It's not a bad point for an op-ed. The Deng Xiaoping political and economic settlement obviously has legs in a way that the solely political settlement of the Chinese Civil War did not. In the hyperbolic world of China punditry, Mann is talking a lot more sense than, eg, the author of "The Coming Collapse of China".
I think pulling in Burma and Sudan is a bit ridiculous though; China maintains sufficient rule of law to give spaces for the middle class to prosper a little, which I don't see a lot of evidence for there. Egypt and Pakistan are probably better analogies.
Point taken on the tiger economies though.
The current sharemarket boom has actually brought in a lot of small investors in the last few years. Here's hoping they don't get caned by the inevitable bust. My feeling is that the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the 1989 demonstrations are still close enough to popular memory for people to focus on material freedoms for now. And Shanghai might be pretty rich but the rest of the Chinese middle class is not exactly swimming in money.
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