Prosperity over freedom

„Americans sometimes assume that a richer China will soon demand greater freedom and democracy. Don't bet on it: What Chinese repeat to foreign visitors, in so many settings that the canned phrases become credible, is something like this: We like what we've got; we're worried about losing it; we want stability even if it means less freedom and openness.

Chinese don't seem to know much about Xi Jinping, the man who this week became heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, beyond the fact that he is a »princeling« son of power and that he is married to a star singer. This makes him a man who is likely to maintain the status quo - and perhaps reform the system and spread the wealth just enough to keep any dissenters quiet. For most Chinese I encountered, those qualities seem to be enough.

»You don't find many idealists in China today«, says Alan Guo, a former Google employee who has created an online shopping business here. »It's more important to solve a traffic jam in Beijing than vote for president«. There's protest in China, to be sure, but it's largely about economic and property issues. The freedom agenda of Tiananmen Square in 1989, embodied today by the imprisoned Nobel Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, has mostly been throttled. Among the elite in China's wealthy cities, fear of the peasants in the hinterlands seems to be a bigger concern than the opaque Communist Party leadership.”