Text Messages in China to Be Scanned for ‘Illegal Content’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So basically, the more posturing the West does, the more aggressively the Chinese will side with their government. Suffice to say, current foreign policy exacerbates this.
No outside force can possibly get the Chinese to revolt - in fact any outside force is likely to do the exact opposite, and help cement the Communist regime's power. Most new-generation Chinese are happy to give up freedoms they've never known how to enjoy, in exchange for the chance to escape poverty and live a better life.
So, the only way to get the Chinese people to revolt against their government is for the economy to stagnate, and for people to no longer perceive a worthy "trade" of their freedoms for economic progress. As soon as the people lose hope of a better life, support for the regime will crumble quickly.
Speaking as a Chinese, anyhow.
There are some fairly simple unspoken rules (e.g., "don't talk shit about the government") that everyone knows, and if you follow them, nothing will ever happen to you. In other words, the Chinese government's oppression is consistent and systematic - a far cry from the secret police, death squads, random people nabbed off the street sort of perception that many Americans seem to have.
This has probably greatly helped the longevity of the current regime. People will rebel if they see no effective, guaranteed way to dodge your oppression, but most will fall in line if you can give them a more or less guaranteed way to stay out of trouble with minimum tangible sacrifice.
Historically revolts were fought by peasants over high taxes that left them starving. Now-a-days the issue is the lack of private land ownership, and the government is already implementing land reform for this specific reason. Corruption is still rampant, but people are generally kept well-fed. People will only shed blood if their livelihood is on the line, usually abstract reasons such as freedom of speech alone is not enough, these things usually only change gradually from within.
That's a commonly made statement, and I don't claim to have a basis for definitively disagreeing with that statement. But I have heard some historians claim that many of the regions of China had better governance in the 1930s (some under "warlords," and some under the KMT central government) than China has had at any time under the PRC regime. That would be an interesting historical question, and probably depends on which forms of "oppression" one counts and which subgroups of the population are most regarded in the analysis.
Even as I knew Taiwan in early 1982 when I first arrived there, when Taiwan was still a one-party Leninist dictatorship that practiced censorship and even political assassination, it was a less oppressive place than China is today, in my personal view of what is oppressive and what is not and who is most oppressed.
In the end though, China probably would have been better off if ROC stayed, but the fact of the matter is different. Note that by China I am referring to the mainland. Taiwan is hands down better off today.