Politics & Power Quote by Tom Lantos

For all its skyscrapers and export surpluses, Lantos frames China as a state running on nerves. The line is engineered to puncture the common assumption that power equals confidence: the more “enormous” the regime’s material strength, the more revealing its alleged “absolute” fear becomes. “Petrified” is doing the dirty work here. It’s not “concerned” or “wary” but immobilized by dread, suggesting a legitimacy so brittle it can’t survive contact with unfiltered reality.

The strategic target is “the free flow of information,” a phrase that sounds procedural and liberal but functions as a moral weapon. Lantos is smuggling in a claim about consent: if citizens can compare narratives, investigate corruption, or watch how other systems argue with themselves in public, the party’s story stops being the only story. He’s also making a subtle distinction between coercion and legitimacy. Wealth and police power can enforce compliance; they can’t manufacture belief indefinitely.

The mention of “China’s younger generation” tightens the screw. Youth signals a cohort that is networked, aspirational, and less marked by revolutionary memory; it implies time is on information’s side. In the post-Tiananmen, early-internet era when Lantos spoke often about human rights and authoritarian accountability, this is not neutral analysis so much as a diplomatic brief: justify pressure on censorship, elevate information access to a strategic issue, and recast the regime’s greatest vulnerability as something as mundane, unstoppable, and contagious as people talking to each other.