POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "In China, Politics Is Still Big Secret: Key Moves to Be Made at Congress, but Few Know When It Will Occur," by Jason Leow, Wall Street Journal, 17 August 2007, p. A4. ONLINE: "China's iClone: Cellphones, microchips, cars, even iPhones—there's virtually no high-tech Western product that China's cloners can't copy. Pretty soon, you might even prefer their work," by Dan Koeppel, Popular Science, August 2007.

China's well on its way to replicating the steal-copy-clone-improve trajectory previously pursued by other emerging markets throughout history--to include that thieving United States in the latter decades of the 19th century. It's catching-up strategy may offend (and it surely should bring our proper, legal-ruleset-enhancing responses), but it beats the hell out of the "great leap forward" and other such craziness of the Mao-rate-of-nongrowth. But politically, China remains immature relative to its rapidly maturating economic models. China increasingly deals with the world economically in a highly sophisticated fashion and yet presents a leadership/ruling model that seems almost perfectly designed to prevent effective discounting of risk by outsiders--not to mention, by its own people right up to its highest bureaucrats. Can you imagine having something so crucial as the party congress that will pick your next generation of leaders being so secretive and iffy that no one in power can give you a firm date as to when it will happen? I do believe this is the last party congress that will be conducted in this technocratically-secretive manner. We've seen China steadily progress through the "great man" phase to the reformer phase (Deng) to the codifier phase (Jiang) to the hard-science technocratic phase with Hu and Wen (mirroring Gorby's generation and its rise), with all of this happening in about a quarter-century (the Soviet journey was somewhat longer at about one-third-of-a-century in the making, although far less steadily so and enduring the typical zig-zagging of Russian history), and now we've got the Fifth Generation teed up with their law-economics-politics educational backgrounds. Give the Fifths a good five years to get ready to rule and I think we'll see a significantly different public face to the party congress in 2012, primarily because this crew will be more confident in managing such expectations and public relations. Thanks to Jean Rogers for the PopSci article.