When the Chinese state collapses

So far at least, Deng Xiaoping's approach to open up the economy without political liberalization seems to be working, and much better (?) than Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost.

The latter quickly triggered the demise not only of the feared USSR but the entire Eastern European Communist bloc.

China, meanwhile, is going strong, and a pretty good economic speed.

Like many, I thought that the protest movements in 1989 would fundamentally restructure China's internal political arrangement.  But, Deng and Li simply wiped out the protesters. 

There is still a part in me that hopes that the Communist government would collapse. Soon.  But, there are no signs of such an apocalypse.

At least, that is what I thought until I read this blog post over at the New York Review of Books.  Pretty darn exciting:

On July 21 in Beijing, four days before WikiLeaks published its documents, Chinese President Hu Jintao convened a high-level meeting to discuss ways to prevent leaks from the archives of the Communist Party of China. 

How fantastic it would be if slowly various secrets begin to leak out ... It has the potential for not only the downfall of the Communist government, but even for a completely new global order.

So, what are the kind of secrets that we might want to know about first?  Apparently there is a list of seven party secrets that have a priority over others:

1. The famine during the Great Leap Forward in 1959-62. Somewhere between 20 and 50 million people died because of bad policy, not “bad weather.” What exactly happened? What policies caused the famine and what policies suppressed information on it? How much grain was in state granaries while people starved? Is it true that Mao sold grain to the Soviet Union during those years in order to buy nuclear weapons?
2. The death of Mao’s military commander General Lin Biao in 1971. The official version of events, which to this day exists only in bare outline, strains credulity: Mao’s “closet comrade in arms” suddenly plotted a coup, failed in it, tried to flee to the Soviet Union, and was shot down in his plane. What really happened? Why? Why shouldn’t we know more?
3. Mao’s will and personal lockbox. Mao’s wife Jiang Qing said at her trial (as part of the “Gang of Four”) that Mao had a written will that mentioned her. Did he? What did it say? Mao also apparently kept his own lockbox of “most core secrets” that, in his later years, not even Jiang Qing could see. Mao’s mistress Zhang Yufeng kept the key until September 21, 1976, twelve days after Mao’s death, when Hua Guofeng, Mao’s anointed successor, is said to have taken it from her. What’s in the box?
4. The Beijing Massacre of 1989. The basic story is fairly well known from The Tiananmen Papers, Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, and Li Peng’s diary. But the records of some key meetings still are classified, and responsibility for the massacre remains an extremely sensitive question in Chinese politics.
5. The brutal suppression of the Falun Gong after 1999. Falun Gong claims there are concentration camps for their members and that internal organs of executed believers are surgically removed and sold. True? Untrue? What do the records say?
6. Beijing’s huge but secret “stability maintenance” budget. The Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences reports that Chinese government spending on domestic “stability maintenance”—the monitoring, intimidation, roughing-up, and illegal detention of petitioners, aggrieved workers, religious believers, professors, bloggers, twitterers, and other sources of “trouble”—now exceeds what the government spends in any category except the military. What are the details of this budget?
7. Bank accounts of Communist Party officials. Corruption and graft are widely viewed to be problems at every level of Chinese government, but exactly how much money have officials squirreled away? How much have they sent abroad?

 I can't wait ... here is to wishing that it will happen soon. Real soon.