The End of China's Rise
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July 25, 2012
China’s exceptionally high economic growth rate is what first called
attention to its rising power. Strong economies can play a key role in the
global marketplace and pay for major military buildups. However, China’s growth
rate has slowed from 10.4 percent in 2010 to 7.5 percent in 2012. The rate,
which economists predict will only decline further, may already be lower. The
figures used by the media are based on Chinese data, the veracity of which many
question.
Furthermore, according to The Economist, the closer a developing
nation comes to catching up with developed economies, the harder it is to
sustain growth rates because it is increasingly forced to innovate for itself.
Among emerging-markets economists, the question is not whether China’s growth
will slow but whether China will experience a soft or a hard landing.
A slowing economy is challenging for all governments but especially so for
the Chinese: the legitimacy of their regime is not based on democratic choice by
the people but on its ability to provide a high and rising standard of living.
The recent strong growth generated high expectations among the Chinese people,
most of whom have not attained the kind of affluence found among those who made
it, a group that is mainly located in the coastal cities. In contrast to
populations where all are down and expect little, China’s disparities and
inability to meet expectations of future high growth are the kind of
developments that social scientists view as major factors in destabilizing
regimes.
Moreover, China’s economic surge of the past several decades also has brought
major environmental challenges. By the end of 2007, China was home to sixteen of
the world’s twenty most polluted cities and was the highest carbon dioxide
emitter in the world. Given China’s economic model, which is heavily dependent
on resource extraction, environmental degradation imposes growing constraints on
the nation’s growth. This problem is further compounded by the sheer size of
China’s population and the difficulty of providing for it. For instance, there
already is a serious water scarcity. At the same time, China is plagued by
pervasive corruption, particularly at the local level. It ranked seventy-fifth
on the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, far below nations such as Japan
(fourteenth) and the United States (twenty-fourth).
China’s aging population also bodes poorly for its future. Feng Wang,
director of the Brookings Tsinghua Center, argues that China’s economic boom
owes much to the peculiarities of its demographics—characteristics that are
fading. Because China still maintains its thirty-year-old one-child-per-family
policy, the coming years will see a drastic decline in its young labor force and
a sharp increase in the ranks of its senior citizens.
As to China’s colonizing the world, it faces rising pushback. African nations
that have received billions of dollars in Chinese investment and aid complain
that their Chinese benefactors often do not hire local workers; they are
clannish and avoid contact with the locals; the natives they do hire endure poor
working conditions and poor wages; and that the terms of trade are unfair.
“Mercantilism” and “neocolonialism” are terms quickly applied to China.
China’s neighbors are increasingly alienated. In several cases, most recently
in Burma and Vietnam, Chinese overtures led these nations to move closer—to the
United States. Indeed, China has very few allies and those it does have (namely,
North Korea) are much more a source of cost and trouble than support.
In short, the image of a thriving, bustling China about to challenge a
declining United States is so yesterday. All we need is one more magazine cover
story about the rising China—as we once had on the rising Japan—to be sure that
this story needs to be rewritten, if not turned on its head.
Amitai Etzioni is a professor of international affairs at The George
Washington University. His newest book, Hot Spots: American Foreign Policy in a Post-Human-Rights
World, will be published by Transaction in October
2012.
Back to Mao?
- July 26, 2012 | 12:00 am
The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese People Fear the Future
by Gerard Lemos
IT HAS BEEN a tumultuous year for China. In March, the Communist Party
unexpectedly sacked one of its biggest magnates, Bo Xilai, who was set to be promoted next autumn to the Politburo
Standing Committee, the country’s most powerful body. This charismatic autocrat built up an unusually loud
gangster personality that, in this rapidly growing country, was too “Red” for
his more cautious peers. In 2007, Bo gained a high profile when he took command
of the exploding mega-city of Chongqing, an industrial entrepôt of
twenty-nine million people in the country’s southwest. He cracked down on
organized crime, revived welfare programs, built low-income housing, and
embarked on a Maoist nostalgia campaign that earned him the respect of the poor.
“I like how Chairman Mao puts it: The world is ours. We will all have to work
together,” reads a text message that Bo sent out to city residents in 2009, one
of the many quotations that were usually taken from the former premier’s
Little Red Book.
Bo, the son of a famous revolutionary, was part of the “New Left,” a movement
that seeks to move China away from capitalist development and to sew up its
growing inequalities. But this is 2012, not 1964, and Bo’s celebrity unnerved
rivals who favored a more nuanced, market-driven approach. In the end, they
didn’t need to do much about him: as Bo got increasingly brutish, his own
success killed him. His anti-corruption crusades became a front to lock away
(and sometimes execute) political opponents. And thanks in part to wealth that
his government confiscated from a number of industrialists, the so-called man of
the people amassed a fortune. Party elites, who tend to keep quiet about their
largesse, were uneasy about the wealth flaunted overseas by his Oxford- and
Harvard-educated son. Bo was a liability to the party’s legitimacy, and a threat
to their hard-earned spoils. He had to go.
Bo’s political dreams were ended in February, when the Chongqing police chief
sought asylum in the American consulate in Chengdu, about 180 miles away. The
official reportedly revealed to American diplomats that Bo’s wife was involved
last November in the murder of a British entrepreneur because of a business
dispute. Every week since then, the allegations have piled up with the mystique
of a James Bond novel. The New York Times has revealed that Bo even
wiretapped the phone calls of the president, Hu Jintao. His son, who finished
his Harvard master’s degree in May, will move on to law school in the U.S.,
while his wife is being held in detention. Bo, meanwhile, has been stripped of
party posts and has not been seen in public since the imbroglio began.
In the raucous and unforgiving world of Chinese politics, this sort of drama
unfolds every decade or so—although the death of an Englishman has made this
episode an unusual international incident. The odder puzzle, though, is how this
thuggish plutocrat became so powerful in a country which, by Western
stereotypes, is becoming prosperous and modern. The answer is that, for millions
of Chinese, it isn’t, a conclusion to be drawn from Gerard Lemos in his rigorous
and depressing study of the residents of Chongqing. It is a much-needed and
remarkably well-timed glimpse into the underbelly of this Asian tiger, one that
reveals the terrible burdens of a growing wealth gap, rising prices, decaying
communities, and weakened social safety nets. Lemos offers a view of China
outside the glamorous city centers of Beijing and Shanghai, telling the stories
that censors keep away from international eyes. In these circumstances it is
comprehensible why so many laborers and farmers turned to Bo, in the same way Al
Capone was both cruel and admired in Prohibition-era Chicago.
Lemos has worked on community and urban issues around the world and was an
acting chairman of the British Council, the semi-independent government arm that
promotes British culture worldwide. From 2006 to 2010, he lectured on social
policy at the Chongqing Technology and Business University, a job that
cultivated his interest in Chinese history and language. His aptitude for this
country quickly earned him the trust of locals. When an official expressed his
frustration over community disputes, Lemos proposed a plan to measure public
opinion toward the government in a country where this sort of information can be
hard to find. He created questionnaire cards that asked about the worries and
the aspirations of regular people, and gave them out to three hurting
neighborhoods. Residents could fill them out anonymously and hang them on “Wish
Trees,” fake trees that his team constructed, but that are auspicious in Chinese
superstition.
The remarkable part is that Lemos obtained approval to carry out this project
in a systematic way, and narrowly avoided losing all his responses to
confiscations. The face-conscious Communist Party is nervous about revealing
public opinion to the outside world, preferring to commission the state-run news
agency Xinhua to compile these secret reports. This book is thus an
intelligence-gathering project, too.
Most revealing among the findings is that, unlike the bulk of the Tiananmen
Square protesters, the Chongqing urban poor are not agitating for democracy, or
at least not openly. They are looking for basic security in their daily lives,
access to health-care, education, and land rights. They also want a return to
the stable Confucian family life that has been strained by creeping drug use,
prostitution, and debt. When conducting the surveys, one woman even cried over
her malaise in front of Lemos and the authorities: “My husband is dead. He was a
Communist. He fought for liberation in 1949. We are the workers. We are the
people. They [the party] must serve the people. My daughter is far away in
Guangdong. I am sick. I’ve had this lump for a long time. I think it’s cancer. I
can’t afford to go to the doctor and I haven’t told my daughter.” Stories such
as these show how a hooligan like Bo can amass power on a popular mandate,
despite being vehemently opposed to Western-style democracy.
While Lemos offers a meticulously researched account, his conclusions are not
always “pathbreaking,” as described on the book’s back cover. Among Asia hands,
it is a common trope that the laborers and farmers of China—along with the
Vietnamese and Indonesians, to name a few—harbor uncertainties about the future
and regularly take to protest. In a particularly strong chapter on protests,
Lemos correctly notes that the Chinese are not stoically quiescent to the
heavy-handed party crackdowns. Quite often, the one-party apparatus has trouble
exerting its dictates over the entire country, which sometimes looks more like a
fractious, American-style democracy, sharply divided among provincial lines.
During my visit to Chongqing, affable locals happily launched into tirades
against their government’s health and farming failures. “The fact that the
Communist Party can stay in control does not mean they will have the support of
the people,” Lemos writes. “The ‘weapons of the weak,’ the hidden narratives,
the ridicule and contempt for the Party can only grow.”
The End of the Chinese Dream is original, rather, in the rigor and the
depth of its human storytelling. In his narrative, Lemos gives credence to
skepticism over whether the Chinese “dream” is real and whether the government’s
economic reporting stands up to scrutiny. It is true that no growth story in
history can match China’s—at least as it is viewed by the millions of people it
has welcomed into the middle class in a short span of three decades. Still,
officials have been known to cook their books under pressure from Beijing
bosses. Unemployment, for instance, probably goes under-reported: party
officials have been known to offer large packages to workers to “resign” from
their factories rather than accept lay-offs, as reported in Foreign
Policy. In late June the New York Times suggested that the
government could be exaggerating electricity usage statistics to mask the
current nadir into which industry has fallen. And for a brief period three years
ago, car sales mysteriously took off in China while gas usage sat still, raising
questions (and, some would say, conspiracy theories) over whether
government-linked bodies were purposely buying up cars that were not being used.
It is hard to believe that the struggling souls of Lemos’s study are buying
them.
Is China, therefore, a “paper tiger"? Yes and no. Predicting an imminent
Chinese collapse is a cliché among pundits, such as Gordon G. Chang, who has
continuously set and then changed his doomsday dates since 2001. (His latest
China doomsday is pegged on 2012. Sometime this century he will be proven
right.) Lemos tip-toes toward the Chang school of alarmism, but he is shrewd
enough not to cross into it—in part because he uses well-grounded examples from
the field rather than speculation based on economic data.
These talking heads are correct that the party will need to tackle inflation
and asset bubbles in the coming years. But this is no reason to portend an
insurrection; the Communist leadership has always managed to reinvent itself
after far more disastrous fiascoes of poverty, mismanagement, and social
unrest—from the Great Leap Forward (45 million people dead), the Cultural
Revolution (1-20 million dead), the 1976 Tangshan earthquake (240,000 dead), and
the Tiananmen Square demonstrations (hundreds to thousands dead). Party elites
have always had a talent for self-preservation, even by turning to vicious
purges. The more important question is what form the party will take next: a
democratic umbrella arising out of an Chinese Spring, a takeaway from Lemos’s
book, or an even more authoritarian, and perhaps neo-Maoist, fiefdom resembling
Bo’s Chongqing?
Part of the answer requires looking to what the Chinese expect from their
government, and how the party models itself in response to those aspirations.
For China, this era is different from any other time in the previous century.
The party is dealing with a distinct generation of urban, consumerist youngsters
who are not old enough to remember the pre-1980s revolutionary years. Since
they’ve witnessed the recent blossoming of China, many have a nationalistic
spirit that their elders, who suffered through the mayhem of the past
half-century, no longer possess. The party has dropped the volatile and
destructive language of Mao. Politicians today call for “scientific” and
“harmonious” development in clearly planned steps, part of a revival of China’s
older Confucian values. But Lemos points out that since governing over human
beings is far messier and unpredictable than any algorithm can show, this
economic philosophy has had unintended consequences for the party’s
science-educated rulers. Lemos is prudent to warn that unrest around the country
will continue, and that the divided leadership is ill-equipped to handle the
situation.
Americans can therefore rest assured that China will not overtake their
economic might, even if it does eventually become the world’s largest economy.
The scary flipside, though, is that a Chinese collapse will bode even worse for
American interests. Lemos is careful not to predict a coming downfall, although
he does play with the fact that most experts did not foresee the Arab Spring and
the fall Berlin Wall, either. Popular discontent in China, however, probably
will not lead to these sorts of political openings. If the remarkable ascent of
Bo is to be a forewarning, the end of the “Chinese dream” will instead bring
about a hardliner revival and the withering of the moderate Politburo leaders.
Thankfully, Bo has been purged right before the election, so this “New Left”
faction has lost leverage for now. But others like him are gaining a popular
footing, and their nationalist fervor should be feared.
Geoffrey Cain is a freelance journalist who has covered Asia for
Time, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and The
Washington Monthly. As a Fulbright scholar from 2010 to 2011, he studied the
Vietnamese Communist Party’s censorship of newspapers.
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