SINOROVING By Pepe Escobar (Asia Times)

SINOROVING
PART 4: The peasant Tiananmen time bomb
By Pepe Escobar

PART 1: The Great Wall of shopping
PART 2: Selling China to the world
PART 3: The hottest label: China chic

"There is chaos under heaven and things could not be better." - Mao Zedong

"The biggest danger to the Party since taking over has been losing touch with the masses." - Hu Jintao

SHANGHAI - Everywhere in developed, urban China - Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou - the message was the same. The next "counterrevolutionary rebellion" - as the Communist Party defined the student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989 - if it happens, will be a peasant revolution. Foreign diplomats and Chinese scholars in Beijing or young, urban, 'Net-connected professionals in Guangzhou have told Asia Times Online in unmistakable terms: nobody from the party's "fourth generation" leadership wants to go back to the Maoist model of economic autarky and foreign-policy isolation.

Most of all, however, nobody in the leadership - as well as most influential intellectuals - wants the toppling of the Communist Party by pluralist forces advocating a multi-party democracy: that would amount to, in the words of a Beijing scholar, "an unpredictable, very dangerous destabilization". There's only a slight detail: what 1 billion Chinese peasants will make of all this. Enter Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao...

Complete article and links at Asia Times. If you are not familiar with this news source, you may want to read more there.