The idea that reform is a Western plot to weaken China is Communist Party spin.
PRIME Minister Julia Gillard's visit to China this week coincides with a nervous and reactionary campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to suppress any possibility of a "jasmine revolution" - given what has been sweeping the Arab world recently. Scores of leading intellectuals, human rights lawyers and activists, journalists and scholars have been arrested to silence and intimidate them. The case of the artist Ai Weiwei has made headlines, but many others have been swept up by the party's forbidding security organs.
This suppression should concentrate our minds on how we think about the rising power of China. Human rights abuses are generally considered ugly, and a regime that treats its own citizens in this manner does not look like a trustworthy or pleasant neighbour; to say nothing of a prospectively benign regional superpower. The real lesson from the current repression in China, however, is not the strength or unpleasantness of the regime, but its insecurity. A regime that imprisons a man such as Liu Xiaobo and denounces the award of a Nobel peace prize to him as "an obscenity" is deeply insecure and politically immature.