China and Democracy

Arguments for and Against Democracy The proponents of it, see democracy as good and very important. It enables individuals to decide what is good for them. Others argue that people don’t know what is in their best interests. Also, the definition of autonomy to various individuals differs. For example, democracy cannot in itself ensure that each individual will prevail.Advertising We will write a custom critical writing sample on China and Democracy specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Democracy provides a mechanism for solving group conflicts and social differences. It offers a channel for open discussion and expression of diverse ideas for better decision making. But then, the value of democracy in theory is very different in practice. Even when there is economic growth, it has always been accompanied by social inequality, embezzlement of public wealth and grand corruption. Public dissatisfaction with how democracy works has b een evident with the various civil protests on hampered economic growth, social inequality and the subsequent emergence of criminal gangs. Some just waive their constitutional right to vote. In fact, most individuals believe in the rule by the technocratic elite as compared to democracy. Democracy’s ability to result to economic sustainability is contentious. This I because the heavy taxation often results to reduced productivity. Further, it may not be able to curb inflation through strict policies. Democracy also leads to religious and ethnic conflicts. Economic association and availability of information and transparency and accountability yield economic growth. Without democracy, there is no way of making the government accountable through the electoral process making them wasteful in their economic dealings. Chinese perception of democracy The Chinese citizens favor an economically rich country as opposed to their desire for a democratic society. Freedom is not the only way to measure what is important to a society. Instead, it should be associated with something of value to society. Democracy does not mean much if the citizenry is hungry, sick, uneducated and generally chained with poverty. Chinese scholars argue that how democracy can only be equated to how much individuals are able to make decisions on what they hold important in their life. It is the abilities that one has to make his own individual choices on the things that we value and hold in high regard. People associate leaders with individuals who have acted to empower people rather than those who concentrate on economic growth. The Chinese public however, views the government as caretakers and protector other than as owing obligations to them to offer them the basic needs.Advertising Looking for critical writing on political sciences? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More Chinese movement towards democracy At the beginning, due to the s courge of war, instability and famine facing them, the Chinese people were only concerned with fighting for a peaceful and safe environment that is free from hunger with political stability and cohesion. They did not worry about individual freedom and democracy. And these they achieved less for the now emerging high cases of instability and criminality in their country and people have resulted into ranking social order as the topmost current concern for them. Then there was need for educating the public so as to empower them to utilize the opportunities available for economic growth. Basic education was integral for the Chinese people to integrate their own economic goals with the world market. Though the government was unable to achieve a compulsory nine years education for all its masses, it is determined to universalize its education system in this era that education has become important for any individual to be successful in life, even in the Chinese economy. The Chinese governm ent has also worked hard towards the realization of an improved health facilities and nutrition. There is increase in both protective and curative measures adopted as well as fight against epidemics and improved sanitation. This has resulted to low mortality rate and increased life expectancy laying a ground for the need of higher rights. Women rights have also taken shape where women can choose their own spouses, right to divorce, to education and even to hold a job. They are also empowered to make political stands. Even though this has not been fully realized, it has been a great milestone for the Chinese people. The people’s right to a job and subsequently the employer’s right to choose a worker of his choice have created free movement of labor as opposed to the rigid and immobile system that existed, even though this has resulted to risk of unemployment since the government no longer guarantees the public with jobs. Further, almost all the population has been issue d with houses increasing people’s freedom to make decisions concerning their own lives leading to economic growth. This in turn has resulted to institutional and cultural change pushing political reforms even higher. Chinese Reaction to Democracy Chinese public has its own feelings toward the individual freedoms and rights. From the controlled flow of information, now there is not only increased freedom of speech but also increased use of the internet and international communication through fax, telephones, mails and computers.Advertising We will write a custom critical writing sample on China and Democracy specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More The government has invested heavily on technology and telecommunications all over the country. The media is no longer under the threat of the government on what it publishes. However, the media is not as free as it should be. There are still limitations imposed on the media both directly by the government and indirectly by the business people. But the freedom has its own disadvantages such as the uncontrolled informational flow carrying with it lifestyles that were formally regarded as a taboo thus eroding public morals and standards of values, especially with pornography infiltrating the market. However, people generally believe that the media should expose the current social evils and problems facing the country, as they too no longer support the increased freedom of information. The right to consumer goods too has a different aspect to it. If ones financial position is low, then the right to choose the products he would want to consume is inhibited and does not help. But the Chinese economy has grown thus empowering the consumers to purchase not only the necessities, but also the luxuries. Further, the right to choose consumer goods cannot in itself ensure that consumers get exactly what they want to buy. It requires an additional right to consumer protection by state against the producers so they can enjoy the primary right. Also, the right to work and live in a house of your own as granted by the state is still regulated by the market forces of labor. Most of the population is now faced with massive unemployment leading to social disparities and therefore reduced ability to own houses. Also, the people have a right to personal lifestyle through the music they listen to though most of them listen to music reflecting their values. There are also other rights such as right to inheritance, to dealing in stocks, to acquire wealth or hard currency. Therefore, what democracy means for the majority of other countries may not be the same conception for the Chinese people. They define what democracy is and they act towards its realization, their democracy. This critical writing on China and Democracy was written and submitted by user Haley Pennington to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.

A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert Study Guide

A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert Study Guide â€Å"A Simple Heart† by Gustave Flaubert describes the life, the affections, and the fantasies of a diligent, kindhearted servant named Fà ©licità ©. This detailed story opens with an overview of Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s working life- most of which has been spent serving a middle-class widow named Madame Aubain, â€Å"who, it must be said, was not the easiest of people to get on with† (3). However, during her fifty years with Madame Aubain, Fà ©licità © has proved herself to be an excellent housekeeper. As the third-person narrator of â€Å"A Simple Heart† states: â€Å"No one could have been more persistent when it came to haggling over prices and, as for cleanliness, the spotless state of her saucepans was the despair of all the other serving maids† (4). Though a model servant, Fà ©licità © had to endure hardship and heartbreak early in life. She lost her parents at a young age and had a few brutal employers before she met Madame Aubain. In her teenage years, Fà ©licità © also struck up a romance with a â€Å"fairly well off† young man named Thà ©odore- only to find herself in agony when Thà ©odore abandoned her for an older, wealthier woman (5-7). Soon after this, Fà ©licità © was hired to look after Madame Aubain and the two young Aubain children, Paul and Virginie. Fà ©licità © formed a series of deep attachments during her fifty years of service. She became devoted to Virginie, and closely followed Virginie’s church activities: â€Å"She copied the religious observances of Virginie, fasting when she fasted and going to confession whenever she did† (15). She also became fond of her nephew Victor, a sailor whose travels â€Å"took him to Morlaix, to Dunkirk and to Brighton and after each trip, he brought back a present for Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬  (18). Yet Victor dies of yellow fever during a voyage to Cuba, and the sensitive and sickly Virginie also dies young. The years pass, â€Å"one very much like another, marked only by the annual recurrence of the church festivals,† until Fà ©licità © finds a new outlet for her â€Å"natural kind-heartedness† (26-28). A visiting noblewoman gives Madame Aubain a parrot- a noisy, stubborn parrot named Loulou- and Fà ©licità © wholeheartedly begins looking after the bird. Fà ©licità © starts to go deaf and suffers from â€Å"imaginary buzzing noises in her head† as she grows older, yet the parrot is a great comfort- â€Å"almost a son to her; she simply doted on him† (31). When Loulou dies, Fà ©licità © sends him to a taxidermist and is delighted with the â€Å"quite magnificent† results (33). But the years ahead are lonely; Madame Aubain dies, leaving Fà ©licità © a pension and (in effect) the Aubain house, since â€Å"nobody came to rent the house and nobody came to buy it† (37). Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s health deteriorates, though she still keeps informed about religious ceremonies. Shortly before her death, she contributes the stuffed Loulou to a local church display. She dies as a church procession is underway, and in her final moments envisions â€Å"a huge parrot hovering above her head as the heavens parted to receive her† (40). Background and Contexts Flaubert’s Inspirations: By his own account, Flaubert was inspired to write â€Å"A Simple Heart† by his friend and confidante, the novelist George Sand. Sand had urged Flaubert to abandon his typically harsh and satiric treatment of his characters for a more compassionate way of writing about suffering, and the story of Fà ©licità © is apparently the result of this effort. Fà ©licità © herself was based on the Flaubert family’s longtime maidservant Julie. And in order to master the character of Loulou, Flaubert installed a stuffed parrot on his writing desk. As he noted during the composition of â€Å"A Simple Heart†, the sight of the taxidermy parrot â€Å"is beginning to annoy me. But I’m keeping him there, to fill my mind with the idea of parrothood.† Some of these sources and motivations help to explain the themes of suffering and loss that are so prevalent in â€Å"A Simple Heart†. The story was begun around 1875 and appeared in book form in 1877. In the meantime, Flaubert had run up against financial difficulties, had watched as Julie was reduced to blind old age, and had lost George Sand (who died in 1875). Flaubert would eventually write to Sand’s son, describing the role that Sand had played in the composition of â€Å"A Simple Heart†: â€Å"I had begun â€Å"A Simple Heart† with her in mind and exclusively to please her. She died when I was in the middle of my work.† For Flaubert, the untimely loss of Sand had a larger message of melancholy: â€Å"So is it with all our dreams.† Realism in the 19th Century: Flaubert was not the only major 19th-century author to focus on simple, commonplace, and often powerless characters. Flaubert was the successor of two French novelists- Stendhal and Balzac- who excelled at portraying middle- and upper-middle-class characters in an unadorned, brutally honest manner. In England, George Eliot depicted hardworking but far-from-heroic farmers and tradesmen in rural novels such as Adam Bede, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch; while Charles Dickens portrayed the downtrodden, impoverished residents of cities and industrial towns in the novels Bleak House and Hard Times. In Russia, the subjects of choice were perhaps more unusual: children, animals, and madmen were a few of the characters depicted by such writers as Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy. Even though everyday, contemporary settings were a key element of the 19th-century realist novel, there were major realist works- including several of Flaubert’s- that depicted exotic locations and strange events. â€Å"A Simple Heart† itself was published in the collection Three Tales, and Flaubert’s other two tales are very different: â€Å"The Legend of St. Julien the Hospitaller†, which abounds in grotesque description and tells a story of adventure, tragedy, and redemption; and â€Å"Herodias†, which turns a lush Middle Eastern setting into a theater for grand religious debates. To a large extent, Flaubert’s brand of realism was based not on the subject matter, but on the use of minutely-rendered details, on an aura of historical accuracy, and on the psychological plausibility of his plots and characters. Those plots and characters could involve a simple servant, a renowned medieval saint, or aristocrats from ancient times. Key Topics Flaubert’s Depiction of Fà ©licità ©: By his own account, Flaubert designed â€Å"A Simple Heart† as â€Å"quite simply the tale of the obscure life of a poor country girl, devout but not given to mysticism† and took a thoroughly straightforward approach to his material: â€Å"It is in no way ironic (though you might suppose it to be so) but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move my readers to pity, I want to make sensitive souls weep, being one myself.† Fà ©licità © is indeed a loyal servant and a pious woman, and Flaubert keeps a chronicle of her responses to major losses and disappointments. But it is still possible to read Flaubert’s text as an ironic commentary on Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s life. Early on, for instance, Fà ©licità © is described in the following terms: â€Å"Her face was thin and her voice was shrill. At twenty-five, people took her to be as old as forty. After her fiftieth birthday, it became impossible to say what age she was at all. She hardly ever spoke, and her upright stance and deliberate movements gave her the appearance of a woman made out of wood, driven as if by clockwork† (4-5). Though Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s unappealing appearance can earn a reader’s pity, there is also a touch of dark humor to Flaubert’s description of how strangely Fà ©licità © has aged. Flaubert also gives an earthy, comic aura to one of the great objects of Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s devotion and admiration, the parrot Loulou: â€Å"Unfortunately, he had the tiresome habit of chewing his perch and he kept plucking out his feathers, scattering his droppings everywhere and splashing the water from his bath† (29). Although Flaubert invites us to pity Fà ©licità ©, he also tempts us to regard her attachments and her values as ill-advised, if not absurd. Travel, Adventure, Imagination: Even though Fà ©licità © never travels too far, and even though Fà ©licità ©Ã¢â‚¬â„¢s knowledge of geography is extremely limited, images of travel and references to exotic locations figure prominently in â€Å"A Simple Heart†. When her nephew Victor is at sea, Fà ©licità © vividly imagines his adventures: â€Å"Prompted by her recollection of the pictures in the geography book, she imagined him being eaten by savages, captured by monkeys in a forest or dying on some deserted beach† (20). As she grows older, Fà ©licità © becomes fascinated with Loulou the parrot- who â€Å"came from America†- and decorates her room so that it resembles â€Å"something halfway between a chapel and a bazaar† (28, 34). Fà ©licità © is clearly intrigued by the world beyond the Aubains’ social circle, yet she is incapable of venturing out into it. Even trips that take her slightly outside her familiar settings- her efforts to see Victor off on his voyage (18-19), her journey to Honfleur (32-33)- unnerve her considerably. A Few Discussion Questions 1) How closely does â€Å"A Simple Heart† follow the principles of 19th-century realism? Can you find any paragraphs or passages that are excellent specimens of a â€Å"realist† way of writing? Can you find any places where Flaubert departs from traditional realism? 2) Consider your initial reactions to â€Å"A Simple Heart† and to Fà ©licità © herself. Did you perceive the character of Fà ©licità © as admirable or ignorant, as hard to read or totally straightforward? How do you think Flaubert wants us to react to this character- and what do you think Flaubert himself thought of Fà ©licità ©? 3) Fà ©licità © loses many of the people who are closest to her, from Victor to Virginie to Madame Aubain. Why is the theme of loss so prevalent in â€Å"A Simple Heart†? Is the story meant to be read as a tragedy, as a statement of the way life really is, or as something else completely? 4) What role do references to travel and adventure play in â€Å"A Simple Heart†? Are these references meant to show how little Fà ©licità © really knows about the world, or do they lend her existence a special air of excitement and dignity? Consider a few specific passages and what they say about the life Fà ©licità © leads. Note on Citations All page numbers refer to Roger Whitehouses translation of Gustave Flauberts Three Tales, which contains the full text of A Simple Heart (introduction and notes by Geoffrey Wall; Penguin Books, 2005).