by Rob Gifford
Fourth and finally, China is different now because there has been a psychological revolution. Huge parts of the Chinese mind-set have been changed. China is no longer looking inward and backward—it is looking outward and forward. It has put science above belief (sometimes too much) and has jettisoned centuries of tradition in order to achieve modernity. (Westerners should try to imagine having to throw out everything of value in their heritage—Greek philosophy, Roman law, Judeo-Christian teachings of any sort, not to mention classical music and other art forms. That is what China has done to its own traditions.)
Attitudes toward the family have been revolutionized too. The family used to be the state in miniature, with the father-son bond mirroring the ruler-subject relationship. Now though, the vertical relationship in the family is coming second to the horizontal conjugal relationship between man and wife. Youth is triumphing over age in the cities; the individual is becoming more important than the group. Again, the change is imperfect and the fallout is huge, straining the fabric of society to the limit. But compared with many developing countries, China has become a fount of modern, scientific thinking and go-getting individualism. Chinese people can now dream dreams as they never have before, and they have more power in their hands to fulfill them.
So all in all, it seems to me that China is in a different situation now than in most of the other transition periods in its history. The question is, Are the Chinese leaders approaching this completely different situation in the completely different way that it requires? And I have to say, the answer to that is no. What we have in China is a mobile twenty-first-century society shackled to a sclerotic 1950s, Leninist-style political system. The economy is changing, the society is changing, but the politics are not, and that is starting to cause sufficient problems in governance, and even in the economy, to call China’s rise to potential greatness into question. China is more fragile and brittle than it appears.
In order to stay in power, the Party knows it has to make some political changes, and it has done so, allowing capitalists and entrepreneurs to become Party members, for a start. It has also made some administrative reforms. There are experiments with more than one candidate for posts within the party hierarchy. There are programs to train legal officials, such as judges, by sending them abroad. The government is trying to show it is listening to the people, and becoming more responsive, to allow more recourse for people within the one-party system so that Old Hundred Names will not seek recourse through demonstrations on the streets. There has been a limited introduction of elections in the villages, the lowest level of China’s political system, and Chinese leaders have been looking to places such as Singapore as examples of how to govern more efficiently without introducing a full Western-style political system.
But these changes are all within the current system. The process has been termed “consultative Leninism” by China watchers such as Richard Baum of UCLA, who says that the Party is attempting “to facilitate the emergence of controlled societal feedback without incurring the considerable risk of spontaneous political blowback or, even more dangerous, organized anti-regime pushback.” But in the end, Baum and many other China scholars see such minimal attempts at reform as a blind alley. Singapore (population 3 million) would rank as a small-to medium-size city in China, and reforming a medium-size city, or making it wealthy enough that its citizens didn’t care much about political reform, is a lot easier than reforming a continent (never mind China’s lack of the transparent, British-style legal system and civil service that Singapore possesses).
The elephant in the room that no Chinese leader wants to talk about is, of course, democratic reform itself. China has come a long, long way in one hundred years. The path has been a winding and difficult one, but the country now has to a large extent fulfilled two of the Three Principles of the People laid out by the architect of the 1912 Revolution, Sun Yat-sen. China has international respect (the first principle), and although it still has poverty, by and large, it can feed its people (the second principle). But the revolution is still unfinished. Sun Yat-sen’s third principle of giving rights, political rights, to the people has not been realized, and it is not at all clear that it will be realized any time soon.
There are two reasons why not: First, most Party leaders still believe in the Communist Party’s almost divine right to rule alone. Second, any who believe in political reform are frightened, because of the failure of the 1912 Revolution and the simple fact that China has never succeeded in going down the democratic road before.
They were also frightened, in more recent years, by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the realization that, while not reforming may be dangerous, starting to reform may be even more so. They could be right. Just ask Mikhail Gorbachev, or indeed look at the last rulers of the Qing dynasty between 1900 and 1912. They initiated changes and created new institutions in an effort to reform and save the imperial state, but in doing so they unleashed forces that destroyed it.
In taking the steady-as-she-goes, stability-at-all-costs approach, though, the Communist Party leaders, in their eternal fear of luan (chaos), are storing up a lot of problems for themselves. They are planning the new roads, the shiny new buildings, the new airports, and the actual pillars to hold it all up. But they are ignoring the need to construct the pillars of any new political house that will need to be built in advance, so that the collapse of the country in 1912 does not repeat itself. This means building the pillars of strong institutions and an independent judiciary, and taking power out of the hands of men and putting it into actual institutions of governance. The problem is that doing that would, of course, be tantamount to the Party signing its own death warrant.
The situation is getting too serious to ignore. There comes a point when insisting on stability actually creates more instability, and it feels as though that point may soon be reached in China. Nero is fiddling while Rome burns, and what the country needs is a blueprint for gradual political change.
In fact, a document was written back in the late 1980s that almost matches that description. It was drafted by the reformist Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang (with the backing of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping) and presented to the Thirteenth Communist Party Congress in the fall of 1987. That was a time, before the demonstrations of 1989, when China’s political leaders were looking at all possibilities for political reform. Zhao’s paper was not a revolutionary document espousing full democratization, but it was nevertheless significant in laying out the first suggestions of a shift toward what Richard Baum calls “soft authoritarian pluralism.”
At that meeting, two years before the killing of the students in Tiananmen Square, Zhao (who for my money was one of the greatest Chinese officials of recent millennia) proposed a number of political reforms. He suggested, among other things, a separation of the Communist Party from the functions of state administration and a reform of the state personnel system—the notorious Nomenklatura—to minimize political patronage and ensure reliance on merit in government appointments and promotions; he encouraged an increase in the voice and legislative autonomy of the rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress, and the people’s congresses at all levels; he suggested augmenting the watchdog role of the other so-called democratic parties, which currently exist just to provide the Communist Party with a fig leaf for its claims to be a multiparty state. He proposed strengthening the rule of law.
Zhao’s proposals were never implemented. He had already been criticized by hard-liners as too liberal when the demonstrations of spring 1989 broke out, and his downfall was sealed by May 19, when he went to Tiananmen Square to plead with the students to leave. He was detained under house arrest in Beijing until his death, in 2005. The Party, spooked by the fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc, continues to this day to clamp down on any meaningful political reform of the type that Zhao suggested. But the problems are still the same—in fact, much worse than they were in 1987. And scholar Richard Baum says, “It can be argued that the
road to the CCP’s survival must inevitably run through Zhao’s 1987 reform blueprint.”
The fact that the government at present does not seem willing to consider this, however, raises the possibility of a third outcome for China. This scenario is that China neither implodes nor becomes the next superpower but just muddles through, remaining largely as it is. This argument has been put most forcefully by the U.S.-based scholar Pei Minxin in his book China’s Trapped Transition. Pei suggests that China’s so-called transition may not be a transition at all, and that the Chinese Communist Party’s unwillingness to change its political system means that China’s economy could start to fizzle. “Having seized political power through the gun, a former revolutionary party, such as the CCP, will unlikely seek its own demise through voluntary reform,” he writes, adding that the Party is fully able to keep a lid on the unrest that is bubbling up. If no major shock occurs to bring about a political meltdown, writes Pei, China could enter a period of prolonged stagnation. Since so much of the world’s economic growth and stability depends on China these days, such a downturn could have major consequences for the global economy.
The crucial part of this analysis is the phrase “if no major shock occurs.” I think, if everything continues to run relatively smoothly, and if the economy continues to grow (or even slows down a little), the Chinese government may be able to carry on as it is for a while, without too much political reform. It has already proved itself an adept ideological chameleon, able to transform itself to fit the changing environment. It may well be able to continue to bankroll its inefficiencies and keep a lid on the dissent that is bubbling up more and more from the grass roots.
However, such an analysis does not take into account the possibility of a sudden shock to the system. My concern is that something could come out of left field, something that no one is expecting, in the same way that the Asian financial crisis hit Southeast Asia (though not China) in 1997–98. China is very different from Thailand and Indonesia, but the Chinese economic miracle has major fault lines running through it, and is certainly more fragile than it looks. A really huge outbreak of avian flu, for instance, or a worldwide oil shortage, or a large tariff increase on Chinese exports into the United States, or a run on the Chinese banks—any of these could put huge pressure on the Chinese system. Anything that might spark a downturn in the economic growth, on which the Party relies so much for its legitimacy, would be very dangerous for the CCP. Then the angry farmers and angry laid-off workers could start to cause Beijing some real problems.
Beijing is pedaling fast to try to deal with all of these issues so that if something happens out of the blue, it will not have a seismic impact on Chinese society. But the brittleness of Chinese society is very worrying, and there is only so much reform that can take place within the current system.
By a pure twist of calendrical fate, the date that may be looked back on as crucial in deciding what happens in China falls exactly one hundred years after the overthrow of China’s last emperor and the failed 1912 Revolution. In 2012, if all goes to plan (and there’s no guarantee of that), President Hu Jintao and his risk-averse generation will step down from their leadership roles in the Communist Party at the Eighteenth Party Congress, making way for the so-called fifth generation of leaders. Members of the fifth generation (Mao Zedong represented the first generation, Deng Xiaoping the second, Jiang Zemin the third, Hu Jintao the fourth) were born in the late 1950s or the 1960s and so came of age and began their careers in government after the reform era began in 1978. Many of them have lived and studied abroad, and are familiar with Western political systems. It is generally believed that they are a different type of political animal from the fourth generation, more international, less dogmatic, more flexible, and they will need to be, because I think the decade after 2012 will be when the problems, especially those of rural China, will become too widespread and dangerous to ignore or simply suppress.
It could well be the most important decade in China’s long, illustrious, and sometimes tortured history, when the government leaders must decide whether they want the country to go on to a different, better future or whether they are prepared to risk consigning 1.3 billion people to the tragic cycle of Chinese history once again.
This is unknown territory. We don’t know if they can do it. We don’t know if they will accept the need to do it. And if they don’t do it, there is, as Pei Minxin suggests, no guarantee that the only alternative is collapse. But even if there is no big crunch, nothing coming out of left field, I don’t think the current system can continue as it is forever, and the growing number of minicrunches are likely to weaken it and lead to serious problems. In the years following the Party Congress of 2012, the combination of rising rural discontent and a new generation of leaders, hopefully more receptive to political change, could mean, should mean, that some political reforms will be instituted.
For now, though, the Chinese leaders are working hard to keep the economy growing while simultaneously launching a big campaign to encourage people toward a “harmonious society.” The problem is that economic growth is creating as much disharmony now as it is creating harmony.
In addition to the economic problems, there are simply too many contradictions in Chinese society. The Party wants to create a modern society. But it doesn’t want to allow too strong a civil society of churches, unions, associations, and other social organizations needed to build a modern nation. It does not want people using the Internet to access sensitive information, but it needs technology to become the modern country it wants to be. The Party needs to promote knowledge in order to compete, but knowledge is dangerous. It needs empowered people in order to become strong, but it can’t let the people be too empowered.
Despite all the very real economic progress, these contradictions could start to cause some very real problems as Chinese society becomes even more mobile, and the political system struggles even more to keep up. The Party needs some visionary leaders to lay out a plan for the future, a blueprint for some kind of political transition. But in a country that still values stability above all else, that kind of vision does not seem to be forthcoming.
I spend my final morning in Shanghai at the city’s Urban Planning Exhibition Hall. A sign outside, in Chinese and English, sets the tone: BLAZE NEW TRAILS IN A PIONEERING SPIRIT. The main exhibit is a scale model of the city, demonstrating how Shanghai will become a twenty-first-century metropolis. The exhibit is extraordinary. There are details of the new Yangshan deepwater port, which will soon be the world’s busiest, built on three islands, twenty miles offshore, joined to the mainland just south of Shanghai by the world’s longest sea bridge. Then there’s the transformation of Chongming Island—more than three hundred square miles of prime real estate in the middle of the Yangtze River—into a high-tech, green research and development zone and residential area, linked to Shanghai by an eleven-mile tunnel under the river. There are yet more exhibits about the “informationization” of Shanghai, which include statements such as this one:
We believe that with our endeavours, all our dreams will come true in 2010. There will appear in digital Shanghai a platform for public services that is rich in content, highly-shared and inter-connected. The platform will be a milestone as Shanghai becomes one of the international, financial, economic, trade and shipping centers.
The language is hyperbolic, and the implementation woefully lacking in consultation with the people, but the scale of the vision is huge. The time frames are long—ten, fifteen years—and I find myself walking around the exhibition trying to catch the eyes of the few other foreigners who are there, just so I can raise my eyebrows and say to them: “This is quite scary, isn’t it?” knowing they are likely to feel the same.
Once you’ve thought through whether all this could come to pass, you find yourself thinking, What if it does? What will it all mean for the rest of us? If cities such as Shanghai and Beijing and Tianjin and Chongqing remake themselves into the industrialized, informationized
R & D hubs that they want to be, does it all add up to a threat to the West, and if it does, how should the West respond?
Economically, of course, China is in some ways a threat, if you are measuring it by the number of Western jobs lost to Chinese factories. China is still the main center for global manufacturing, and if you are one of the people in Middle America (or Britain or wherever) whose job is moved to Shanghai, China’s development is inevitably a cause of anger.
In light of this, it is right that Western governments try to protect their own industries as much as is possible and practical. It is also right to keep up the pressure on Beijing on issues such as the violation of Western intellectual property rights, and to keep pushing for an improvement of China’s labor rights, for the sake of the Chinese workers and in order to restore some kind of fairness to the competition. Such policies will create friction with Beijing, but a certain amount of economic friction is inevitable as China rises.
If the idea of “the China threat” is pushed too far, however, and the language becomes too emotional and politicized (as it sometimes does in the United States), there is a danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of animosity, beyond the inevitable friction caused by China’s development. To allow the problems in the relationship to define our whole China policy is simplistic and dangerous, because so much of the Western economic boom of the 1990s and into the new century has been driven by China. Whether it is Chinese yuppies and companies buying Western goods and commodities and thereby giving a boost to Western stock markets and manufacturers, or the Chinese government buying U.S. government bonds and thereby keeping U.S. interest rates down, China’s rise is undoubtedly benefiting the West in many ways.