Weekend News You Might Have Missed

You would do well to read this interesting and important essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It's important because if the author is correct, China may face a difficult transition in the near future - much sooner than most people currently think.

Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself.

While the Communist leaders try to put their Humpty-Dumpty Party back together again, natural forces may sneak up on them and end their evil reign, just as they toppled the old Soviet State far sooner and quicker than most people anticipated. Add to this similar predictions about the possible unification of North and South Korea - which would be another shocker for most of us, to be sure - and Asia could look, to put it mildly, a whole lot different.

Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened.

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