China's rulers are worried about the lack of faith in communist ideology and how this lapse might sweep them from power:
Regime members, like French aristocrats, no longer believe in their own ideology but cling to power. The Chinese people have come to expect rapidly rising living standards, and may abandon the regime if it doesn’t produce.
Regime elites must be careful, like Deng in 1989, or the rulers will lose everything and chaos will be unleashed on China.
China’s rulers have also been circulating a six-part TV documentary blaming the collapse of the Soviet Union on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms and softness. Message: Avoid democracy or political freedom.
All this, writes the Wall Street Journal's Jeremy Page, is “part of an ideological campaign launched by China's new leader, Xi Jinping, to re-energize the party and enforce discipline among its members.”
Can they re-energize the party? Or is the Chinese Communist Party just the ancien regime waiting for the revolution?
There is always Plan B of replacing party loyalty with nationalism stoked by anger at foreigners. But that's a dangerous place to be.
Hey, in a completely unrelated matter, China is thinking of reorganizing their military districts to be more effective in projecting power in place of the old districts designed to repel invasion:
China is considering reorganizing its seven military regions into five in a bid to respond more swiftly to a crisis, the Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Wednesday.
The news comes amid rising tensions over Beijing's territorial claims in the region, with China and Japan squaring off over a chain of uninhabited islands in the East China Sea.
Each of the new military regions will create a joint operations command that controls the army, navy and air force as well as a strategic missile unit, the major daily said citing senior Chinese military officials and other sources.
The planned revamp would mark a shift from the current defence-oriented military that relies mainly on the army to one that ensures more mobile and integrated management of the army, navy, air force and strategic missile units, Yomiuri said.
That has no relation to Chinese Communist Party worries about retaining power, I'm sure.
I'm sure the party has things under control. I mean, they just need a short and glorious war against some objective not worth the bones of some notional Pomeranian grenadier, no?
China's rulers might believe a foreign adventure can save them. But they could be wrong. They might lose that glorious little war. The people might not like that.
Or China might win that glorious little war--and demand a bigger one that China's rulers don't want to risk. The people might not like that, either.
The Chinese military might not like that choice either, believing that they are better than they really are (I've mentioned this) and thinking that they--and not the Chinese Communist Party--are the vanguard of the nationalistic people:
The CCP leaders are having an increasingly hard time dealing with their aggressive military commanders, who are sometimes acting first and conferring with their political bosses later.
China is a big place. Believing that the question is necessarily who rules united China could be a mistake. I don't know why the continent-sized China can't experience all of the outcomes we debate.
UPDATE: China denies that they are working on unified commands to promote joint warfighting:
China denied on Tuesday a state media report that said its military will establish a joint operational command structure for its forces to improve coordination between different parts of the defense system.
It doesn't say that China is denying redrawing military district boundaries, however.
