An Uncertain Future for a Great Country

Today's Washington Post features a lengthy article on the struggles of Chinese farmers. What could be precedent, outside organizers entered the picture of one of the rising number of farmer uprisings.

Taishi has become a milestone in the peasant uprisings that increasingly are breaking out around China, generating open concern in President Hu Jintao's government and in the Communist Party. In Taishi's rebellion, outraged local farmers for the first time received help from outside political activists and Beijing-based intellectuals whose politics were shaped in part by the 1989 democracy movement.

I hope that the societal changes in China won't lead to a violent revolution. Violence has never helped anyone. The Chinese government and the entrepreneurs, both homegrown and foreign, should realize that individual lives count.