CHINA 2012

FIRST IMPRESSIONS • BEIJING - WOW!!

• Amazing infrastructure

• Outstanding architecture

• Only new cars on the road

• 6 ring roads – outer 200km

• Flowers alongside the roads (sweepers)

• Very clean

• 65,000 taxis

• Pollution

Tia An Men Square and the Forbidden City

CURRENT ISSUES

• SOURCE

• Deng Yuwen, assistant editor-in-chief of

Study Times. Paper of the Party School of

the Communist party’s central committee

• Incoming Communist Party leader Xi

Jinping was president of the party school.

CURRENT ISSUES • Failure to build a high-quality economy

• Failure to nurture the growth of a middle class in China - an ever-widening gap between a few very rich people and the low-income bulk of the population

• Socially destabilizing gap between rural and urban life

• State's continued enforcement of the one-child policy

• The education system values quantity over quality and continues to stifle creativity

CURRENT ISSUES

• Pollution, which has got worse over the past decade.

• Government's attitude toward providing China with a stable energy supply

• Communist party failure to build an effective and convincing value system that can be accepted by most people (corruption, in other words)

• The administration's failure to give China a clear and consistent diplomatic style on the world stage.

• Despite the administration's emphasis on democracy, freedom, rule of law and political reform, little progress has been made

On the basis of China’s national

conditions, the country will

continue to keep combining

electoral democracy with

consultative democracy, driving

people’s democracy by intra-

Party democracy, and

governing the country by law.

(Quote from Chinese Daily.)