2012: The Year Of Russo-Chinese Democracy?

Gordon Chang predicts the fall of China's government in the coming year:

As a result, we will witness either a crash or, more probably, a Japanese-style multi-decade decline. Either way, economic troubles are occurring just as Chinese society is becoming extremely restless. It is not only that protests have spiked upwards -- there were 280,000 "mass incidents" last year according to one count?-- but that they are also increasingly violent as the recent wave of uprisings, insurrections, rampages and bombings suggest. The Communist Party, unable to mediate social discontent, has chosen to step-up repression to levels not seen in two decades. The authorities have, for instance, blanketed the country's cities and villages with police and armed troops and stepped up monitoring of virtually all forms of communication and the media. It's no wonder that, in online surveys, "control" and "restrict" were voted the country's most popular words for 2011.

It should be noted that Chang's book claimed?the Communist regime would fall in 2011.?Sergei Guriev and Aleh Tsyvinski?make a similarly bold claim about Russia:

Ironically, the wave of protests since [the election] is consistent with the ?modernization hypothesis? that Putin?s government has always used to justify the rollback of democracy in Russia: democracy is sustainable only if society is sufficiently well-off and has a solid middle class; until then, centralized rule is needed.

Now, it seems, sufficient prosperity has arrived, calling forth a middle class solid enough to demand government accountability, the rule of law, and a genuine fight against corruption. Whatever happens in the March 2012 presidential elections, the political mobilization of the middle class will eventually lead to democratization.

Nicolai Petro and Dominique Moisi are less certain. Me too.

(Photo: A large crowd of villagers forms in front of police lines at the scene of environmental protests over the past few days in the town of Haimen, Guangdong Province on December 22, 2011. Demonstrations over a power plant in southern China turned violent for a second straight day on December 21 when police fired tear-gas and beat protesters, witnesses said. At least six people were said to have been injured in the clashes with police in Haimen, a town in Guangdong province where residents are protesting against a coal-fired power plant that they say is a health hazard. By Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images.)

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