China & the high tech society

When I posted recently about the troubles of having an authoritarian high tech society, one of the examples that came to my mind was modern China. Another actually is pre-revolutionary France -- not as high tech, I'll admit, but one in which the populace had rising, but unmet, expectations.

I am reading a book now on modern China -- China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise. The commentary describing the book remarks

She sets out to explain why it is not a mere fantasy and why we, basically, need to be nice to China to keep the nightmare at bay.

["It" is war between the US & China.]

When I read the tea leaves, I doubt that anything can prevent breakage in China. It's an authoritarian country that is trying to turn itself into a modern, high tech society, which seems impossible enough on the surface. Then add in:

Inside China, she argues, the party leadership is hemmed in by threats to its stability: a rapidly aging population, the rise of the Internet, privatization of the economy, a widening gap between urban rich and rural poor, a restive population fed up with corruption, pollution that not only sickens but kills, mounting unemployment in an economy that needs to grow 7 percent annually just to provide jobs for 25 million new people entering the workforce.

In other words, even if China did not have an authoritarian government, it would have trouble. Does it look like the government can square this circle?

"All around them," Shirk contends, "the leaders see new social forces unleashed by economic reforms that could subvert the regime." Moreover, Shirk describes a regime -- half Mafia, half corporate board -- so obsessed with staying in power that it is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges. In a country where communist ideology is dead and a dog-eat-dog form of capitalism is ascendant, you'd think economic interests would be supreme. That's not the case, Shirk argues. After the crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the military and security services gained even more power than they already had in a society built on Chairman Mao's maxim that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The headlines today read: China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes Does this mean that things have gotten so bad the government can't prevent the news from getting out or that they are becoming more open?

The big question though, is how much longer will China be stable & in what way will it explode?