Bret Stephens: Hong Kong Pops the China Bubble - WSJ - WSJ: "These are the people for whom every conceivable door in China is already open. What about the nonelite? What about the people who don’t have a politically connected relative, or can’t afford to bribe a party official for a contract or a doctor for a medical procedure, or lack the funds to leave the country, or simply intend to pursue an honest calling in life, and do so honestly?
These are the people for whom the demonstrators in Hong Kong were also marching. “Don’t make us like the rest of China,” is an implicit theme of the movement. It comes from people who understand that what is hailed in the West as “the China dream” is a hoax. Dreaming is the essential freedom: There can be no true dreaming when the state regulates the sorts of dreams its people may have.
Where the real dream lies is in the minds of China’s cheerleaders in the West. These are people with the souls of technocrats. They look to Beijing now—as they did to Moscow in the 1960s—as a model of government in which wisdom comes from the top, national energies are put in the service of gigantic projects, and autocratic consensus replaces democratic fissiparousness. They seek life (and politics) without contradictions. Five or 10 years from now, when the China bubble has burst, they’ll be making a fetish of some other promising technocracy."
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