China Law Blog

When I first arrived in Taiwan in 1973, people there said that you Americans have "too much freedom (tai duo zi you)" and at 18 years of age, I was flabbergasted with this statement as I thought that either you have freedom or you don't and that there was no limitations or quantities that could be assigned to that term.

I have learned a lot since, but in many ways, I feel that China has a lot more freedom than the United States as the long arm of the paternalistic father knows best "for the public good" law has not intruded into people's private lives like it does in the US. I still prefer the chaos (luan) of "too much freedom" to draconian government interventions to protect you from yourself, but then I am a libertarian Daoist philosopher with a healthy skepticism of "States" by nature and am wary of the sheer arrogance of the political "chatter" class when they view the masses (Lao Bai Xing) as so much chattel that need to be guided to making correct decisions for themselves.

The sad part of China's limitations on political "freedom" is the prevention of civil society's own natural organic means for taking care of things to show up and replacing it with an unrealistic and disempowering reliance on the State/Nation to take care of things.

Bad news, Grasshopper. It was Kris Kristofferson who wrote those words. Janis just made them famous.

Terry's comment is quite on point. For those of us Lao Wai who had the privilege in living in Taiwan in the 70's when we were teens or in our early 20's, we experienced a more traditional Chinese society with less social/political engineering than can be seen in mainland Chinese cities (the countryside is entirely another world), but Taiwan was just as "developing" then as China is now. Freedom is a relative,not absolute term. We sometimes forget that even in the USA, poor people yearn for the freedom to live with the knowledge that they have jobs, have food, have roofs over their heads, and can raise families in safety. For some people, and for some societies, such freedom is a sufficient and noble goal.

Like Terry, I too felt freer in many ways in China than I do here in Australia. I met a Canadian in Shenzhen who felt the same.

As you know, I have always been critical of the approach that most Westerners tend to take when assessing China, as they tend to couch most of their criticisms in Enlightenment terms, with references to so-called individual freedoms, democracy, etc. I prefer to take the pluralist view, like that of the British philosopher, John Gray. 'The liberal project of stating, and enforcing, universal limits on government power, especially when it is coercive, amounts to the prescription that a single form of political order be everywhere installed regardless of the cultural traditions and ways of life of its subjects,' writes Gray in his book, Enlightenment's Wake. 'That political orders should be vessels for the transmission of ways of life across generations, and that the forms of government may legitimately vary according to the cultures of the peoples they serve, are propositions rejected by all liberals, new and old.' The liberal view is a dangerous one to adopt, as Theordor Adorno argued in his now famous Dialectics of Enlightenment - just take a good honest look at the mess we've made in Iraq all in the name of liberating the Iraqi people from a dictatorship.

'The pluralist standard of assessment of any regime or government,' argues Gray (and I agree with him), 'is whether it enables its subjects to coexist in a Hobbesian peace while renewing their distinctive forms of common life.' On this assessment, like Gray himself concludes, China easily passes the test. Freedom is a relative term, no doubt about it!

"Stupid Pig sees China's increasing wealth as eventually leading to greater "higher" freedoms and I agree."

This statement only makes sense if "wealth" (or power) is merely the means to the higher goal of freedom.

I suspect that if one researched the issue, one would find that for many people wealth (or power) rather than being a means to freedom is simply an end in itself.

If wealth (or power) is an end in itself, then one would expect people to voluntarily choose to renounce their freedom and repeat untruths in order to increase their wealth (or power).

This reminds me of the character "Milo" in the book "Catch-22" who took money from the Germans to bomb his own airfield and justified it in the name of freedom and free enterprise.

Freedom truly is a relative term, however, for me the ability to drink beer on the street with out police interference pales in comparison to the power I wield as an individual to influence decision making at all levels of government in my home country. I generally find that people (north americans, specifically) severely and cynically underestimate their ability to participate in a positive manner in the decision making process. As an urban planner I know that even one articulated voice at a project presentation or proposal in my home-country has the potential to change the entire direction and goal of the development. I guarantee you that is not the case here in China.

Furthermore, sometimes I feel that foreigners tend to assume that their mainland friends share the same. The simple act of moving to another city, for example, can bring a world of bureaucratic nonsense piling down upon them that is not shared by us.

There are a couple of disturbing views expressed above that shouldn't go unchallenged.

1. "Freedom is a relative,not absolute term. We sometimes forget that even in the USA, poor people yearn for the freedom to live with the knowledge that they have jobs, have food, have roofs over their heads, and can raise families in safety."

These are not "freedoms". The "Basic Freedoms" include: liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of association; equal political liberties that protect the integrity and freedom of the person (including freedom of occupation and choice of careers and a right to personal property); and finally the rights and liberties covered by the rule of law.

The so-called "freedoms" to have a job, food, housing", etc. could be satisfied under a Stalinist regime.

2. "The liberal view is a dangerous one to adopt, as Theordor Adorno argued in his now famous Dialectics of Enlightenment - just take a good honest look at the mess we've made in Iraq all in the name of liberating the Iraqi people from a dictatorship."

I don't think that Adorno in his "Dialectics of Englightenment" is saying that Liberalism is dangerous. Rather, I think that he is saying that the danger lies in fascism. I think that Adorno is making the case that the Enlightenment's effort to bring about the liberation of man and the individual through its emphasis on science and scientific technique eventually leads to fascism when science and scientific technique become ends in themselves (production is standardized, people become commodities, etc.). This process could have the effect of destroying Liberalism, destroying individuality.

The Chinese seem to be mostly interested in the power afforded by foreign technology and scientific technique, rather than individualism and Liberalism.

The trouble with saying China is "free", is that the people affected by human rights tend to be in the minority, hence giving the illusion that the society is free. A truly free society, a democratic society, is one in which the rights of the minority are protected, rather than smashed upon for the comfort of the majority.

But I personally believe a large portion of lack of freedoms in china are social and not political in nature. How easy is it for a student to decide he doesn't want to go to college, but rather be a free-lance artist? Family pressure is enormous on this aspect. How free are people to move and live where they want to?(this one has both social and hukou-enforced restrictions). How free are people to marry whom they want (or not get married at all)? The concept of being locked down and pressured by society is very deeply inbedded in China, and I believe it enhances the slowness of political reforms. As expats in China, we also enjoy freedoms that Chinese people simply cannot enjoy, and we need to remind ourselves of that.

Dear Steven,

It's true that Adorno was attacking facism, but it is also true that he was attacking the entire Enlightenment project, which he argued can lead to facism. The rise of facism does indeed, as you say, involve the destruction of liberalism, but liberalism itself can lead to facism, once Will is introduced into Reason. Liberalism sows the seeds of its own destruction - this is the essential message of Adorno's.

Like John Gray (who attacks liberalism very explicitly - he very rightly identifies liberalism as Enlightenment discourse) I believe that the over-critical attitude that many foreigners have towards China's system of governance stems largely from their strong faith in the legacies of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, which of course made valuable contributions to our modern ideas about democracy, human rights, religious tolerance, and the rational pursuit of truth.

I too of course, strongly admire Enlightenment values (most people do) but I recognise that the tradition has led to a number of serious failings, all of which, as Theodor Adorno argued, stem from its undialectical vision.

The Enlightenment, despite its noble values, has repeatedly led its faithful down the road to making dangerous, universalising abstractions, its rigid, instrumental Reason often suppressing differences that lead to systematic violence - this is also John Gray's main beef with liberalism/Enlightenment.

In their Dialectics of Enlightenment, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that 'where scientific rationality was initially used to attack religious, superstitious and mythical dogma in the name of free inquiry, tolerance and an open society, soon enough scientific rationality was unleashed against those ethical values that had inspired its use in the first place. "Knowledge" became divorced from "information", norms from facts, and the scientific method increasingly freed from any commitment to liberation, transformed nature into an object of domination. Reason, once the great liberating force, became "instrumental".'

When viewed this way, the Enlightenment can be seen as 'the progenitor of a society in which the manipulation of others by an all powerful state represents the high point of rationality, in which human subjectivity and individualism and creativity are necessarily squashed in the name of efficiency and instrumentality. Not liberation but the concentration camp, where inmates find themselves reduced to the numbers tattooed on their arms, becomes the logical extension of the Enlightenment. Its legacy is therefore not the promised progress, but barbarism and the subordination of subjectivity to the "culture industry", capitalist forms of thinking and the "totally administered society".'

Whereas many see the Enlightenment as the movement toward freedom and democracy, I agree with Adorno and Gray, who see it as leading to the development of modern states, which in turn develop systems of control and bureaucratic administration that extend greater and greater control over the individual. Adorno, unlike most of today's postmodern thinkers, was a Marxian who sought to rehabilitate projects of coherency. He argued precisely the opposite to what postmodern deconstructionists advocate. In his view, deconstruction can only do just that - deconstruct the system. It cannot genuinely get outside the system. For that, argued Adorno, we need to add an extra distinct dimension to our knowledge. It is not that we need to dismantle systems, but that we need to interweave them with an alternative. We have to not deconstruct, but to reconstruct our knowledge.

Steven, we live in a world of paradox, and so Enlightenment needs to recognise such paradox in order to be truly enlightened. Reason, to be reasonable, must counterbalance itself with its opposite. This is a universal phenomenon - there is never any unity without internal opposition.

Without such internal opposition, Reason itself simply becomes a question of power: the object of Enlightenment knowledge simply subjects the Other to itself. When, for example, English farmers occupied Native American lands upon arrival at Plymouth, they stripped away from Nature its aura of mystery, the sacredness with which Native Americans invested in it.

As Yvonne Sherratt points out in her book, Adorno's Positive Dialectic, 'Enlightenment to be enlightened, needs Subjects who can communicate rationally, and to do so, they need not attempt to transcend their own humanity, but rather, they need to be so intensely receptive to their world that they can be, in one moment fully rational and in the other, fully absorbed.' Failure to do so in my view can only result in the formation of views that are fundamentally ethnocentric, and that are hence potentially dangerous. This is the view pushed very strongly by John Gray as well.

Indeed, it has been the Enlightenment's undialectical, half-baked concept of Reason that has led not only to the ethnocentrism of Europeans, but also, consequently, to so much of the world's suffering. Even today, Western countries continue to glory in spreading Enlightened religion and democracy to the 'backward native cultures', and their colonial adventures they justify by their Enlightened superiority - an alibi for the conquest of developing countries.

Enlightenment thinkers may very well have promised a steady progressive improvement in manner, morals, technology and general social well-being, but the harsh reality is that the world even today continues to suffer from unprecedented levels of state sponsored violence and economic exploitation. Just look at what is happening in Afghanistan and Iraq right now - imperialist adventures, justified using Enlightenment values: we must save the good people of Iraq from the tyranny of dictatorship, and help them to install a wonderful democracy modelled on our own. The history of the 19th and 20th centuries is the history of such violent conquests and hypocrisy, and the 21st century doesn't look like shaping up to be any better.

'What was and is at issue,' as Lyotard has quite rightly observed, 'is the introduction of Will into Reason.' Enlightenment, rather than being the great demistifying and emancipating force promised, has instead turned out to be its very opposite, because it argues that we can cover or encompass the world through our reason and our language. Facism and liberalism are simply two sides of the one coin - this is Adorno's main argument.

Only by adopting a more dialectical approach to Reason, can we Westerners gain a deeper, fairer, more balanced set of attitudes towards China and its system of governance. We need to more fully absorb ourselves into the Chinese mind, into the Chinese way of seeing and doing things, if we want to be able to make more rational, more reasoned, more Enlightened judgements about China, its people, and its institutions. And that means recognising the fact that most Chinese view notions like freedom, human rights and democracy in different ways from us.

Adorno's and Gray's attack against the Enlightenment is essentially an attack against liberalism, because after all, what is liberalism? It's the discourse of Enlightenment. Foucault of course, offered up the exact same argument.

What is interesting about Gray, is that he rejects the use of liberal values as a legitimate standard with which to evaluate China's human rights situation and its system of governance, arguing instead for the adoption of a pluralist standard of assessment. It's a fairer, more 'enlightened' approach, in my opinion.

"Liberalism sows the seeds of its own destruction - this is the essential message of Adorno's."

That's right: Liberalism contains a contradiction in that although it is an outgrowth and glorification of individualism, it sets in motion systems that favor the standardization of production/people, and, hence, ultimately destroy individualism.

Horkheimer basically said the same thing when he forsaw a future in which "success" is conformity.

But one doesn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, as they say. The Liberal idea of Justice as distributive fairness and its notion of basic freedoms is irreplaceable, as the only alternative is some version of "Might Makes Right".

Hey guys, why don't you pay Hu Jia a visit and tell him all this gibberish about freedom being a relative term? I'm usually not into cursing people, but I think a week in a prison cell would be the right cure for some of you. It's all very well rationalizing about individual freedom and human rights as long as you yourself are enjoying them. I a way, freedom is like wealth. You most appreciate it when you don't have it. And believe me, it's got nothing at all to do with cultural differences.

Steven Blayney: Good luck pushing your "Basic Freedoms" to the many millions starving and homeless in Sichuan, Gansu and elsewhere. One step at a time, and get the priorities straight.

@ MAJ:

"Like Terry, I too felt freer in many ways in China than I do here in Australia. I met a Canadian in Shenzhen who felt the same."

Not surprising since foreigners live "outside the system" in China. So how is that internet access working out for you in Oz? Firewalls down under?

@Todd - Based on that logic, Great Britain would still be controlling most of Africa and the Indian subcontinent. There is never a 'good' time to give people freedom, and one shouldn't try to pretend otherwise by imagining that discomfort can be avoided through the 'softly-softly' approach.

As it is, freedom is usually granted at a point of crisis for the old system - I simply cannot imagine that change in China will happen otherwise. There will be a war, a successful separatist movement, or a great environmental or economic catastophe - and then the Chinese people will understand why the power to control their own lives and to engage in free debate is as important for their own safety as any material possession.

Appropos of this worthy discussion is today's article by Lee Kuan Yew, found at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/0616/037.html?partner=email

The penultimate paragraph reads as follows (and please pay particular attention to the final sentence therein):

"But this moment of world sympathy will pass, and concerns over China's future role will remain. The West is uncertain whether this huge nation will be good or bad for the world. This tension will only be resolved when both sides approximate each other's worldviews and accept that they will never have identical cultural values."

Sounds like what I've been saying for the past 35+ years.

Cheers, all.

Dear Steven,

Thanks for your response. I agree that we ought not to throw the baby out with the bath water, as you say. As I said in my previous comment, I too strongly admire Enlightenment values (I think mor has misunderstood my intentions, judging from his/her comment above). My real argument here, is that I don't think we ought to be dogmatic when it comes to making prescriptions for freedom, human rights, democracy, and so on. A pluralist approach I think, is fairer, more realistic, and ultimately, more enlightened. There is nothing 'gibbersih' about this in my opinion, though mor is of course free to dismiss my views with ease!

FOARP: Based on your logic, I'd still be sitting in a commune in California, waiting for the Revolution to begin. But it's not 1968 anymore, and my beard is a lot greyer than in those days.

I don't know which China you are perceiving, with some sort of grand-scale struggle resulting in "The People" finding nirvanistic freedom to debate and control their own lives, whatever that means. But, hey, being a Westerner is a beautiful thing, isn't it? Keep the faith, baby.

Instead of arguing about the fine points of theories and principles, it will be more helpful to conduct some real-world experiments and tests.

It is well-known that in the '80s and '90s, there are large number of Chinese immigrating to the West, legally or illegally. These people included poor peasants and well-educated young people. The attractions of the West were many and diverse, but opportunities and freedoms are the main reasons: economic, social, press and political. The degree may vary, but no one will deny that economic opportunity and freedom were by far the most important factors.

Ask yourself and your Chinese friends around now, how many of them are still desperate if still thinking to immigrate to the West, compared to the '80 and the '90s? Also ask those Chinese who are studying or living in the West, how many of them are thinking of going back to China to work and live?

Clearly, when the Chinese are weighing such a choice, they will carefully balance all the trade-offs and make a conscious call.

As yet another indicator, how many foreigners are working and living in China today? Is the number significantly increased or decreased compared to the '80s and '90s, even if the environment (pollution etc.) in China is clearly deteriorating?

For a lot of freedoms, it's not black and white. Individually, you may have your strong opinion regarding the freedoms in China; collectively, we're reaching a conclusion that is statistically significant.

Dear casual observer,

I appreciate your point - as a foreigner living in China for five years, I did live "outside the system" - but only partially. Very few of my Chinese friends felt as though they were deprived of many freedoms though, and quite a few, having lived and studied in places like the United States, Australia and New Zealand, prefer life in China where their job opportunities are greater, and where they feel just as free and as materially comfortable. That's why they returned. My spouse, who is Chinese, certainly doesn't feel any freer here in Sydney than she did in Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Hangzhou - the last three cities that we lived and worked in before leaving China. Indeed, the majority of Chinese students who study abroad these days are happy to return to China, and that's because life in China's larger, more developed cities is no longer noticeably inferior - Shanghai for example, is now ranked roughly on a par with Portugual by the United Nations Human Development Index.

As for internet access - I used the internet daily while in China, and was able to access an incredible wealth of information on literally every topic I researched - and that included articles highly critical of China's human rights situation. True, numerous sites were inaccessible, but I was always able to find plenty of alternative sites that contained the same range and types of criticisms. I was never starved for information critical of China, that's for sure!

Todd - thanks for providing the Lee Kuan Yew quote that you endorse. I agree with you both totally, hence my belief in the need not to be dogmatic when it comes to making prescriptions about human rights, democracy, notions of freedom, and so on.

Freedom is different to everyone all over the world. Children think freedom is the opportunity to stay up late. Teenagers think freedom is the ability to "hang out" with their friends all weekend.

Freedom to me is being allowed to go to a church service at the same time, at the same church with my wife.

Freedom to me is being allowed to travel to Hong Kong with my wife without the hassle to join a "tour group"

Freedom to me is being allowed to have my children allowed the best education.

Freedom to me is being allowed to have my entire family understand what it means to vote.

I have lived in China for 9 years, have a Chinese wife from a "small town" and due to this is not allowed by law to sit in the same church, at the same time with me, if it is in English

Traveling by ourselves is not possible because she is not from the "1st or second tier" cities, so this means we have to go in a tour group and not have the freedom to choose our own hotel or flight.

If we raise our children as Chinese citizens they are not allowed to attend the international schools and learn to voice their own opinion. Yes, we can send them to the local Chinese school, but we do not have that freedom to choose between international or Chinese.

Voting is an exciting process and allows one to choose the person they want to lead. Unfortunately, if my wife and family continue to be Chinese, than they do not have the freedom to make this decision.

And one last thought to everyone, I am assuming, are foreigners, do you really think if this was the China Daily, Xinhua, or any of the other state owned papers, you would have the opportunity to voice what is freedom?

None of us will ever know what freedom really means to another person!

@Todd - The idea of a (presumably - and no offence if I'm off-base here) thoroughly establishment lawyer being a former commune member is too delicious to bear!

You certainly have a point, but all the same, I don't think of democracy and free speech as "nirvanistic freedom". The problems surrounding the Three Gorges Dam are well known, it is the system which resulted in the banning of any public discusion of the issue which will come under fire if the dam ever collapses.

You may think I'm being an arrogant westerner in saying that having a roof over your head and a full larder matters little if local officials have unregulated power to take both away. However, most poor people in China say as much themselves when asked.

@Greg - The vast majority of the Chinese people have never been consulted, how can you say that a 'statistically significant' figure can result from the relatively small proportion of Chinese who have been overseas - even if you are correct about saying that the majority of them prefer Chinese 'freedoms' over more liberal ones.

FOARP: Thanks for the acknowledgement, old man.
I think you understand the point I was making.
In every society, there are peculiarly-evolved and existing, and evolving, ways to assert one's ideas and opinions. There isn't a lack of freedom in China. There's an evolving system of freedom, just as there is here in the USA. All evolution doesn't proceed at the same time, or pace, or direction. As the popular response nowadays to certain heady questions goes, "it's complicated."

@FOARP - I agree with you the vast majority of the Chinese people have never been consulted. What I was trying to say is that based on the real-world experiences including my personal ones, I've seen a major shift in people's sentiment when it comes to immigrating to the West.

Granted, given the population size and pockets of poverty in China, there will always be large percentage of Chinese people who want to immigrate to the West given the chance. But what I'm suggesting is that we have a large sample size, from different economic backgrounds, to test the hypothesis that the freedoms in China have been vastly improved in the last decade compared with the '80s and '90s.

The reason I use the willingness to immigrate to the West as a proxy of the status of Chinese freedoms is that it's a critical decision that people have to make and they would have to consider a set of trade-offs that are largely freedoms-based.

I have just read through the various views above regarding what is freedom (and whether it's more than" just another word for nothing left to lose" - and regardless of who may have said that first or last Janis Joplin certainly lived it and also died by it) (and may she forgive Bobby Mc Gee)

And I also have had the good fortune or perhaps the misfortune (mostly the good fortune) of having lived for at least a couple of years in more than a dozen countries and in some of those for considerably longer. Countries with political and economic systems (and cultures and subcultures) "all over the place": The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, The Kingdom of Norway, The Kingdom of Thailand, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and also a few other non-kingdoms whose governments at times seemed to behave a lot like monarchies.

And also Switzerland, Cuba, Italy, the U.S., Anglophone Canada, Quebec, France, The Philippines, and Brazil. And if I were to count all the other countries where I lived for under six months the overall number doubles or triples. (But whether I personally had lived in one country for my entire life or in all 200 plus countries of our happy planet is not the point here) What I would dare suggest is that my own personal direct experience (empiricism?) may count for something even if I may have drawn the wrong conclusions from it.

And based on this purely personal and subjective (but direct) experience and the valid or misguided conclusions that I personally may have drawn from it, what strikes me as missing from the discussions above is the importance or significance of the specific social culture or the interpersonal culture that exists in any given country as a variable that affects (or even determines) "freedom". (and certain possible descriptions or qualifiers for it such as its "vibrancy", "liveliness", "exuberance" or "depressiveness", or "stifling nature" and etc. etc.)

And social and interpersonal culture is something that is generally speaking the result of a country's short, medium and long term history and culture (and the presence or absence of religions and religiosity and of what kinds) and not only of its present or past political, legal or economic systems. For example feeling like one needs to comply to other people's notions and expectations of "political correctness" (and in particular those that may apply within the social and cultural spheres) can be a significant constraint to one's day to day life, freedom of expression (even if it's guaranteed by the law and often particularly if it is guaranteed by the law).

There are certain countries - for instance Switzerland and Japan - that just don't "feel" all that free (for quite different reasons) though both are democracies where political freedoms certainly apply (but there sure are a lot of tacit cultural rules) whereas there are others such as Cuba and Brazil (and even when Brazil was a dictatorship) that simply are experienced by most people as more free. (and certainly much more free-wheeling and I am not intending to criticize the many other good qualities of either Switzerland or Japan)

Cuba in particular may well have a quasi Stalinist system but living in Cuba was never the same experience (for hardly anyone) as living in East Germany or the old Czechoslovakia. Simply because Cuba's "cultural default setting" is an almost irrepressible cultural and social exuberance.

And so it seems to be me that if one doesn't (also) go beyond political philosophy and comparative systems of government and what Englightnment philosophers may or may not have thought or enshrined into Constitutions....to also understand why the above is so, I think one misses a very significant part of the overall picture about what it means to be free or not free somewhere.

And I am sorry to say that by these kinds of criteria "the land of the free and the home of the brave" is quite often not very up to snuff. (though there are certainly plenty of brave people and some very free ones too; and although a lot of people "vote with their feet" to go there once they become taxi drivers in D.C. or New York they for some reason don't seem to express the greatest feelings of "freedom"; Maybe because it's just another word for nothing left to lose and they just happen to know all about that more than most.

FOARP and Greg - there is more than just plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that an increasing number of mainlanders now feel that China is a more preferable option as a place to settle down in - some empirically-verifiable quantitative evidence is now beginning to emerge. Statistics released by the Chinese Ministry of Education earlier this year in April for example, show that the percent of mainlander students who travel overseas to study and that return after graduating increased in 2007 by 4.79 percent over the 2006 figure. This was despite a 7.94 percent increase in the number of Chinese students venturing abroad to study in 2007. The fact is this: the number of Chinese students travelling overseas to study increases every year, and the percent of those students that return to mainland China after graduating also inceases every year. This is the emerging trend, because Chinese graduates with from overseas universities now commonly perceive their job opportunities as being better in China. It's also a quality of life issue for many - it's becoming increasingly easier to acquire one's own home, and all of the material comforts that most of us Westerners have for long taken for granted. Home ownership in Shanghai for example, is now significantly higher than the average US home ownership rate. That has been the case for quite a few years now. Most realise that they're no freer here in places like Sydney than they are in Shanghai or Beijing or Shenzhen, Hangzhou, etc. My spouse, who is Chinese, loves living here in Sydney, but she enjoyed our time living in Shanghai just as much. She certainly felt no less free anywhere in China than she does here - and we spent our first two years together living in the small provincial town of Huai'an, in Jiangsu Province - which was by no means a glitzy and cosmopolitan metropolis I might add.

Although time specific empirical trends (such as those cited above) are certainly interesting and can be revealing, indicative and even may provide some useful guide to personal choice and action, individual experience and personal trajectories vary tremendously depending on a whole range of internal and external variables that are person and situation, and broader context- specific.

Personally I would never decide to live permanently in either Australia or China (though I accept that one should never say never) but someone else might be perfectly happy living in either country. And they are both huge and have huge cultural and other differences within them.

And I suppose that if the right things happened to me (or if I was able to "make them happen") and aspects of my own internal experience, make up and possible external trajectories were affected accordingly, I might be perfectly happy living there too, either for a while ...or even forever "until death do me and the planet part"

Empirical evidence and seemingly good theory both can lead to either right or wrong conceptual or practical personal and societal conclusions and to some very counter-intuitive and paradoxical ones as well. (as the quantum mechanics-determined semiconductor behaviours right in the guts of the computers we all write on certainly could attest to, if one just bothered to take the time to try to understand how they work)

It's a complex and probabilistic and indeterminate world out there.

The one thing that seems near certain to me (probabilities notwithstanding) is that it's going to hell because of global warming.

So frankly speaking the comparative rates of home ownership or of job opportunities in the U.S., Australia or China really don't seem like the most intellectually compelling topics to me.

Thanks for your interesting and thought provoking response Robert. I agree entirely that "personal choice and action, individual experience and personal trajectories vary tremendously depending on a whole range of internal and external variables that are person and situation, and broader context- specific." I didn't mean to suggest otherwise, since that is exactly what I am myself trying to point out: notions of freedom, human rights, etc., are viewed differently by different people. Nevertheless, patterns can be identified, since the articulation and understanding of such notions are very often culturally mediated.

The American cultural anthropologist and sociologist, Deborah Davis for example, has convincingly demonstrated, empirically, using both qualitative and quantitative sources, that home ownership, and the freedom to choose how to decorate one's own home, and the act of consumption (buying furniture for example) is very often experienced by today's urban Chinese as "expanded freedom, autonomy and pride." This is because, historically, in China, such possibilities were very limited for most people. That has changed dramatically over the last 15-20 years, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that the CHinese, generally, have never "felt" freer, or more optimistic about their collective futures. The act of shopping, of consuming, might seem uninspiring to many, but to many Chinese it is exoperienced as increased "freedom, power, autonomy and pride", and as the French philosopher Michel de Certeau has argued in his very influential book, The Practice of Everyday Life, the act of consuming is also an act of appropriation, and can therefore entail, to some extent at least, feelings of personal empowerment, and even creativity.

Hello Mark Anthony, and many thanks for your kind reply to me. (it's always nice -and regrettably also relatively rare- to come across people who are actually interested in a measure of engagement with others)

It certainly looks like you pretty much agree with what I said, and I too agree with what you have now expressed above. And also with what Deborah Davis appears to have found, and with what Michel de Certeau apparently also argued, though I wasn't aware of either's work.

The point I made (or tried to make) in my earlier comment was simply that "social culture" and "interpersonal relations culture" (albeit neither being all that easy to define or to "generically operationalize") make a big difference to the "degrees of freedom" that people living in those cultures or places or contexts practically-speaking experience day to day.

For example if one lived in Brazil during its earlier periods of autocratic dictatorship or in Cuba today, one might still experience more personal "socio cultural" degrees of freedom in every day life situations and in its multiple interpersonal transactions (provided one stayed away from political matters which in most aspects of everyday life one does not need to become all that involved with) (or involved with at all) in those places, than if one lived in formal (and more prosperous) democracies such as Japan, Switzerland or the United States

That is. the immediately preceding are all places which although more free in terms of their political and civil rights and their economic freedoms which can be enjoyed, are imbued by many subtle (and not so subtle) (and tacit and not so tacit) cultural and social constraints (rules, values, norms, expectations, attitudes and etc. etc.) in terms of what is "politically correct", although not in a political sense but rather in a socio-cultural sense. And these singly or collectively can end up seriously stifling a person's personal experience of personal freedom.

So I suppose I am just saying the obvious, when I try to argue that in addition to political and economic freedoms there also are socio-cultural freedoms (or their absence or their constraint) that equally (or perhaps even more so) need to be taken account in terms of how they impact a person's overall or ultimate "experiential/ psychological bottom line". (which is different from both one's financial bottom line or the standard political and economic freedoms that one may or may not enjoy)

And although Cuba (for instance) is a political dictatorship I would argue (from direct experience) that because there is freedom FROM religion there (rather than freedom OF religion) the relative weakness of "religious culture" and of religiosity there (which I personally consider negatives) actually promotes secular humanist values as these then better can be experienced and brought into relief in every day life. (even if Castro might well be an ogre, notwithstanding what a majority of the Cuban population actually thinks of him, and notwithstanding (also) the impoverished state of the country)

Therefore it is a mistake in my opinion to assess the "livability" of a country or of place (for either its own people or for visitors) based solely on whether it conforms or doesn't to Voltaire's or John Locke's or Thomas Jefferson (and forgive him for owning slaves) englightnment notions of liberal democracy. (Though they too are of course important, but not exclusively so) As well as whether it is economically prosperous or not or presents economic opportunities or not. (though this too is of course also important)

To give one final deliberately provocative example, in Saddam Hussein's Iraq (if one stayed clear of anything to do with politics) one would find every day Iraqis hospitable, friendly, open, welcoming, genuine, talkative, expressive, polemical, rhetorical and overall highly civilized and very intellectually engaging people. And one would easily be invited into people's homes for a cup of tea. And I lived in Switzerland for five years and was never invited into any Swiss person's home for a cub of tea or anything else. (o.k. I am exaggerating, I was invited twice in five years)

Not to mention that most Iraqis then also couldn't give a damn if their neighbours were Sunni or Shiah. But according to the "standard text or the official narrative" (yet another aspect of political correctness) they are now "truly free" i.e. according to formal notions of political freedom as understood (or dissembled) by Condoleeza Rice et. al. But just try to walk around the street of Baghdad today now that they are all "truly free" over there.

And the above I think is not all that different from what you have said that for a Chinese person "freedom" can mean simply being able to buy different kinds of furniture for his or her own house and he/she probably couldn't care less about whether she is also free to insult or praise Hu Jin Tao publicly or on TV. Jay Leno yesterday took George Bush to the mat yet again and of course this (as humorous as it also was) is to be taken as tacit "proof" of the great "freedom" that we have in America. (never mind that in the end George Bush is still there and got elected fraudulently the first time around, but we are all ever so much more free because we can call him a turkey on TV if we wish to)

Luckily there are nevertheless still some considerable "socio-cultural" freedoms in the countries of "greater anglosaxonia" too (a region which I have personally defined as including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and the Great Mother Country of Great Britain). And luckily there are also some considerable socio-cultural freedoms in "greater Confucian (but never confusing) -land"....which is a similarly constituted new region a bit further east also covering some rather disparate countries such as Japan, China and Korea.

But I had said earlier that I personally would never choose to live in China or in Australia in part also because I consider that there are many other countries in our happy or unhappy world with many more socio cultural "degrees of freedom' and full of happy and exuberant and engaging people whose company can be experienced. (regardless of how poor or politically unfree they all may be and at times even because of it)

There is another "generic law" which I humorously like to call the inverse square law of niceness versus prosperity which is that as soon as people start to get beyond a certain level of prosperity they tend to all become obnoxious. (though there are of course countless exceptions that prove the rule...in either direction)

Some countries with relatively happy social /interpersonal cultures are in fact some of the most unlikely one could think of such as Angola and Mozambique which notwithstanding the scourge of war and landmines whose poulations have been forced to experience still have some of the friendliest people on the planet. (even if they are missing some limbs).

And I certainly do hope I have not come across as saying that the way to be happy is to have your limbs blown off by a Soviet or American made landmine. And let it suffice to conclude by saying that the reader is free to distill or reject any learnings that may be inherent or absent in anything I have said above.

Robert - thanks for your detailed response. I truly enjoyed reading it, and I found myself agreeing with literally everything you said. Your 'social culture'/'interpersonal relations culture' paradigm I think is a very useful one, and I liked the various examples you drew upon to help illustrate the model.

The vast majority of the Iraqi people (if they're not already dead) were, without a doubt, far better off under Saddam Hussein's rule than they are now, that's for sure. Not only in terms of the various freedoms they were able to enjoy thanks to their 'interpersonal relations culture', and because, as you also point out, back then they were at least able to walk down the street in relative safety - but also they were far better off materially - they were freer from poverty. Immediately prior to the military invasion and occupation, Iraq was ranked 75 out of 177 countries by the UN Human Development Index. Today's China sits at 81 by comparison. Iraq had a first class health care system, medical practitioners were among the world's best-trained, the country had a steadily growing middle class, good access to education, high per capita literacy and numeracy rates, etc. Now the country isn't even ranked -because it has been impossible to even collect data maybe? Or perhaps the results would be politically an embarrassment to the United States and its allies? Or both?

As for your 'generic law' - well, I agree with that too. Let us call it a truism. Some of the poorest people (materially) that I have ever met have turned out to be the most generous, the friendliest and the most giving- even, seemingly at least, the happiest. I have a few such tales to tell in a book that I have just had published - a travel narrative, due for release later this month, recounting some of my experiences throughout China. I can tell similar stories too, from trips I've made to other places, to remote Aboriginal communities here in Australia, places I've been to in Vietnam, South Korea, even inner-city slums like Redfern, here in Sydney. East London pubs tend to be warmer, friendlier places than those in the north-west of the city. I think a great number of people have such experiences, and so share with us this impression; have formulated for themselves this rule.

All the best,
Mark Anthony Jones

Hello again, Mark Anthony

This is just to acknowledge that I did see and read your last response to me above and that I also was quite glad (for some reason) that there can be two persons out there (you and me in this particular instance) (though there are of course many others too) who were able to exchange some points of view, find reasonably clear agreement (even though disagreement would have been just fine too, if it had been clear enough) and also reasonably effectively "conclude an intellectual iteration" without either getting stuck, sidetracked and/or without retreating into assorted "spaces of tacit or explicit uncommunicative-ness or uncommunicability".

Which is something often also related to a kind of presumed "superiority" of one's own views whereby what the other person may or may not think is not even worth arguing with. Which of course is a not so well disguised form of obnoxious (and stupid) (and ultimately also untested) arrogance.

And so is this above instance or tiny caselet (involving you and me) yet another example of the very same possible range in socio-cultural and interpersonal culture, its variables and their degrees of freedom which also end up having a number of philosophical and political implications?

Why is it that some peoples enjoy talking, discussing, arguing and etc etc. while other peoples or other cultures immediately clam up and assume that for whatever tacit reasons it is "much much better not to explore agreements or disagreements" too much lest either the other party take offense or because it is "impolite" or inappropriate or presumptuous to state one's own personal opinion too clearly....(since probably some authority somewhere already had stated the definite and final correct opinion about the particular matter and so "who am I"?...to express my own personal points of view?)....Both of which are forms of sociocultural oppression regardless of whether or not the ideas of Voltaire or Thomas Jefferson are then enshrined or not in the constitution of the country where the conversation took place.

And so which peoples actually have the greater degree (or degrees) of socio-cultural freedom? And is this distribution related or unrelated to the standard political freedoms? (this would be an interesting topic for further analytic elaboration and then empirical study)

Not to mention another perhaps more technical or narrower aspect which is related to the tacit rules by which "proper conversations" can be conducted in terms of the time and the timing and duration of the various interventions and exchanges.

You may have noticed that French and Spanish panel discussions or seminars or conferences easily end up with lots of people either interrupting one another or talking at the same time.....(within reason and within those boundaries that still allow some communication and exchange of information to take place) And this is considered perfectly normal. But in Anglosaxon circles this is completely abnormal and also impolite.

For instance in France one person may speak for five minutes straight if she wishes and then another person may talk for only five seconds. Later the reverse might obtain. (or not).

Instead proper conversations in "greater anglosaxonia" tend to be those where each speaker talks for about 10-15 seconds only and then the "responder" equally talks for another 10-15 seconds (and the more equal the time period and the shorter it is the more "proper" the (staccato) conversation is deemed to have been; (exaggerating a bit to make the point) and then there is another response and so on. Anyone who speaks for five minutes and "doesn't let others speak" (they of course cannot interrupt him) is "impolite".

But what if the thought you may need to express in fact requires five minutes instead of only five seconds to express? And what if you need to explain a lot of relevant context and background for your point to make any sense? Am I interested in actually hearing what you think and have to say or not? Or am I interested instead in using the tacit socio-cultural rules of "proper conversations" to muzzle you or to deform your views?

I personally prefer conversations in which anyone can take either five seconds to say what they want or need to say (if it can be summed up in five seconds) or they can take five hours if that's what's needed or best for them. And although Fidel Castro (for instance) does talk "a bit long at times" since I understand Spanish I have listened to a couple of his four hour speeches from beginning to end and they actually contain a heck of a lot of very interesting substantive ideas. (whether one then agrees with them or not).

It also could happen that during one particular meeting you would do all of the talking and I only listen, and the next time it's the reverse. (of course this should not be a license for windbags to go on and on, but then again they can always be interrupted if that's the case)

I watched one of the so called Doha Debates on the BBC yesterday evening which are always moderated by Tim Sebastian. Yesterday he had a senior official from Hamas on the program. And he kept indirectly trying to constrain his train of thought and force him to speak out of context by insisting that he strictly answer only the very specific question posed to him, preventing him from placing the question into proper temporal, historical, or spatial context.

Such as: are you for or against the killing of innocent women and children? And even when he tried to say that of course NO-ONE is "FOR" killing innocent women and children...he would not allow him to finish a sentence (and ably used the audience to ridicule him and to insinuate that "he thought that only he was right and everyone else was wrong".

A revolting performance by a a particularly able ideologue and propagandist of "greater anglosaxonia" or maybe in this case it is the "international community"....a term which should be exposed for the propaganda tool that it is unless it refers accurately to the majority of the general assembly members of the United Nations. (and it never does)

And the topic of the debate itself was deliberately wrongly framed....i.e. isn't it against Palestinian's own self interest for Hamas and Fatah to be locked in a struggle? This too could not be discussed (according to Tim Sebastian) in terms of the reality that the "international community" had refused to recognize the results of the Palestinian elections which they themselves had insisted upon and preferred instead to arm opportunists within Fatah to run the West Bank and to confine the pro-Hamas Palestinians into the prison which Gaza is.

But this too could only be discussed in terms of "never mind what others have done" (as though this key aspect could simply be set aside without grotesquely deforming the context to the point where any actions make no sense) what are YOU doing to come to terms with Fatah? (even though Fatah doesn't want to come to terms and never will as long as the Bush administration is supporting it). But talking about THAT was "not answering the (pointed and narrow and arbitrarily restricted) questions.

So another interesting aspect worthy of exploration is how the interpersonal dialogue culture and the social culture of different countries can further be exploited for political purposes by certain segments of the media. (From the depths of Foxy Fox-Channelism to the Noble Heights of Fairness and Accuracy of the BBC) But this is in fact a whole different topic.

Anyway thanks again and all the very best