Could it be that with TorchTibet, earthquakes, and everything else, the Chinese government is thinking that becoming an economic superpower and getting all that attention may well be a knife which cuts both ways?

Maybe hosting the Olympics was just a bad idea on Jiang Zemin’s part, just like the French-designed 300M sunnyside up egg of an opera house just off Tiananmen.

Maybe being poor and underdeveloped has its advantages after all. Then nobody cares what you do. Can we do a reset?

How about calling it China’s Pain In the Arse Rise (for the Chinese)? If we knew it would be this much trouble, we would have continued staying poor and supporting proletarian revolutions and fighting imperialism all over the world instead.