what are more relevant to chinese reality?
here is my story.
members of "proprietor committee" in our building are elected by each resident. many of them have various complaints about the service provided by the property management firm and some even had serious conflicts with the property mgt firm. but when the chances come to them to use the power of "proprietors committee" to fight for their own interests, they are very unconcerned. few of them showed up in the election and few of them wanted to become the candidate, and mostly importantly, they don't know what the "proprietor committee" can do for them.
you find similar phenomenon in media and many other areas of chinese society. freedom of speech, even though confined by the government and limited at present, is abused by the public; newly gained personal powers are not fully explored and properly exercised; hunderds of thousands of new laws are made but known and implemented by few, congressmen published their emails and telephone numbers but have few incoming inquiries or complaints ...
in many aspects, china is still in the early stage of the learning curve, and you need to move upwards step by step.
censorship is relevant, democracy is relevant, but there are many other issues more relevant and more urgent. and the priority list made by chinese people is quite different from the one made by some overseas "china observers". i am not suggesting that the second list is totally bullshit, actually we could learn a lot from it, but without doubt, the first one is mostly more founded.
the great value of westerners like Jeremy is that he could contribute a lot to reveal the chinese priority list to those outsiders and help them gain better understandings of china's reality, it would be a loss IF danwei degradeS to the level of "mainstream media" and become a propaganda tool of lecturing chinese how important democracy and free press are to china.
thanks for listening to my rant