People's Revolution in China?

Let me start by saying I don't know next to nothing about no internal Chinese politics. But the NYT reports something that's been bothering me for a while: where is the simmmering people's revolt in oppressive capitalist-communist Asian governments like China and Vietnam, with that magical combination of all of the economic oppression, and none of the political freedom? Apparantly, small revolts are breaking out all over, just the sort of violence against that human spirit that people tend to make poems and songs and paintings start breaking windows over - a "lowly porter" beaten by a government official for muddying his wife's clothes.

"What are you looking at, bumpkin?" Mr. Yu recalls Mr. Hu saying.

Mr. Yu is mild mannered, with a slightly raffish grin stained yellow from chain smoking. Mr. Hu, wearing a coat and tie and leather shoes, looked like he might be important. Mr. Yu said he should have let the moment pass. He did not.

"I work like this so that my daughter and son can dress better than I do, so don't look down on me," he recalled saying. Then he added, "I sell my strength just as a prostitute sells her body."

Mr. Yu said he was drawing a general comparison. Mr. Hu and his young wife, Zeng Qingrong, apparently thought he had insinuated something else. She jerked his shirt collar and slapped his ear. Mr. Hu picked up Mr. Yu's fallen pole and struck him in the legs and back repeatedly.

Perhaps for the benefit of the crowd, Mr. Hu shouted that it was Mr. Yu, sprawled on the pavement, who was in big trouble.

"I'm a public official," Mr. Hu said, according to Mr. Yu and other eyewitnesses. "If this guy causes me more problems, I'll pay 20,000 kuai" - about $2,500 - "and have him knocked off."

Those words never appeared in the state-controlled media. But is difficult to find anyone in Wanzhou today who has not heard some version of Mr. Hu's bluster: The putative official - he has been identified in the rumor mill as the deputy chief of the local land bureau - had boasted that he could have a porter killed for $2,500. It was a call to arms.

Mr. Hu's threat, spread by mobile phones, text messages and the swelling crowd, encapsulated a thousand bitter grievances.

How many Hong Kong movies start with an scene just like this?

I can't imagine that the horrific tsunamis in surrounding countries won't create additional popular and international pressure on China. (Which would explain their ill-timed saber rattling, a sure sign, like Argentina and the Falklands, of a worried dictatorship.)

In my heart of democratic hearts, whether some kind of intervention or pressure was wise or suicidal, nothing America ever did felt as cowardly and morally shrivelled as our rolling over for Tiananmen Square, shrinking even from support and encouragement to the protests, when the people of the world's largest nation were looking to us for a signal, and we looked away to next year's bottom line.