What's Really Going on in China

Justin Raimondo has taken the recent Chen Guangcheng affair to provide an overview of what is really going on in China. Among his conclusions:

Western policy wonks and reporters touted the ouster of the "Maoist" Bo Xilai as a decisive shift away from authoritarianism and toward the "rule of law," only to find this illusion cruelly crushed by Chen’s dramatic escape and his arrival at the doors of our embassy in Beijing...

This incident underscores, above all, the question of just who is in charge in China. The typical Western view is that China is a totalitarian dictatorship, ruled with an iron fist from Beijing, where the central leadership has taken on a "reformist" cast and is slowly but surely leading the world’s most populous nation into modernity and, presumably, a more "democratic" future. Yet the reality is that China is far from monolithic: authority is widely dispersed simply because the country is too big, too complex, and too rambunctious to be effectively run from a central location. The coastal cities are bastions of liberality, while the inland provinces – to say nothing of China’s "wild West" – are more conservative, and historically resistant to Beijing’s edicts...

The image of China as a model of Confucian stability, which the regime has been eager to project, has been taken up by our policy wonks, by Western reporters, by this administration, and by economic actors who have an interest in maintaining the fiction of China as a place in which the West can safely invest. Under the carefully orchestrated ministrations of the "reformist" leadership, we are told, the "rule of law" is supposedly gaining a foothold in the land of Mao, and China – like Japan, and the other "Asian tigers" – is slowly becoming integrated with the West. Recent events in China, however, are rapidly refuting this Pollyanna-ish balderdash...

By allowing themselves to get in the middle of this, the US government has shown that it has no understanding of what is happening in China at the present moment. The biggest fear of China’s current leadership – the heirs of the reformist Deng Xiaoping – is that another massive populist upsurge, similar to the Cultural Revolution, will envelope the country in "chaos." That is why they moved to crush Bo Xilai, who had the audacity to revive some Maoist era slogans in an attempt to hold his "Chongqing model" up as an example for the nation. The headlong rush to "modernization" and "reform" has created glaring inequities and in many ways resembles the free-for-all that accompanied the dismantling of the Soviet state: a new class of Chinese oligarchs, just as audacious — and rapacious — as their Russian cousins, has arisen and is seeking to preserve and legitimize its power...

 The entire Raimondo political analysis is the best I have seen on China and a must read and it is right here.