IMHO why can't both take one step back? Forbidding technologies flow leads to different standards in different countries. China forbode Google, Twitter, etc from rooting in China years ago, so China developed a totally different ecosystem than the rest of the world (basically) to take their place: baidu as search engine, QQ as IM, weibo as social media. This made Chinese hard to take a peek to the outside world, while the outside world also has a hard time peeking in.
And now US is doing pretty much the same. Just when Chinese companies are trying to develop overseas business, US bans them. And as people from US and China cannot communicate, hatred grows and lotsa Chinese are now volunteering to ban foreign products. This is truly meaningless.
The whole point of the West's policies is to increase competition at the low end of the labor market (manual, commodity, factory) while maintaining protectionism at the high end (intellectual property, media, culture, and technology), which is not coincidentally where elites are concentrated. The idea is to keep the price of labor as low as possible (to maximize profit for the owners of enterprises).
How does the West's policies increase competition at the low end of the labor market? By your argument, the West is harming itself by cutting off access to cheap Chinese labor.
Are you sure that's the whole point? Undisputed superpower of the world isn't exactly a minor detail, I'm pretty sure China has that at least in the back of their minds.
China has seen the days of democrats coming to power and China killed them. It has the experience in doing so. IMO when a democratic power is rising in China, China knows how to kill it swiftly. So uh, China becoming democratic is still highly unlikely, at least within 30~40 years I guess.
I think the most likely route at the moment is schism and fragmentation within the existing power structure along geographic lines, as happened with the Soviet Union. I suspect this would only be possible in the face of sever economic crisis, in which the economic and political interests of the regions severely diverged from those of the central authorities.
It's difficult to see this actually happening though. China is pretty prosperous and can probably weather even a severe economic crisis. The Soviet Union was far more ethnically and regionally diverse. It also had the Eastern Bloc countries under a loose enough control that it was possible for them to slip out of it's fingers, which started a domino effect that China isn't really vulnerable to in that way.
Russia was also hilariously poor, even when it was relatively powerful. Saying Russia is more ethnically diverse than China is an interesting statement, given the enormous breadth and width of China and all the different subcultures and people living there. Unless this is a skin colour thing? I don't really understand ethnocentric reasoning
Ethnic politics in China is like everything else a complete stitch-up. China, though big, is a fraction of the size of the USSR, which was 70% Slavs while China is 91% Han. That's less than a third as much ethnic diversity. The problem is a lot of even that diversity is fake.
There are some powerful members of the ruling Chinese elite that 'belong to minorities', but the threshold for that is having one ethnic minority grandparent, who themselves might have had only one ethnic minority grandparent. Oh, and ethnic minority groups get some educational advantages, so it's an advantage to get the classification. This means the ranks of minorities get heavily packed with people who are in practice indistinguishable genetically and culturally from the average Han, but have the right to represent and speak for their minority group.
Thus in theory minorities are very well represented, get various advantages and have a voice in politics and society. In practice the people who get to do so are hand picked by the party and have the most tenuous links imaginable to the minority they supposedly represent.
Leaving aside the frankly problematic amount of veiled racism, China is large. There are a lot of people in it so even if 91% is Han, they might still have more other people in it than Russia does.
I am a Chinese and I travel sometimes. Never been to Europe or America (but I really hope so), I've been to lotsa attractions in China, Singapore, Malaysia, etc etc. And in every single place I've been, there are really a buttload of shitty Chinese tourists. They just randomly spit around, throw whatever they are holding into shrubs, talk real loud in public, and when it's crowdy, one will push another. IMO It's not a matter of Chinese government or something, at least not on this one... I myself guess the reason of this is even the Chinese economic boom made lots of people rich, it didn't really make most people civilized (and self-aware). Hopefully things will be better in future.
You would think it would be faster to just change the keys. Although looking at the repo the credentials they are worried about getting leaked are "admin" "admin"
