Over the weekend, we discovered once and for all what a disaster the 2008 Beijing Olympics really were for the Communist regime. The reason, however, was not an expected one. The Washington Post, in its analysis of the melamine poison scandal, unearthed the surprising fact that essentially wiped out all the benefits of the summer propaganda exercise (emphasis added):
“Initially covered up by officials afraid of losing their jobs and besmirching the Beijing Olympic Games, the melamine contamination scandal began with infant milk formula that killed at least four infants and sickened 54,000 babies. It soon spread to candy, instant coffee, yogurt, biscuits and other products made with Chinese milk, prompting bans or recalls in 16 countries.
“In recent weeks the toxin has been discovered in eggs and in animal feed, sparking fears that tainted foods go well beyond dairy products and may include fish, shrimp, beef and poultry.”
So it turns out that fear of "besmirching the Beijing Olympic Games" led in part to the greatest international embarrassment for the Chinese Communist Party in nineteen years.
Oops.
Under normal circumstances, this would be bad enough, but the regime is going through anything but normal times.
For starters, we have the oncoming recession, the first serious one since the regime become the export maven for which it was famous just months ago (and is now infamous, see above).
The extent of the economic slowdown is becoming unavoidable; the coal and coke industry appear to be in a full-fledged recession—a word that strikes terror in the heart of a regime that needs economic growth of at least 7 percent just to keep up with the population.
It might also explain the impetus behind the massive "economic stimulus" the cadres announced over the weekend, although the success of that plan is debatable, at best. More likely, it will simply mean more incentives for the cadres to steal land and build useless factories while the economy sinks beneath the waves and the ecology worsens.
The melamine and economic crises also come just as the rest of the world has decided to stop giving the Communists so much slack over festering problems that refuse to simply go away. The regime's insistence that the "developed world" cover the cost of greenhouse-gas reduction rings quite hollow now that Communist China is the leading carbon emitter.
True, Taiwan is becoming much more cooperative under President Ma Ying-jeou, and the fate of former president and advocate of Taiwan independence Chen Shui-bian, who was arrested Wednesday morning, is letting Beijing enjoy some Taiwanese schadenfreude. But even that is countered by the Dalai Lama’s decision to would listen more to his people and take a tougher line on occupied Tibet.
Even worse for the cadres, India's center-left government appears to have finally gotten wise about the real danger from Beijing. With the right-wing opposition already suspicious of the Communist regime, anti-Communism in India has become the consensus position—a serious geopolitical problem for a regime dependent upon foreign appeasement to advance, or even survive.
The cadres will do their best to ignore all of this, and choose instead to go with the tried but not longer so true formula. They will continue expanding their influence abroad. They will continue to crush dissent at home. They will continue to use the Korean colony to maximum effect—although with trouble with the abductions of Japanese citizens returning to the news, that could rapidly see diminishing returns.
Those who remember the First Cold War will remember this phase of Communism well: the Brezhnev phase.
Leonid Brezhnev's solution for the problems faced by the Soviet Union—ignore them and increase the aggressive behavior abroad—worked so well that the USSR couldn't outlast him by as much as a decade, even though no American President seriously challenged his regime until just before he died.
That should bring hope to all anti-Communists. Even if Obama becomes the "second Carter" his critics fear he will be, Hu Jintao seems determined to be the second Brezhnev.
Bismark is reported to have said, "God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America." He continues to be more right than he could have possibly imagined.
D.J. McGuire is co-founder of the China e-Lobby and the author of Dragon in the Dark: How and Why Communist China Helps Our Enemies in the War on Terror .
