by Ryan Weber

Created on: September 20, 2008

The twentieth century witnessed the emergence of great technology, which endowed governments with greater control over their people than ever before in history. In Europe it brought forth the rise of totalitarian states in Germany and Italy. China and Russia embraced Communism as an alternative to Capitalism. China has long been known as a Communist state, however, in recent years, it has evolved into something else entirely.

To Russia and China, the prosperity of the West was enticing. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Communism as a practical ideal was on the wane. By 1991, Russia gave up on it completely and attempted to reform into a Capitalist state. China waited and watched Russia go through the pains of privatizing its industries. It wasn't until 1997, when Great Britain's lease on Hong Kong expired that China began to embrace Capitalism. The result of China's reforms was not Communism or Capitalism, but Fascism.

According to Mussolini, "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism, as it is the merger of corporate and government power." Indeed, what China has achieved is the convergence of Capitalist commercial wealth, with government power. In a totalitarian state like China or Nazi Germany, national unity is of the utmost importance. Where a democratic nation will have an open heart to the suffering of a minority group, a fascist state seeks to erase minority culture altogether. An authoritarian regime believes that national pride brings unity and unity brings ultimate power.

Just as in Europe, when Hitler proclaimed the right to reclaim the Sudetenland and other areas believed to be of Germanic cultural heritage, so too does China wish to have unity of traditional Chinese territory. For China, the task of uniting their land was fairly simple, since only a few small regions stood in their way. In 1951, as China invaded Tibet, the US and their Western allies were still recovering from World War II.

The peaceful land of Tibet was easily captured by the vast Chinese army. Once conquered, the Chinese government began a steady campaign of propaganda. Hitler once said, "By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise."

In time, the Chinese leadership decided to take even more drastic measures. They begun construction of a great railway leading directly from the capital of Beijing to the gates of Lhasa and rebuilt the war-ravaged capital of Tibet. They marketed

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