As a Libyan protester said, "After we saw Tunisia and Egypt, we thought that we can do it too;" their "fear wall broke" and the people of Libya no longer feared their corrupt and brutal dictatorship. In contrast, the prospect that the Middle-East pot might boil over into their region has dramatically increased the fear factor of Vietnam's and China's communist rulers. Since the Middle-East uprisings began, in fear of popular uprisings, they have reacted with increasingly brutal crackdowns and arrests of possible dissidents, with Vietnam following China's lead. Vietnam's pucker factor must have ratcheted up several notches when the...