Friday, January 22, 2016

Throwing away the Mandate of Heaven.

Hong Kong’s Missing Booksellers
The fear and outrage that is spreading in Hong Kong is feeding anti-Communist and separatist sentiments there. This should worry Beijing, and so should the condemnation it has received from Western governments. (Mr. Gui is a naturalized Swedish citizen, and Mr. Lee holds a British passport.) But the fallout was also so predictable that one wonders how China’s leaders, supposedly grandmasters of strategic machination, went about this political calculus.
The Chinese government’s questionable management of its financial markets recently has already suggested that it is seriously disconnected from reality. And now it is using brute force to snuff out a tiny Hong Kong publisher of two-bit political gossip. Is the Communist Party simply becoming more ruthless in quashing dissenting voices, or is its political judgment slipping?

1 comment:

Chiu ChunLing said...

The breath-taking ignorance of the reality of CCP rule in China is to be expected of the NYT.

China is not a free nation. Nobody has any rights, and dissidents are disappeared and killed by the thousands as a matter of course. This is precisely why so many leftist politicians in the West envy the Chinese government.

The CCP isn't riding a tiger or balancing on a wire or whatever ridiculous metaphor for tenuous control analysts love to employ. There won't be any serious challenges posed by internal dissent until China has a large population of discontented combat veterans from wars with other nations returning home, a development that should be the better part of a decade away. Until then, everything that happens can easily be handled by using unlimited force...and the CCP is not shy about doing just that.

But there are inevitable foreign image problems as a result, and that should be the question we ask. What does Beijing's willingness to be spoken ill of by the usually adoring NYT tell us?