While U.S. commentators in China for the Olympics hail how the repressive Communist regime is trending toward Western capitalism, author Naomi Klein says a countervailing dynamic is underway as the United States and the West adopt more authoritarian techniques.
"What I see is that China is becoming more like us, the West, in many ways, and we're becoming more like China in many ways,” says Klein, the author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. “I wouldn't say that we are the same society yet, but what we see are these sort of steady trends, and a kind of an odd sort of meeting in the middle …
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“They embrace the side of our society of extreme consumer capitalism, and our leaders start to embrace many of their tools of social control—indefinite detention, loss of civil liberties—that their leaders are embracing."
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