This is not good.

Even if Obama doesn't care, China does.

//Well, China, as host of the current G-20 summit, rolled out the red carpet -- or at least the red-carpeted airplane stairs -- for the arriving leaders of such countries as Britain, Australia, Germany and Russia.

For President Obama, arriving yesterday on Air Force One, there was no such dignified reception. Instead, there was a shoving match with the press and a confrontation with National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in which a Chinese official shouted "This is our country. This is our airport." For lack of any portable stairs rolled to the front door of the presidential plane, Obama was left to jog down the aircraft's own stairs at the back.

Obama downplayed the insult, telling reporters "not to over-crank the significance."

Maybe that makes sense in the bubble-world of the Ben-Rhodes-foreign-policy narrative, where the tide of war is forever receding, the arc of history bends toward justice, the oceans rise and fall at the command of Obama's pen and phone, and the echo chamber, on cue, applauds.

But China's reception was an insult, pure and simple. No one need study the tea leaves to understand that this was a gesture of gross disrespect, seen around the world, putting the American president in his place -- especially as compared with the warm reception for Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

While the missing red-carpeted staircase is mainly symbolic, the realities behind it are increasingly dangerous. Among them are China's territorial grabs at sea, provocations toward the U.S. Navy, cyber attacks, military exercises with Russia and evident tolerance  -- despite United Nations sanctions -- of illicit traffic that enables North Korea's continuing nuclear missile program.//

With a spare 30 million men who can never get married...

...this can't be good news.

China prepares for "social unrest."

Beijing has underlined its concern that an economic slowdown could lead to social unrest in China, with the country’s security chief urging local officials to do more to prepare for the “negative effects of the market economy”.


Zhou Yongkang, a member of the politburo, told provincial officials that they needed to find better methods of “social management” – a euphemism which can include everything from better internet censorship and strategic policing of violent unrest, to a better social safety net.

“It is an urgent task for us to think how to establish a social management system with Chinese characteristics to suit our socialist market economy,” he told a seminar on “social management innovation”.

“Especially when facing the negative effects of the market economy, we still have not formed a complete mechanism for social management,” he said. Mr Zhou also urged officials to limit spending on wasteful “vanity” projects that trigger public anger.

His comments are the clearest sign yet that Beijing is worried that the global economic crisis could lead to serious domestic social unrest. Mr Zhou’s remarks, published by the state-run Xinhua news agency on Saturday, came at the end of a week which saw evidence of a slowdown in Chinese manufacturing, an easing in credit policy to avert a sharper slowdown, and two outbreaks of violence.

Recent months have seen a rise in unrest – apparently linked to economic grievances, including workers’ fears about the economic dislocation caused by Beijing’s long-term plan to move away from low-value manufacturing to more creative and innovative industries

And:
 

Tension spilt over in the central Chinese city of Xian on Friday, with Xinhua reporting hundreds of people overturning police and government cars after officers took more than two hours to arrive at a scene where a girl had been killed by a building truck. Ordinary citizens often complain that the government does too little to protect them from safety risks like dangerous driving by such trucks.


More than 10,000 workers in Shenzhen and Dongguan, two leading export centres in southern China, went on strike last month to protest against cuts in overtime – which they rely on to supplement meagre basic pay.

Strikes? In a Communist country?