Not necessarily true though, because flattening, shooting, and mutilating your own people wastes all the potential contributions that each one of them could have made to your economy, it taxes whatever political capital you have with the local populace, and it exposes the rest of your country to strange and unnecessary risk as well. You could just as easily drop that booster in to the middle of Beijing as you could drop it into a random fishing village, for example. As for violence=control=power through fear and force, idk how to argue that one. A certain degree of force and violence is present in every society that comes to mind. I still think there's a political orbhistorical precedent for the way violence is wielded in mainland China though.