China as currently constituted and with its present behaviour will NEVER win acceptance as the Asian regional hegemon — unless perhaps it tries to do it the 1931-45 Japanese way. Even its allies and clients like North Korea and Cambodia don’t trust Beijing very much.

Beijing’s sermons about “stability” remind me of an alcoholic preaching the virtues of teetotalism. If there was stability, there’d be no need to keep talking about it. An almighty alcoholic has no time for withdrawal treatment.

On the other hand, as you submit, stability predicated on economic progress is real, and is “true for any society”. So what CHina needs to keep xenophobic tendencies at bay is continued economic progress, and she doesn’t need the CCP for that.

But yeah, no place for that garbage, hence everyone putting Jing down as a nutter.

That’s true for any society, SK. The CCP’s mantra is that Chinese society were more “vulnerable” for all kinds of temptations, while it is them who continue to create the conditions for just that calamity. That’s handy, isn’t it? Stirr up nationalism, then turn to the outside world, point at the mob (of an unknown size) behind you, and say: “Look at those dangerous fools! They need a strong hand! Help us to keep them down, rather than empowering them!”

With that approach – which isn’t only corrupt, but also unsustainable in the long run -, it is also easy to equate people like Jing and Liu Xiaobo. I call that moral disorientation.

Though I would agree with t-co in the sense that, when times are tough, it’s easy for the racist/xenophobic scape-goating mentality to take hold. In that sense, Jing might be an anonymous manifestation of Yang Rui, but several orders of magnitude nuttier.