The QOTD(SF!) comes from today's David Brooks column, in which the intrepid columnist visits China:
Tired of the bureaucracy, [Chinese businessman Edward] Tian resigned from Netcom and has founded China Broadband Capital. It funds firms that are using cellphones as the next information technology platform, and it owns part of MySpace China. He sits alone in a beautiful office in the middle of the park where the Qing Dynasty emperors came to worship the sun. His office was the emperor's dressing room. With his lingering insecurity, with his fierce determination to prove and reprove himself, he is in some ways typical of the Cultural Revolution generation elite. But he is also a cultured man, and in that he is atypical. The Cultural Revolution swept away much of the old Chinese culture. It was followed by the wave of commercialism and materialism. Dignity is now defined by money and French and Italian luxury goods. The spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution has yet to be filled. Some set of values - good or bad - will eventually fill it, and at that point, the final aftershock of the hell will be finally felt.
Brooks never mentions nationalism as a set of values that could fill the "spiritual vacuum left by the Cultural Revolution." Another set would be what you might call "regionalism" - the ongoing effort by provincial authorities and ethnicities to assert their autonomy from Beijing. Neither set probably would be conducive to Chinese stablity.