Comments on: China’s political instability

By: Google, China, and ’strategic ethics’ « thenextwave

Google, China, and ’strategic ethics’ « thenextwave — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 12:12:08 +0000

[…] There’s quite a lot of this about at the moment, and I’ve blogged on aspects of this (political, environmental) in the past. Stephen Aguilar-Milan argued in a blog post this week that “the […]

By: Craig Ullman

Craig Ullman — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 19:00:09 +0000

Last time I checked, revolution theory stated that revolutions occur when rising expectations are suddenly dashed. If China falls into a major recession, you’ll have a very dangerous situation for the leadership.

Of course, there’s no formal opposition in China, no set of leaders to rally behind, and the government has a monopoly on force. But that monopoly assumes the soldiers are willing to follow their orders. A lot has changed since 1989….

By: jake

jake — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:25:16 +0000

These are all good points, but the fact is that unrest remains too fragmented and focused on local corruption and abuses to create the kind of broad social movement that might make real change. What we should watch for is what the intellectuals do. Thus far most stand with the state, but if their position starts to deteriorate and a number of them start making common cause with the workers and peasants who have been the victims of the reform era, they could provide the links necessary for social discontent to gel into a real challenge to state and economic elites.
http://razetheladder.blogspot.com/2008/08/state-of-china-as-olympics-begin.html