This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
The Coming Chinese Crackup
Authored by David Shambaugh, originally posted at The Wall Street Journal,
On Thursday, the National People’s Congress convened in Beijing in what has become a familiar annual ritual. Some 3,000 “elected” delegates from all over the country—ranging from colorfully clad ethnic minorities to urbane billionaires—will meet for a week to discuss the state of the nation and to engage in the pretense of political participation.
Some see this impressive gathering as a sign of the strength of the Chinese political system—but it masks serious weaknesses. Chinese politics has always had a theatrical veneer, with staged events like the congress intended to project the power and stability of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. Officials and citizens alike know that they are supposed to conform to these rituals, participating cheerfully and parroting back official slogans. This behavior is known in Chinese as biaotai, “declaring where one stands,” but it is little more than an act of symbolic compliance.
Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself. China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping, is hoping that a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party’s rule. He is determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party’s collapse. But instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Xi may well wind up having the same effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.
Predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated,
China-watchers have been on high alert for telltale signs of regime decay and decline ever since the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Since then, several seasoned Sinologists have risked their professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was inevitable. Others were more cautious—myself included. But times change in China, and so must our analyses.
The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think. We don’t know what the pathway from now until the end will look like, of course. It will probably be highly unstable and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way, those inside of it will play along—thus contributing to the facade of stability.
Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign—a focus of this week’s National People’s Congress—he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies.
The Chinese have a proverb, waiying, neiruan—hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Mr. Xi is a genuinely tough ruler. He exudes conviction and personal confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is extremely fragile on the inside.
Consider five telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability and the party’s systemic weaknesses.
First, China’s economic elites have one foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble. In 2014, Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute, which studies China’s wealthy, found that 64% of the “high net worth individuals” whom it polled—393 millionaires and billionaires—were either emigrating or planning to do so. Rich Chinese are sending their children to study abroad in record numbers (in itself, an indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher-education system).
Just this week, the Journal reported, federal agents searched several Southern California locations that U.S. authorities allege are linked to “multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses that enabled thousands of Chinese women to travel here and return home with infants born as U.S. citizens.” Wealthy Chinese are also buying property abroad at record levels and prices, and they are parking their financial assets overseas, often in well-shielded tax havens and shell companies.
Meanwhile, Beijing is trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged financial fugitives living abroad. When a country’s elites—many of them party members—flee in such large numbers, it is a telling sign of lack of confidence in the regime and the country’s future.
Second, since taking office in 2012, Mr. Xi has greatly intensified the political repression that has blanketed China since 2009. The targets include the press, social media, film, arts and literature, religious groups, the Internet, intellectuals, Tibetans and Uighurs, dissidents, lawyers, NGOs, university students and textbooks. The Central Committee sent a draconian order known as Document No. 9 down through the party hierarchy in 2013, ordering all units to ferret out any seeming endorsement of the West’s “universal values”—including constitutional democracy, civil society, a free press and neoliberal economics.
A more secure and confident government would not institute such a severe crackdown. It is a symptom of the party leadership’s deep anxiety and insecurity.
Third, even many regime loyalists are just going through the motions. It is hard to miss the theater of false pretense that has permeated the Chinese body politic for the past few years. Last summer, I was one of a handful of foreigners (and the only American) who attended a conference about the “China Dream,” Mr. Xi’s signature concept, at a party-affiliated think tank in Beijing. We sat through two days of mind-numbing, nonstop presentations by two dozen party scholars—but their faces were frozen, their body language was wooden, and their boredom was palpable. They feigned compliance with the party and their leader’s latest mantra. But it was evident that the propaganda had lost its power, and the emperor had no clothes.
In December, I was back in Beijing for a conference at the Central Party School, the party’s highest institution of doctrinal instruction, and once again, the country’s top officials and foreign policy experts recited their stock slogans verbatim. During lunch one day, I went to the campus bookstore—always an important stop so that I can update myself on what China’s leading cadres are being taught. Tomes on the store’s shelves ranged from Lenin’s “Selected Works” to Condoleezza Rice’s memoirs, and a table at the entrance was piled high with copies of a pamphlet by Mr. Xi on his campaign to promote the “mass line”—that is, the party’s connection to the masses. “How is this selling?” I asked the clerk. “Oh, it’s not,” she replied. “We give it away.” The size of the stack suggested it was hardly a hot item.
Fourth, the corruption that riddles the party-state and the military also pervades Chinese society as a whole. Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign is more sustained and severe than any previous one, but no campaign can eliminate the problem. It is stubbornly rooted in the single-party system, patron-client networks, an economy utterly lacking in transparency, a state-controlled media and the absence of the rule of law.
Moreover, Mr. Xi’s campaign is turning out to be at least as much a selective purge as an antigraft campaign. Many of its targets to date have been political clients and allies of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. Now 88, Mr. Jiang is still the godfather figure of Chinese politics. Going after Mr. Jiang’s patronage network while he is still alive is highly risky for Mr. Xi, particularly since Mr. Xi doesn’t seem to have brought along his own coterie of loyal clients to promote into positions of power. Another problem: Mr. Xi, a child of China’s first-generation revolutionary elites, is one of the party’s “princelings,” and his political ties largely extend to other princelings. This silver-spoon generation is widely reviled in Chinese society at large.
Finally, China’s economy—for all the Western views of it as an unstoppable juggernaut—is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit. In November 2013, Mr. Xi presided over the party’s Third Plenum, which unveiled a huge package of proposed economic reforms, but so far, they are sputtering on the launchpad. Yes, consumer spending has been rising, red tape has been reduced, and some fiscal reforms have been introduced, but overall, Mr. Xi’s ambitious goals have been stillborn. The reform package challenges powerful, deeply entrenched interest groups—such as state-owned enterprises and local party cadres—and they are plainly blocking its implementation.
These five increasingly evident cracks in the regime’s control can be fixed only through political reform. Until and unless China relaxes its draconian political controls, it will never become an innovative society and a “knowledge economy”—a main goal of the Third Plenum reforms. The political system has become the primary impediment to China’s needed social and economic reforms. If Mr. Xi and party leaders don’t relax their grip, they may be summoning precisely the fate they hope to avoid.
In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the upper reaches of China’s leadership have been obsessed with the fall of its fellow communist giant. Hundreds of Chinese postmortem analyses have dissected the causes of the Soviet disintegration.
Mr. Xi’s real “China Dream” has been to avoid the Soviet nightmare. Just a few months into his tenure, he gave a telling internal speech ruing the Soviet Union’s demise and bemoaning Mr. Gorbachev’s betrayals, arguing that Moscow had lacked a “real man” to stand up to its reformist last leader. Mr. Xi’s wave of repression today is meant to be the opposite of Mr. Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost. Instead of opening up, Mr. Xi is doubling down on controls over dissenters, the economy and even rivals within the party.
But reaction and repression aren’t Mr. Xi’s only option. His predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, drew very different lessons from the Soviet collapse. From 2000 to 2008, they instituted policies intended to open up the system with carefully limited political reforms.
They strengthened local party committees and experimented with voting for multicandidate party secretaries. They recruited more businesspeople and intellectuals into the party. They expanded party consultation with nonparty groups and made the Politburo’s proceedings more transparent. They improved feedback mechanisms within the party, implemented more meritocratic criteria for evaluation and promotion, and created a system of mandatory midcareer training for all 45 million state and party cadres. They enforced retirement requirements and rotated officials and military officers between job assignments every couple of years.
In effect, for a while Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu sought to manage change, not to resist it. But Mr. Xi wants none of this. Since 2009 (when even the heretofore open-minded Mr. Hu changed course and started to clamp down), an increasingly anxious regime has rolled back every single one of these political reforms (with the exception of the cadre-training system). These reforms were masterminded by Mr. Jiang’s political acolyte and former vice president, Zeng Qinghong, who retired in 2008 and is now under suspicion in Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign—another symbol of Mr. Xi’s hostility to the measures that might ease the ills of a crumbling system.
Some experts think that Mr. Xi’s harsh tactics may actually presage a more open and reformist direction later in his term. I don’t buy it. This leader and regime see politics in zero-sum terms: Relaxing control, in their view, is a sure step toward the demise of the system and their own downfall. They also take the conspiratorial view that the U.S. is actively working to subvert Communist Party rule. None of this suggests that sweeping reforms are just around the corner.
We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world’s second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule forever.
Looking ahead, China-watchers should keep their eyes on the regime’s instruments of control and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of citizens and party members alike are already voting with their feet and leaving the country or displaying their insincerity by pretending to comply with party dictates.
We should watch for the day when the regime’s propaganda agents and its internal security apparatus start becoming lax in enforcing the party’s writ—or when they begin to identify with dissidents, like the East German Stasi agent in the film “The Lives of Others” who came to sympathize with the targets of his spying. When human empathy starts to win out over ossified authority, the endgame of Chinese communism will really have begun.
»
- 73036 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
- advertisements -
The article starts by saying,
3000 Chinese "elected" officials are meeting.
That nearly made me puke.
Why the clauses around the word elected?
Chinese officials are indeed elected by people at different levels to choose the best minds from all across China.
That is exactly why western forces failed to develop Ziang Zemin and Zhu Rong Ji as patsies to control China.
These 2 jokers were easily replaced by other better leaders who put China first.
There is no collapse coming.
As someone said earlier, you can replace China with US and the article makes more sense.
Many Rich Americans are already out of US and many are creating bunkers within America too.
Chinese rich planning to run out of China cannot cause China to collapse.
my first reaction was this article could be about US
David Shambaugh ... originally posted in the Wall Street Journal... two telltale signs that the article to follow is less than worthless.
.
wsj billionaire propaganda
I have worked in China for 12 years, speak and read the language and live among the people. I have authored two books on about China and am writing a third one, having done thousands of hours of research in the process. I just did an informative radio interview that offers a much, much different perspective on China's past, present and future. I invite you to listen to it:
http://44days.net/?p=2300
After reading the above article and listening to the radio show, you be the judge.
Jeff J. Brown, in the belly of the New Century Beast
jeff@44days.net
I moved to China when I retired 2 years ago. It is amazing how much propaganda Americans believe about China. They really need to get a passport and a visa and leave their trailer parks now and then. That might also put them out of range of the American media and their drivel.
One thing to like about China... They execute banksters. :-)
they also execute high-ranking government officials ... those comparable to cabinet members, supreme court judges, state governors ...
can you imagine the US executing corrupt government officials? (NEVER)
I have read the comments (mostly). What imagineries. This article was posted last week and has many informed and critical critiques (that you can find online). The author is a respected scholar and his previous books, articles are all accessable. Therefore he has elicited measured responses by others expert in this area (i.e. not ZH'ers) who may disagree.
What perhaps you do not understand from your visceral and outside perspective is that a power struggle is in the making (for many years). I have posted this from time to time here but it bears repeating. There is a Party Purge in progress, or if we call it by historical terms, a Party Rectification Campaign--ala Mao in the late 50s). Xi's clique calls it an anti-corruption campaign. It is both. It has moved from the Party to the military (14 generals were recently purged) and now will hit the SOEs. This campaign will not be met with passivity. Potentially, it may erupt chaotically especially when it devolves on powerful patrons (your so-called oligargh class) within the regions. For Xi and Co., it is a dangerous and politically fragile course. Anti-corruption is all for the good but does not address the root problem: the institutions within the party that spawned it. Root out that.
The author is a useful idiot aparatchnik of the statists. "Respected scholar"? HAHAHAHA
That's good.
China needs another 'Great Leap Forward'.
The last one worked out just swell.
They do like that 'Forward' slogan, don't they?
I am not sure I understand your comment but yes they do not need another GLF or a GPCR. If it comes to that, end game. What is interesting is that the author, generally supportive of China's course of development since 1978, has now changed his mind. Thus the debate (and surprise) at this perspective from a variety of sources (Chinese and others).
But that's neither here nor there. A power play is, well, in play. Move forward or back to the 'good old days' circa 1950s.
The lesson of the last decade.
If you like endless civil war get rid of your dictators.
Democracy didn't even work in Northern Ireland, a large Catholic minority were disenfranchised.
Democracy didn't work in the Middle East, a large Sunni/Shia (country dependent) minority were disenfranchised.
Ukraine - A Russian speaking east was disenfranchised ..........
Yugoslavia had to broken up into many parts to separate the warring ethnic divisions, eg Serbs, Croats, Muslims ......
The divisions in China are not suitable for democracy as we know it.
Home grown, Jeffersonian democracy v. democracy imposed by outsiders. That's the difference between the US experience and the rest. This is a bit of a generalization, but the Americans of revolutionary times basically said "Just leave us alone." And it worked for awhile. Given the global busybodies of today, home grown democracy may never happen again.
Democracy has certain prerequisites:
1) A nation with a fairly uniform outlook (even the differences between the North and South in the US needed a war to resolve them)
2) Floating voters to ensure different parties get into power (ethnic and religious differences do not provide floating voters, they stay firmly in one camp or the other)
Democracy has certain prerequisites:
You forgot the most important one - a well educated and informed electorate. Which is almost completely lacking in the USA today.
Spot on Dickweed spot on. USA is failing because the electorate has failed
The biggest problem with democracy is that voters vote for what benefits them individually in the short run. They don't think of the Greater Good or the future of their children.
Watch the movie "Idiocracy"
If you study the history of democratic elections worldwide and especially in South America, you will find that the United States undermined almost all democratically (homegrown Jeffersonian democracy) elected governments to install dictatorships to support American corporations, which gutted natural resources and implemented death squads. See John Perkins Confesions of an Economic Hit Man, and Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine to understand how home grown democracies have been continually destroyed by the US for the last 70 years and more.
You have put your finger on the problem with democracy.
Somtimes people just don't vote the right way.
We can now see the civil wars in the Middle East being funded by external nations looking after their "team", Sunni/Shia.
We should not be surprised, the NORAID tins used to rattle across the US to fund their "team" during the troubles in Northern Ireland.
Wishful thinking that China is more corrupt than US. Dream on as the Wall St Ponzi sewer implodes.
I find it odd that every place is moving toward breaking point together, almost as if told to. I mean China isn't the USA nor UK and it does not seem in their interest to bubble up their economy like Western nations - unless the people in control in China are the same people in all the other places around the world. Then all this makes sense in that they need a big enough event to get the sheeple to accept a change in direction, new currancy etc.
What BS. Which country is he talking about?
"The Central Committee sent a draconian order known as Document No. 9 down through the party hierarchy in 2013, ordering all units to ferret out any seeming endorsement of the West’s “universal values”—including constitutional democracy, civil society, a free press and neoliberal economics."
"Constitiutional Democracy" is what the unionized drones try to tell our kids is the structure of the US government. It is propaganda. Our form of government (as initiated) is "Republic", i.e a rule of law not movable by the flexible ideals and mores of an electorate. However that would be bad for business for the lawyers and the government aparatchniks who inhabit the "government of the US", who's main purpose is to put up the facade that the citizen's "vote" matters. Democracy??? There is not even a "right" to vote, so how could this form of government be a "Democracy"?
"Free Press"? HAHAHAHAHAHA. This article is proof that this author is just another statist aparatchnik in a sea of statist enablers.
"Neoliberal Economics"? Right, if you call Corporate Fascism "Neoliberal Economics".
"birthright citizenship" is at the root of the demise of the United States, yet the "free press" continues to propagate it's legitimacy. That anyone born in the US is a "citizen" regardless of parentage is pure fallacy, and not in the meaning of the 14th Amendment. Children born of NON US Citizen parents are not born "subject to the jurisdiction of the US", which is the requirement for citizenship. (see Wong Kim Ark @ 693, that the parents must be at least legal residents) It causes all sorts of ills and incongruities--- it is basically kidnapping. It also creates the security whole suggested by this article (even if the author fails to mention it). It has caused the illogical situation of young children considered US Citizens, yet their parents are illegal aliens. The whole belief that anyone born in the US is a Citizen has undermined the laws and immigration policies of the US, and allowed the Marxists, like the Usurper Obama, and those before him, to infiltrate the citizenry and dilute it, so that our society looks nothing like the Republic that was envisioned, passed down to our "PROGENY" (See US Constitution Preamble).
So the author legitimizes the nonsense that is "birthright citizenship", claims that the US is a "Constitutional Democracy", which it certainly is not, claims that there is a "free press" and not a state run media of useful idiots, which he represents, and tries to insinuate that this is a "free" economy, not a state run basket case.
Journalism died long ago.
BINGO Mick!!!
Great post . . . .well said.
Rule of Law.
A concept, as practiced in the US, with a marvelous capacity for 'elasticity'.
" I have a phone and a pen."
" Some systemically important institutions are too big to jail."
" If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
" Well, they're here now. How will you deport all of them?"
etc, etc...
WSJ author hahahaha - Yes, China's no poster child on corruption, but you need to remember that the controllers are doing a huge graff on officials no matter whether they are crumbs or tigers. I don't see anything of the sort in the West. LMAO with this article and the timing is, well to say the least, propaganda promotion at its peak. hahaha.
Zionists are going full retard and using its tentacles as its last defense.
The Zionists are really trying to destroy the US on its way out, I urge all American's to be vigilant and push these thugs out of office so they cannot continue to gut a great nation.
Yea you Zionist pigs you can try to pit one nation against another, but it not going to work this time.
Get the hell out of Ukraine and stop your NATO fascist agenda. Everyone wants a peace deal and you throw a farking spanner in there with arms and lethal aid as well as Soros mercs.
Do not think China will go down; not a chance. The US will go down first.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/14/world/europe/british-leader-diverges-f...
David from Khazari mafia, which bombed with a-bombs NY, has a dream:
The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think.
I would say the endgame for Khazars is comming.
I would say the endgame for Khazars is comming.
Yeah buddy . . . . .
Men Stim Wow.
Cryptic movie about China reference. Who will get it?
federal agents searched several Southern California locations that U.S. authorities allege are linked to “multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses that enabled thousands of Chinese women to travel here and return home with infants born as U.S. citizens.”
are we not being colonized...anchor babies?
The bright side is that they can afford their own Pampers unlike the Golden Hoards streaming across our southern borders where US taxpayers are literally buying their shit.
Fresh every day.
Speaking of Chinese Crackups -
Confucius say: Woman who do hand-stand has crack up
Watch the China Unscensored channel on youtube for some insights into the multiple factions that make up the Communist party in China. It's like watching a game of live chess. Purges here, corruption there with pawns, knights, kings and queens.
It'd be histerically funny if people weren't dying.
Very unlike the US where the corruption is not only legal, it is institutionalized and sanctioned by the highest Court in the land.
A kinder and gentler Game of Thrones where the players only lose their place at the trough instead of losing their heads.
That's progress.
To paraphrase Pee Wee's Big Advanture, "There ain't no basement in the Alamo."
There ain't no corruption in the US.
You don't know sh@t about China.
Isn't the master plan to destroy EVERY sovereign? TPTB plan to destroy all viable government, rendering the global population extremely maleable to their 'solution'.
According to the Wall Street Journal writer:
The Central Committee sent a draconian order known as Document No. 9 down through the party hierarchy in 2013, ordering all units to ferret out any seeming endorsement of the West’s “universal values”—including constitutional democracy, civil society, a free press and neoliberal economics.
Apparently, Wall Street regards "neoliberal economics" to be
one of the West's "universal values".
Hence, any attempt to "ferret out" neoliberal economics is believed "draconian".
SHOUTSTANDING analysis of China. Thanks, Tyler(s).
Fire Angel
More, from the article by the Wall Street Journal writer:
Chinese leaders "also take the conspiratorial view that the U.S. is actively working to subvert Communist Party rule".
Obviously, somebody needs a reality check.
this guy d.s. is a myopic forgery of supremo ignorance. total bs!!! for a minute there, i thought he was talking ussa. like amercans's aren't leaving for china!
chiang kai-shek ( whom, btw... had moar harvard grad's in his adm. than fdr had in his entire arsenal of confidants) idiot!!!
ironically, this mirrors america today-- asshole!
jmo
The color revolutions all burst forth unanticipated? Yeah, right, except by those who organized and funded them. Of course the Chinese and Russians crack down on NGOs -look at what they've done. The legitimate ones that may do some good are undermined by the activities of those serving the illegitamate purposes of power players.
So who cracks up first west or east?
My guess is that Japan kicks off the festivities, but the larger question is who can hold out longer once they do happen.
In that regard, a country with no social net to speak of and the need for constant export earnings coming from a world of customers who no longer purchase things at the same rate as previously is going to be in a world of hurt.
lol
the "crack down" mainly consists of requiring foreign funded NGOs which attempt to influence government policies to register as foreign agents
the same as foreign funded NGOs operating in the US are required to do under US law!
oh, the hypocrisy.
Never forget that The Wall Street Journal is neocon/neoliberal central.
This article is telling us what they want and will try to make happen.
They tried their subversion recently in Hong Kong. They will not stop which is why China is implementing laws to reign in foreign NGOs.
who the fuck is this cunt Shambaugh, fucking Shambaugh, sounds like a fucking shambolic fucking jew boy to me.
I have never read such crock of fucking shite about China before today.
This shite is pure puerile propaganda from beginning to end.
Don't believe a word of this shit, it comes from a Kenyan monkey pussy boy who is on his knees sucking nigger cock and licking nulands pussy all day.
If this cunt ever set foot in China it would be a fucking miracle, because having been there living for 6 years from 2000 and visiting for up to 3 or 6 months most years since, running 3 businesses in China and having friends in almost every part of China, I know, I don't just guess, I know what this cunts game is.
Just like the CIA and the Tibetan terrorist cunt or at least his fucking CIA trained older brother, that fucking moronic fuck wit the dally fucking llama, it is all about lying and spreading total shit about the reality in China and trying to cause as much trouble as possible.
because few Americans actually visit China outside the fucking grunts and corporate lackeys of the multu nationals trying to rape the labor forces in China they have a very big agenda indeed.
Lie as much as you can about China, scare people about china and tell them its going down, then when we are finally fucked, we can blame it on them when we go to war.
Lying neoliberal cunts and its fucking hawhaw prostitutes in the press will see you never ever get any real or true story about reality in China.
This fucking shambleboy is nothing more than another lying cunt brought out to spin more shit lies and garbage.
Aren't you cocksucker,?
What does monkey jizz taste like boy.
Debate me you cunt, if you dare, and I will rip your fucking head off
Oh, Tyler, Without Chinese, Your dear Russia would have died by now. When you wish China die in a firery death, it serves you well to remember that your Russia is pretty much prop up by China. Because of China, you still have some dingnity left, or you'd be on your knees, battered, and begging...
Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe’s communist states two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists—until it happened. The post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated,
What complete and utter disinfo.... The west was the cause & main benefactor
who allows this crap to soil the pages of ZH