China is the next big empire and money is starting to flow more and more into China. In US, there is a credit crunch and in China, there is a dearth of companies to fund. Clearly, it's easier to fix the latter. I see China eclipsing US entrepreneurship scene in less than 10 years.
Sure, number of companies may be easy to fix with population and money, but the number of good companies is a lot harder. Just ask all the VCs with fat funds and sleepy portfolios.
They'll doubtless continue to do well - that's a good thing - but they have plenty of issues of their own to deal with, including ethnic minorities, and a big democracy deficit that will likely become more irritating to a rising middle class.
I tend to agree with this. What matters to the "rising middle class" isn't so much democracy or not, but how much individual freedom and lifestyle they can have. Once the sustenance issue is solved, people want higher ends - more personal freedom, rights, information, opportunities, expression, etc. That being said, most Chinese are still poor and historically, it's been the peasant class that has caused the most problems for governments. It'll be interesting to see how the Chinese government balances the needs of the two groups.
