I finally took care of the rest of this:
The takeaways:
-The CCP is more like the world's biggest Rotary Club than anything
too sinister.
-It's okay to sleep through the mandatory Party lectures at your place of work.
-Sometimes sending a person to a work camp is less paperwork than granting them a food stand license and since everyone is dissenting in some manner...
-Most Chinese people are fine with no democracy, they'd just like a legal system separate from the party because otherwise it's like dealing with asset forfeiture in the U.S. so why bother.
-If you're eight years old and a loyal aspiring Party member, who is a Maoist teachers pet all through cadre school and university, your midlife crisis will consist of you wondering why your job exists other than to provide you with slightly better living standards than your non-Party peers who work for the private sector.
-You can expose corruption but only real important corruption and go over local party heads when you do it by using the internet, then they only shut down your account and fine you while probably killing the corrupt mayor or whoever.
-Chinese people don't get why the rest of the world cares about them so much. Or this feeds into their Kingdom of Heaven complex.
-If you swapped the American and Chinese corporate-state-complex for a week, the only thing we'd notice is more efficient paperwork on meaningless things and happier presentations of bad news.
-Also, less welfare spending.
-Which gets to something to the book dances around because I don't think they could get too many people to say it directly. The Party is still organized along the geographical lines it was under Mao, so the farmers and citizens of certain areas are looted at higher rates and provided less services than those who were "essential" to the Revolution. This is exacerbated by internal migration.
-The Soviets fixed that problem, but despite that clear success for Marxist-Leninism, the Chinese in general think the Soviets were a bunch of fuckups who never learned how to do anything but shit their own pants. Except for Lenin, who was perfect and had everything just feet from Communism before Stalin had to mess everything up. Unless it was Stalin who fixed all of Lenin's fuckups and had them on the verge of Communism until Khrushchev fucked up or Gorbachev or you know what, just check back next week for the official history recap because with Christmas and everything we kinda got distracted.
-The Cultural Revolution didn't happen. It was a Western misunderstanding of the Chinese democratic process. *nervously looks around*
-Chinese leaders/academics/etc. fear Chinese nationalism more than anything. The great assumption is that fair elections would keep the Communists in power until a strong nationalist political force (even if it was in control of the Party) emerged. Hence the non-Party elite's belief that the Party needs to stay in absolute power to manage this delicate balance.
-Hu Jintao's dream as a kid was to become a Olympic gold medalist in Ping-Pong:
Also, he doesn't give a shit:
-"The CCP will survive, in part because most intellectuals always speak to and for the insiders, not those who are outside. They will speak up for the party as long as they're given a house and job by the party to do so. [They ask me why I publish contentious academic articles overseas with his real name] I answer that to publish otherwise indicates that not telling the truth is accepted. This is one of the country's problems-that everybody is trained not to tell the truth. Everybody is telling lies, they trick themselves and others."
-"[There is a phenomenon in China whereby] the less you believe something, the strong you advocate it. You think that just speaking of it will bring benefits. It rules out mistakes. Fake words become a form of exchange for profit."
Anyway, pretty cool book, and more of a interviews/man-on-the-street type of deal focused on how the Party operates and doesn't want to dwell on stuff like the Great Leap Forward. I need to finish the other one now, I think it's a bit more in the style of how repressive the Party is. This book went with a notion that yeah, there's repression and then there's also a form of self-repression that's more of a don't rock the boat while things are going so well type of situation. (While the poor don't have any money so who gives a fuck what they think or want.)
Sadly however, it does feature a brief section in which Thomas Friedman is held up as both an intellectual AND a journalist. It makes up for this by meeting with some Party cadre guy who is totally amused by Americans and Europeans and their constant fretting over income inequality.
