Where Is China?

Over at The New York Times is an article that asks if China is ripe for revolution.  The author, Stephen R Platt, an Associated Professor out at UMass Amherst, lays out the history and talks to the current economic condition.  Then he talks to the Taiping Revolution (20 million dead), a Century and a half ago.  In the end the British and French intervened on behalf of the established government, against those in rebellion.

The question is, how would we view a contemporary revolution in China.  Here is his concluding paragraph:

We may not be so far removed.  Given the precarious state of our economy today, and America’s nearly existential reliance on our trade with China in particular, one wonders:  for all of our principled condemnation of China’s government on political and human rights grounds, if it were actually faced with a revolution from within — even one led by a coalition calling for greater democracy — how likely is it that we, too, wouldn’t, in the end, find ourselves hoping for that revolution to fail?

Life can be complicated

Regards  —  Cliff