History, especially recent Chinese history, suggests that the world is willing to watch pretty much anything without lifting a finger.

As for massive social revolution, what do you think is happening in China right now? The better part of a billion people are moving out of rural poverty and into the cities in about as big a social revolution as there has ever been.

I was thinking of revolution of a less pleasant sort, for which the urban immigration is a necessary prerequisite. There's a Tank Man streak in the Chinese psyche, which, when multiplied by a few hundred million of the recently enfranchised, well ...

As for lifting fingers (Man the Mice! Man the Keys!), our intense scrutiny may be all that's required to catalyze the reaction.

This Tank Man streak in the Chinese psyche you speak of doesn't seem to have come up much since well... Tank Man.

Most of the "strife" in China nowadays is ethnic I think.

(Disclaimer time: I'm Taiwanese, not Chinese. My view of China is a bit skewed.)

I spent a lot of time talking with people in the Haidian District in Beijing. This area is contains the two most prominent (and many, many lesser) universities in China so it's interesting to see the general opinion of people around there.

The unfortunate part is that it's a whole lot of apathy. I'm sure it's not easy, even for a foreigner, to find the heart of some people willing to speak or move against the Chinese government, but so many who I ran in to were casually trying to remain in their own world disjoint from the government. They feel a little rebellious just to support the stores that sell ironic Mao Zeodong merchandise and love to mildly mention that the government is really not that great here. That's about the depth of what I actively observed.

I'll disclaim that I didnt' spend much time talking to those in what would have been the most charged fields (politics or philosophy, perhaps), but the general apathy was sort of disheartening.

It's not all negative though. The educated Chinese are largely embracing the internet and desire to involve themselves more. For many, they give you a surprised look when you ask them about bypassing the firewall: you mean you don't have access to a proxy? Really? I thought everyone did. If this is the face of the new Tank Man, it's definitely going to be a different ride, but the transformative power of an enormous information pipeline plugged into the future leaders of your country still seems pretty portent.

And ethnic strife would need to be the topic of a whole essay. China has cultural problems there, too.

Maybe, maybe not -- we'd be the last to know. I suspect a lot of people just quietly disappear, like Zhiyong. But their carefully crafted public image of beaming, docile support for the government seems hollow from a nation that housed between 5 and 7 revolutions in the 20th century, depending on how you count.

It's pretty clear what you were thinking of, and pretty disgusting. Wishing more bloodshed on a country that has seen so much of it in the past century is the worst kind of armchair punditry.

As far as references to a 'Chinese psyche' go, that's skating awfully close to 'the Oriental mind'. You really want to generalize over a billion people?

Wow. Words are so slippery, especially for a bad writer like me. Let me be clear: I have no desire whatsoever to see a bloody revolution in China. I am by no means advocating a revolution. The "lifting a finger" bit was a joke about our laziness, not a call to action, although I see now how poorly it was worded. It would be hard for your interpretation to be more at odds with how I actually feel. I'm for peace and quiet and hacking Lisp. That said, I was calling it as I see it, and I can very easily see what I called.

As for the Tank Man bit, would it change your mind if I told you I was half Chinese (I'm not, but still)? It's like saying "there's a revolutionary streak in the American mindset" -- totally innocuous.

Damn, talk about miscommunication ...

I wouldn't think outside scrutiny would be sufficient. Since a revolution is going to happen from the inside out, its the people of China that would need to know whats going on and decide to act. This is difficult because of how controlled information is in China.

Separately, the size of the country may make a revolution difficult though because of the amount of coordination (explicit or not). The government can probably stop any small revolution but its (more) doubtful they could stop a large one. I guess this means that the more pleasant sort of revolution is more likely to be successful (if a revolution is going to happen at all).

And the greatest threat to the established order is the missing women. [1]

The large number of unattached young men with little to no prospect of getting married provides a volatile substrate for almost any social movement that promises to upset the current order and bring it's supporters to prominence and power.

The traditional solution to the problem of excess males is war. But the manifestation of male frustration can take many forms. Art movements, religious or political devotion, founding startups. Given the size and spectrum of China's population I would expect to see all of these and more to be tried by young men who know that they have few if any prospects of marriage without some great success in hand.

1. http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1019/p09s02-coop.html

You mean the kind of revolution, well, attempts at revolution, that we have seen in Iran recently?

I'm not so sure about that. I think in most dictatorships most people already know that something is not quite right. Spreading that knowledge further is good - but the other guys still have the guns...

Oddly enough, the attempted revolution in Iran happened because a fraction of the ruling elite called for it. Iran up to this point has been an ostensibly democratic theocracy, odd as that may seem and the protests involve shock, shock that this democracy was being violated.

This move in China involves putting an end to the most mild appearance of opposition - it's a bad move for any efforts at mild change - which the protests in Iran began as.

Of course, since despite it's democratic form, Iran is also very repressive, the protests which began as efforts at mild change often veered towards more extreme efforts.

Indeed, I suspect that every time another repressive regime feels some heat, the Chinese communist party gets a little more nervous. But naturally neither I nor anyone else is able to read the leaderships' mind...

How about a gradual social revolution? Do you prefer that your social changes occur in short, violent bursts, or would you rather have them spread out over a long period of time?

Well, my preference is irrelevant. I was just airing an acute hunch. :)

I think the big question for China's future is whether its essentially inevitable further transformation will be as peaceful as Hungary's or as violent as Yugoslavia's.

Neither of those comparisons make any sense, in my opinion. We've got the standard differences of country size (both in terms of land area and population) and time (a lot has changed about the world, especially in terms of communication, even in the past 15 years).

But, we've also got the huge difference that China, and Chinese people, are simply different. I don't even know where to begin in describing how different Chinese people in China fundamentally are from Americans in America. It's like when I see comments made by people such as "I wonder how the Chinese people can stand <insert thing here>", I immediately think to myself that it's a complete non-issue, just an accepted fact of life, for all of my Chinese relatives living in China. Also, things such as the one child act don't help - you've literally got an entire generation of spoiled only childs, and let me tell you, many of them are remarkably spoiled in the cities. You've got this feeling of collectivism which still very much exists, the "we" taking precedence over the "I", not in the oversimplified hive-mind way that most Westerners perceive it as, but rather something more inbetween. It always amazes me that people in China can feel such a sense of duty to their country (such as a student feeling it's his/her duty to the country to do well in school, something that pretty much never happens in the USA), but yet also feel such apathy for other people around them (to a degree that also doesn't happen in the USA ... not saying we're saints here who never pass by homeless people on the streets without even looking at them by any means, but the degree is still different).

And the list goes on and on, I still don't know where to begin or where to end. I know I'm not comparing China to Yugoslavia or Hungary here, but the perception gap even to this day between China and the USA is so great (and more importantly, so much greater than what most people think it is) that I can't imagine it being much less for China and other situations. Point being, a revolution might be peaceful, or it might be violent, or it might be somewhere inbetween, but none of these outcomes would have anything to do with the situations that led to Hungary's outcome being the way it was, or Yugoslavia's being the way it was.

Social scientists in China, trained as so many of them were in a Marxist framework, are actually very frightened by the example of Yugoslavia. Regional economic disparities in China are even greater than those in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. Maybe Chinese people are very different in general from Western people (but the Chinese people I know best aren't all entirely different from people elsewhere in the world), but if Marxist theory about how the masses respond to economic circumstances is at all correct, the central government of China has something to worry about.

As another participant point out in another recent HN thread, China has a long historical experience with regional splits and loss of authority by the central government. To speak of China as having a 3,000 year history (as one entity) is hardly more accurate than to speak of Rome (the empire) as having a 2,500 year history. There is some cultural continuity from the very beginning in both cases, but twentieth century Chinese history was full of years of regional warlords and a very prolonged major civil war (which arguably hasn't ended yet).