The country's reformers seek incremental political changes to complement its gobsmacking growth. If they fail, it could be war
- The Guardian, Thursday December 4 2008
In Chinese reactions to the troubles of the rest of the world, from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai to the recession in the US and Europe, I hear a hint of complacency and a touch of arrogance. "If that's what you get with democracy, perhaps we're better off without it," is how one official thinker summarises his reaction to the atrocities in India. And if the west wants China to bail it out of this self-inflicted financial mess, it must give Beijing more power in international institutions. The refrain of "China's back" mingles with "that wouldn't happen here". They may be speaking too soon. If they are, it will be our problem as well as theirs.
Gobsmacking is the word to describe China's economic development over the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping initiated what has come to be known as the period of reform. In these three decades, growth has averaged more than 9% a year. As I write, I look out at the garishly neon-lit skyscrapers of downtown Shanghai, which make the business districts of all but the largest American cities seem low-rise and sober by comparison.
Across the river, the Superbrand Mall is a buzzing hive of conspicuous consumption, with young Chinese stopping off for a coffee at Starbucks, weighed down with shopping bags from the most fashionable western brands. Yes, cities like Shanghai are islands of urban prosperity in a sea of rural backwardness, but this growth has also lifted perhaps 300 million people out of extreme poverty. If it goes on like this, the Chinese economy will, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, be roughly the same size as those of the United States and the European Union by 2020. If.
The well-known free marketeer Zhang Weiying, dean of an impressive new management school at Peking University, argues that after 30 years the economic reform is essentially complete. Yes, the commanding heights of the economy are still occupied by giant state-controlled enterprises, but as they come to be quoted on stock exchanges across the world, gain minority private shareholders and face market pressures, so they increasingly behave like value-maximising companies. They have a long way to go, but the direction of travel is clear.
What's needed for the next 30 years, he suggests, is a complementary political reform, starting with the rule of law. This is an argument I have heard many times over the past fortnight, and in quite surprising places. For instance, in the austere offices of the Chinese Communist party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, an institution whose primary task is to collect and translate official writings and declarations, from Marx through Mao to Hu Jintao. Its deputy director, Yu Keping, a prominent political scientist and party reformer, argues that China is moving from the rule of man towards the rule of law. For the first time in several thousand years of Chinese statehood, he suggests, ordinary people are being offered legal recourse against political authority. Even the top party and state leaders should be subject to the law. The country also needs more transparent, less corrupt government; a civil service answering more efficiently to the needs of its citizens ("one-stop service!" he cries enthusiastically); and more democracy, both in local government and inside the Communist party. Comrade Lenin would be turning in his grave.
Practice lags far behind this theory. Any Chinese lawyer can tell you how far away the country is from having an independent judiciary. And its ruling authorities, though no longer communist in anything but name, are in one vital sense still Leninist: that is, uncompromisingly defending their monopoly of political power. Nonetheless, in political reforms too, the direction of travel is encouraging.
If we in the rest of the world have any sense, we will encourage it with every means at our disposal - starting from the aims set by Chinese reformers themselves. Rather than saying, "No, this can't work, what you need is western-style multi-party democracy", we should say, "Right, for strengthening the rule of law, here's this detailed body of experience; for a more professional civil service, we have this useful method". We will achieve more by offering a complex toolkit for good governance and the rule of law, including human and civil rights, rather than a single template for democracy.
Thirty years ago we would have said that Leninist capitalism was a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs. Well, here it is, right in front of our eyes. After another 30 years of Chinese-style incremental reform, "crossing the river by feeling the stones" as Deng Xiaoping put it, who knows what new political riverbank they will have reached?
But the Chinese system is wrestling with many tensions. Public protests are a regular occurrence, and some turn violent: demonstrators recently stormed Communist party offices in Gansu province. And this is before the economic downturn has begun to bite. The test of any political system is how it withstands hard times. The Chinese system, as it has emerged over the past 30 years, has not yet stood that test.
What's the alternative to further open-ended, incremental reform? The most likely scenario is one that we have seen elsewhere in the post-communist world. Faced with growing discontent, as rising expectations clash with lowered economic performance, post-communist rulers turn to nationalism to preserve their own power. There's every reason to believe this could be popular in China. Even among Chinese people critical of the current system, one seldom finds much sympathy for the Tibetans or for the Muslim population in the northern province of Xinjiang. If a few despairing members of those small minorities turned to violence in one of China's big cities, the majority reaction would probably be degrees fiercer than in India.
Nationalist netizens in China's hyperactive blogosphere are more luridly anti-western than China's current rulers. If, in the coming years, the existing system were to fail to meet rising expectations - due to a combination of global recession, American and European resistance to Chinese exports, local corruption, mismanagement and lack of democratic controls - the temptation would grow to salvage legitimacy by turning to a more aggressive nationalism.
Even with the wisest leadership in Beijing and Washington, the global rebalancing of power over the next decades will be hard to manage without conflict. Introducing his national security team on Monday, Barack Obama observed that "newly assertive powers have put strains on the international system". A former US commander in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon, recently revealed that there were people in the Pentagon under George W Bush "who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here, because sooner or later we're going to be at war with China".
Susan Shirk, who was one of the senior US officials responsible for China policy in the Clinton administration, argues in her book, China: Fragile Superpower, that American policy should give priority to China's external behaviour, precisely to avert the long-term danger of war. But China's external behaviour can't be separated from its internal dynamics. We cannot afford not to be interested in the progress of its uncharted, incremental economic and political reforms, and we must want them to succeed. Otherwise we'll all be Shanghaied.
Gobsmacking is the word to describe China's economic development over the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping initiated what has come to be known as the period of reform. In these three decades, growth has averaged more than 9% a year. As I write, I look out at the garishly neon-lit skyscrapers of downtown Shanghai, which make the business districts of all but the largest American cities seem low-rise and sober by comparison.
Across the river, the Superbrand Mall is a buzzing hive of conspicuous consumption, with young Chinese stopping off for a coffee at Starbucks, weighed down with shopping bags from the most fashionable western brands. Yes, cities like Shanghai are islands of urban prosperity in a sea of rural backwardness, but this growth has also lifted perhaps 300 million people out of extreme poverty. If it goes on like this, the Chinese economy will, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, be roughly the same size as those of the United States and the European Union by 2020. If.
The well-known free marketeer Zhang Weiying, dean of an impressive new management school at Peking University, argues that after 30 years the economic reform is essentially complete. Yes, the commanding heights of the economy are still occupied by giant state-controlled enterprises, but as they come to be quoted on stock exchanges across the world, gain minority private shareholders and face market pressures, so they increasingly behave like value-maximising companies. They have a long way to go, but the direction of travel is clear.
What's needed for the next 30 years, he suggests, is a complementary political reform, starting with the rule of law. This is an argument I have heard many times over the past fortnight, and in quite surprising places. For instance, in the austere offices of the Chinese Communist party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, an institution whose primary task is to collect and translate official writings and declarations, from Marx through Mao to Hu Jintao. Its deputy director, Yu Keping, a prominent political scientist and party reformer, argues that China is moving from the rule of man towards the rule of law. For the first time in several thousand years of Chinese statehood, he suggests, ordinary people are being offered legal recourse against political authority. Even the top party and state leaders should be subject to the law. The country also needs more transparent, less corrupt government; a civil service answering more efficiently to the needs of its citizens ("one-stop service!" he cries enthusiastically); and more democracy, both in local government and inside the Communist party. Comrade Lenin would be turning in his grave.
Practice lags far behind this theory. Any Chinese lawyer can tell you how far away the country is from having an independent judiciary. And its ruling authorities, though no longer communist in anything but name, are in one vital sense still Leninist: that is, uncompromisingly defending their monopoly of political power. Nonetheless, in political reforms too, the direction of travel is encouraging.
If we in the rest of the world have any sense, we will encourage it with every means at our disposal - starting from the aims set by Chinese reformers themselves. Rather than saying, "No, this can't work, what you need is western-style multi-party democracy", we should say, "Right, for strengthening the rule of law, here's this detailed body of experience; for a more professional civil service, we have this useful method". We will achieve more by offering a complex toolkit for good governance and the rule of law, including human and civil rights, rather than a single template for democracy.
Thirty years ago we would have said that Leninist capitalism was a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs. Well, here it is, right in front of our eyes. After another 30 years of Chinese-style incremental reform, "crossing the river by feeling the stones" as Deng Xiaoping put it, who knows what new political riverbank they will have reached?
But the Chinese system is wrestling with many tensions. Public protests are a regular occurrence, and some turn violent: demonstrators recently stormed Communist party offices in Gansu province. And this is before the economic downturn has begun to bite. The test of any political system is how it withstands hard times. The Chinese system, as it has emerged over the past 30 years, has not yet stood that test.
What's the alternative to further open-ended, incremental reform? The most likely scenario is one that we have seen elsewhere in the post-communist world. Faced with growing discontent, as rising expectations clash with lowered economic performance, post-communist rulers turn to nationalism to preserve their own power. There's every reason to believe this could be popular in China. Even among Chinese people critical of the current system, one seldom finds much sympathy for the Tibetans or for the Muslim population in the northern province of Xinjiang. If a few despairing members of those small minorities turned to violence in one of China's big cities, the majority reaction would probably be degrees fiercer than in India.
Nationalist netizens in China's hyperactive blogosphere are more luridly anti-western than China's current rulers. If, in the coming years, the existing system were to fail to meet rising expectations - due to a combination of global recession, American and European resistance to Chinese exports, local corruption, mismanagement and lack of democratic controls - the temptation would grow to salvage legitimacy by turning to a more aggressive nationalism.
Even with the wisest leadership in Beijing and Washington, the global rebalancing of power over the next decades will be hard to manage without conflict. Introducing his national security team on Monday, Barack Obama observed that "newly assertive powers have put strains on the international system". A former US commander in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon, recently revealed that there were people in the Pentagon under George W Bush "who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here, because sooner or later we're going to be at war with China".
Susan Shirk, who was one of the senior US officials responsible for China policy in the Clinton administration, argues in her book, China: Fragile Superpower, that American policy should give priority to China's external behaviour, precisely to avert the long-term danger of war. But China's external behaviour can't be separated from its internal dynamics. We cannot afford not to be interested in the progress of its uncharted, incremental economic and political reforms, and we must want them to succeed. Otherwise we'll all be Shanghaied.
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