The State Peace and Development Council – the polite name for Burma’s military government– is an endangered species: an authentic old-style Asian dictatorship, brutal, irrational and xenophobic. China and Vietnam have remade themselves as authoritarian but increasingly prosperous and business friendly, governments. Most of the others stumbled and fell, from the Philippines and South Korea in the 1980s to Indonesia in 1998.

The Burmese generals are threatened by 100,000 demonstrations of monks, nuns and housewives. Is their demise inevitable? What will happen next? And what will come out of all this?

Nobody knows the answers to these questions but a few probabilities can be sketched out. To start with, the movement that has reached such impressive proportions in the space of a week, may have to sustain itself for a good while longer yet. To have gone from a few thousand marchers a week ago, to 20,000 and then 100,000 is remarkable, but imposes a burden of its own. If the demonstrations shrink, they risk losing the attention of the outside world as quickly as they have commanded it.

In 1988, the first time mass demonstrations threatened the regime, it was months before the eventual denouement – a murderous crackdown which killed as many as 3,000 people.

This time it will be harder for the army to fire upon the demonstrators – partly because so many of them are monks, but also because of the presence of scores of young Burmese, armed with cheap digital cameras, quickly putting up images of the demonstrations on the Internet.

A violent, “Tiananmen style” conclusion can’t be ruled out, given the historical intractability of the regime. So far even the mildest of the Buddhists’ demands – that the authorities apologise for beating up monks in the town of Pakkoku on September 5 – has been greeted with stubborn silence. The notion that pressure from China makes such a thing impossible overestimates both the pliability of the regime and the extent of Chinese concern about what is no more than an isolated corner of its sphere of influence.

If the SPDC cared about being isolated, Burma would not be in the state it is today. But can the generals really be deaf to the calls of so many people across the world that they – simply – negotiate the country’s future? The lives of the monks and their young supportersA violent, “Tiananmen style” conclusion can’t be ruled out, may depend on the answer to that question.

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