media - From a fence-sitter: conflicting concepts

In the ongoing debate on the Taishi/Guardian Asiapundit has described me once as a 'fence-sitter'. I must say, that is a rather comfortable position as the combatants are increasingly divided up in two camps.
From the fence two observations, that are triggered off by a short debate I had earlier this week at the Dutch radio on - what I had qualified as - the one-sided view of most human rights organization on the changes taking place in China.
Ben Knapen, the future foreign correspondent for NRC Handelsblad in Indonesia, said that when in a country one person is wrongly beaten, tortured or prosecuted, the government should be held responsible. That is riding morally very high grounds and basically there is very little you can say against it, apart from that it does not work, at least it does not work like that in China. Not only because of the size of the country, but also because the central government does not have enough leverage over what is happening locally that it can actually be held responsible for many of the things that go wrong in China.
That is bad enough and the problem seems to increase as the central power seems to be eroding. Politically, it might still be correct to hold Hu Jintao accountable for everything that happens in his country, in real life it only contributes to the self-satisfaction of those who have only those moral highlands in sight, not the swamps of Guangdong province.
The conflicting concept of a second participant was even more troublesome. For my book on 15 misunderstandings about China and the Chinese, I wanted initially skip the misunderstanding that China is on the brink of collapse. While having some validity in the years after Tiananmen, very few people are still waiting for this upcoming collapse. I still kept it in my book, since it allows to tell so many nice stories about Western observers who have been wrong.
In my time in China I must have noted large numbers of reasons why China would collapse and all those doomsday theories have only one thing in common: it did not happen. There are very good reasons (but that would take a bit more time to explain) why it is very unlikely it will happen, despite the enormous problems the country faces.
This doomsday scenario has made many observers, media, academics, trade unions and human rights organizations very lazy. They think they can just wait until the end is there and do not have to look into what is really happening. Even for that reason alone it would be very useful to shelve this concept, until there is a real reason to use it again.