At Asia Times, Peter Lee writes Smelling Salts for China's Jasmine Dream:

With its ceaseless calls for "stability", China's government has backed itself into a Confucian corner.

"Instability" - a multipolar society fueled by access to the Internet - is becoming a fact of life, the new default setting. The intrusiveness of the "Great Firewall" and the security apparatus attempting to impose stability are threatening to become more prominent irritants than the dissent they are meant to stifle.

Unless the Chinese government has enough resources to send police to every street corner, a goon to every dissident's household, and a fifty-center to every online forum whenever an impish website announces a demonstration, it is going to have to develop new tools to manage China's political life.

The most relevant lesson for China from the people's revolts in the Arab world is that single-party authoritarianism is increasingly vulnerable. When only state tools (police, security forces and the army) and the occasional club-wielding thugs are available to counter widespread political dissent, the government quickly finds itself on the wrong side of the public-relations equation.

China's future may look more like Russia and Iran's: messy and multi-party.

Both Russia and Iran have chosen to reconcile themselves to multi-party politics, if not democracy. To protect the ruling groups, they have created, financed and preferentially promoted through pro-state media and various murky machinations nationalist political parties that serve as another weapon against democratic dissent. ...

Many Chinese dissidents are understandably infatuated with the spectacle of large crowds in large squares.

There is also appears to be an understandable but somewhat more dubious assumption that the magic process of democracy will adequately resolve the deeply rooted problems created or papered-over by decades of authoritarian rule.

Unfortunately, revolution in China will probably look very little like the Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia - which inspired the optimistic liberal democratic aspirations of China's dissident Charter 08 - or even the Egyptian revolution. It may very well look a lot like the Soviet collapse of 1991: the near instantaneous liquidation of the massive territories and state assets of a multi-national empire.

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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007:

In a previous story, I noted that the Army's top general, Peter Schoomaker, appears to have found himself in agreement with Howard Dean, three years after the fact.

Dean, of course, famously said that, "the capture of Saddam has not made America safer," a pronouncement that provided ammunition not only for the wingnuts, but even for certain of his Democratic rivals for the presidency.

And as yesterday's post detailed, the Army's top general, Peter Schoomaker, in an effort to explain away the failure to capture Osama bin Laden, took a roundabout logical jaunt that led him right down Dean's path: that Saddam's capture had done nothing to make America safer.

Which is what Dean said. And Dean was pilloried for it, not only by the wingnut right, but also by Democratic rivals Kerry and Lieberman.