[Blind dissident] Chen [Guancheng] is a Tank Man everyone knows by name. He dreads torture but just keeps talking. Beijing worried that the Arab Spring would embolden China's people. Chen indicates that Chinese dissidents no longer fear direct confrontation with the regime.
The dissidents have exposed cracks in the Communist Party's Great Wall of corrupt monied despotism and state repression. China Communists don't want a Berlin Wall ending; Deng's economic modernization was designed to maintain Communist Party control. Another Tiananmen, however, might incite dozens of local rebellions and produce a Chinese Syria.
This fall, China faces a change in senior leadership. Pray the new leaders opt for a Berlin transition, not Tiananmen destruction.
China's economy is big enough and their military has enough power projection capabilities that interesting times in China could have disruptive effects globally.
Not that I'd say we should prop up a dictatorship to avoid economic problems in an already fragile Western world. But that is the reality of unrest in China no matter how much the corrupt autocrats deserve that fate.
