January 16, 2006

| Adventures in Sociology >>

Stories of protest in China continue to hit the NYT courtesy of Howard French. This time a teenage girl got killed.

It reminds me of a question I have had for some time: Just who exactly runs China? I mean, I know the names. But where do these guys come from? How does one rise to the Chinese Politburo? I just have no concept of the way it works. All I see in Hu Jintao’s bio is a string of bureaucratic jobs… the logic of advancement eludes me.

Also, check out this WorldChanging post on “The Beijing Consensus.” Particularly interesting:

The second Beijing Consensus theorem is that since chaos is impossible to control from the top… you need a whole set of new tools. It looks beyond measures like per-capita GDP and focuses instead of quality-of-life, the only way to manage the massive contradictions of Chinese development. […] China