The Children Devour the Revolution

↪ The Children Devour the Revolution 

BEIJING - The Arab Spring that swept away dictatorships across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 unnerved many in the Chinese leadership. Liu Yuan, one of the boldest and most ambitious generals in China's People's Liberation Army, was particularly shaken by what he identified as a fatal weakness of Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi: his son. Until the revolution, Qaddafi's second-oldest son, Saif al-Islam, was seen as a Western-leaning reformer, a voice for modernization and democracy. And he was educated in the same class of prestigious overseas universities attended by dozens of princelings (the sons and daughters of high-ranking Chinese officials).

In an extraordinary closed door speech in February, notes of which Foreign Policy has seen, Liu cautioned that Saif exposed himself to the flattery, privilege, and ideological brainwashing of the "Western hostile forces" -amorphous enemies of Chinese communism. And he returned to Libya with ideas of liberty and democracy, which fatally softened the ideological defenses of his once-defiant father, Liu said, leading to his bloody demise. It is exactly this kind of Fifth Column that Liu fears could kill China from the inside.

Perversely, I think the Chinese general has it right — among many things, one cause of the regime's fall was their pretense to be something they weren't — democratic. The rest of this fascinating piece is on Chinese politics, btw.