Hu Jintao - Does he

by phil on Sunday Apr 27, 2003 3:20 PM

Hu Jintao - Does he really run China? By Chris Suellentrop The economic reforms that China has undertaken over the past two decades have created a burgeoning middle class with the potential to undermine the regime. When the government lied about SARS to its people, these Chinese citizens turned to foreign news sources on the Internet, or traded text messages to each other over their cell phones, in order to discover more reliable information.

The inevitability of a distributed node system (aka democracy).

Even the much-criticized decision to hand Beijing the 2008 Olympics may have encouraged Chinese officials to act. They couldn't be looking forward to the embarrassing prospect of decathletes in surgical masks.

This is cool: If not Hu, who? If not now, Wen? In the short run, it matters who Hu Jintao is. But in the long run, the American public is right to ignore him. There are forces more powerful than men.

More proof of the Second Superpower