Talking Behind their
Back:
Chinese Thoughts on their Coming Collapse
October
23, 2002
By 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.
(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.