The Korea Liberator (TKL) offers a sympathetic interview with Gordon G Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes on the World and The Coming Collapse of China. Naturally, TKL focuses on events relating to the peninsula, although Chang also briefly reaffirms his belief that the Chinese Communist Party is collapsing.:

TKL: 10. Lastly, let’s have another prediction on where China will be in, say, 10-20 years? A decentralized capitalist, democracy? An aggressive mercantile oligopoly? Or perhaps even fragmentation?

Chang: Or all of the above [laughter].

I don’t believe that the communist party will be ruling China very much longer. I think it will fall from power by the end of this decade. But my crystal ball is not clear enough to provide a specific answer as to what happens next. Over the long term, China will develop representative institutions and a free economy, but perhaps not in the time frame you mention.

I don’t think China will fragment, but I do see Taiwan becoming recognized as the independent state that it actually is today. But apart from that, China won’t fragment. There will be a great period of uncertainty and turbulence in China, but 10 years are not enough to produce a democracy and the free market.

AsiaPundit has both of Chang’s books and would recommend them. While AP does not fully subscribe to to Chang’s view that the CCP will collapse — particularly in such a short timeframe — a deep economic correction would not be a surprise. Although there is hyperbole, even six years after publication Chang’s text still well illustrates the fragility of the modern Chinese state and, moreover, offers a welcome antidote to China hype.

Technorati Tags: asia, china, east asia, economy, north korea, northeast asia

The terrorists have won, so says Anna at Sepia Mutiny.

In the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Indian government issued a directive to internet service providers to start blocking sites hosted by Google’s Blogger service, TypePad and Geocities. The alleged reason for the block: terrorists have been using the internet to communicate.
We shudder at the thought that India’s intelligence services will eventually discover that terrorists also use telephones, national postal services and pencils.
UltraBrown offers the following comment:

As the world’s back office, for India to blame overzealous techies would hardly be credible. It’s not yet clear which blogs the government was targeting, but banning all of Blogspot is nothing less than outright repression — mimicking the tactics Pakistan used to shut down discussion of Danish cartoons critical of Islam. India is now in the august company of some of the world’s least free nations

Amit Varma, who just penned a piece for the Guardian on how collaborative blogs such as Mumbai Help can be put to use in a crisis ponders: ” Won’t it be ironic if, after all that Mumbai Help attempted to do last week, residents of Mumbai aren’t even able to access it?”

Much, much more at DesiPundit, Global Voices and .

While India is following the route of authoritarian China in blocking blog hosting services, curiously neither country has banned . Although concerns abound about online sexual predators using the service, we must assume the youth-oriented service is free from terrorists, pro-democracy dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners.

Technorati Tags: asia, censorship, india, south asia