Don't forget Iran, but worry about China

Five years ago Iran's government was like that of China of 2006, Putin's Russia or Castro's Cuba. It was a tyranny, but a popular tyranny. It was not East Germany under Soviet occupation.

Now Iran's government is an unpopular tyranny. It's starting to resemble East Germany, but with more public unrest. Truly unpopular tyrannies can endure for ten or fifteen years in isolated nations, but Iran is a highly educated and moderately well informed nation.

Iran's current tyrant will fall within the next four years. He will most likely be replaced by a more popular tyrant, but there's a chance of something better. Tyrants are often surprisingly sensitive to foreign opinion, so we should keep the light on Iran and keep the BBC's Farsi service funded. There's not much else to do though. The Iranian people will have to fix this one.

So don't forget Iran, but we have something much bigger to worry about.

We need to worry about China.

We know world economic output is falling as quickly as in the Great Depression, but America isn't (yet) reliving GD I. So if the mean is bad, and we're above the mean, who's big enough to bring it down?

China.

I've commented on some signs of fear in China's government. Today brings another sign ...

China blocks Google services for an hour | World news | guardian.co.uk

Google suffered intensive disruption in China tonight just days after it was warned by the authorities to scale back its search operations.

Search functions and Gmail were inaccessible for more than an hour in a move seen by web watchers as a warning shot across the bows by China's censors...

This is desperation. China's tyrants are afraid of what China's economic upheaval is going to mean. Their worried about North Korea collapsing, they're worried about the Iranian example and they're trying to turn off news from the world. It's craziness born of panic.

The desperation of China's tyrants is probably not something to celebrate. China's people will eventually demand representative government, but it would be best to have that happen in a setting of economic prosperity -- not depression.

We need to get more Americans buying more Chinese stuff. Now.