This is an apt metaphor for the haughty bluestaters who are so solicitous of the working man until he gets uppity and votes the wrong way, then the "working man" becomes the "ignorant" or the "hoodwinked."

OJ,

Our elites wouldn't behave any differently. Imagine if you bumped into even a D-List celebrity in America. That is perhaps why they do not pick up on this as being significant.

The Chinese social contract has always been dependent on the bureaucratic class not pushing the envelope, their absolute power provides them, too hard. When they do this either by seeking more power relative to Beijing or whether they seek to overdo their lording over 'Old Hundred Names' the society hurtles into collapse. The Empress Dowager period is a good recent example.

What elites? Martha Stewart is in prison.

She ripped off other members of the elite, and her behavior was so egregious that she needed to be taken down a peg. It also didn't help her that she behaved badly around other elite types. Insider trading is one of those things that get punished very severely from time to time to enable us to continue the fiction that the stock market is not as rigged a game as your average trotter track. Every so often an obnoxious two-bit bimbo like Martha Stewart has to go to jail just to bamboozle the little people into believing that there really is a working regulatory system at the SEC. If Leona Helmsley had kept a lower profile and been less obnoxious, she would never have gone to Danbury.

The guy who does my hair, such as it is, writes poetry on the side. He met Chazz Palmentieri's mother somewhere and she asked him to send her some of his poetry. When he did so, a couple of security people were sent by Mr. Palmentieri to warn him to stay away from his mother. When even Chazz Palmentieri, a 'celebrity' so down at the heels that he cannot even appear on Hollywood Squares, has torpedoes pushing ordinary people around, we are truly infested with a celebrity culture and should not be too dismissive of the Chinese.

Pushing stalkers around.

The Mandate of Heaven totters.

Yet it is important to note that had Mao Tse-Tung not been a military genius, than Chicang Kai-Shek most likely would have destroyed the Communists with his expeditions. It is very hard for rebellions to succeed.

The only real question is whether the PLA will defend the government. If it does, then the Communists will remain in control. If it does not, they will fall. In every case where a velvet revolution succeeded in Eastern Europe, the army sided with the people. If it did not, then you have Lukashenko in Belarus.

What does the PLA want?

Chris,

It is probably erroneous to speak of 'the PLA.' It is factionalized and most high-ranking officers have significant business interests in the manufacture of goods for export. Should the government want to invade Taiwan, there are lots of generals who would be far more concerned about Wal-Mart's reaction than about any Taiwanese military effort. Warlordism is the natural state of Chinese polity and it is hurtling back to the days of the mandarins as we speak.