I have read with the maximum attention your article (“Beijing Embraces Classical Fascism”). It is possible discuss in what sense and measure China is a fascist State (the problem of Fascism’s definition is discussed by S.G. Payne) but I think that the main intention of your article is to indicate the peculiarity of the Chinese system. The passage from the Marxist ideology to the hypernationalism was the principal trait of Stalin’s version of Leninism. So it is possible to speak about fascist’s transformation of the Russian communism. Someone defined Stalinism as “red fascism”.
I would prefer to speak about China not as “a mature fascist state” but “something we have never seen before”. There are many things that we have never seen before. Now we have a paradoxical situation: not only great China but also little Iran claims a dominant role in the World’s politics. In some point the Soviet expansion met its limit in the Chinese pretensions. Is Napoleon’s prophecy about China as a sleeping giant coming true? And now this giant wakes up and makes paces that shake all the Earth.
I am not sure that Chinese rulers “know that Mikhail Gorbachev fell when he tried to control the economy while giving political freedom”, and therefore “they are attempting the opposite, keeping a firm grip on political power while permitting relatively free areas of economic enterprise.” Russia followed its own logic. Gorbachev was dragged by events. I was in Moscow and Leningrad in 1989. It was another country that I remembered in 1973: no respect for authorities was seen, the police was almost invisible; the centre of the city was full of private commercial activity. What is Russia now? Some one defined the Russian political system as corporative capitalism. We can observe the clear tendency to restrain the political freedom. It explains the Russian support (patent or not patent) to the Islamic dictatorships.
I think that China must see the democratic sphere’s extending as a danger for its political system, but also the increasing influence of the Islamism. In China there are 20 million Muslims or more. I read in an Italian edition (Io sto con Oriana) about a turmoil of Muslims in a Chinese city that was suppressed with the help of military force (exact data I don’t remember). Some new interesting conflicts seem to prospect. As a Russian poet said, “we are only dreaming peace”.