Why “China Century” will be shortest on record
Jan. 3 (Esquire/by Thomas P.M. Barnett): China’s late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping chose wisely: Reversing Mikhail Gorbachev’s subsequent logic, he focused on the economics while putting off the politics.
This decision later earned him the sobriquet “the butcher of Tiananmen” when, in 1989, the political expectations of students quickly outpaced the Party’s willingness for self-examination.
But it likewise locked China onto a historical pathway from which it cannot escape, or what I call the five D’s of the dragon’s decline from world-beater to world-benefactor: demographics, decrepitude, dependency, defensiveness, and — most disabling of all — democratization.
Full story: http://bit.ly/eKRIn6