The old CW was that as China got richer, it would grow more democratic. The new CW seems to be that China will get richer, but not more democratic. The inside pages of your newspaper, however, keep being filled with stories like this one where "2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices, a human rights group said today." To me, it always seems more likely that the whole place will collapse into chaos.
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Chinese Stability
12 Nov 2006 12:46 pm
Comments (20)
The prospect of widespread social chaos (beyond the day to day chaos that marks life in china) is not far from the minds of the Chinese Government either. In 2003 there were 58,000 incidents of social unrest in China, which rose to 70k+ in 2005. What is significant beyond the numbers themselves is that the Chinese government actually released the figures.
I think there are irreconcilable tensions in the current Chinese model that guarantees serious social and economic upheavals. Economic progress is premised on a reduction in state provided support systems coupled with continued access to very low wage labor. As the Chinese workers become even more impoverished and the government/owners become even more wealthy (by virtue of their continued access to the masses of low wage workers), something will have to give. I suspect we will see continued worker unrest (there are thousands of ad hoc labor confrontations every year), demands for a larger share of economic growth, and ultimately a showdown between the ruling oligarchs and the masses. I don't think anyone can predict how this shakes out but most believe it won't be pretty.
Chaos like Iraq chaos? Or chaos like somewhere milder? Brazil, India, or Indonesia maybe?
Remember that South Korea went through 40 years of autocratic rule before coming out the other side as a prosperous (if somewhat corrupt) democracy...
You seem to be ignoring the many moves that the Chinese are making towards democracy. They've begun elections at the local levels, they're cleaning up corruption, they're empowering labor unions and many, other things. Certainly there is unrest, and plenty of it. There are plenty of problems. As there is, and always has been, in other countries. But they are definitely moving forward while Americans are definitely moving backward.
Americans need to worry about their own democracy and freedoms, or lack of them, and stop criticizing other countries. At this point they're not leading the world, they're way behind it. In many ways China now has more freedom than the US. You're five times more likely to be in prison if you're an American than if you're Chinese.
The whole place will fall into chaos? I very much doubt it. I think the US will fall first. But we shall see.
"Economic progress is premised on a reduction in state provided support systems coupled with continued access to very low wage labor."
What does that mean, that it is premised? That is the way that its going right now, but it isn't necessarily the way it needs to play out in the long term. Isn't the Chinese government trying to extend labor rights, only to be opposed by the American Chamber of Commerce?
I think that Hu Jintao realizes that having an industrial sector is so overweighted towards export is not that stable in the long run. The way to solve that is to try to raise overall purchasing power of the Chinese working class by improving their working conditions, pay, etc.
As far as Chinese democracy goes, it interests me how otherwise intelligent people will talk about it in "and they all lived happily ever after" tones, as if democratization of China is a sollution and not the beginnings of a whole new set of problems. That is not to say that it isn't worth working towards- I think that it is. However, a democratic China has just as much a potential to be chaotic.
Here's some photos from another protest.
When I was studying in China a year ago my professors told me that China is either in state of mass chaos (Cultural Revolution, Civil War, and soforth) or very strong central control. The periods of chaos are so horrifying that people will be willing to support the central government despite its lies and incompetence.
Right now the Communist Party is still a long way from losing power.
"To me, it always seems more likely that the whole place will collapse into chaos."
There are thousands of riots and protests every year throughout the country, most of which go unreported in the western press. The growing divide between the poor interior and nouveau riche east end is not just economic but cultural; people in the east are coming to have more in common with their ancient foes in Japan (and the east Asian prosperity zone generally) than struggling peasants in central and western China. Deforestation, floods, and desertification is displacing thousands of people annually. As subsidies to the interior decline, there are re-emerging ethnic, religious, and linguistic tensions. Provincial officials often tell western journalists and academics off the record they believe China is heading toward a new era of fragmentation (the country has spent almost half its history in pieces). America should probably be more concerned about destabilization and its attendant risks (including the prospect of unsecured WMDs falling into the hands of non-state actors) than China becoming some kind of regional or global hegemon.
Lots of riots have almost no relation to collapses into chaos. The Chinese state will maintain its authority more or less unless there are severe internal divisions within the ruling groups or, even more importantly, it goes bankrupt. The economic boom makes the latter outcome unlikely and in fact gives the regime a lot of room for manoevre vis-a-vis dissidents.
"Collapse into chaos" is usually a sign that the analyst has reached the current limit of his or her thinking. Happens to the best of them; even, apparently, to MY. But real collapsed-into chaos is incredibly rare. Germany, the remains of Austria-Hungary and Russia did not collapse into chaos at the end of World War I, though three centuries-old monarchies crumbled away in a matter of months. Nor will Communist China collapse into chaos. We'll have to wait a little longer for MY to wrap his head around what he thinks, if he decides to put much energy into it, but it will surely be something more than "collapse into chaos."
"Russia did not collapse into chaos at the end of World War I"
What would you call a civil war and invasion by Great Britain and the United States?
Ok, lets ammend Doug's statement...long standing monarchies/authoritarian systems don't collapse into chaos unless A. They go into "a civil war and invasion by Great Britain and the United States" or B. They get beat in the largest, deadliest war known to man at the time...and split up into a bunch of small countries that 15 years later get conquered by a fascist demogouge...
Ah, what could be more American than worrying about the fate of China? Will we see disorder on the scale of the Taipei Rebellion, a fundamentalist Christian movement that swept China in the 1850s and resulted in 50 million deaths? Will they repeat our mistake of manufacturing millions of gas-guzzling cars? Will they 'clamp down', throwing as large a proportion of their citizens in prison as we have in ours? All alarming possibilities, to be sure.
And certainly, according to critics, their mistakes have been legion. They were wrong to join the Russians in communism, and wrong to kick the Russians out. The Great Leap Forward was a mistake, and so was the Great Leap Backward. And so it has gone, to the point that, instead of worrying about the US being stuck with worthless Chinese government bonds, we're now worried about the Chinese being stuck with worthless US government bonds.
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
The Chinese have almost a thousand years of experience as a command economy and, with a population almost three times as great as ours, spend less than a tenth of what we spend on their military. With a trivial investment of support they helped the Vietnamese bring our war machine to a grinding halt, and then, having learned from the experience of others, prudently withdrew when the Vietnamese fiercely resisted a Chinese landgrab in the 70s.
Maybe "creative chaos" was the phrase MY was searching for.
2,000 people mobbed and ransacked a hospital in southwestern China on Friday in a dispute over medical fees and shoddy health care practices
Hot damn! More of that over *here*, please.
and invasion by Great Britain and the United States
The Allied intervention was pretty trivial, IIRC. Not that anybody wants foreign troops in their country.
I think the "chaos, baby!" theory has some merit. China has a long cyclical history of de/re-unification. Modern communications seem to offer a real prospect that those days are gone. OTOH, the more such internal links are forged, the less the central gov't likes it, b/c it promotes dissent and potential rebellion.
Things have to get pretty far out on the Hobbesian scale for me to call it chaos, but that doesn't change my key point that "collapse into chaos" is usually more reflective of the analyst's thinking, i.e., hasn't gone any further, than of an actual situation.
As far as immediate post-Romanov Russia goes, multi-sided civil war punctuated by several foreign interventions is a pretty good description. But is it chaos?
For a contemporary example, consider Afghanistan in early 2002. Most readers of this blog would probably consider central Afghanistan three months after the fall of the Taliban the epitome of chaos. Rory Stewart's book shows us something different entirely.
Which is precisely my point. All social bonds are not severed and many things will be retained across any transition, no matter how wrenching. When MY writes "chaos," I read him to mean "greater disorder than now" and "granular changes that I don't have the detailed knowledge to evaluate." If he thinks about it more, which of course he may not be inclined to do, there will be less "chaos" and more details about what changes might actually be like.
(And on that note, good night, it's late Over Here.)
This seems to be about as good a place as any to ask about an area of my ignorance that has been bothering me lately.
What became the soviet union was I am guessing not nearly up to US standards at the time. After a civil war( revolution) and taking at the very least their share of damage from two world wars, they were one of two super powers. This strikes me as a remarkable success for their economic program. Is that true?
After this period, the ossification of the government and their inability to adapt led to a collapse in 1989, which strikes me as evidence that theri economic program failed, at least in maintaining the gains it had made.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler has been talking about the inevitable collapse of Social Democracy, but this seems more interesting in terms of China and what we know of great communist powers -- Remarkable growth is followed by what? Does communism require the chinese to follow the soviet's path as, I think Matt suggests, or is it possible for them to adapt?
Is the chinese model a better model, economically, than an IMF style market appraoch for developing countries? Is there good evidence, or is it theory?
Doug: It's true that if analysts switched to your definition of "chaos" that would prove they don't know what they're talking about. But they haven't. According to everyone's definition of chaos, post-World War I was chaotic. In fact, China could fall well short of that and still reasonably be described as chaotic. (Point taken, though, that post-World War I Germany was not chaotic.)
theCoach: Russia was already a major military power before World War I. Still, the Soviets built an impressive military machine. In the industrial era, command economies could compete with capitalist economies, since the key element was productive capacity, and successful central planning, whether by a few large firms, or by the government. The Soviets also diverted a much larger portion of their productive capacity to military uses than the United States did.
"The new CW seems to be that China will get richer, but not more democratic."
This may be a correct short run view, but you have to give them time. Building a proper democracy is 'hard work', and we hear that it can be easily sidetracked, both in developed countries like ours and elsewhere.
Not that people don't know what they're talking about, but that "collapse into chaos" is often tossed out when someone simply hasn't thought something through yet.
I hear "collapse into chaos" all too often, much more often than I think is warranted, even by definitions of chaos less stringent that mine. Hence the Afghanistan example above.
Similarly with MY's concerns about China. Social unrest in certain areas that the central authorities cannot (or do not) clamp down immediately. That could have lots of different implications. "Collapse into chaos" is essentially a throwaway remark, a marker for "I need to think about this further if I want to write more than four sentences about it."
If we want to talk about the end of World War I, appropriately enough for a time in and around November 11, we should not only draw a distinction between chaos and chaotic but should also consider where and for how long. (The Ottoman succession and the creation of modern Iraq would be relevant here, too.)
I'm afraid your analysis is very shallow. Have you been to China? By the loose definitions above China is already in chaos. The economic differentiation between the coast and the interior is immense and incrementally widening. The government is well aware of the destabilizing effects of this fact. They are attempting to deal with these problems in many ways. Some autocratic, crackdowns and jailings, and most economic and social, investment and promoting understanding and appreciation of ethnic minorities. Whether they can walk this tightrope is a very good question and they will succeed or fail by their own actions. That being said, as we see in the deteriorating economic and social welfare standards of the middle and lower classes in the good old USA the forces of economic consolidation are not restricted to 'control economies' (whatever that means) as if the US economy grows like a tall oak tree, proud and free. Corporatist control of the US economy is at least as deeply rooted as China's 'command economy". As far as fragmentation it is obvious that the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians (ever hear of Victor Emmanuel?), Germans (just the latest unification in 1989, first created as a nation about 120 years ago), USA (Louisiana Purchase, Mexican Annexation, Alaska, Hawaii, etc.), etc. etc. etc. know a thing or two about historical fragmentation. At the beginning of the 20th Century China was a feudal state ruled by a divine emperor. 70 years ago it was a country brutally crushed under the boot heel of a sadistic bloodthirsty Japanese military dictatorship bent on dominating all of Asia. Their peasant army saved us from that. The Japanese are now our good buddies! As recently as the late 1970s most of China didn't have enough to eat. As a communist government they have been under concerted attack, and as a very adept economic competitor continue to be, by the massed forces of US and European capitalism. This isn't a Marxist interpretation, this is economic reality folks. The incredible social and economic progress they have made should be lauded by anyone who calls themselves a progressive. The present regime must at the very least pay lip service to the ideals of a true people's revolution that include advancing all the people of the nation. Would that our government held as closely to our founding principles. There are obviously many problems with the monolithic government model that presently rules China. As a US citizen I think of our government sending the FBI and police after grannies in the peace movement, arresting people for wearing anti Bush t-shirts, firing a lady for flipping off the president, suspension of habeas corpus and the right to see evidence and confront your accuser, torture, secret prisons, degradation of public education, voter suppression, etc. and see the same autocratic tendencies at work. My experience with the American people gives me some hope that the fruits our great heritage can be restored. My experience with the Chinese people gives me great confidence that theirs can be fulfilled. As a final point my Chinese friends all ask me do the US people fear China as much as the media portrays? Maybe I should stop saying no, eh?
Comments closed November 26, 2006.
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Heads in the Sand
A friend of mine once wrote a paper about China with the title "Chinese Democracy: The Institution Before the Album?" I now think that this should be the title for anything that anyone writes about China.
Posted by Nathan | November 12, 2006 1:10 PM