http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_CHINA_JASMINE_REVOLUTION?SITE=PAPIT&SECTION=NATIONAL&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Jasmine flowers in front of McDonald's.  Twittering in Starbucks.  Calling the Chinese government hooligans!  Oh my!
::)

Sounds like the tea partiers in Wisconsin

Well, since it worked so well at Tiananmen squa-aaw, crap.  I forgot.  Cutting off the cameras did work pretty well at Tiananmen, at least for the Chinese government.  It worked so well that not a word of it was breathed on US networks during the Olympics some 20+ years later.

Well, since it worked so well at Tiananmen squa-aaw, crap.  I forgot.  Cutting off the cameras did work pretty well at Tiananmen, at least for the Chinese government.  It worked so well that not a word of it was breathed on US networks during the Olympics some 20+ years later.


I'm willing to bet the Internet would help a lot more leak out this time around, even with the great firewall.  Could the Chinese gov't afford a week or two with total Internet blackout? Imagine the impact on the businesses.

I'm willing to bet the Internet would help a lot more leak out this time around, even with the great firewall.  Could the Chinese gov't afford a week or two with total Internet blackout? Imagine the impact on the businesses.


Sure...if it's necessary for state security.

Here, hand some of these out to the boys in lieu of pay!

http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/464898/2/istockphoto_464898_ball_and_paddle.jpg

I'm willing to bet the Internet would help a lot more leak out this time around, even with the great firewall.  Could the Chinese gov't afford a week or two with total Internet blackout? Imagine the impact on the businesses.


Exactly.

Actually, there are fairly regular protests in China.  The thing is, they're isolated, get no (within China) media coverage, and they're typically against one or two localized corrupt officials. 

The Western analogy would be the way in which we disregard most police abuse: every week or so, a cop makes a bad shoot (cop serving a warrant with a typo in it against an equally-bewildered innocent civilian who thinks he's the target of a home invasion, cop gets pissed off at a bystander with a camera, cop mistakes firearm for a taser, etc.) on a civilian. 

And the fact is that popular support in China just isn't there yet, because the level of corruption isn't past the breaking point yet, and isolated incidents of corruption don't quite get to the point where a billion people say "screw it, burn it all to the ground".  (The western analogy holds here, too.  Half the time, the guy on the receiving end of the beatdown or the tasering really did beg for it.  And most of the time, our cops only shoot the guy's dog for barking too loud from within its cage, rather than blowing away the civilian himself.)

The one good thing that's come out of the chaos in the middle east is that it serves as an illustration of just how amazingly incredibly long the "long list of usurpations" has to get before all hell's supposed to break loose, and it really puts our domestic poliitical squabbling in perspective.

Aren't most of the 1 billion+ Chinese still sustenance peasant farmers living in medieval conditions?

I mean there's an upper crust of about 60 million urbane elites who get the opportunity to throw jasmine at Starbucks beneath the Beijing skyscrapers, but most of the country lives in, well, a different kind of China.

Aren't most of the 1 billion+ Chinese still sustenance peasant farmers living in medieval conditions?

I mean there's an upper crust of about 60 million urbane elites who get the opportunity to throw jasmine at Starbucks beneath the Beijing skyscrapers, but most of the country lives in, well, a different kind of China.


Many nworking in sweat shops owned by US based transnational corps

Aren't most of the 1 billion+ Chinese still sustenance peasant farmers living in medieval conditions?

I mean there's an upper crust of about 60 million urbane elites who get the opportunity to throw jasmine at Starbucks beneath the Beijing skyscrapers, but most of the country lives in, well, a different kind of China.


http://i649.photobucket.com/albums/uu217/thirdinline/excellentfrog.jpg

All snark aside - if a billion Chinese peasants wind up wanting western-level goods-and-services, one of two things will happen:

a) The CCP gets its ass overthrown in a way that's been overdue since Tiananmen, and the US doesn't have anyone to whom it owes that portion of its debts.
b) The CCP retains power, the peasants get brought up to Western standards of "middle class" living, and the US gets 10% of the resulting consumer market.

Either way, I bank coin.