True. And he’s very lucky that the rise in world petroleum prices coincided with the ebbing of his term…
And I have a question for you Chevan. --I’ve also been under the impression, hearing and reading in Western news reports that the overall perception is that one of the reasons Putin faces little real, defiant opposition is that his gov’t controls most, really almost all, of the media in Russia.
Do you agree or disagree with that statement?
Correct. Actually, the hunting accident wasn’t the main problem since hunting accidents happen; it was the way they handled it. They didn’t put out any press releases for several hours and almost acted like they initially thought of trying to cover the whole thing up. That coupled with the fact that Cheney is perceived to be one of the darker, more autocratic elements in the Bush regime who has pushed Bush farther to the right and generally acted like a scofflaw for the last seven years…
That’s true.
And do you guess who help him to reach such great prices?
His friend George;)
We are joiking recently in my work that if the USSR still exist- we would have builded the communism already due to the oil-prices.
And I have a question for you Chevan. --I’ve also been under the impression, hearing and reading in Western news reports that the overall perception is that one of the reasons Putin faces little real, defiant opposition is that his gov’t controls most, really almost all, of the media in Russia.
He actually controlled just few central television canals, that BTW i do not watch:)
But he is unable to controll the internet and newspapers.
But problem of lack of opposition is not this - but just simple fact that there is no any REAL MAN in opposition that people can trust and believe.
All of them or former Yeltsyn beurocrats or newest “candidates-degenerates” like the Casparov with 0,0% of political rating.
Besides this ugly opposition was not able to Join in coalition and put the common candidate.
All of them simply want a part of power.
Except may be the communists- who traditionally “fight for their ideas”.
But they also have been discredited for the last 20 years:)
But isn’t the Russian gov’t trying to set up a separate internet in which they can filter?
You think the electoral college is bad, try the British system: Labor Party gets 36% of the popular vote and has a majority of almost 70. This is something like 60% of all the seats. Had the Conservative party got 36%, their majority would have been one. that’s one seat.
And you are whingeing about 49.something (I believe there were two British governments in the 20th century where the party with the largest number of seats had a smaller proportion of the popular vote, but in a close race any system other than proportional representation risks this. And proportional representation sucks.)
Basically, stop whingeing. Or build a time machine.
That I doubt. The Communist system was sufficiently screwed up that they would have found another way to collapse no matter how much money they threw at it.
Well pdf you know that this is not so.
And the even the communist system could be transformed to the better one using the market mehanism and investitions- kinda China.
The entire problem is that istead of the “extreme Socialism” od soviet type we now build the “wild capitalism” with worstest social policy in the world.
And this is only sad story about Putin
Internet filters?
never even hear about it:)
Well it seems the China have tryed to do simular few years ago.
But this is rather unpossible or extremaly hard to realise.
I was referring to this. I read it a while ago, so I may be off a bit:
Russia Casts A Selective Net in Piracy Crackdown
Political Bias Alleged In Pursuit of Groups Using Illicit Software
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 14, 2007; A13
MOSCOW, Nov. 13 – The newspaper Novaya Gazeta, one of the last outposts of critical journalism in Russia, suspended publication of its regional edition in the southern city of Samara on Monday after prosecutors opened a criminal case against its editor, alleging that his publication used unlicensed software.
The case is part of a larger assault on independent news media, advocacy organizations and political activists, according to government critics. But it is one that is specifically tailored to deflect foreign criticism.
In multiple police raids against such groups, authorities are ostensibly targeting the alleged use of counterfeit software. Western governments and companies have long urged action against the widespread piracy in Russia.
“Our law enforcement finally realized that computers are very important tools for their opponents, and they have decided to take away these tools by doing something close to the West’s agenda,” said Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama research institute in Moscow. “I suppose you could say it’s very clever.”
In the past 10 months, police in at least five Russian cities have raided the offices of media outlets, political parties and private advocacy groups and seized computers allegedly containing illegal software, paralyzing the work of the organizations. Often, authorities demand that employees submit to questioning and order them not to leave town until legal action is completed.
According to some estimates, the piracy rate for all kinds of intellectual property in Russia is as high as 80 percent. The International Intellectual Property Alliance, a U.S. coalition of rights holders, estimates that its members suffered piracy losses of $2 billion in Russia in 2006, according to a letter the coalition recently sent to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The organization said that progress in enforcing intellectual property rights in Russia has been “insufficient.”
Most of the Russian groups targeted by the authorities deny buying counterfeit software or say they used it only unwittingly. They charge that with authorities doing little to challenge the rampant piracy in Russia, including illicit production of disks in defense facilities and other agencies, the raids on their own offices amount to selective enforcement of the law.
“This is not a campaign against piracy, it’s a campaign against dissent,” said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, a deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta in Moscow, who is in charge of the newspaper’s regional editions. “The authorities want to destroy an opposition newspaper. It doesn’t matter if we send more computers to Samara. It doesn’t matter if we show we bought computers legally. It will change nothing.” The paper says it believes its software is legal.
Russian officials declined to comment on the piracy cases Tuesday, but police and prosecutors had previously told Russian news media that the raids are simply part of a broader crackdown on illegal software and other forms of piracy.
Police have raided businesses that play no political role, but without the sustained effort directed toward groups that are critical of the Kremlin.
“It’s cynical, but it’s also very difficult for us to say anything,” said one Western observer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly on the subject.
Most of those accused of using unlicensed software appear to have some connection, sometimes quite tentative, to the opposition coalition called Other Russia, which is led by Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin.
Police in Samara, for instance, first raided Golos, a private group that monitors elections, in May, just before Kasparov’s organization held what it called the March of Dissent to coincide with a Russian-European Union summit in the city. Ludmila Kuzmina, the head of Golos, said police showed up in her office 90 minutes after she made a statement on the Echo Moskvy radio station saying that she supported the march.
Police seized the group’s computers and opened an investigation into the alleged use of unlicensed software. Kuzmina had to sign documents agreeing not to leave the city until the investigation, which is still continuing, is completed.
“The quality of our work is suffering,” Kuzmina said. “I am under pressure all the time. They call me for interrogations. All I do is deal with the police.”
Also in May, police in the city of Tula seized a computer at the offices of one of Kasparov’s coalition partners at the time, former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. Private groups and a Novaya Gazeta office in the central Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod were also raided and accused of using illegal software before a March of Dissent in that city in August.
Advocacy groups have been accused of the offense in the cities of Volgograd and Syktyvkar, according to Pavel Chikov, head of Agora, a coalition of Russian private groups. “They have suddenly decided it’s a great tactic,” Chikov said. “They can stop all the activities of a group at a key moment, before a march or during the election period.”
Last month, police in Samara raided another news media organization, the Internet outlet 63.ru, which had a reputation for reporting that was critical of the government. Five desktop and two notebook computers were taken for “expert evaluation,” 63.ru said.
The offices of the Samara Novaya Gazeta, a weekly, were first raided by Interior Ministry investigators before Kasparov’s rally in May. Police seized financial documents, as well as computers. The paper was one of the few media outlets that had planned to cover the march, according to its editor in chief in Samara, Sergey Kurt-Adzhiyev. Moreover, the editor said, his daughter, Anastasia, 21, was one of the local organizers of the march.
The paper had continued to publish since May but Kurt-Adzhiyev said that in the past two months, investigators also began pressuring its distributors and advertisers. Last Thursday, police seized the last of the newspaper’s computers in Samara.
“They visited all organizations and companies with which I work and told them to terminate all cooperation,” said Kurt-Adzhiyev, 50, who is now barred from leaving Samara. “They told them if they didn’t agree, they would have problems. I even lost my own personal computer. It became impossible for us to go on.”
Kurt-Adzhiyev said the paper would now attempt to sell its Moscow edition in Samara, but he said he worried that local newsstands would be reluctant to carry it.
Meanwhile, according to Tatyana Lokshina, head of Demos, a Moscow-based human rights group, activist groups across the country are hastily checking the legality of their software. “Most people are trying to put things in order,” she said.
Kremlin Seeks To Extend Its Reach in Cyberspace
Pro-Government Sites Gain Influence
By Anton Troianovski and Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, October 28, 2007; A01
MOSCOW – After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia’s dwindling public sphere.
Allies of President Vladimir Putin are creating pro-government news and pop culture Web sites while purchasing some established online outlets known for independent journalism. They are nurturing a network of friendly bloggers ready to disseminate propaganda on command. And there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network – one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.
“The attractiveness of the Internet as a free platform for free people is already dimming,” said Iosif Dzyaloshinsky, a mass media expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.
Putin addressed the question of Internet censorship during a national call-in show broadcast live on radio and television this month. “In the Russian Federation, no control is being exercised over the World Wide Web, over the Russian segment of the Internet,” Putin said. "I think that from the point of view of technological solutions, that would not make any sense.
“Naturally, in this sphere, as in other spheres, we should be thinking about adhering to Russian laws, about making sure that child pornography is not distributed, that financial crimes are not committed,” he continued. “But that is a task for the law enforcement agencies. Total control and the work of the law enforcement agencies are two different things.”
Many people here say they believe Putin didn’t mind a free Internet as long as it had weak penetration in Russia. But with 25 percent of Russian adults now online, up from 8 percent in 2002, cyberspace has become an issue of increasing concern for the government.
Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election. Days of street protests in the capital, Kiev, led to a new vote that brought a pro-Western politician into the presidency.
Today, the Kremlin is ready with online forces of its own when street action begins.
On April 14, an opposition movement held a march in central Moscow that drew hundreds of people; police detained at least 170, including the leader of the march, chess star Garry Kasparov.
Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the “Terminator” movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time.
They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal’s coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts.
“We played it beautifully,” Danilin said.
In a lengthy article published online last fall, three Russian rights activists argued that a strident, vulgar and uniform pro-Kremlin ideology had so permeated blogs and chat rooms that it could only be the result of a coordinated campaign.
Putin’s allies in the online world acknowledge that the Internet represents a challenge to the status quo in Russia, which has, since Soviet times, relied on state-controlled television to influence public opinion across the country’s 11 time zones.
“You watch the first channel or the second channel and you can only see good things happening in Russia,” said Andrei Osipov, the 26-year-old editor of the Web site of Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, referring to national stations that back the Kremlin. “The Internet is the freest mass media. . . . There is competition between state and opposition organizations.”
The Kremlin is also increasingly allying itself with privately run online outlets that foster a new ideal for life in today’s Russia, one that is consumerist and uncompromisingly pro-Putin.
The main champion of this ideal is 28-year-old businessman Konstantin Rykov. The pearl of Rykov’s media empire is the two-year-old Vzglyad (“View”) online newspaper, which features a serious-looking news section with stories toeing the Kremlin line and a lifestyle section that covers the latest in luxury cars and interior design. Surveys rank Vzglyad as one of Russia’s five most-visited news sites.
“Rykov is a man who created a good business on the government’s view that it has to invest in ideology,” said Anton Nossik, an Internet pioneer in Russia now in charge of blog development for Sup, an online media company. Nossik said that Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s domestic political adviser, organized private funding for Rykov’s projects.
Kremlin officials deny any involvement. “It is a general habit of everyone to connect every popular occurrence and success with the Kremlin,” deputy Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said when asked about Rykov. “In reality, it is not so.”
In an interview, Rykov would not comment on his investors. A framed portrait of Surkov hung above his desk; Rykov is running for parliament on the list of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in elections slated for December.
“The Vzglyad newspaper has created this appearance of a state publication for itself since the very beginning,” Rykov said. “And from the perspective of business and selling ads, that’s very good.”
Allies of the Kremlin have also begun buying some of the companies that have helped make the Internet a bastion of free expression in Russia. Gazeta.ru, long the country’s most respected online newspaper, was sold in December to a metals magnate and Putin loyalist.
And last October, Sup, which is owned by Alexander Mamut, a tycoon with ties to the Kremlin, bought the rights to develop the Russian-language segment of U.S.-based LiveJournal. The segment, with half a million users, is Russia’s most popular blog portal.
“Mr. Rykov is pro-Kremlin. Mamut and Sup are pro-Kremlin. The social networks are all being bought by pro-Kremlin people,” Ruslan Paushu, 30, a popular blogger who works for Rykov, said in an interview. “Everything’s okay.”
So far, Gazeta.ru has continued to publish articles critical of the Kremlin, and no widespread censorship has been reported on blogs run by Sup. But as the government wakes up to the Internet’s potential, many of Putin’s critics are growing nervous.
Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.
“Personally, I am against developing and adopting a special law that would regulate the Internet,” Leonid Reiman, minister of information technology and communications, said in a written response to questions. “The Internet has been always developing as a free medium, and it should remain as such.”
But in July, Putin briefed his Security Council on plans to make Russia a global information leader by 2015. Russian news media reported that those plans included a new network apart from the global Internet and open only to former Soviet republics.
“To put it bluntly, we need to fight for the water mains,” Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s foremost political consultant, said in an interview. “We need to fight for the central networks and for the audience segments that they reach.”
Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, special adviser to the chairmen of the Internet Governance Forum, a group convened by the United Nations, said some Russian officials he has spoken to are considering a separate Internet, with Cyrillic domain names, and appear to be studying China’s Internet controls.
Peskov, the deputy presidential spokesman, said in an interview that a Russia-only Internet was still in the “investigative phase,” adding, “I don’t know if it’s more than thinking aloud.”
“It’s not meant to get rid of the global network,” he said. “It’s a discussion of creating an addition.”
For now, supporters as well as critics of Putin see the Kremlin doing something atypical: competing on more or less equal terms with its opponents.
"Certainly, there’s the dark segment that is still saying words like ‘prohibit’ and ‘limit,’ " said Marat Guelman, who worked as a political consultant for the Kremlin until 2004, when he broke with the administration. But “what is happening on the Web vis-a-vis the authorities is very good,” he added. “That is, they’re trying to play the game.”
That strategy is in contrast to the way Putin brought the independent television network NTV to heel at the beginning of his term, using highly publicized court cases and raids by heavily armed security forces.
Marina Litvinovich, a blogger who used to work for Pavlovsky, the Kremlin consultant, and now works for Kasparov’s United Civil Front, said she is satisfied with the government’s approach to the Internet because it forces Putin’s allies to respond to criticism rather than simply ignore it.
She also argued that as the Kremlin consolidates political power, it has less incentive to come up with sophisticated online propaganda. “They’re not really in need of particular creativity right now,” she said.
Thing is, I’d say that China abandoned socialism quite some time before the Soviet Union collapsed, instead adopting a form of pragmatic nationalist dictatorship (for want of a better description - and it isn’t really a true dictatorship as the leader steps down regularly and is selected on a more or less meritocratic basis). This has enabled it to get the cash to weather the transition away from socialism to some form of quasi-capitalism. Because the Soviet system was that much more hostile to private enterprise and that much more ideologically socialist, it wasn’t flexible enough to adapt and so collapsed completely (with all sorts of unfortunate consequences).
I would suggest that China has more “wild capitalism” (I personally prefer to refer to it as “robber baron” capitalism, after the US experience of the 1880s) than Russia ever has, with the difference that any Chinese capitalists with political ambitions are rather more ruthlessly suppressed than the equivalent Russians. This leads to the Oligarchs being rather more obvious in Russia than in China, but I would suggest that there are actually rather more abuses going on in China - up to and including slavery in some instances.
China’s slave families struggle to expose dirty little secret
Date: December 8 2007John Garnaut
HU JIYONG should be celebrating his epic escape from China’s “black” brick kilns, where he and hundreds of other kidnapped children were forced to work up to 20 hours a day in sub-human conditions.
Instead, the 18-year-old is too frightened to talk to outsiders or leave his mother’s home.
The timing of his escape was all wrong. He climbed up a human ladder and slipped past the thugs and guard dogs in September — one month after police declared the black kiln children had all been rescued and this sordid chapter in Chinese history was officially closed.
Mr Hu had been kidnapped at 15 while walking in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province. He was bundled into a van and driven to a brick kiln in Linxian, across the border in Shanxi.
In May this year he heard that investigators were closing in. Brave journalists and parents had ignited a media firestorm that was shaking society, particularly in Shanxi. So his mouth was gagged and his emaciated body stuffed into a sack and he was sold to another brick kiln — this time back in Henan province.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao had mobilised 40,000 police in a military-scale investigation. Officials said they searched 8760 brick kilns and other suspect enterprises and rescued 359 children. It was a shining example of how media exposure can lead to government accountability and better policy.
But the successes did not include Hu Jiyong, who was still forced to work extreme hours, on two meals of watery rice gruel a day. According to his mother, Zhang Aihua, six co-workers were caught trying to escape in June. He was forced to watch as they were beaten to death.
Distraught parents believe hundreds of other children are still working in black kilns in the provinces of Henan, Shandong and Hebei.
“Almost 500 parents are still searching for their children,” says Yuan Chen, who now devotes his life to walking the country roads of Henan and Shanxi with a photograph of his 18-year-old son, who disappeared last year from a Zhengzhou worksite. “Two-thirds of the children have not been found,” he says.
Mr Yuan knows his son was working at a black brick kiln because an escaped child worker recognised his photograph.
The state security apparatus that assisted parents and children in May and June has now reverted to ensuring various layers of government are not embarrassed by more bad news.
One parent from Henan told The Age that the chief of Shanxi’s Public Security Bureau had pleaded with her to renounce her evidence of missing children. She, and others, have been threatened and intimidated.
A spokesman from the Henan propaganda office told The Age it had no knowledge of a black kiln problem. The Shanxi Public Security Bureau’s black brick kiln rectification office said: “We have rescued all the black kiln migrant workers and shut down all the black kilns.”
Observers say the former Shanxi governor who has just been appointed vice-minister of culture in Beijing, cannot afford any more humiliations.
The trail to the missing brick kiln children often starts at the giant railway station in Zhengzhou. Earlier this year it was the locus of a thriving people market. It is here in January that a boy, 15, was lured by an offer of work at a beer factory for 1200 yuan ($A186) a month. When he realised it was a trap, it was too late.
The teenager says he heard his captors bartering over him. “His body is strong and his brain is fine, he’s worth 500,” said one." “An older man is worth 400 and maybe 300 for a retard, but this boy’s body is thin and puny,” said another.
He was sold for 200 yuan. Two days later he was one of Shanxi’s black kiln children, where he remained until a group of parents set him free in May.
The “black worker” market no longer exists, but Zhengzhou station is still a rendezvous for the parents of missing children.
Miao Lisong, stands there with an old mobile phone pinned to his ear. “Where are you, I’m already here,” he shouts.
He is soon greeted by four other parents. They squeeze into a car and head for the Nanyang brick kilns, where Hu Jiyong made his miraculous escape.
All year these men have travelled back roads of Shanxi and Henan, inquiring at every brick kiln and asking questions of everyone they see. At night they sleep on newspaper at roadsides, with bricks as pillows, hugging photographs of their children.
The approaching winter has brought a renewed urgency.
“The coldest month is coming and I still don’t know where my child is,” says Mr Miao, whose 25-year-old son went missing last year and was recently seen at a Shanxi black kiln. “If he has been beaten, his wounds will not heal as well as they would in summer.”
He admits he doesn’t know whether his son is still alive. But he cannot stop searching until he is sure.
His spirits lift when a farmer confirms there is a black brick kiln up ahead. Village officials all say the black kilns have been closed, but this one, like many, still has a smoking chimney.
The boss says he never used black workers. But an old worker says quietly: “We did have black workers but they’ve been moved — I don’t know where they’ve gone.”
For a few brief months local officials went along with the national search. Now they are busy washing their hands of responsibility. Shanxi’s black kiln rectification office said: “Parents cannot prove that their children are now in Shanxi.”
The parents tried the Henan petition’s office, only to be accused of making a fuss.
When they tried to take their complaint to the petitions office in Beijing, they were intercepted at Zhengzhou station and told to go home and wait for news.
“We are just like a ball that they kick here and there but nobody cares,” says Mr Miao. The old man says he spends many nights lying awake, crying. But sleeping can be worse. “I often dream about my son, and he is saying: ‘Dad, why don’t you come for me’.”
He and dozens of other parents believe they still have a chance — if only they can get their story to Premier Wen Jiabao.
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2007/12/07/1196813021595.html
Also, six months ago,
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/slave-brickmakers-liberated-in-china/2007/06/15/1181414540468.html
oh that what you mean.
Well i think the internet controll is qute sensless thing coz you could controll your sites , but this is rather problematic to controll the foreign sites.
For instance Kremlin already enough long time could not forbid the Chechens extremists site www.Kavkazcenter.com but nothing can do;)
So in practice - although the “limitation of pornography” is a right issue, but this is more the polotocal step then the real plan.
BTW i ve heared that in USA the CIA has got the exclusive right for the total listening of any phone-talks.
Is this true?
I think the Chinas quasi-capitalism is more succesfull in progress then russian one.
Sure thay had a dictatorship of ComParty but i do not think this is the worst solution for them.
Really just compare with post 1990- russia:
1.We have full desintegration- China vise verse returned back the Hon-Kong and probably soon - the Taiwan.
2. We had the war in Checnija and Abhazia, perished a lot of peoples - China had a nothing simular.
3. We had a 40% economical decrease- they had a 50% increase.
We lost the thechological level - China are going to a space, beginning to produce a electronic chips and computers , improve ther technological basis.
4. today we have 7-8% economical rise per year mostly due to the Oil-prices- China have 10-11% without any oil and gas:)
5.We the die out 1 million per year coz of social policy gov- Chinas increase the life-level.
So cinsidering importain points above the Chinas quasi-capitalism is not so bad as the Russian one.
I would suggest that China has more “wild capitalism” (I personally prefer to refer to it as “robber baron” capitalism, after the US experience of the 1880s) than Russia ever has, with the difference that any Chinese capitalists with political ambitions are rather more ruthlessly suppressed than the equivalent Russians. This leads to the Oligarchs being rather more obvious in Russia than in China, but I would suggest that there are actually rather more abuses going on in China - up to and including slavery in some instances.
Do not forget in WHAT hole was the China just 30 years ago. Today this is one of the dynamical-progressive economy in the world.
Sure there a lot of problems still exists. However they continiously solve it.
Agreed - I think the Chinese have been a great deal more successful than the Russians in general in making the transition to a market economy. However, the cost of this is measured in the abuses which take place and in they way they dumped socialism a lot earlier than the Soviets did.
China has still maintained its organs of oppression,1-party state, political prisons, political executions and so on, so it’s still socially, but not economically, Communist.
Certainly an interesting mixture, and I wouldn’t want to emigrate there…
Me neither.
A bit too tenuous a situation for me.
I suspect there are tensions within China that aren’t apparent to us, notably between the old guard communists and the newer leadership, compounded by oddities like the army running various enterprises. In some respects China is more like a South American dictatorship run by a military junta behind the scenes, but run rather better and on a much bigger scale, but with the added complication that both the army and the party are paths to material success and power.
Such situations always leave open the possibility of a revolt or grab for complete power by one group, or factions within group.
I don’t have any reason to expect it, but I think it’s entirely possible that, should there be an internal revolt or grab for power, China could undergo a sudden reversal like the Cultural Revolution produced, which could change the face of what we think is the emerging China.
If that doesn’t happen, the next problem China will face is the same problem that the USSR faced during and after its post-war zenith, with different ethnic or former national groups demanding independence, which then raises issues about loss of resources and profit for the currently commerce-oriented leadership. So they have to suppress that, which they will, because China ain’t Yugoslavia, but it won’t help China internally or internationally.
I’m not sure that in some respects the WWII era warlords haven’t been replaced by a modern form of army, party and commercial warlords exercising dominion over much of the nation. If so, problems are bound to emerge.
Yes it seems he will the next president.
There is no any doubts- he will if Putin has choose him.
At least you wont have to worry about getting this guy for your President,A worry we here in the U.S. face every 4-8 years… 
