I always wondered what had happened to him. One of the great, largely usung heroes of the last 100 years. Proof that the "Little guy" can win in the end.
Unfortunately China is not socially ready for democracy because 90 percent of her population is still rural poor (despite the pictures of modern skylines of Hong Kong and Shanghai). Historically when modern China tries to have a benign central government that tries to accomodate all the regional desires she degenerates into chaos because most of her uneducated population is not ready, which in turn ushers in authoritarian one man rule (Generalissimo Chiang Kai Sek or Chairman Mao Tse Tung) versus the chaos of the warlord period. Today China faces great financial weaknesses, her banks have bad loans that equal to half of China's GDP and no one in the Communist government knows what to do about it. I predict that within this century the Communist will lose control of China and the country will plunge into social chaos just like the 1920's when the Republic of 1911 failed (warlords and wealthy families took advantage of the democratic laws to protect their own interests and paralyzed the central government reforms) and lost control of most of the rural regions of China during the Great Depression. Democracy will just add to the chaos because most Chinese are family centric, not nationally centric (they will take care of their family/clan members first before they lift a hand to help a fellow stranger in a time of crisis) and add the fact most are barely educated rural poor. When a country undergoes a banking crisis and collapse, food and essentials become scarce as prices skyrocket because the national currency worth becomes less and less each day. Just read the accounts of what happened in China during the 1920's and during the Great Depression, and post World War II China, it does not paint a flattering picture of the Chinese society.