The Chinese Regime
I posted this on a newsgroup the other day, when someone posed the question why the Chinese Communist regime had outlasted its fellow communist states in Russia and Eastern Europe. Anyone who has an interest in recent Chinese history may have some interest in reading it.
The East European communist dictatorships were being heavily supported by Russia at the time. Once communism began to collapse in mother Russia and its influence waned, the regimes in the surrounding satellite states began to fall with it.
China was a large independent state whose regime could easily exist without Russian support. The Chinese dictatorship learned a great deal from the downfall of their fellow communists in the East European states. To that end, they implement limited government reforms, attempted to reduce corruption and opened up their economies to international trade. The net result is now many millions of Chinese are quite well off. That bought a certain amount of goodwill or at least tolerance for the communist regime among the general population.
Those strategies bought the Chinese regime some time, probably several decades longer that their fellow communists lasted. But the future outlook for the regime isn’t that good. With the spread of the internet and cell phones, their control of the flow of information will gradually wane. That’s bad news for any dictatorship. The population will wise up and get organized and the government will have to react to that, either with more reforms which will limit their power or else move towards something resembling an actual democracy.