From Egypt to China

Recently a friend asked my opinion about the Egyptian revolution and how Chinese people may react to it. The topic is timely and illuminating and thus I would like to share my answer to the readers. The Egyptian revolution is remarkable to the contemporary history, but its impact to China and the Chinese people in the near future will be limited.

Egypt

The Egyptian revolution occurred with the background of the Web-2.0 booming and the economic recession. The booming of Web 2.0 has brought the world wealth accumulation. The economic recession did, however, exactly the opposite. This pair of contradiction composed a main melody in the past decade. The Egyptian revolution was an explosive release of the said contradiction in the Middle East.

Accompanied with the Web-2.0 booming it is the trend of globalization. The world becomes flatter than before. The economic recession, on the other hand, warns us a terrible side effect of the world being flattened. The dams and other traditional landscape obstacles that used to preventing the flood of the global economy river have gradually lost their functionality in this newly flattened world. Globalization is both of a primary contributor of the economic growth in the last decade and a primary cause of the economic recession at the end of the decade. As we all know, the flood in a plain usually lead to greater destruction than it is in a valley surrounded by mountains. Besides the other internal reasons, the said contradiction is the main external factor for the Egyptian revolution.

In this evolution, the Egyptians were not pursuing the idealistic freedom. They were (and are) looking for better life. The fallen of the Mubarak administration was not due to the lack of freedom in the nation. It was, however, due to that the lack-of-freedom model had become the inevitable obstacle for the economic growth of Egypt. As I always said, the Web evolution is not just about the Web, it is a social evolution in essence. The Egyptian revolution is a typical example of how the virtual world evolution has been extended to the real world.

China

If we apply the same scale to study China, immediately we can see the difference. The economic landscape of China has not been flattened omnidirectionally during the last decade as it was in some other nations such as Egypt. Although China is one of the primary beneficiaries of globalization, China has very carefully prevented itself from being flattened unconditionally. By contrast, China is one of the few nations that have intentionally constructed the new barriers to fight against the technological improvement. Many critics have criticized what China did. Especially from the ethical point of view, I also agree to the critics. But at the same time we must admit the fact. It is these efforts of being against the tide of globalization that survives China from the economic recession. Due to the same reason, the chance of China being significantly affected by the explosive Egyptian revolution is very low.

Another factor in the scheme is the people in China. Unlike the Egyptians, most of the Chinese in mainland China are atheists. It means that they significantly care more about the present life than the life in future, let it alone the life after death. Therefore, it is very unlikely, if ever possible, to appeal their attention by the pure moral value. On the other hand, in history Chinese are not this type of persons. Unlike people in many other nations, especially the western countries, Chinese revolutions have never occurred due to the spread of any other global-scale revolution. Even the communist revolution in China was not a continuation of the Russian revolution but more or less the continuation of the regular dynasty substitution in its own history. As a nation with super-long history and tremendous number of population, China is a place where it may only export but unlikely import revolutions.