An iconic billboard in the quintessential boom city of Shenzhen features Deng’s famous statement that China's “basic line will not waver for 100 years.” If Deng was right, we are less than one-third of the way into the era of “reform and opening.” But four challenges identified by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2010, that growth becomes “unbalanced, unstable, uncoordinated, or unsustainable,” threaten the boom. The key to balance lies in increasing the consumer share of GDP, allowing China to create a modern consumer economy. Stability will depend on the government's ability to address grievances as the gap between winners and losers widens. Coordination is the great test facing the ruling Communist Party, of whether it can manage the politics of growth without fundamental changes to the system. Sustainability is an issue that has global implications, as citizens of a warming planet watch anxiously to see if China is successful in greening the boom. The fifth great challenge, left out by Premier Wen, may be the external one: whether the world is successful in making room for China.
Susan Shirk is director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of political science. Shirk first traveled to China in 1971 and has been doing research there ever since. During 1997-2000, Shirk served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asia and Pacific Affairs, with responsibility for China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mongolia. She founded in 1993 and continues to lead the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue (NEACD), an unofficial “track-two” forum for discussions of security issues among defense and foreign ministry officials and academics from the United States, Japan, China, Russia and the Koreas. Shirk served as a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, the Board of Governors for the East-West Center (Hawaii), the Board of Trustees of the U.S.-Japan Foundation, and the Board of Directors of the National Committee on United States-China Relations. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an emeritus member of the Aspen Strategy Group. As Senior Adviser to The Albright Group, Shirk advises private sector clients on China and East Asia.
Well, I think this question of the connection between the economic reform and political reform is one that’s very important and very interesting in the Chinese case. It’s often said that China is a historical experiment of retaining an authoritarian, communist political system while introducing an open market economy. And, as that kind of experiment, it has been, actually, remarkably successful. And I try to make this case to the North Koreans all the time. "You could do it too. And it doesn’t mean committing political suicide. You can use the economic reform to build support for the regime, and that’s what they’ve done in China." So, on the other hand, I do not believe that China is exempt from the forces of world history and is so unique, I mean every country’s unique in many ways, but I believe that the urbanization, the size of the college-age population, increasing income, that people become increasingly frustrated with not having the authority to select their own leaders. That they’ll be fed up with corruption, with unequal income, and that maybe even, conceivably, this financial crisis, this downturn, could combine with other issues that people have and stimulate widespread unrest. And the thing we’ve seen about these kinds of political systems is it doesn’t take a well-organized opposition to bring the whole thing down. It can just erupt in a crisis. If large numbers of people are mad and upset about the same issue at the same time [shakes head]...And the leaders know this. This is why they’re so nervous. They feel this political insecurity. On the other hand, if the leaders at the top can hang together and maintain their cohesiveness, which is another thing we haven’t talked about, but that’s very hard to do in an oligarchy like this; we don’t have a Deng Xiaoping, we don’t have a Mao, we have a bunch of fairly unimpressive people who are trying to govern this big country and hang together, and are in competition with one another, of course. So, how do you manage to prevent public leadership splits? My view is that the regime can survive, even with widespread unrest, if they can avoid public leadership splits. But, if one guy at the top decides to defect when he sees the protests and he’s just sees this as his chance to really shake things up and become number one or number two, there’s always that temptation. So, I think there’s a lot of political uncertainty. I don’t think the downturn necessarily dooms the Chinese political system or Communist Party rule, but I think it’s a big challenge. Now, as to what happens in terms of economic policy and reform, again, what I would imagine is that maybe somebody at the top tries to make a political challenge; for the system being so corrupt, unequal income, this kind of populist reformer, maybe a nationalist reformer, which is something we should be concerned about, who says, we really have to, at least, strengthen the legal system, or introduce local elections so people can kick out the rascals. So, of course, we had hoped that Hu Jintao would be that kind of person; he’s proven, I think, to be fairly timid, [to] not want to take any risks. So, it may be that the economic reform has kind of reached the limits it could go without some more substantial changes in the political institutions.
Add New Comment
comments powered by Disqus