breaking the conventional thinking: the China fantasy

When people come to China they often want a quick flicks on the question what is China's biggest problem, often business people, journalists? I'm mostly tell them they are their own biggest problems. Breaking the mould of conventional thinking is becoming now more important than ever.
New insights on how Chinese companies are conducting their price wars as a part of an intelligent strategy I found groundbreaking on management practises. The book The China Fantasy by James Mann seems to be doing the same for the political thinking on China. For the review of the Washington Post:

The China Fantasy raises an awkward and important question: What if there is a third alternative between the rise of democracy and the collapse of China's political order? What if that alternative is the survival of the one-party state, with all its apparatus of control and repression?

Its again the foreigners looking at China who have to deal with their own illusions. When the system as we know it now is going to stay, we will have to deal with it - and with the huge changes that take place in the system itself. I just ordered the book, so you might hear more about this subject.

politics - The Party is here to stay

For years people with different political sympathies in the West did find common ground in the conviction that China's political systems was going to change. The country could not manage its economy and other problems without more political participation of its citizens. Economic growth would push China's middle class to more political demands.
Tha arguments were different, but the outcome would be the same: after the economic changes, political changes were inevitable.
I have never been too sure about that. In China you could see how the government was able to manage it multiple crises and learn from it. And as long as the economic growth continues, there are not reason to expect much to change in the mostly a-political attitude of its citizens.
Arthur Kroeber points in the same direction in the Financial Times, here in a pick up by A Glimpse of the World:

The China-must-reform-as-we-say-it-must fantasy has been most clearly articulated by two recent books. China’s Trapped Transition, by Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment, claims that corruption has so overwhelmed the Chinese state that it is rapidly losing the capacity to deal with all sorts of social problems. The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton (reviewed by Martin Wolf in the FT on February 2), asserts that “the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party are in an unstable halfway house” between socialism and capitalism, and that the party must surrender its monopoly on power – soon – or risk economic collapse.