Personality cults are a traditional fixture of totalitarian communist dictatorships. Generally they become less banal and intrusive on the lives of everyday people as those nations modernize and traverse the onramp to Al Gore's famous Information Superhighway. As it happened in the former USSR and a score of other nations in the last two decades, this modernization process also usually means an end to the communist, one-party regime.
The fact that the two phenomena have gone hand-in-hand in so many places around the world is one of the many worries of the governing elite of the People's Republic of China (PRC). For now, the Middle Kingdom remains kind of a hybrid. China's economic growth and speed of modernization has been nothing less than astounding, but the communist party still has the monopoly on power.
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