Authors: Odd Westad
Despite receiving credit for China’s overall economic growth, there is little indication that the CCP as a party is capable of dealing with some of the social tensions this growth is creating. The party’s steady refusal to allow increased political pluralism, which could have acted as a safety valve against discontent, will make Chinese politics more unsettled over time. The CCP today is unable to act with massive brutality against its own urban population, as it did during the Mao era, not least out of fear that such atrocities could unsettle the country’s economy. A leading party member told me that he thought that even a repeat of 1989 would be unthinkable now: “Just imagine,” he said, what would happen to the country’s credit rating!” But at the same time the party’s leaders gamble all on the general economic growth keeping their people from taking action against them. As we have seen, in history such gambles rarely pay off.
A main reason why China is viewed with such suspicion abroad is that it is led by a Communist party. But today’s Chinese regime is a far cry from Communists of the past. In reality, the regime itself has become much more like Taiwan or South Korea before democratization—authoritarian, and sometimes ugly and brutal, but not capable of atrocities on the scale of those of the past even in its own defense. While
it is impossible to predict what will happen in Chinese politics, I would not be surprised if China follows a similar pattern of democratization to the other main states in the region, only stretched out over a longer period of time. Whatever happens, the CCP will not be around forever, and those foreign observers who today equate the party with the country are making a major mistake. History shows that China is as capable of political change as it has recently been of economic and social change, and there is no set of ingrained values or attitudes that will necessarily put the country at odds with its neighbors or with the West. As before in its history, China’s direction will ultimately be a matter of its leaders’ political choice.
One issue that will be intriguing to follow is the development of civil law in China. The rule of law has always lagged in China’s modern transformations, and the Communist Party likes to believe that this is still the case, so that it can abduct and imprison its enemies at will. But as in the surrounding countries two decades ago, the deficiencies of civil law are coming under increasing pressure from rapidly developing commercial law. Foreign and Chinese investors alike are eager that their money be protected, and they have reaped a great harvest from the seeds they have sown. Today’s business law in China is remarkably similar to its Western parentage on crucial issues such as contract law, company law, banking law, and commercial dispute resolution. What is more: Commercial law is not only accepted, but adhered to within China, with court decisions usually not discriminating against foreign companies or foreign investors, or by definition ruling in favor of state-owned companies against others. While the argument that emerging middle classes are more democratically inclined than other groups rarely holds up in history, the need to protect investments is, as Karl Marx observed for Europe in the nineteenth century, one of the reasons why the bourgeoisie generally create the rule of law. And, at least in most cases, it becomes hard over time to defend the principle that money has more rights than men.
As this book has shown, China is manifold, and only those who respect its pluralism are likely to stay in power long. The Qing ruled for a long time because they learned that China is a pluralistic society and has to be governed according to its discongruity. The Guomindang did not realize this and fell quickly. The CCP has not realized it either but is so convinced that the modern condition means congruity and homogeneity that it expects history to come to its rescue. Its leaders also believe that the homogenization of China is in accordance with the real wishes of the majority population and therefore part of a Chinese tradition. They are probably wrong on both counts. The Chinese want stable and predictable government, but they also want respect for their own predilections and practices and do not want a state that meddles unnecessarily in their business or, unjustly, enriches its leaders’ sons and daughters. Like the Guomindang before them, in a period of tremendous change the Communist leaders run the risk of maximizing the number of their enemies just when they are most in need of acquiring allies.
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HE CURRENT LEADERSHIP
in Beijing is obsessively fearful of political deviance and ethnic or religious dissonance. Maybe because they know that their power to govern the economy is limited, they insist on controlling the political sphere. At the moment there are no political alternatives in China, and although workers’ movements and professional organizations pressure the government from many different directions, the number of political dissidents is very small. Even so, the CCP overreacts—with disastrous consequences for its regime’s international reputation—whenever it feels challenged by opposition. When the soft-spoken dissident Liu Xiaobo, already sentenced to eleven years in prison for peaceful protest, won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2010, he was demonized by Chinese authorities as a criminal and an insult to the prize. The vaguely millenarian and transcendental Buddhist movement Falun Gong was banned in 1999, with the CCP condemning
its “feudal superstitions and decadent ideas.”
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Thousands of its members ended up in prison. The CCP seems inherently incapable of dealing with criticism and therefore appears to be afraid of anyone or anything outside the economic sector that the party itself has not explicitly sanctioned.
The two most important issues concerning the CCP’s treatment of minorities—political, religious, ethnic, and cultural—will be its policies toward Tibetans and Uigurs, and toward religious revivalists. These policies will of course be linked. Part of the reason why the party is so afraid of regional autonomy is that it fears such freedoms would be used by religious extremists within China. Internationally, its harsh treatment of the Tibet and Xinjiang opposition is among the regime’s biggest problems—more important, according to recent polls, than any other single issue for US, European, and Muslim views of the country. Many Chinese, and not just those who support the government, think this criticism is unfair: China’s economic transformation is surely more important, they think, and Tibetans and Muslims in western China have benefited at least as much as the majority of Chinese from the growth in the economy. What these defenders of the status quo fail to realize is that it is the CCP’s tone-deafness to the natural religious and national aspirations of minority groups that is creating China’s problems on these issues at home and abroad. As we have seen, the Communists are not the only leading group in recent Chinese history who have had trouble understanding China’s minority populations. But spreading the leadership’s retrograde views through modern media is rapidly making matters worse.
There are very clear signs that China is running out of time to start allowing more autonomy and less interference for its main minorities. At the moment, most Tibetans and Xinjiang Muslims would be satisfied with being allowed to run their own religious affairs (mainly because outright independence seems chimerical). But with the Communists denigrating the Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, as a “wolf in
monk’s robes” and calling the exiled Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer “a housewife who has used her illegal fortune to conduct secessionist activities,” the future does not look bright.
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The younger generation of Tibetans and Uighurs will want increased recognition of their own identity within China, and will not be satisfied with less. Sending political education teams to be stationed in Lamaist Buddhist monasteries and closing Xinjiang mosques for so-called preservation and repair will mean only more tension between minorities and non-Tibetans/non-Muslims in the western provinces. The CCP government will then be forced to intervene on behalf of immigrants from other parts of China, and the negative consequences of such confrontations for China’s image in the world will be great.
The international reputation of the CCP and the PRC is also challenged by a revival of religion within the main parts of China itself. The Falun Gong phenomenon may just be a beginning of Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian resurgences and metamorphoses. As we have seen, the Chinese state has been—from its perspective—cursed with such “superstitious sects” for the last 250 years. But today the challenge seems greater than ever, simply because the state itself gives its people so little to believe in—except material progress, which rarely has stirred people’s hearts. I sometimes visit a Christian congregation in the Beijing suburb of Haidian. It is not registered with the authorities, because its members want to avoid outside control, but still counts more than 1,000 members. The congregation is evangelical Protestant, and its members are young, white-collar Chinese with good educations and little political ambition, but a lot of interest in money and finance. As with other congregations, irrespective of religion, the authorities face a choice in how to treat this group of Christians. If they are smart enough to leave them alone, there is little reason to expect trouble. But if they do not, then there is little doubt that these people will follow what they see as the will of God rather than the will of the Communist Party.
The same pattern holds up for other groups in society as well. Some young Chinese may believe CCP propaganda about foreign interference being behind arrogant Tibetans or disloyal Muslims. But the very same people get embarrassed if they have to talk about the CCP’s Internet censorship to friends or relatives from abroad. In all my years of teaching history in China, the most embarrassing moment I have witnessed for a Chinese student was not discussing, say, Mao’s purges or the 1989 crackdown. The worst moment came when the student had to explain to newly arrived foreign classmates that Facebook is blocked in China. Young people in China are seething over not having access to the same forms of networking or simple fun as kids elsewhere. Despite the government’s best efforts to build a Great Firewall of China, the country’s youngsters know better. They know what they are missing out on, and they resent the authorities for blocking it. Some observers will say that easy access to games or chatrooms is of minor importance in a country that still imprisons people for their beliefs. But no government in recent Chinese history has gone on annoying its young people for very long without paying a price. In this sense the Great Firewall may be more a symbol of the regime’s impotence than a protection against foreign seditious influences.
B
ECAUSE OF ITS RAPIDLY EXPANDING
economy, China’s future international position will to a large extent be set by how well its acquisition of knowledge keeps up with that of other countries. So far China is not doing well in this respect. Young Chinese are exceptionally good at reading and algebra: Shanghai high school leavers are the best in the world on both scores, according to recent statistics. But China’s institutions of higher education often let them down, and they have to go abroad for their advanced training. Very often the best young Chinese then excel at their foreign universities and remain abroad for long periods of time. This dichotomy is particularly true for the humanities and social sciences but is also notable in science and technology.
China’s top universities suffer in comparison to the best American or European institutions. They have a very large number of talented people in them, but they are run in ways very similar to Soviet institutions of old. Conformist mediocrity is rewarded above unsettling brilliance. The party and its views hover over everything, and hiring and promotion are decided by patronage rather than by talent. The problem is not censorship by itself. Debates and discussions at the top institutions are today free to an extent unthinkable only a few years ago. The problem is the conformism that institutions of higher education produce, and the lacunae in innovative knowledge, which descend from that. China today is simply not, by itself, producing enough top thinkers within various fields of knowledge to sustain its future growth.
This failure is a serious problem for China’s engagement with the world. To overcome it, the Chinese government needs to rework its higher education system, or—a less likely prospect—allow these institutions to reform themselves profoundly from within. Given the centrality of education in the government’s own development plans, it is remarkable that not more is done already. In the meantime China is, in fact, shedding talent at a high rate. Newspapers and the universities and research centers themselves often publish major articles about how world-famous scholars who were born in China or have Chinese ancestry return to teach at Chinese institutions. But there are few of these, and they are usually at the end of their careers. Young scholars who are trained abroad sometimes go back, although, as we have seen, only in small numbers. But then they only stay for a few years if they are so good that they have the chance for a job abroad. The encounter with the problems and intricacies of the Chinese higher education system defeats them. They felt they fitted in at Yale or Cambridge or CalTech but feel marginalized at Chinese universities.
It is possible that foreign-trained scholars who return and remain in China will, eventually, change the system. There are examples of real centers of excellence in Chinese research, and they are sometimes found
in surprising places. One such example in my field is the Central Party School of the CCP. Here there are no limits to discussion (even though little of it can be repeated outside the school’s compound in northwestern Beijing), and it attracts first-rate minds to teach the party’s future leaders. There is also the possibility that the establishment of foreign universities in China will transform the Chinese landscape of higher education, as it did in the late nineteenth century. The largest of these at the moment, the British-run University of Nottingham campus in Ningbo near Shanghai, can take up to 8,000 students and teach them in a university setting that is similar to what they would encounter outside China.