On Sat, 23 Dec 2006 09:20:59 -0600, Pat Flannery
wrote:

Jonathan wrote:

China, as the largest and most repressive govt
the world has ever seen,

Stalin's Russia makes China look like a kid's summer camp.
North Korea makes China's government look like a kid's amusement park
with unlimited free rides and ice cream.
In fact, most of the world's governments prior to around the year 1200
look pretty awful in comparison to China today.

Indeed. Has this guy Jonathan ever _been_ to China? Anyone who's
visited Shanghai in the past ten years is probably wondering what
alternate reality he's from.

qualifies as the most
brittle and sensitive system possible.

Actually, it's survived this long by being far more flexible than
other Communist dictatorships. Ever since they booted out the Gang of
Four in 1976, they've been looking for ways to adjust to the reality
that Communism doesn't work.

A popular uprising is what the protesters at Tiananmen Square were
hoping for; by forcing the government to use violence against its own
people, such outrage would be generated in the inhabitants of the rural
areas that they would march on Beijing, overthrow the government, and
set up a democracy.
The first part of their plan worked just great. :-)

They missed the little detail that most people don't care very much
about democracy, they care about being safe and warm and fed. China
has enough to eat and no one's invading it, so right there the present
government's already outperforming most previous Chinese regimes.

As soon as the Chinese Civil War is over, and all the millions of dead
from violence and starvation are buried.

And the Chinese would have no illusions about that, since they've had
at least three civil wars in the past two centuries that produced
exactly that.

So how do you build a conspiracy they believe might
succeed? You first find what frightens the CCP
the most.

Losing their WalMart contracts.

Oh, I think there might be other contracts even more important than
Wal-Mart -- like their oil deals.

And build it from that. They fear the
hundred million strong religious movement
knows as the Falun Gong the most. They
have gone to extreme, even for them, measures
to ban the movement. Going so far as to actually
create an entire govt ministry, like an interior dept
to silence them.

Because they remember what happened in the Taiping Rebellion, and the
Boxer Rebellion, which were both started by groups rather like Falun
Gong...





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