I may never buy a used guitar again...

[Duff]

Remember the Chinesse dude and the tank?

What ever happened to that guy? Anybody ever hear from him again?

Anyway, they are all communists; like one big union, right? Cleaning up these messed up factories and straightening out this criminal activity should be a short order for them.

Seriously though, my new Vox AC15c1 is a really nice China made amp. A lot of really really good products are coming out of China. Our Classic Vibes we love so much come from China. Whoever made these items are good workers that obviously take pride in their work and probably value their jobs.

There has to be mega money going back into China and a substantial proportion of that money has to be going back to the workers and people, in one way or another. Then again, there are SO MANY PEOPLE in China that mega amounts of money going into the economy probably is diluted very significantly, just by the sheer number of people living there and the massive superstructure of the country and the cost of maintaining it, even at a marginal level.

Maybe Syo knows if the factory owners are allowed to keep the vast majority of the profit or if there is a big stockholding class that benefits from the profits. Do the workers in some of the plants get to buy stock or are they given "x" amount of stocks. Do they have profit sharing in any of the plants? It is possible that there are incentives for excellence. Seeing so many excellent products coming out of China would seem to suggest that something is going right, at least in some places.

[Ch0jin]

Remember the Chinesse dude and the tank?

Of course. Tiananmen Square 1989. Protesters take to the streets of Beijing to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang, a Pro- Democracy campaigner. As with plenty of large public protests, all kinds of of other groups joined in as well and the protest was eventually put down violently by the military. The image you reference is, as far as I know, the only image (or one of very few at least) that came out of the whole event. It depicts an unknown man in a white shirt blocking the path of a PLA tank. I was in the very same spot only last year.

What ever happened to that guy? Anybody ever hear from him again?

Shortly after the iconic photograph was taken he was ushered back into the crowd by a small group. Friends? Concerned citizens? Secret Police? Nobody knows for sure, but as far as I can tell, he has never resurfaced.

Anyway, they are all communists; like one big union, right?

If you mean all of China, then yes. They run a single party system and the governing party is the Communist Party of China, making all of China a communist state.

Cleaning up these messed up factories and straightening out this criminal activity should be a short order for them.

I get where you're going with this, but I don't think anything is going to be that simple in a country of 1.3 billion people, single communist state or not.

To go completely and utterly off topic....

If you get the chance, Beijing is a great city to visit. For a city of some 22 million people I was amazed at how clean, slick, modern and organised it feels. (especially after experiencing what 18-20 million people in Cairo feels like.....) Not Tokyo slick by a long way, but impressive nonetheless.

[Duff]

I was joking that because they are communists, comparing it to a big union, looking out for the general welfare of all the population, particularly the working class person, is their main communist objective and alternative approach to government and economic distribution of wealth among the people.

I doubt that anything like that is happening. They have no power to protest or initiate workplace change and are probably dominated by an upper class of some type, probably not refered to as aristocrats, but the managerial elite or business owners or something of that sort that consolidate all of the decision making power and all other power. There is probably a HUGE group at the bottom of the socio-economic pyramid that don't have anything coming and live basically hand to mouth, with few, if any opportunities to move up the ladder of society. They are likely very passive and apathetic. Easy for the power brokers to manipulate in their ostensibly warped version of communism and capitalism.

Syo would know best about the demographics since he has seen the situation first hand, especially out of the cities in the rural industrial areas.