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Talking Behind their Back:
Chinese Thoughts on their Coming Collapse
Christopher Marsh
The
summit meeting between Presidents George W. Bush and
Jiang Zemin in Crawford later this week provides an
opportune moment to reflect on the future course of
Sino-American relations and the implications of China’s
"fourth generation" leadership taking the helm
of the Middle Kingdom. It is clear that the events of
September 11 have significantly altered the relationship
between the United States and China. The
predictions of a coming conflict with China, so popular
just two years ago, have faded. Officials in both
Washington and Beijing are now more concerned with the
war on terrorism and China’s leadership succession.
(1) Behind these questions, however, looms a more
serious issue – the future of China itself, a subject
with enormous implications for the United States.
Pronouncements about the approaching collapse of
China remain as popular today as they were a decade ago
in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square – although an
increasing number of Western China-watchers are giving
serious consideration to the possibility that China may
be able to transform itself successfully, averting
regime collapse.
Chinese scholars and policymakers, of course, are very
familiar with the pronouncements and prognostications of
American analysts and academics – after all, the
average research center in China receives such
periodicals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy,
and The National Interest. Of course, the
reverse is rarely true – how many academic and policy
research institutes in the United States receive the
leading Chinese journals, such as Guoji Guanxi
[International Relations] and Jingji Yanjiu [Economic
Studies]? While we remain fairly ignorant of Chinese
views on international affairs, we should not assume the
same is true for them.
Following a talk I gave at a university in Shanghai on
the differences and similarities between the Soviet
regime on the eve of collapse and China’s current
situation I was struck by the obvious – Chinese are
well aware of Western predictions about their country’s
coming collapse and well-versed in our literature.
I was surprised to learn that Gordon Chang’s The
Coming Collapse of China (2001) had even been
the topic of a seminar at this particular university.
Contrary to what one might expect, Chinese scholars have
a sophisticated understanding of our literature on
democratization and regime change. Works such as Samuel
Huntington’s The Third Wave was translated into
Chinese several years ago, and has for the past several
years been required reading at the country’s top
universities, such as Beida and Fudan. The study of such
works is not simply an exercise or a vacuous attempt to
formulate refutations. This research is used to identify
problems, devise solutions, and guide the course of
further reform.
For the last two years, I have sought to gather and
analyze Chinese views on democratization and regime
transitions in post-communist states. The Chinese
are keenly interested in studying the cause and effects
of reform in other formerly communist countries.
While many American China specialists have
concentrated their attention on Chinese perceptions of
the United States, I have spent a considerable amount of
time reviewing what the Chinese have been saying about
the problems of democratization in eastern Europe and
the former Soviet Union. A number of Chinese
periodicals, especially Dongou Zhongya Yanjiu [East
European and Central Asian Studies] and Eluosi Yanjiu
[Russian Studies], are examining and debating the
merits of the reforms undertaken in other parts of the
former communist bloc. I have also had the
opportunity to interview some of China’s leading minds
on the subject, including those from the country’s
foremost policy think tanks and research institutes as
well as Communist Party insiders. The Chinese are
actively studying "what went wrong" in Russia
and other countries in eastern Europe, hoping to devise
policies that can continue to promote economic growth
and a gradual deepening of pluralism, without resulting
in a violent or sudden collapse of the current system.
The high degree of Chinese interest in comparing
and contrasting China’s experience with reform over
the last twenty-five years with that of Russia and the
other states of the Soviet bloc supports the notion that
China may be able to stave off a regime collapse
indefinitely.
What is clear is that Chinese academics and policymakers
are drawing their own conclusions about the causes of
regime collapse in places like the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia, as well as the desirability of following in
the footsteps of their former brethren in eastern Europe
and Eurasia. They see a number of pitfalls arising
out of the Third Wave of democratization. Chinese
scholars caution that the collapse of the Soviet Union
did not bring the kind of peace, prosperity and
stability to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union
that had been expected or promised. While the
Chinese are well aware that certain eastern European
states, such as Hungary and the Czech Republic, have
made important strides towards democracy and economic
development, they also believe that the region’s
success stories are not appropriate models for China.
Instead, the fate of Yugoslavia provides a much more
pertinent and troubling analogy.
Of course, China’s true counterpart is not eastern
Europe but Russia. There the war in Chechnya, a decade
of economic hardship, and greatly diminished
international stature offer no better prospect. Even the
vaunted "Russian recovery" over the last two
years pales in comparison to the Soviet period; output
in light industry is still only at 18 percent of its
1990 level, while overall output from manufacturing has
been halved. Even more significant, high technology
production has fallen by nearly 80 percent. As China
looks on, with an economy that has grown at a rate of
nearly 10 percent each year since 1978, and with GDP
quadrupling between 1980 and 1995 alone, Russia does not
offer a model to be emulated but one to be avoided.
Indeed, it is the fate of the Soviet Union that most
preoccupies Chinese thinking. The collapse of the USSR
in 1991 gave a drastically different meaning to the
Chinese saying, popular in the 1950s, that "the
Soviet Union’s today will be our tomorrow" (Sulian
de jintian jiu shi women de mingtian). How could a
party-state modeled after the Soviet Union, based on a
parallel ideology, and facing similar dilemmas, consider
the events of 1989-1991 in eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union to be of no consequence to itself, particularly
given the large body of scholarship in China devoted to
analysis of the region?
It should come as no surprise that, in light of such
facts, Chinese leaders and many common Chinese feel that
their choice of securing regime stability above all else
has been vindicated. While Chinese intellectuals
certainly lamented the violent means used to quell the
student protesters in June 1989, the events in eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union over the next several years
indicated that, had the Chinese Communist regime fallen
at that time, things might actually have turned out
worse, resulting in economic decline, an increase in
corruption, and even civil war and ethnic conflict.
Meanwhile, China continues to pursue controlled
liberalization, a sort of "managed pluralism"
(2)--with elections at the village level becoming more
democratic, with the National People’s Congress
gaining greater legislative power, and greater openness
permitted in the media.
Ideas such as contrasting a "controlled" as
opposed to an "uncontrolled" transition
permeate the scholarly research in China on post-Soviet
Russian politics. A prominent scholar of Russian
politics in China, Zhang Shuhua, even argued recently in
the pages of Dongou Zhongya Yanjiu that the West
places too much emphasis on democracy, holding it up as
the one good above all other values. Zhang argues, and
Chinese leaders agree, that stability and prosperity are
equally important values. Assessing the value of Western
advice given to Russia in the course of its transition,
Zhang concludes, "Ten years of political transition
in Russia indicate that the form of democracy
transplanted from the West has not bloomed nor borne
fruit in Russia."
One of the underlying assumptions I think most
Western policymakers and China-watchers operate under is
that China is unaware of the fate in store for its
future. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Chinese intellectuals, academics, and
policymakers--especially those who are members of the
"fourth generation"-- are keenly aware of
Western musings about the coming collapse of China, and
they are even more interested in using this work to
identify and correct flaws in their system that will
serve to revitalize their nation and buttress the power
of the Communist Party. This might be cause for us to
reconsider the likelihood of a coming Chinese collapse
in plotting the future course of American policy.
Christopher Marsh is Associate Professor of Political
Science and Director of Asian Studies at Baylor
University. His most recent book is Russia at the
Polls, and he is currently completing Unparalleled
Reforms: Lesson-drawing and Policy Choice in the Soviet
and Chinese Transitions from Communism. He has
conducted research at Tsinghua University and the
Institute of Far East Studies (Institut Dal’nego
Vostoka) of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
See the comments made in recent issues of In the
National Interest by Yang Jiemian (September 18,
2002 at http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/vol1issue2Yang.html
) and Pang Zhongying (October 16, 2002 at http://www.inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Vol1issue6Zhongying.html).
(2) For a discussion of the dynamics of managed
pluralism, see Nikolas K. Gvosdev, '' Managing
Pluralism:
The Human Rights Challenge of the New Century,'' World
Policy Journal, Winter 2001/2002, at http://www.globaldem.org/pdfs/Gvosdev_World_Policy_Journal.pdf.
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