Quote:
Originally Posted by Urzu 7
Okay.
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To be more precise,
a major transition of power is about to take place. The CPC is more openly divided than it has been in many years and, worse for the CPC's leaders, publicly with the
crisis involving major party member Bo Xilai. It is taking every advantage of the distraction provided by the anti-Japanese riots, if it wasn't responsible for them in the first place, to quietly resolve internal party divisions.
All of China knows somewhere in their hearts that the Maoist mandate is dead, and the CPC rules because it rules, nothing more. Throughout the 90's and 00's, that wasn't too much of a problem because China was experiencing meteoric economic growth, but now that even that is slowing down faster than the government expects*, the only way for the CPC to maintain power in the long term is to legitimize itself with Chinese nationalism and a paramount image of stability.
*China's leaders are no fools; they know this will happen and they've been touting for a while the necessity for a "controlled cooldown" of the PRC economy, but the recent slump exceeds their predictions by some margins.
Although this latest round of incident was provoked by everybody's favorite Governor Ishihara attempting to buy and develop the Senkaku Islands, forcing the Japanese government to preempt him, I view the massive Chinese reaction to be deliberate provocation by a Party hungry for external distractions for what seems, to me, to be an increasingly restive populace. If foreign governments are worrying and keeping tabs over the upcoming transfer of power, citizens of the PRC are quite more...anxious.
Worse, the decades of military buildup and the recent years of intra-Party instability has strengthened the power of the People's Liberation Army relative to the CPC proper. Although in China it has long been a key principle of the CPC that the Party controls the gun and not the other way around (a legacy of the brutal warlord period), that doesn't change the fact that guns have power in themselves. The PLA is just about the most jingoistic force in Chinese politics, and the growth of its power is not a happy sign. Even the Americans are making serious efforts to establish contact and liaisons with the PLA because, so I speculate, they want someone who can call it off if some jingoist nutjob gets a hold of that nasty red button.
One can see how the overturning of decades of charm diplomacy that used to be the PRC's policy on everyone except the hated, hated Japanese has engendered such overt hatred from its neighbors just by reading through this thread and the opinions of our Asian members, many of whom are quite level-headed otherwise. This new belligerence maybe a direct outgrowth of the PLA's newfound power, and if it is a sign of what is to come, I am not happy.