Airstrip One

Stability Postpones Reform

A short note on Jiang Zemin's retention of power over the party elite in the Chinese republic, which will be engineered at the postponed Communist Party congress in November. His ideology of the Three Represents radically allows capitalists to become communists and join the party, although most already are, through the power of guangxi.

Zemin has opted for political stability by shoring up the social sources of the party. Even as social unrest grows in the countryside and industrialised towns, as economic problems mount in state owned corporations and through huge misallocations of capital, the elite continues their path of controlled modernisation by entering the WTO. By sitting on the new generation who favour political solutions, the gerontocracy is gambling that it can prevent a social explosion without diluting its power. And every fragile leadership will turn to space and war to shore up its support. First taikonauts, then Taiwan