In 2001, Random House published a 345-page book entitled “The Coming Collapse of China,” and recently, since the collapse has not yet occurred in the past seven years, PBS interviewed the author of the book, Gordon Chang, a son of a Chinese immigrant to the USA. On the one but the last page of his book, we learn that Chang has been living in China for “almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai” as counsel to an American law firm. He also published articles about the “coming collapse of China” in the New York Times and other major Western periodicals.

The dictatorship of China does not want the Chinese to read even the phrase itself the “coming collapse of China.” But the West is welcome to believe it, since it may chase further away the Western concerns about the “China threat,” weak or nonexistent as those concerns have been under President Bush and President Clinton as well as among the presidential candidates for 2008, except for Duncan Hunter, who received so few votes that he withdrew from the presidential race.

Neither Chang nor his Western promoters seem to remember what Sun Tzu said in his “Art of War”: an attacker should seem the opposite of what he actually is. The dictators of China are satisfied that Chang represents in the West their dictatorship as the opposite of what it is. According to Chang, it is so weak that its collapse was coming already in 2001, when he published his book.

Needless to say, Chang never even as much as hints at the “China threat,” since the dictatorship of China, as he represents it, pathetically struggles against its own “coming collapse.”

The book is a bold antidote against a dozen or so Americans, mostly without any administrative rank, who assert (no, not in the New York Times!) that the dictatorship of China may, indeed, collapse due to the Western involuntary subversion (recall a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square during the Tiananmen movement against the absolutism of the dictatorship of China). But Chang never as much as hints that to survive, the dictatorship of China may try to establish world domination, owing to (1) its development of post-nuclear super weapons (as per “Unrestricted War,” published in 1999 by and for the military of China) and owing to (2) the Western super-pacifist mood as exemplified by Chang.

The question is: but why does the dictatorship of China cling so stubbornly to its absolute power?

This is a more redundant question than would be the question: Why do the wealthy in the West value their wealth?

Now, absolute power is infinitely more valuable for its owners than is any wealth, and, indeed, includes wealth. In the 1930s, beloved Stalin appeared to his beloved people in his soldier’s tunic he had worn in 1918. But he secretly lived in the palaces, expropriated from the Russian royalty all over the country, and was finally to become the Byzantine emperor-God, infinitely above all Russian tsars or emperors.

Chang’s vision of the “coming collapse of China” resembles the visions of Marxists-Leninists in the West and Russia in the 19th century, except that to them, signs of the “coming collapse” stemmed from “capitalism” (to be replaced by “socialism”), while to Chang, such signs stem, on the contrary, from the insufficient development of capitalism in China as compared with the West. Chang is a 19th-century Marxist-Leninist upside down.

On p. XVI of his book we read a sentence that seems to come from a 19th-century Marxist-Leninist criticism of “the bourgeois society”: “The symptoms of decay are to be seen everywhere.” Chang’s first example is the Falun Gong. “The Party banned that group [for the exercises the “Party” popularized before 1999] and drove it underground.” “But the Falun Gong is fighting back; its members lost their fear.” No mention of the torture of them to death after 1999.

On p. 21, Chang estimates Mao’s victims at 30 million, though 80 million is usually cited, “but the population for all its suffering, stood by the Party and its leaders. Today, when the Chinese people are enjoying relative prosperity, the nation is plagued by social disorder.”

Chang does not say that the love for Mao (or Stalin) was the infinite fear of them. The disappearance of such infinite fear Chang views as a decay, decadence, “social disorder.” Thus, Falun Gong (p. 25) “highlights yet again the weakening grip of the apparently mighty Community Party. . . . If the Party cannot effectively [!] deal with the Falun Gong, what hope does it have with other foes?”

Chapter 2 is entitled “Lake of Gasoline,” and its last sentence (p. 44) is: “China is a lake of gasoline, and that individual [that is, a person who is “angry, shrewd or just desperate”], in some small town or large city, will have only to throw a match.”

Each chapter of the book describes a fatal weakness of the Chinese dictatorship. Thus, Chapter 8 (pp. 166-186) deals with prostitution as yet another sign of the “coming collapse of China.” Chapter 12 (p. 256) is entitled “Road to Ruin: How the State Will Fall.” The Epilogue is entitled “The State Begins [in 2001] to Disintegrate.”

Perhaps Chang should be introduced to the nature of post-WWII wars to understand that the dictatorship of China may not just tremble in the expectation of its coming collapse, but instead it may annihilate the West, establish world domination, and convert into fertilizer the no-longer-needed U.S. firm that Chang consulted as well as Chang himself.

WWII ended with Japan’s unconditional surrender to the USA. Why?

Previously, the weapons were reflections of the country’s “industrial development.” But nuclear weapons were not just products of industrial development, as were, for example, tanks, but were the results of nuclear studies, with many European nuclear scientists immigrating to the United States to escape anti-Semitism. Japan’s general industrial development proved to be useless when confronted with results of nuclear studies that became known as nuclear, or atomic, weapons.

I refer my readers to books like Eric Drexler’s “Engines of Creation,” published in 1986 and reprinted last year, and “Oblivion: America at the Brink” by Lt. Col. Thomas E. Bearden (a former Pentagon analyst). We know how these results of scientific studies have prospered in China. The photographs of Drexler were posted at research centers in China, and all of his books and articles were put on the Internet — despite Falun Gong, prostitution, and other such signs of the “coming collapse of China.” In the USA, Drexler did not receive a cent from congress for his “Foresight Institute,” which he had founded in 1986 — and has been ousted from it!

As for Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden, he explains at the end of his book why he entitled it “Oblivion — America at the Brink.”

The darkest days in the history of our republic lie immediately ahead of us. If we are to survive, we shall need the most strenuous and rapid effort in our history, now.

According to Lt. Col. Bearden, the West will not collapse owing to Falun Gong or prostitution, but it may be annihilated by post-nuclear super weapons to which his book is devoted and which China has been developing with the help of Putin’s Russia.