In his journal “Rightful Resistance revisited,” Kevin O’Brien addresses whether the form of resistance to the government found in China is consistent with the definition of rightful resistance.  Rightful resistance is a form of  popular resistance against the state where citizens seek to legitimize their cause by using the states own rules or rhetoric.  I agree that the resistance in China is rightful resistance due to the fact that the citizens use legal modes to achieve their ends.  An example used by O’Brien is the people of Henen, who used the regulations of the central government to get out of excessive taxes being placed on them by their local government.  They threatened to report the violations if they did not repeal the taxes.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk the guest speaker gave on the economic climate in China, and how innovation has had a turbulent past with the Chinese people.  I particularly enjoyed how he incorporated cultural hypotheses to explain why China did not become, and still has not become, the world leader in science and technology, even though at one time they were thousands of years ahead of the west.  Personally I enjoy looking at cultural and historical factors to explain modern phenomena, so learning  how Confucianism and imperialism and communism overtime worked to stifle innovation from the ground up in China is particularly interesting to me.  I believe that it is a combination of all of these factors that has contributed to the modern economic climate in China, and not so much the geographic or other factors.  I believe that China is a very traditional, backwards facing society, that is comfortable in tradition and in their particular niche in the world, and has not until recently decided to look forward more.

In his writing Yang discusses how the Chinese Government has a hybrid system, where the government is still centralized, but there is still a certain amount of federalism that exists for local governments.  The local governments do this through what he calls fiscal federalism, where the local governments are able to maintain autonomy over local economies, laws, infrastructure, schooling, healthcare, and a variety of other areas.  I believe that this offers an explanation for what we saw in the documentary about Dandong. The mayor was directly responsible for the infrastructure projects of the city, and the citizens went directly to him to help solve their problems.  These problems that were unique to the city itself, and not particularly in other cities such as Shenzhen, which is undergoing rapid growth and modernization, while Dandong is falling behind.  This gives evidence to the fact that the central government does not have power over individual cities economies.  I also believe this is comparable to the American federalist system, where the states have their own economies and power over their own economies and infrastructure, education, etc.

Mao Zedong was a much different character than what I had thought of previously before viewing this documentary.  I was unaware of the sheer magnitude of the atrocities that he and his party were responsible for.  Leaving his people to starve and purging the culture of anyone who did not align with his ideals or who crossed him.  However I am more interested in how he was able to amass so much power for himself, and make himself almost like a god, regardless of the things he did.  I think there is an interesting connection between the traditional culture in China, and the willingness of the people to follow to communist party and Mao.  This connection comes from the tradition of dynasty rule and imperialism that had been the foundation for Chinese government for thousands of years, and did not come to an end until right before Mao came to power.  I believe this made people more pre-disposed to submitting to a sort of all-encompassing power, and were looking for someone to replace the old Emperor and the dynasty.  instead of having a dynasty and an emperor, they now had the party and Mao.  This combined with the fear people had for him and his ability to command respect, made him able to successfully replace dynastic rule with party rule.