ARTICLE: Tension Increases as China and Australia Grow Closer, By MICHAEL WINES, New York Times, August 21, 2009

More evidence of the 4th generation leadership seeming lost in China's deeply internal-ized fears of its own future: Australia grants a visa to the Uigher movement leader Kadeer and Beijing has something new to freak out about.

Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, countered that the nations' relationship is always "full of challenges" and that their broader ties will endure. "We share enormous common interests with our friends in China, but we have continuous differences," he was quoted as saying.

Hardly all Australians are persuaded. "I really don't think there's anything that Australia can do," J. Bruce Jacobs, a China specialist at Monash University in Australia, said of the tiff. "The Chinese seem to have various people they like to pick on -- the French, because of the Dalai Lama, and us, because of Kadeer. I think all of this is driven by political imperatives within China."

This is why I--quite frankly--remain unimpressed with the notion of Chinese global leadership: they remain internally weak from all these manias and fears and nightmare scenarios. You can't be that brittle back home and expect to lead anybody abroad. Beijing remains too afraid of itself to command respect from others.

How can you be taken seriously when this little old grandma strikes such fear in your political soul? Geez, Kadeer would barely qualify as a crank here in the States.