Fukuyama on China's "Weakness"
Coming from a different angle than the piece posted below, Francis Fukuyama indicates that while crushing Tibetan dissent may be the purview of a central government, much of China's challenges comes from the central authority's weakness. Namely, that much "tyranny" in China is actuall localized tyranny by local elites as opposed to the technocratic elite in Beijing. In fact, Fukuyama asserts Beijing is "riding a tiger" because it requires blazing economic growth that comes from sometimes brutal local kleptocracies. Consequently, even as it desires to stamp out corruption, its need for the very growth the kleptocrats offer ties its hands.
Fukuyama actually asserts that "State weakness can hurt the cause of liberty. The Polish and Hungarian aristocracies were able to impose their equivalents of the Magna Carta on their monarchs; those countries' central governments, unlike their English counterpart, remained far too weak in subsequent generations to protect the peasantry from the local lords, not to speak of protecting their countries as a whole from outside invasion."
This is seems to be quite an illuminating was to consider China's internal needs. If one considers that the European arrival (followed by the Imperial Japanese) in China led to, in many a Chinese mind, to a century of humiliation, a strong state would be necessary to avoid both the tyrannies of myopic local elites and their petty depredations as well as scavenging "outsiders."
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