Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

The president of China, Hu Jintao, completed his visit to the U.S. this week. I must say that I am disappointed with Hu's performance since becoming president. Hu is supposed to be the first of a new generation of Chinese leaders. Hu and many of his deputies were trained as scientists in the most prestigious universities in China. With this background I would expect that they will be less ideologues than the previous generation of leaders who came to power as revolutionaries. Surely they would understand that just having a capitalistic economic system will not be enough. Social reforms will be necessary before China catches up with the West. At first Hu showed a lot of promise. He showed compassion for victims of HIV right after he took office. His government's handling of the avian flu epidemic was better than previous administrations' handling of other health crisis. I thought that having a scientist in charge will bring about more meaningful changes in society. Unfortunately this appears to be a false hope.

I can understand that democracy cannot occur overnight. China is afraid of what happened to Russia. A whole scale attempt to change from communism to democracy quickly was not successful in Russia. The collapse of the Russian economy with increase in crime have led to a backlash and Putin's government is reverting to totalitarianism. But having changed from a state controlled economy to a market based economy over the past twenty years or so, China should be in position to make more social changes. Improvement in human rights will not only make life better for the people but will lead to more creativity and thus move China forward. Some, like Andrew Grove of Intel believes that China can catch up to the U.S. in the next 25 years. I don't think that is possible. China has a lot of problems. Seventy-five percent of the people still in rural areas and are extremely poor. There is no way China can sustain this 9% annual growth rate. Social reforms that can unlock the potential of its huge population is the only way that can take China to the next level. If this generation of leaders do not allow this to happen it will not only be bad for China but will lead to deterioration of the world economy and threaten world peace.