Part of this is the other side of the same phenomenon that makes the prediction of America’s imminent demise so popular with masochists and people who haven’t unlearned their college professors’ crisis theory dialectics. A steady stream of predictions like these flows from publishing houses. I’ve never seen one come true yet, current circumstances included. The Joads aren’t clogging our highways, and we have plenty of peaceful avenues to ventilate our grievances that China lacks.

Of course, it won’t help that we’ve spent more than the cost of the entire Iraq war in just a month, and that could do to our economy what it did to Japan’s in the 90′s, but Japan eventually recovered. Economies rise and fall according to the capacity of their people to invent, produce, innovate, and react flexibly to changes in markets. Those things in turn require free markets in goods, services, and labor; honest government; the rule of law; and an educated population with decent civic virtues and the critical thinking skills to govern itself rationally. We’re certainly not a perfect society in all those ways, but our fundamentals make us much stronger and more stable than China on all counts.

China’s leaders have a divide-and-rule strategy that relies on isolating restive rural regions from each other, exploiting ethnic divisions, and whipping up angry nationalism among urban only-child netizens who dwell near the centers of power. Anger, however, is a very unpredictable thing. Policed chatrooms and state-sanctioned mobs are a skewed sample of public opinion. It’s much harder to gauge the sentiments of the urban and rural poor, or of those who prefer to keep their views to themselves for various reasons. Just because the xenophobic anger is real among the new Boxers (this is also true of North Koreans) doesn’t make it a representative or complete picture of public opinion, nor does it mean that the angry mobs won’t turn on the state after some perceived provocation. I expect they will turn on the state in due course, and plenty of historical precedent supports this prediction.

The bigger questions are whether the state can save its basic structure and pacify the mobs by acceding to some of their demands, or whether the mobs will let themselves be pacified at all. Nor does it mean that we will necessarily like the post-CCP China; after all, the CCP is the one thing that has prevented China from becoming a world power.

During the 1990s, when there was so much about the Rise of China to world prominence and talk of the next superpower — I always had a wait and see attitude.

From what little I read about contemporary China, it seemed that they had great pockets of prosperity within seas of often dire poverty.

That sounded at least a little familiar with other parts of China’s past — Isn’t that one of the recurring themes in Chinese history? Periods of growth and prosperity followed by periods of upheaval as the pressure between haves and have nots got too big?

I could remember reading a book critical of American-style capitalism and materialism that said that the reason the United States did not witness a popular revolution or major popular economic unrest between socialists/communists and capitalists was that the US managed to spread the wealth around enough to keep the have nots docile.

I thought the book downplayed the lives and environment of the American have nots, but I thought the idea was worth considering.

And when I kept hearing about China’s future as a world leader — I kept wondering if they would be able to spread the wealth around enough as they grew or whether the massive population would prove too big a strain on growth and limit its potential….???

Now that the whole world’s economy is on a steep downturn for a period of some years…

….it will be interesting to watch how China and Chinese society fares….