"So far the only country that's been totally successful at that has been Singapore - which, let's not forget, is a tiny, mono-ethnic city state that could hardly be more different than large, multi-ethnic China."

Possibly just nitpicking, but as I've spent a fair amount of time discussing and visiting Singapore for a number of reasons, I'd like to add that Singapore is hardly mono-ethnic.

Wikipedia quotes: "Chinese formed 75.2% of 'Singapore Residents', Malays 13.6%, Indians 8.8%, while Eurasians and other groups formed 2.4%."

Not to mention that race- and religion-related (Malays and many Indians there are Muslim) tensions are quite prevalent, despite the state-controlled media refusing to spend much time covering it. Anecdotally, one of the people I spent a lot of time with was muslim and when she was looking for jobs she would be asked, over the phone, if she was muslim (or if she wore the veil) and was refused interviews many times and even told, plainly, that they didn't hire non-Chinese.

During one of my visits I had a chance to see a political rally and ask some questions about the election process. It's basically the anti-thesis of what we would describe free-speech as. Citizens and groups are not allowed to publish political information in many forms - in particular negative information about candidates.

"'However, individuals seeking to use mass e-mail and mass SMS as tools to influence people, or to affect the outcome of an election, should realise that they are still governed by the laws of the land. And these include libel,' said Dr Balaji.

'They should not assume that the fact that they are e-mailing or SMS-ing information gives them licence to say anything they want.'"
http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=42036

It's a matter of legal terms, mostly, but the conventional wisdom I heard from several people is that the ruling party will consider any negative press or distributed information about them as libel and will censor it harshly. In effect, you cannot criticize anyone in power - even as many members of the government are openly and outrageously corrupted. It's so commonly understood it's become a joke there, but it's not that funny to me, because I was also told that if you staged a protest, you'd be arrested, peaceful or not.

How does this relate to your post... well... I don't know. I guess keeping a strong economy in Singapore isn't as easy as your sentence may have implied. It comes at the cost of individual freedoms, and is leaving ethnic minorities behind more and more every year.

That's why authoritarian nations are always, inherently unstable. Unless they can maintain perfect economic growth at all times, eventually they'll stumble.

What about a nation like North Korea which has had nearly continuous negative economic growth?  You aren't describing the conditions required to avoid a revolution so much as the conditions required to maintain popular support.

China has a fairly-well formed system of government by riot.  Regional and local governments can basically do what they want, that is, they are given authoritarian powers with the exception that they are always subject to correction by higher authority, which comes seemingly randomly, but not uncommonly comes in the form of regional or local leaders being executed.

Naturally, this kind of organization leads to corruption of regional and local officials, who are not regularly scrutinized.  Eventually local dissatisfaction with price increases or worker death rates or pollution reaches a boiling point and you get sizable protests or riots or vandalism, without a terribly large distinction between them because without a right to protest protests are illegal actions by themselves.  The local or regional authorities try to suppress these for a while, and if they can't, eventually the national government steps in and meets most of the demands of the locals.

The overall effect is to keep things quiet, since you can't achieve anything by yourself, and if you do get most of the locals on your side and willing to risk their lives for your demands, you'll just see your demands granted which will reduce the motivation of the locals to protest in ways they can be punished for.

The important thing to remember is that these protests are not against the national government, which plays little role in people's day to day lives in rural areas, but against regional and local authorities or business owners, and that they are not coordinated, but occur at random times so that the national government always has overwhelming force available to bear on them if they feel it would help the situation.

What about a nation like North Korea which has had nearly continuous negative economic growth?  You aren't describing the conditions required to avoid a revolution so much as the conditions required to maintain popular support.

Ahh, but North Korea isn't authoritarian, it's totalitarian.  See what I did there?  In all seriousness, there is certainly a point where a government becomes so oppressive that it can (theoretically) hold on to power forever.  This is particularly true if the state controls all information and has a strong ideological component.  Read Hannah Arendt's On the Origins of Totalitarianism for a more informed take on this.  The thing is, those states almost by definition can't have positive economic growth.  If they appear to be well off economically, it's usually because they're killing large portions of their populations and then redistributing their resources to those who are left (see Hitler's Germany, Stalin's purges, and North Korea's use of slave labor camps).  

The important thing to remember is that these protests are not against the national government, which plays little role in people's day to day lives in rural areas, but against regional and local authorities or business owners, and that they are not coordinated, but occur at random times so that the national government always has overwhelming force available to bear on them if they feel it would help the situation.

I completely agree with your explanation of the urban riots and your picture of how China is ruled - and I didn't mean to imply that the rural riots are a direct threat to the government.  What I was trying to get at is that the government simply doesn't have the same sort of pervasive control that, say, North Korea's government does.  So while those rural riots aren't an issue now, if the CCP pisses off the middle class to the point where there are both rural and urban riots, then they become an issue.  As long as economic growth remains strong, that's not likely to happen - but considering that cracks in that growth are already showing, I'm pessimistic that it can last long enough for the CCP to develop a more effective method of governance.

China has had the same government system for better than 3000 years. Foreign royals (Ming Empire) and foreign ideas (communism) have toppled the head but all, even Mao, have left the same system of bureaucratic local governance in place. The changes have been in name and title only. Should the current government falter in some fashion, there's little reason to believe that there would be the cultural impetus to install a different system, as opposed to simply new rulers. China is not on a march to democracy.

It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.

China is not on a march to democracy.

Did I ever say it was?  You'll note that I have explicitly stated in at least two other posts that I don't think China will become a Western style democracy any time soon (if ever).  All I'm saying is that I don't think the CCP rule is stable.  Even if you're right and the CCP is replaced by a very similar regime if it falls (which, I agree, is quite likely), there will still be an incredible amount of turmoil, death, and economic disruption during the transition from the CCP to the new regime.  China simply cannot afford to repeat the 1910s and 1920s all over again - and the rest of the world probably can't afford for that to happen in China, either.  At the very least, that sort of disorder would almost certainly lead to Japan fully re-militarizing, and very likely to a hot war between Taiwan and one of the factions in the new Chinese Civil War.  Can you imagine what would happen if the US is drawn into that?  It certainly wouldn't be good.  I hate the CCP's record on any number of levels, but I also pray for them to hold onto power as long as possible.  I can see no good coming out of the dissolving of that regime.

Now, that said, I don't think that if the CCP's rule ends in China that we'll see a democracy come out of that. We could just go to another authoritarian government (or even to a complete breakup of the country). I'm one that believes in the inevitability of western-style democracy. I'm just a pessimist about the sustainability of market-authoritarianism.

I'm generally persuaded to the 'it'll eventually happen' point of view, but as noted I wonder if this is because of western bias. I've little understanding of how China actually replaces its leadership and thus whether there is sufficient flexibility to change prior policy.

On a separate OT:
JXG: Your mods are really beginning to annoy me. Initially I thought it was a mistake - port's comment is obnoxious? but reviewing your mod history, there is a clear pattern of random mod assignment to comments. Is it too much to ask that you be grown up - or are you too childish to realize that TnT offers transparency on moderator history?

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.

I've little understanding of how China actually replaces its leadership and thus whether there is sufficient flexibility to change prior policy.

It's basically on a ten year cycle - each new central figure gets two five year terms.  I say "central leader" instead of saying a specific title, because the central leader usually holds many titles - usually a party leadership title, a government leadership title, and he is also the head of the military (eventually - for example, Deng Xiaoping remained head of the military for a number of years after he officially turned over leadership roles to the next generation).   Deng's successor, Jiang Xemin, tried to do the same and held onto his military position well into Hu Jintao's first term.  Hu was able to oust him from that role much more quickly than Jiang got rid of Deng, though (realistically, Deng just eventually resigned when he wanted to - he had far more power than Jiang or Hu will ever have).  There is absolutely no mechanism to replace the leadership in case of a crisis - during Tienanmen, when there was an impasse in the Central Committee between hard liners soft liners, Deng and a number of older party leaders were able to come out of retirement and lay down the law, forcibly retiring the soft liners, breaking the impasse, and putting down the riots.  If a similar situation happened today, it's highly doubtful that anyone in China would be able to take a similar absolute leadership role.  The impasse would have to continue until one faction violently suppressed the other (or simply until civil war broke out).

China is not used to snow, so of course it will cause transportation problems.  The roots of their problems with this storm go deeper, however.

Electricity demand is way up with increased prosperity.  Recently a series of high-profile coal mine disasters resulted in a government crackdown on unsafe mines.  These two factors combined to create a coal shortage even before the latest storm.  Heavy snows in parts of the country where snow was not so unusual had already further reduced coal supplies.

While there is a relatively free market in coal, electricity prices are capped by the government, which resulted in a situation where generators lose money by selling electricity, and generators started taking plants offline resulting in blackouts.  This is reminiscent of the China's recent diesel fuel shortage, when refiners shut down because with price controls, they lost money by running their refineries.

In any case, even before the storm, China was suffering widespread coal and electricity shortages.  Then the storm hit and increased coal and electricity demand and shut down coal transportation.  More power plants ran out of power and shut down.  More electric trains were taken out of service because of power blackouts, which deepened coal shortages.  At the busiest travel time of the year, when transportation capacity was already insufficient even in the best of times, priority was given to coal transportation (normally the lowest priority) over passenger trains.

This left what appears to be hundreds of thousands of people waiting at train stations outside in freezing weather for days.  It's not clear to me from other reports just how well the government handled this situation, since some reports have the government opening hotels for them and telling the passengers clearly that trains were not coming anytime soon.