China is not about to collapse, democracy is not arriving in the forseeable future, censorship will continue, the CCP isn’t going away and it may still be in power generations from now.
Read this detailed and relatively balanced picture of why this is so. This may baffle and/or displease some of us, but it is reality so we had better get used to it and adapt to it as best we can. That doesn’t mean to kowtow before it and accept all it does with resignation and a sense of inevitability.
But we do have to keep a clear head about how Chinese people view their government, and about how the circumstances that actually could lead to an overthrow of some sort simply aren’t there, at least not yet. You can point to the thousands of demonstrations, the ethnic unrest, the massive problems it faces, the environment, and those are all valid issues. But we are nowhere near a tipping point, and may never be. If you are sitting back and waiting for the coming collapse of China, it may be a very long and lonely wait.
Richard Burger is the author of the China blog The Peking, which has been publishing since 2002. The Peking Duck’s posts on hot-button issues generate energetic comment threads from all sides of the political spectrum, and the site used to be a target of nationalist Chinese blogger trolls who criticized Burger for his views on China, which were often critical of the government.
Burger became an editor at the newly launched English edition of the *Global Times* in 2009, a Chinese newspaper that has a reputation for leftist, nationalist content. He is an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing to Taipei and finally back to Beijing.
