While the US Department of Defense continues to focus on the emerging threat of China as a conventional power and Goldman Sachs contemplates the exact date of China's emergence as the world's leading economy, another scenario is building steam: that China will implode. Thomas Lum, at the Congressional Research service, wrote a report earlier this year that details a growing tide of unrest:
In the past few years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced rising social unrest, including protests, demonstrations, picketing, and group petitioning. According to PRC official sources, “public order disturbances” have grown by nearly 50% in the past two years, from 58,000 incidents in 2003 to 87,000 in 2005. Although political observers have described social unrest among farmers and workers since the early 1990s, recent protest activities have been broader in scope, larger in average size, greater in frequency, and more brash than those of a decade ago. Fears of greater unrest have triggered debates with the Communist Party leadership about the pace of economic reforms and the proper way to respond to protesters.Given globalization's tendency to catalyze social fragmentation and the rise of new methods of warfare (my global guerrillas), a meltdown scenario should be considered as a serious possibility. When China's economy does head south (since it is inevitable that all prolonged booms eventually go bust), the government's lack of legitimacy will likely become THE central issue. Also, while some could argue that a pacifist "color" revolution will step into any breach that emerges, I wouldn't put too much faith in it. The government will resist the rise of any mass political movement violently (which explains the state's recent crash effort to build a one million man paramilitary police force), and it will likely be successful in this effort. Instead, the real opposition will come from a reemergence of primary loyalties (loyalty to anything above the state) and their armed defenders: global guerrillas.