THE CHINESE MARATHON
Sanya, Hainan Island, South China Sea. This is China's Florida, where Chinese Snowbirds escape from freezing their tuches off suffering Beijing's winter. I am at Howard Johnson's Sanya Resort eating a cheeseburger and listening to a local rock band playing Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman, singing the lyrics in English.
The place is gigantic with 1,000 rooms, and packed with Chinese - I am the only Westerner here. The band now launches into an enthusiastic Beatles' Obla-dee-obla-dah, which brings back a flood of memories when I first heard it, dancing with my Hawaiian girlfriend Vonnie at a Honolulu night club in 1969.
The Red Guards were rampaging through China back then, egged on by Mao, while millions of Chinese were starving to death. The scene before me now would have been considered a madman's hallucination in 1969.
Then Mao finally died in 1976, and his successor, Deng Xiao Ping created a "birdcage economy" as the way for China to grow into an economic superpower yet retain a Communist Party monopoly of power.
The Chinese people were allowed to be songbang, unleashed and free to fly around in the cage to make money - but never allowed to escape from the Party's cage itself. They accepted the bargain offered them - prosperity in exchange for loyalty - and the result was the most massive increase in national wealth in the shortest time in human history.
Today, the bargain between the Chicoms and the Chinese people - greater economic freedom for little or no political freedom - is breaking down. The Party needs a new rationale for its monopoly of political power - and has found it in that most lethal of tyrant excuses, jingoistic nationalism and demonization of a foreign devil.
Guess who that is.
