China at the Tipping Point?: The Troubled Periphery

The response of the Chinese state (and of Chinese society at large) to the problems of the country’s periphery —which includes not only include not only Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia, but hundreds of counties, prefectures, and townships in Sichuan, Qinghai, Yunnan, and other areas—is piling more tension and misery upon the populations there, but it is not undermining state power. If anything, the party-state seems to draw strength from peripheral troubles, and indeed these troubles continually undermine prospects for better governance under any future rulers, including those installed by the 2012 Eighteenth Party Congress.