On the twentieth anniversary of the military crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square, Professor Andrew Nathan observes in The Wall Street Journal that the authoritarian Beijing regime "must perform constantly like an acrobatic team on a highwire, staving off crises while keeping its act flawlessly together."
Nathan explains that the most likely form of regime change for China "remains the Tiananmen model, in which three elements come together: a robust plurality of disaffected citizens (in 1989 because of inflation and corruption, in the future possibly because of unemployment, an environmental disaster or some form of national humiliation); a spark event that sends a signal to scattered social forces that the time has come to rise up; and a leadership split, whether due to personality differences or ideological division, that allows the challenge to snowball"
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