An infamous anniversary has quietly passed here in the New-Old Middle Kingdom. I have recently added AsiaMedia, a most engagingly eclectic newsletter produced by the UCLA Asia Institute, to my reading list. Perhaps you should too. Below, is a good reason why--an excerpt and then a link:
China's unpredictable future
It's not just China's domestic affairs that have kept the Communist Party in charge, writes Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
By Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom AsiaMedia Contributing Writer
Monday, June 4, 2007
Eighteen years ago, with protesters marching through scores of Chinese cities and giant crowds gathering in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, many outside observers, myself included, assumed that the era of Communist Party rule in China was nearing its end. ...
But when the Berlin Wall collapsed a few months later, many began again to assert again that the Beijing regime must be on its last legs. After all, not only had domestic developments shown how disliked the Party was by the "People" in whose name it claimed to rule, but the international zeitgeist seemed to be pointing to a future free of Communist rule in all lands.
How then have observers accounted for the failures of those confident "end of history" predictions in a 21st century that sees Communist Party leaders continuing to call the shots in Beijing, Pyongyang, Hanoi and Havana?
In China, one tendency has been to separate the domestic and international storylines. The surprising persistence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is chalked up to internal factors. Much is made of the leadership's ability to find effective ways to appease or buy off some groups (entrepreneurs, for example) and to terrify or simply keep separated from one another individuals who dissent. Attention is also paid to how the regime has skillfully played the nationalism card, has managed to help the economy grow at unprecedented rates, and has pulled back from micromanaging the private lives of the population, a major cause of discontent in 1989.
External developments, by contrast, are typically seen as still indicating that the CCP still lives on borrowed time. International trends, it continues to be thought by many, suggest that Beijing's current regime will ultimately go the way of both the Communist ones that ran Soviet bloc countries and the non-Communist authoritarian groups that controlled South Korea and Taiwan before those East Asian countries democratized.
