Harmonizing

 CHINA, in its thousands of years of history has, as far as anyone knows, never been a democracy. Arguably, for that matter, neither has any other country. Powerful, elite, undemocratic interests and forces invariably intercede between any expressed will of the people and its implementation.(In the United States, corporate intercession is prevalent) A recently released book "We Became harmonized" describes how the current regime in China has for the past decade imposed cultural and behavioral uniformity and conformity upon its billion and a half people, rendering a potentially volatile body politic passive, malleable, controllable, forestalling any possibility of democracy for China in the near future. There are now more than six hundred million surveillance cameras in china, as citizen surveillance has exponentially increased over the past decade. A massive amount of government computer processing and monitoring power constantly observes nearly every square foot of Chinese soil on behalf of the central government in Beijing. The "communist" government accumulates and organizes personal information on hundreds of millions of citizens with a thoroughness and on a scale sufficient to elicit the envy of any American social media platform, intelligence gathering agency, social research institution, or corporate conglomerate. This is a global trend. The world, not just China, is becoming Orwellian, aided and abetted by by technology and a sleeping giant; global culture. We the little people are provided with enough bread crumbs of prosperity and political power to keep us sleepily content. Hence, resistance to our total control by the state, corporate or otherwise, is minimal. One cannot set foot outside a building in London without being caught on camera. Inside, the camera is always on. Every jab at every button on every smart phone in the world is recorded. From time to time Said Thomas Jefferson, the tree of liberty will required nourishment with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Jefferson also said that the preservation of liberty would require a revolution and a new constitution every generation. It may well be that the time has long since come, and long since gone.