"Authoritarian Capitalism" is the big-business fantasy version of fascism. It's what Krupp and IG Farben thlght they were buying with their support of Hitler (there's that name again). It's also what Royakl Dutch Shell thought when they did the same thing. Mjultinationals are empires too, and their ideology begins with Corporate Syndicalism and moves to the right from there.

Australia isn't an empire. It's a serious stretch of any definition to say it's one. The UK and France were imperial states, but are now settled happily into neo-colonialism, which is where people go once they've realized that authoritarian capitalism requires a lot of expenses that a smarter country or empire can avoid. china will get there in a while, but in teh mean time a lot of ugly destructive bullshit will happen, because China's relationship with the PLA is similar to the relationship which the european empires had with their parasitic military aristocracies. Ireland was a money pit for Great Britain, but some rich, powerful landowning families did quite well there.

I have no proof that Hu is planning military action against Tibet or against the Tibetan exile community, but I'm pretty sure it's a lively alternative, and we won't know until after the olympics. In Mexico, student radicals (a democracy movement was "radical" at that time) forced a stalemate with the government prior to the Olympics in 1968. Then after the games, the government moved in hard, massacred the students at a rally in Tlatelolco square. Thousands died or disappeared into black-bag jails. Every once in a while, caches of their bodies will be found in basements all over the DF.

That's what I'm imagining as possible, even likely later this year. I want you, as an informed and intelligent observer, to pay attention to what happens and not think it's all the inevitable homogenizing of a resistant population. Liquidating is more like it. Wait and see.