Uninformed Comments

Desultory Eclecticism spent Thanksgiving weekend surrounded by reasonably adorable children who demanded that he find cartoons for them on youtube; we stumbled upon this one:

The clip is probably a closer approximation of "Sponge Bob: North Korea."  Desultory Eclecticism traveled to China in the early 2000s and saw a hard-working, crowded, chaotic, vibrant society with an occasional battalion marching in lock-step in downtown Beijing, but no outward signs of political repression (which are certainly there below the surface).  University of Michigan political scientist Ron Inglehart has forecast a democratic thaw in China within the next two decades; he may be on to something.  Unlike the ossified one-party Soviet regime, in 1978 Deng Xiaoping's Chinese Communist Party committed to a program of economic liberalization that has made China the #1 trading partner of WalMart and the proud owner of $800 billion in U.S. Treasury Bills.  Yes, the lethal force used in Tianamen Square in 1989 to disperse college students asking for political reforms similar to those instituted by Gorbachev under Perestroika better fit an impudent oil-rich dictatorship than a calculating Asian one, but the Chinese economy could not survive the bad PR of a similar massacre today.  So long as the Party delivers annual 10% growth, there will be no Tianamen-sized demonstrations, but eventually it will fail to hold up its end of the bargain.  Its calculated reaction to the subsequent popular movement will determine whether Inglehart's predicted thaw occurs peacefully or not.