Readers consuming the flood of media reports on the dire state of China over the last few weeks may be convinced that the country’s economy is doomed.
And perhaps not just the economy. China scholar Charles Burton this week offered the view that the leadership of Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping may itself be threatened as rising youth unemployment adds to popular disillusionment with the leadership in Beijing.
Burton, in an opinion piece for The Globe and Mail, reminds us that in 1930, as he was struggling to hold his revolution together against pessimists, Mao Zedong, the communist founder of the People’s Republic of China, quoted the Chinese proverb that “a single spark
