Andres, over at Simon World thinks the easy part of China's modernization is over: "Made in Zimbabwe".
For these twenty and more years what Beijing has had was the legitimacy that economic affluence can buy. Only once has it dropped the ball, allowing inflation to careen out of control at the end of the 1980s, one of the reasons why Beijing's citizens decided to support the university students at Tiananmen rather than stay indoors. Since then Beijing has managed the economy relatively well.
This success fosters admiration, which is always nice to have, and emulation, which is always dangerous to have. Vietnam has begun to open its economy and is attempting to enter the WTO. India in the last fifteen years has finally turned away from its failed socialistic economic experiments and found the better friend of the poor is capitalism. And Japan has long moved many of its factories to Southeast Asia, to countries such as Malaysia and Thailand that have similar economic characteristics as China.
None of these countries would have been competitors for China's manufacturers twenty years ago, but they are now. And I don't think this is fully appreciated by many within China. The sun is setting on the "easy" part of China's modernization
Also:
China's current social stability is a precarious thing, not least because unrest has no formal and legitimate channels to go through. Protest sheets sent to Beijing or riots in Zhejiang are not effective ways for a society to regulate itself. Democratic elections are: they provide a way for citizens to take responsibility for themselves. Quite simply, no other method of choosing a government is now considered more morally legitimate by most people in the world.
The post is a lot longer and worth reading.
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