The reality is that as China's economy has grown during the last two decades, so has repression. China's human rights violations have increased, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the U.S. State Department's annual reports to Congress. Beijing has no intention of easing its totalitarian control. Order and power in China rest on a psychology of fear, including the threat of police action against its people. This is evident to any visitor.
People know to shut up, to pull their heads in, to be careful, to play it safe.
The Communist Party has not provided the rule of law promised by China's constitution. Corruption, the catalytic grievance of many of the pro-democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen, remains as powerful and suffocating a force as ever. The party cannot deal with a restive mass of 150 million rural unemployed and millions more jobless industrial workers. To deflect attention from domestic problems, China blames the West for its plight. Chinese schoolchildren are taught about the humiliation that China suffered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the hands of the Western countries and Japan.