In the Far Eastern Economic Review, Daniel Lynch writes:
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. There will be massive military parades and many speeches by the leaders of the Communist Party. But no one will mention the very real possibility of political upheaval in the near future, or the economic inequality, job losses and slowdown in economic growth the country is currently experiencing.
[…] As the Chinese Communist Party celebrates the People’s Republic’s 60th anniversary, China’s economy is in trouble. Yet the leaders can’t afford to tell the truth because for many years they have been blowing a political bubble called “the Rise of China.” This has led some particularly optimistic Chinese to predict that their country will surpass the United States in “comprehensive national power” — military, economic and cultural — by the late 2020s. The bursting of this political bubble would frustrate the expectations of a newly prosperous, well-educated and wired segment of a nationalistic citizenry and potentially create a dangerous political problem for the authoritarian state. Nevertheless, China’s troubled economy may well be on the verge of throwing the country’s “rise” at least temporarily off the rails.
