That's an important question that exists because of military modernization apart from political pressure to open the political system.
But to this conflict you have to add discontent and even fear from China's business community. China opened the economy--which worked--while keeping the political system closed to those outside the Chinese Communist Party.
Those who successfully built China's economy are rightly telling the party leadership that "you didn't build that" and are edging toward wanting political rights:
1968: Mao Zedong, his Little Red Book and his utterly destructive Cultural Revolution ruined the country in the name of utopian Communist justice. 2013: Mao Yushi says China's entrepreneurs need the rule of law, meaning democratically legislated, legally binding and fairly (non-politically) enforced law -- real justice, not utopian schemes.
Activist Wang Ying, a 6o-year-old grandmother who once ran a private equity firm, told the AP China's political class had a galling attitude. "You can make money because I allow you to. They say, 'you think the money is yours, but actually, I'm just leaving it with you. I can take it back at any time, in any way.'" Shades of the divine right of kings? Matthew Mitchell's "The Pathology of Privilege" nails these characters.
Yeah. Good luck with that:
Can China really come up with some type of Magna Character that unleashes productivity by granting newly rich class some rights against the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power as the end of cheap factory labor inputs from the countryside wanes?
Does the increasingly nationalistic Chinese military--the PLA--think that the Chinese Communist Party is the means to Chinese military greatness? Or does the PLA think that the party gets in the way of the historic Chinese greatness that predates Marx, Lenin, and Mao?
Maybe the PLA supports a Magna Carta that limits party power to enable private enterprise to restore China's position in the world. Or maybe the military sees the entrepreneurs as kulaks to be slaughtered to preserve the party's role in achieving national greatness.
