As China Marches Ahead, Is It On Solid Ground?

A parade marking China’s 60th anniversary in 2009. Despite its strengths,
many Chinese see their country as plagued by moral decline.

Widespread moral decline has long plagued the nation, according to both ordinary and prominent Chinese. Even the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, at a news conference in March, said that Chinese society and politics suffered from corruption and a lack of “credibility.”

Now there are snowballing reports of a sharply slowing economy, such as this one from my colleague Keith Bradsher and this one in Caixin magazine, which quotes a Jiangsu Province official, referring to the collapsing shipbuilding industry, as saying that “a hurricane is approaching.”

...as it prepares for its fifth generation of post-revolutionary leaders, starting this fall — the same generation that ended Communist rule in the former Soviet Union. Are we looking at the end game? Do Communist states, perhaps, have a natural lifespan?

His (Gorbachev's) prime minister, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, was blunter about what Soviet society had become: “(We) stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this — from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”

Ye Xiaogang is a composer, but also a politician; a member of the standing committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top government advisory body, he regularly mixes with senior leaders. Here’s what Mr. Ye said to me recently: “I feel the situation is getting worse and worse, the political situation, the cultural situation. Everyone can see it.”

“People know more, our demands are higher,” he continued. “We have more information. People are asking for democracy. People are asking for economic equality. Intellectuals would like to freely express their own minds. I mean, we’re not North Korea. We’re different. But the whole society is like before an earthquake.”

http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/as-china-marches-ahead-is-it-on-solid-ground

When a downturn in their economy comes (as it will at some point probably sooner rather than later) there may really be the "earthquake" referred to in the article.