[albertni]

Neither of those comparisons make any sense, in my opinion. We've got the standard differences of country size (both in terms of land area and population) and time (a lot has changed about the world, especially in terms of communication, even in the past 15 years).

But, we've also got the huge difference that China, and Chinese people, are simply different. I don't even know where to begin in describing how different Chinese people in China fundamentally are from Americans in America. It's like when I see comments made by people such as "I wonder how the Chinese people can stand <insert thing here>", I immediately think to myself that it's a complete non-issue, just an accepted fact of life, for all of my Chinese relatives living in China. Also, things such as the one child act don't help - you've literally got an entire generation of spoiled only childs, and let me tell you, many of them are remarkably spoiled in the cities. You've got this feeling of collectivism which still very much exists, the "we" taking precedence over the "I", not in the oversimplified hive-mind way that most Westerners perceive it as, but rather something more inbetween. It always amazes me that people in China can feel such a sense of duty to their country (such as a student feeling it's his/her duty to the country to do well in school, something that pretty much never happens in the USA), but yet also feel such apathy for other people around them (to a degree that also doesn't happen in the USA ... not saying we're saints here who never pass by homeless people on the streets without even looking at them by any means, but the degree is still different).

And the list goes on and on, I still don't know where to begin or where to end. I know I'm not comparing China to Yugoslavia or Hungary here, but the perception gap even to this day between China and the USA is so great (and more importantly, so much greater than what most people think it is) that I can't imagine it being much less for China and other situations. Point being, a revolution might be peaceful, or it might be violent, or it might be somewhere inbetween, but none of these outcomes would have anything to do with the situations that led to Hungary's outcome being the way it was, or Yugoslavia's being the way it was.

[tokenadult]

Social scientists in China, trained as so many of them were in a Marxist framework, are actually very frightened by the example of Yugoslavia. Regional economic disparities in China are even greater than those in Yugoslavia before Yugoslavia disintegrated. Maybe Chinese people are very different in general from Western people (but the Chinese people I know best aren't all entirely different from people elsewhere in the world), but if Marxist theory about how the masses respond to economic circumstances is at all correct, the central government of China has something to worry about.

As another participant point out in another recent HN thread, China has a long historical experience with regional splits and loss of authority by the central government. To speak of China as having a 3,000 year history (as one entity) is hardly more accurate than to speak of Rome (the empire) as having a 2,500 year history. There is some cultural continuity from the very beginning in both cases, but twentieth century Chinese history was full of years of regional warlords and a very prolonged major civil war (which arguably hasn't ended yet).