China's safety net, known as the iron rice bowl, has been broken under the strain of industrialization and nothing comparable has emerged to replace it. It's hollowed out so much that Chovanec says it dawned on him that this is why the Chinese save as much as they do and don't consume as much as Americans. This was a revelation for him as a conservative, and it brought him to this conclusion: "The social safety net greases the wheels of capitalism because it makes people feel more secure about the future and willing to spend." FDR's New Deal made capitalism politically palatable and, with the advent of unemployment benefits, created a more flexible labor market because if people lose their jobs, they have a cushion to fall back on and recover.

"We never planned this, but despite the problems we knew it would cause, we were over the moon," he said. "How much longer can the one-child policy last, anyway?"

Wang Yuanyuan, an accountant at Carrefour who was born in the first year of the one-child policy, said being an only child had blighted her life. "My parents were obsessed with me, I was smothered at home and they tried to interfere with my life all the time," she said. "I had to end my first relationship because the boy was three years older and my parents said it was unlucky."

Then she had to reject a good job offer that meant moving away. "My mum and dad both cried all day and begged me not to leave. I'm angry they ruined that chance for me."

Quote by Kendrick:

It's that China looks at time in larger, broader units of measure than anyone else. Five-hundred years? What other people in the world are willing to wait five centuries to be proven right?

Arbitrary use of English words and acronyms is now prohibited and coined terms that are not intelligible to everyone are not allowed to be used...

Abuse of foreign languages, including arbitrary use of English words; acronym mixing in Mandarin and coined half-English, half-Chinese terms that are intelligible to nobody, are commonly seen.

All these have seriously damaged to the purity of the Chinese language and resulted in adverse social impacts to the harmonious and healthy cultural environment.

LEE: Being forthright is saying nothing because there’s a legal process underway; is that correct?

[...]

LEE: Well, then I don’t understand how you can say that you’re being forthright about it if you refuse to talk about it.

LEE: I understand that you’re put in a difficult position where you say that you’re willing, as Arshad noted when the – that you’re – you don’t understand why China is so upset because the U.S. is willing to open up its human rights situation to all kinds of scrutiny --

 TONER: And, Matt --

 LEE: And then the first example that anyone raises, you’re not.

This led to a very long conversation -- over an hour -- in which I explained that if only China would actually engage in a dialogue about these issues with the outside world instead of sabre-rattling and always sounding like a misunderstood and petulant child, maybe then China would advance its cause and help people outside China understand what China is really all about, how human rights are seen through Chinese eyes...

[...]

Why not throw the West a bone and let him go, declare an amnesty and then explain why he was detained in the first place.

This evoked quite a response. "Let Ai Weiwei go? But Richard, how can we do that? How can China admit to the world it is being defeated, it is bowing to international pressure and not doing what is right for China? How can we humiliate ourselves like that?"

Quote by James Fallows:

No one in the outside world would take it as a sign of "weakness" or "humiliation" for the Chinese government to let Ai Weiwei go -- or not to have arrested him in the first place. But nearly everyone in the Chinese hierarchy seems to fear that it would be seen that way.
 
That's a problem, to put it mildly.

In summary, several Chinese language, but overseas based, websites have been blogging on the creation of a ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in China.

[...]

The blogs and websites themselves are largely invisible to ordinary Chinese as the Great Firewall keeps them out, but they can be seen by the security agencies, who have been swift to react.

[...]

Now, because of the number of competing and overlapping security agencies, there is a lot of pressure on the local commanders to make some arrests and to show some success, but there are no genuine protesters, just some bemused local tourists and a lot of foreign journalists.