting, correction camp, public humiliation, etc.).
Then in the 00s the internet became popular for the middle class, and cell phone for the peasants, but the government hasn't loosened its grip, so rather than ideologically-backed student activism, grassroot vigilantism were organized by regular folks against anything from corrupt local officials to animal cruelty cases. These usually come in the form of protests numbered upward of tens of thousands. To let off the steam in a controlled manner, the state sanctioned these protests (not the case before) as long as they are focused on the "local" bureaucrats (provincial and lower). In the mean time, the press are gradually given more freedom to cover these topics, as long as they are "localized" as well.
Overall, eventhough the state is using ever more sophisticated methods to maintain control, it's usually in response to greater pressure from the citizens, and the state seems to be losing ground.
Sorry, I guess what I said came across wrong. I'm certainly not in favor of any boycotts, sanctions, or diplomatic freezings. Economic aid in the form of buying their products can't do anything but help. But that being said, I really don't have any elegent solutions for how to fix the current problems.
Things like this and the iPhone incident (and the pressure put on the poor man because of an innocent mistake), simply make me worried, that's all. Sure, the conditions have improved, but for the huge percentage of the world's population that is, just by chance, born into these conditions, I feel like we should be doing something more to advocate for their rights.
My grandparents were lucky enough to get out of China back in the 20s and 30s to give me the fortunate life I have now. I just wish more people had that chance.
The world is complex. Even if Chinese manufactures are not exploiting cheap labor, the computers that we are using also includes materials from Africa, where warlords sell minerals for making our phones and computers.
We live in North America, Western Europe and Japan are all similar to ancient aristocrats in the world economy. We are spoiled to death compared to people in country side China, Africa. While we sometime sympathizes their hardships, but we are unable to break free from the way we are living now. It is a big problem and I suspect we are unable to find out solutions.
This doesn't mean we can't try to solve it. But I guess after thousands years of inequality in different economic/social class separations in the world, I suspect we can reach a peaceful solution that may against something that are deep inside our genes.
