The Use Of Brains Essay

The commentary in the People's Daily appeared a day after China launched its third manned space flight, which state media also celebrated as a display of the ruling Party's power to marshal economic growth for greater national purposes.
The strikingly long essay dwelt on the Beijing Olympic Games in August as proving that China should stick to Party control and avoid the temptations of Western democracy.
"China's unprecedented success in presenting the world with an extraordinary Olympic Games has stunned the West," says the essay by Mei Ninghua, the chief publisher of another major Party newspaper, the Beijing Daily.
"Throughout the Olympics, the Chinese government and people demonstrated their powerful organizational strength and unsurpassed ability to mobilize society. . . fully embodying the superiority of China's political system."
Chinese officials repeatedly said the Olympics should have nothing to do with politics, and should not be used as a platform to criticize their restrictions on political life.
But there was no such modesty in this latest survey of the Olympics' lessons, which made no mention of a milk-powder scandal that has made thousands of infants ill and killed at least four, and was covered up for months up until the end of the Games.
Late this year, the Communist Party will mark 30 years since China launched market-driven economic reforms under Deng Xiaoping. Some Party scholars have said the anniversary should be the starting point for liberalizing political reforms.
But the republishing of the lengthy comment in Chinese by the Party's top paper – it first appeared in the Beijing Daily – suggested China's leaders have no appetite for big political experiments.
Instead, the Party paper argues that the contrast between China in the Games and the United States in its financial mess offers a lesson for the world on what political system works best.
"Western countries are mired in low growth, and the United States' recent severe financial...