When China’s gargantuan debt bubble finally explodes and the shit hits the fan, China’s leadership may end up in worse shape than just having feces on their faces. They may well be gone. The economic collapse will be epic, so too may be the revolutionary ructions. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
The only question left for China (and every other debt/bubble-dependent nation) is what socio-political consequences will manifest when the credit bubble finally bursts?
In Asia, it’s generally seen as unpatriotic to criticize one’s country in public, even if you disagree with its direction and leadership. The cultural norm is to maintain the “face” of one’s country by hiding its ills from outsiders.
This reticence is especially evident in China, which suffers from the memory of being subjugated by the Western imperialist powers in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
As a general rule, you will rarely hear any profound criticism of China unless you are considered a trusted friend; giving China a black eye in public is frowned upon, even by its domestic critics.
For this reason, the majority of the Western media has very little grasp of what worries Chinese people. Recently, I have heard fears of a Second Cultural Revolution being expressed in private.
There is a Great Divide between generations in China: on the one side is the older generation that remembers the Maoist era with some nostalgia and the terrible adversities of the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). On the other side is the young educated, prosperous generation which has only known consumerist prosperity and personal advancement.
The ideals of the old communes are an abstraction to the young generation, as are the terrible costs of the Cultural Revolution.
A resurgence of devotion to Mao has caught authorities off-guard; they can’t very well suppress public displays of secular worship of the Party’s founder, but raising Mao’s revolutionary ideals from the dustbin of history implicitly challenges the Party’s current leadership.
The older generation resents the young consumer-obsessed generation, and some would like to purge China of the excesses of wealth and consumerism.
It’s not too difficult to see how rising unemployment (China’s Hidden Unemployment Rate) and China’s enormous wealth inequality could spark a new Cultural Revolution that would target Party leaders who have benefited from the state-managed neoliberal capitalism that has greatly enriched the leaders and their family dynasties.
In effect, a return to the party’s Maoist roots would open divisive fissures in the Party and the nation. Farfetched? Perhaps not as much as the conventional sugar-coated media representation would suggest.
The status quo solution (in China, the U.S., Japan, the E.U., etc. etc.) to a weakening bubble-dependent economy is to inflate another even bigger bubble.If debt reached extremes that imploded, the solution is to expand debt far beyond the levels that triggered the implosion.
If fudging the numbers triggered a loss of confidence, the solution is to fudge the numbers even more, so they no longer reflect reality at all.
If the masses protest their powerlessness, the solution is to push them further from the centers of power.
And so on.
To continue reading: China’s Great Divide: A New Cultural Revolution?
