FEATURE: China's Once and Future Rise, WPR, November 10, 2009

The J.D. Yuan piece is interesting on two points: 1) exploring the one party, two factions reality of the 5th generation--in effect, the coastal-vs-interior struggle is begetting two parties within one (no surprise); and 2) the lack of national security credentials among the 5th generation, which, when combined with the blow-hard nature of the older military leadership (which has never gone anywhere and fought anybody in 30 years and hasn't sustained a genuine war in half-a-century), naturally gets Western analysts decrying a civil-military gap (Imagine that! The civilian leadership talks soft power while the military guys seem stuck on the hard stuff--how Unusual!). Upshot? These guys are even more a transitional generation than the last one, having lost much of their youth to the Cultural Revolution. It's not until the 6th show up in the early 2020s that we get a Chinese leadership all grown up in the time/space following Mao, so expect incremental change with this bunch but overall a smarter take on the world than the last bunch.