From my reading of Chinese history revolts have come from leadership provided by intellectuals after an initial uprising sparked by peasant discontent. The peasant discontent could be expressed since there were local centres of power. Now the party bureaucracy controls the local areas, and spontaneous actions of the local people in such instances as faulty school construction resulting in the death of children are easily contained. Chinese intellectuals now have several options - they can settle in the west and go back and forth to China as a chairman [I know] of a department of Chinese studies in a western university does. Tan Yifeng, descendent of a Chinese communist family, like many other Chinese-Australian artists, such as Guo Jian, Wang Zhiyuan and Guan Wei does most of his work in his studio in Songzhuang, on the outskirts of Beijing where there are studios of artists from all of China and the world but has his home base in Canberra. Chinese intellectuals in the West can ignore China altogether. Others like the author of this essay can sit safely in the West and write essays about the current oppression in China.

To the best of my knowledge all Chinese who want to make changes for a democratic China are either powerless, co-opted, controlled and/or imprisoned by the state like Liu Xiao Bo or removed from the scene like Chin Jin, the author of 'The Seduction of the West by China'.

Traditional avenues of change in China are closed. Nevertheless, eventually China will change.

After reading this, I began to compare China to Australia.

1/ a well developed political system
We have mostly a two party political system, that is hardly democratic or well developed.

2/ a robust and healthy internal and external economy
We sell coal and iron ore to China, and we also owe China money. We import nearly everything, and we also have a growing mentality amongst government workers and teachers that anything produced inside the country is inferior.

3/ an embedded social morality
We have a highly feminist society that believes a family is a mother and children, and males have no value other than sperm donor and pay packet. We have an increasing number of unhealthy children, and an increasing number of disadvantaged children or children living in poverty, which is a direct result of feminist policy.

4/ environmental sustainability.
We have consumed a large amount of our natural environment, and we are one of the largest consumers of natural resources per person in the world.

I am not sure what the author was taught by academics at the University of Western Sydney, but maybe Australia can learn something from China.