Among my students, associates and friends, there is a quiet willingness to criticize the government, remark on the corruption of party officials, and play along with seemingly illogical demands from higher ups while basically doing nothing about them — the Chinese version of the colonial Spanish motto,”Obedezco pero no cumplo,” — I obey, but I do not comply (with royal edicts).

To be frank, I was not entirely sure my conclusions were correct until I read a lengthy essay in The Diplomat tonight by Gordon Chang, a writer for Forbes. Turns out I’m a better political and social analyst than I thought.

[Reading the comments after the essay, though, it seems not everyone agrees with me or Chang.]

Chang’s argument is cogent. Prosperity and electronic media have emboldened the Chinese populace as never before, as it plunges headlong into the 21st century. Meanwhile, the powerful elite men (and it is mostly men) who run the central government are slowly losing their iron grip on the country, and have no idea how to regain it. President Hu Jintao recently blamed Western influences on the “non-harmoniousness” of China, but he was relying on a familiar Chinese scapegoat: blame the outsiders for problems that are internal.

As Chang explains in detail, the cloistered men in Beijing pontificate and plan while the rest of the country basically ignores them. The Communist Party, for most Chinese, is no longer relevant to their lives. In addition, they’ve tasted freedom, and they want more.

Despite how the nation’s young feel, most foreign analysts – and all of Beijing’s apologists – tell us the Chinese people don’t care about personal liberty, that they are content to reap economic gains while letting the Communist Party keep its monopoly on political power. Yet due to the repressive nature of the political system, we don’t know if China’s citizens are telling us what they really think. The best we can do is catch a glimpse of them as they make their dash into the future. Chinese society is changing faster than any other on earth at the moment, and the ongoing transformation is shaking the country, even the seemingly invincible one-party state.

Especially the one-party state. “China’s leaders may run what looks like a closed political system, and their decisions seem autocratic,” noted Clinton-era official Robert Suettinger in Beyond Tiananmen: The Politics of U.S.-China Relations. “But they are struggling to keep up with a society that is changing in a direction and at a speed they cannot fully control.”

The pressure is not from without, despite Hu’s polemics. It’s coming from within China, as result of opportunities the Communist Party itself enabled. In essence, the CPC let the genie out of the bottle and now can’t force him back inside.

First, for the past 30-plus years, Chinese have been able to go into business for themselves. Families can till their own land. Entrepreneurs can start their own companies. Housewives and students can open e-stores on taobao.

Secondly, the Internet and mobile phone networks enable news, and criticism, to travel faster than even the government’s vast army of censors can keep up with.

In our volatile time, ideas are more powerful than they have ever been. The cell phone and the laptop can tip the balance against the Party as they can put everyone in touch. With instant communications, alliances can form quickly, thereby making broad coalitions possible. Groups, therefore, can be separated geographically yet still act in concert. That happened in 2003 in Shanghai where organizers of housing protests in different parts of the city made extensive use of cell phones for coordination. Texting spread rumors on SARS and, as noted, forced the government to act. We know hysteria can travel electronically: in 1999 a bank run in China was spread by rumors posted on the internet.

In the past, Chang notes, the leadership felt free to quash dissent brutally, as it did in 1989 with the Tian’anmen Square student protests. But, while the CPC does “round up the usual suspects” whenever there is even a hint of popular protests like the Arab Spring, Chang argues Beijing’s leaders will probably never again sic the Army on their own people.

Veteran China watcher Willy Lam, for one, says it’s extremely unlikely that the current Fourth Generation leadership would ever order another Tiananmen. For one thing, no one in today’s leadership has the personal authority to do so. For another, even if someone in the Fourth Generation gave such an order, it’s highly unlikely that the People’s Liberation Army would obey, says Lam. Even with his military record, it took Deng a long time to find a unit that would actually fight unarmed citizens in 1989. Nobody in the current civilian leadership has the same stature as Deng [XiaoPing], and such an order might split the military and cause a revolt in the officer ranks. Finally, even if the top brass followed an order to shoot, it’s unlikely that ordinary soldiers would kill ordinary citizens on behalf of a regime that has lost the love and loyalty of its people.

“Smith & Wesson beats four aces,” says another great China historian, Arthur Waldron. That’s always true – as long as one is strong enough to give the order and can command others to pull the trigger. China, unfortunately for the Communist Party, has changed too much to permit a 21st century Tiananmen.

Entrenched leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other places have dramatically lost their hold on their governments. That kind of popular movement will probably not happen here. Instead, change will come slowly, even glacially, but it will come, in spite, or perhaps because of, China’s out-of-touch leadership. In the meantime, I reckon I should keep my head down.

I like it, too. So for your viewing pleasure, here is the Korean version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BA7fdSkp8ds

There’s an English version, but frankly the lyrics are nearly unintelligible and don’t match up well with the choreography and melody.

Their official website has the same version as the one I’m sharing.

Dunlop played jazz piano back in the 1950′s around Buffalo, NY, but his day job took precedence over his piano playing. Time passed and Dunlop ended up in a retirement home, where there was a beat-up old piano that he would play when he thought no one was listening.

Then he was discovered by chance, and now you can buy his debut album on iTunes for $9.99. Most of the cuts are his own compositions, but one is a standard, the St. James Infirmary Blues.

His playing is effortless and original. For an 85-year-old guy, he still has his chops.

Dunlop’s story in The New York Times.

JISHOU, HUNAN –Chinese observers seem to draw two opposing conclusions from the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. The more common (state-approved) conclusion is: capitalism is bad, Marxism is good. The more thoughtful conclusion is: if the Chinese government doesn’t deal with widespread corruption, China might see similar protests in the not-too-distant future.

Recently, one of my friends asked me what Chinese reactions to OWS were. So, I’ve spent some time poring over Internet reports and blogs to get a sense how OWS is playing over here. Since my grasp of Mandarin is weak still, and my access to movers and shakers is limited, take my comments here with a grain of salt.

Official Chinese news coverage tends to characterize OWS as a confrontation between the very poor and homeless (the victims of heartless capitalism) and the rich and powerful (heartless capitalist dogs). The Communist Party is using OWS as an object lesson in the superiority of China’s Marxism.

Comments to an article about the clearing out of Zucotti Park in New York City are representative of netizen reactions. Several comments are rabidly anti-American and pro-Chinese, leading other commenters to accuse those writers of being paid pro-government trolls. (The Party reportedly pays people 5 mao, or 0.50 yuan, to post pro-government comments on the Internet.)

The more staid party publication, Global Times, predicts OWS will amount to nothing in the end and China should just wait and see what happens.

The Global Times, a widely read Chinese tabloid published by Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, noted in an editorial that “western countries can withstand street demonstrations better, since their governments are elected”.

“The conflicts may be minor or serious, but it will not bring significant change,” it added. “China needs to stay calm and observe how the street movements in the Western world develop and to make the rights choices for its own good.”

(From The Telegraph, Oct. 17.)

Lost in this state-approved presentation are several salient truths about OWS. It’s not just a poor people’s movement. OWS draws supporters from the middle class, too, including retired police chiefs, Iraqi war vets, housewives, grannies and working stiffs, as well as scruffy looking students. Chinese media ironically play up police roughly dealing with OWS protesters (subtly implying it’s a government crackdown), while obscuring the freedoms of assembly and free speech that permits OWS to be so widespread.

No one in the current government would dare remind anyone here of the 1989 Tian’anmen Square protests, which brought out thousands of students and intellectuals to rally for civil rights and resulted in a quick and brutal reaction by the Chinese police and military. Most of my students, in fact, know very little about that episode in Chinese history.

As an example of how the message of OWS has been skewed, we can look at a street protest in Zhengzhou by supporters of OWS. Some of them included cadres (important workers who are party members) who seemed to believe that OWS was a rally in support of Marxist ideals and against capitalism. Perhaps the protest was Party-sponsored.

Earlier this year, when the Jasmine Revolution was underway in North Africa and the Middle East, the government here quickly acted to foil any similar movements in China. The usual suspects (likely organizers) were rounded up and detained for several months, the Internet was “harmonized” — scrubbed of any rallying cries for a Jasmine Revolution in China — and official media portrayed the successful Arab Spring people’s movements, as yet more evidence for the superiority of the Chinese Way.

Ironies of ironies, you may be thinking, since China was after all founded as a people’s republic after a people’s revolution against a repressive government. That was before all those “peasants” ended up in power themselves, of course.

It’s that bitter irony that other Chinese recognize. The Party and its economic policies of the last 30 years have enabled China to become a major player in the world’s economy and allowed enterprising Chinese citizens to become rich beyond Mao’s imagination. Meanwhile, freedom of expression is tightly controlled, the Internet and media are closely monitored and censored (I had to use a network proxy to search for “Jasmine Revolution,” in fact), and government officials and business magnates help each other become fat cats.

To help grow the economy quickly, the State has given favored businesses considerable freedom to operate as they see fit (another irony, laissez-faire economic policy), sometimes at the expense of the common citizen, whose protests, when allowed, are ultimately pointless. We hear reports of entire city neighborhoods being evicted and razed for a new construction project, of a miner’s widow being denied access to her husband’s remains and being forced to accept a cash payment as compensation for his death, of bad food resulting from lax regulation, poor construction practices, and environmental disasters.

Many have resulted from the close personal and economic relationships that have developed between government officials, who look the other way, and the favored business leaders, who pay them to look the other way. Having given businessmen an inch, China’s political leaders have seen big business take a mile, and become a troublesome barrier to reform.

This is precisely the same message of OWS, which has not been lost on more thoughtful Chinese observers, who warn that China may yet have its own Occupy movement. As long as China can keep its growing middle class content and comfortable with material wealth, protest movements will gain no traction, however. China has largely been insulated from the economic crises of the USA and EU.

But, if the Chinese economy goes sour and middle class folks lose their jobs, homes and comfy lifestyle, China’s leaders will have an enormous problem that all the ‘Net harmonizing in the world will not solve.

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You might also check out this reports.

Stratfor Analysis

Bloomberg analysis

Nando’s of South Africa recently ran a satirical commercial with actors playing several now-dead dictators and a forlorn Mugabe look-alike, who misses all his old dictator pals at Christmas time. Supporters of Mugabe, who has controlled Zim since 1980, threatened Nando’s staff, prompting the restaurant chain to pull the commercial.

Of course, as long as there is an Internet, nothing will ever disappear. So, here it is for your enjoyment.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqvdRP0L65w

Nando’s, by the way, sells really tasty (and spicy) chicken. Their chips (aka French fries) and rolls are pretty good, too. Seeing the ad makes me want some now. Num, num.

You can watch at Vimeo.

Now there’s a Shockwave version of the same idea, by Cary and Michael Huang. A slide control allows you to explore at your own pace.

It takes a while to load, but it’s worth the wait. Nothing showy or (ahem) flashy, but neither was the Eames film.

So, China’s version of the FCC has mandated that, beginning Jan. 1, costume dramas will no longer be interrupted by commercials, which are often as dully repetitive as the shows they sponsor. The hope, apparently, is that viewers will sit glued to their sets and not wander away to watch Hong Kong and Korean soapies, Vampire Diaries, Gossip Girl, or, worse yet, read the news about China from abroad.

The ban on commercials follows another directive a few months ago to eliminate American Idol-like talent contests like Super Girl and Super Boy, which have been much more popular than the state-approved “ain’t we great?” period pieces.

[Speaking of the Super Boy show, one of my juniors was a contestant last year, but was eliminated finally. If you want to check his singing out, here's a link of him learning he advanced to the next round and singing, "Any Man of Mine." Yes, I know, that's my question, too.]

The authorities hope the nation’s networks will provide wholesome entertainment that fosters better understanding of China’s culture and history — all the good parts, of course.