China opposes European and American efforts to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, pretexting the necessity of respecting the country's sovereignty. Yet behind such reservation, most likely, lies an attempt at self-defense. Indeed, Beijing sees that the Arab countries that have witnessed successful uprisings, as well as those that are still witnessing attempts at change, have all adopted the “Chinese model”, i.e. the mixture of economic openness and stringency at the security and social levels, and it fears that the infection will spread to its borders, making use of the enormous disparity in living standards between China's citizens. The Americans are today in effect indirectly leading the trail of change in the Middle East, and they are doing this with their eye on China itself. This is because they see in it a successor to the past state of Soviet polarity (as shown by China's protection of the North Korean regime, Beijing's alliances in Africa and its stances in support of Iran) and a successful competitor in terms of economy and finance, as well as one that actively seeks a military balance of power that would threaten the US's sole leadership of the world, especially as China's GDP in 2010 exceeded that of Japan and ranked second in the world after the United States, with experts predicting that it will reach first place within ten years. Washington considers that toppling the “small pawns” that have adopted the Chinese method would help to isolate Beijing, reduce its influence and limit its efforts to expand in emerging markets and to secure oil energy – and it saw in both the former regimes of Tunisia and Egypt “carbon copies” of the Chinese regime. Indeed, they had both adopted unchecked economic openness, and had both established an effective apparatus of security and repression to protect the small group of people benefiting from the regime and the fledgling nouveau riche class not held to account in any way. In other words, they were drowning in corruption, which flourishes in the absence of the political freedoms that would be required by any system of accountability. Perhaps this explains the fact that Chinese authorities have issued instructions to the state media to refrain from covering the developments of the Egyptian revolution from news agencies and other sources, and to restrict themselves to the news and pictures distributed to them by the authorities themselves. It also explains the warnings the latter issued to the inhabitants of the capital Beijing against answering calls that appeared on some websites to gather and protest, considering their purpose to that of “causing chaos”. These were accompanied by the intensive deployment of security personnel, and calling on the Chinese to “protect harmony and stability instead of allowing a group of individuals outside of China and inside it to exploit the problems in our development and cause disturbances”. And although Beijing acknowledged, in the words of its Prime Minister and other officials, that there was discontent among inhabitants, it ascribed it to inflation and the rising prices of consumer goods – which it linked to the desire to achieve high levels of growth and pledged to find permanent solutions for, completely ignoring the possibility of such discontent having anything to do with political freedoms and the imbalanced growth that has produced a class of millionaires in the major cities, while the majority of inhabitants in the countryside continued to live below the poverty line. And although the scattered protests movements and activities have not reached the extent of threatening the Chinese regime even remotely, the fact that Beijing continues to ignore the requirements of turning into a superpower that would compete against the West, and especially the United States, means that it has not learned from the experience of the Soviet Union, which placed in the hands of its ideological enemies the precious card of freedoms and human rights.
