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based societies see not oppression in reasonably exercised authority
but respect; they see lack of political power not as subjugation but as
order. Of course, this is provided we are talking about a Deng or a
Lee and not a Pol Pot.
To be sure, Asian autocracies are not summarily successful.
Elsewhere, political Confucianism is messier. In Malaysia, Mahathir
bin Mohamad lifted his people out of abject poverty and easygoing
cronyism to mold another high-tech, first-world miracle; but he lacks
virtue because of the tactics he employed as methods of control:
vicious campaigns against human-rights activists and intimidation of
political opponents, which included character assassination. The
Vietnamese Communist leadership has lately overseen dynamic
economic growth, with, again, the acceleration of personal freedoms,
even as corruption and inequalities remain rampant. Think for a
moment of Vietnam, a society that has gone from rationing books to
enjoying one of the largest rice surpluses in the world in a quarter of
a century. It recently graduated in statistical terms to a middle-income
country with a per capita GDP of $1,100. Instead of a single
personality with his picture on billboards to hate, as has been the case
in Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries, there is a faceless
triumvirate of leaders—the party chairman, the state president and the
prime minister—that has delivered an average of 9 percent growth in
GDP annually over the past decade. Nevertheless, Vietnam’s rulers
remain fearful of public displays of dissatisfaction spread across the
Internet. And there is China: continental in size, it produces vastly
different local conditions with which a central authority must grapple.
Such grappling puts pressure on a regime to grant more rights to its
far-flung subjects; or, that being resisted, to become by degrees more
authoritarian. So terrified is its regime of its own version of an Arab
Spring that it has gone to absurd lengths to block social media and
politically provocative areas of the Web.
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