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The Making of Contemporary China
Review Essay The Making of Contemporary China by Arthur Waldron Mao's China and the Cold War. By Chen Jian. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 416 pp. $49.95; $19.95, paper.) The Tiananmen Papers. Edited by Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, and Perry Link. (New York: Public Affairs, 2001. 513 pp. $30.) Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. By Steven W. Mosher. (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000. 193 pp. $24.95.) The Coming Collapse of China. By Gordon G. Chang. (Random House: New York, 2000. 344 pp. $26.95.) Mao's Progressive Legacy When, with the end of World War II in 1945, Mao Zedong sensed for the ®rst time the possibility of real power in China, he spoke out clearly as a democrat, calling for a ``free and democratic China'' with a government ``chosen in universal and secret elections, and . . . responsible to their electors'' that would ``carry out Mr. Sun Yatsen's Three People's Principles, Lincoln's principle of `of the people, by the people, and for the people,' as well as Roosevelt's Atlantic Charter. It will guarantee the independence, solidarity, and unity of the country, and its cooperation with other democratic powers.''1 The words he spoke then but lavishly betrayed would haunt his subsequent career and Chinese politics since his death. 1
Answers to Questions Raised by Reuters News Agency Correspondent Gamble, Sept. 27, 1945.
Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at FPRI. He is also Director of Asian Studies at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Congressionally-mandated U.S.±China Security Review Commission.Translations of Mao are from the new versions found in Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912±1949 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, in press), of which volumes IX and X, edited by Stuart Schram and Arthur Waldron, will cover the years 1945±49.
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Review Essay Such words were very much what many in China wanted to hear. Suspicious of communism yet deeply unhappy with Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship, like their fathers and grandfathers in the late Qing dynasty, they hoped to see a China ruled, like other leading states of the world, in a constitutional fashionÐand Mao's unequivocal support for that won many waverers over. Of course, once in power, Mao acted very differently. Up to now few scholars have acknowledged or recognized just how powerfully Mao's subsequent careerÐand thus China's history during his nearly thirty years of unchallenged ruleÐwas affected by his betrayal of these democratic promises. The switch from the democratic program Mao presented as he sought power to the Stalinist program he imposed once he had won it created a structural requirement for some external threat to justify extraordinary measures and provide the occasion genuinely to win the Chinese people over to his vision of the future. Often this requirement was ®lled by con¯ict or war, by enemies internal and external that would provide the justi®cation for dictatorial rule in Communist-ruled China just as they did in the U.S.S.R.2 Indeed, in most Western accounts Mao has been portrayed as a ®gure for whom the question of legitimacy simply didn't arise. He was unchallenged, possessing like an emperor of old the mandates of Heaven. He was swept to power in 1949 by the masses of the Chinese people who adored him until his death, presaged by a great earthquake, like the passing of an emperor. Overlooked in these accounts are the facts that the Chinese civil war was close fought and its outcome far from predestined; that Mao was widely, if privately, criticized and hated while in power, among other things because of the ghastly human toll he took on the Chinese peopleÐmore than even the Japanese had managed to kill. And though his death was a shock, many a Chinese will tell you how he cried crocodile tears that day. Yet this key insightÐthat the domestic illegitimacy of the regime in China as in Russia led both states to adopt confrontational policies externallyÐhas never been fully accepted by students of international relations, not even today as avalanches of con®rmation pour from newly opened archives. Academia and informed public opinion cling to more America-centered explanations, above all the argument that China originally turned against the United States because the United States hurt its feelings by rejecting peace overtures. Also invoked are analyses based on Chinese national character, whether traditional (the ``Chinese world order'' and ``tributary states'' approach) or modern (Communist or Nationalist ideology). But only rarely has anyone taken internal factors as key, and these few have usually been scholars of Chinese heritage. Chen Jian, now professor of history at the University of Virginia, is one such, who has long worked in Chinese, Russian, and other newly available archives, guided by personal intuition about how China actually 2
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George Kennan laid out the dynamic very clearly in his famous ``X Article'' (Foreign Affairs, 1947).
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Review Essay operates. His latest book, Mao's China and the Cold War, is a milestone and a masterpiece. Clearly written and organized thematicallyÐa chapter on China and Vietnam, another on China and Russia, and so forth, and thus uniquely readable, it should lay to rest many misconceptions that have long plagued American understanding of China, while presenting an utterly persuasive and thoroughly documented new account of the original estrangement. This is the ®rst book anyone interested in the subject should read. In 1949 and 1950, for example, American diplomats remained in place in China, waiting to establish contact with the new rulers. Washington had written off Chiang's Nationalists, who had ¯ed to Taiwan. The stage seemed set for a smooth transition. Indeed much hope, and not only in China, was riding with Mao and his Party. When the Communists reached Shanghai, ``the rejoicing'' in the American Chamber of Commerce ``couldn't have been greater if the city had been liberated by American forces. American and British businessmen were convinced,'' reported the U.S. Consul-General, ``that they would do better under the Communists.'' So were a lot of Chinese.3 They would be disappointed. The Provisional Government announced in 1949 was not constituted by elections nor did it countenance power sharing. Many non-Party dignitaries were included in it, but in the supreme decision-making body, the Central People's Government Council, thirty-two out of sixty-three members were CommunistsÐa majority by only one, but an absolutely reliable one nevertheless. The military and security apparatus were, of course, completely under Communist control.4 This established the pattern. In March 1949, Mao told a Party meeting that ``We do not use the system of parliaments of the bourgeois republics, but rather the Soviet system of the proletarian republics.''5 Three months later criticism elicited one of his characteristic bursts of rhetoric: ``Autocrats! . . . That is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, which one could also call the people's democratic autocracy, the two terms mean the same thing, that is to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.'' Semantically convoluted, to be sure, particularly as Mao uses interchangeably the Chinese terms ``dictatorship'' (zhuanzheng) and ``despotism'' (ducai)Ðthough the second has been carefully edited out of of®cial English translations.6 This bait and switch tactic left many Chinese dissatis®ed and worried about the future. Then came the Communist invasion of South Korea, and the various incidents in the Taiwan Strait. Internal illegitimacy was to be cured by external 3
Noel Barber, Fall of Shanghai (New York: Coward McCann, 1979), p. 164. Juergen Domes, The Internal Politics of China 1949±1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 23±4. 5 Conclusions at the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Mar. 13, 1949, p. 199. 6 On The People's Democratic Dictatorship, June 30, 1949, p. 215. 4
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Review Essay success. As Chen puts it, ``Mao and his fellow CCP leaders could clearly sense that by ®rmly and successfully confronting `U.S. imperialist aggression' in Korea and Taiwan, they would be able to translate the tremendous pressure from without into dynamics that would help enhance the Chinese people's revolutionary momentum while legitimizing the CCPs authority as China's new ruler.'' (p. 87) And China would go to war as much for domestic as for external reasons, repeatedly during Mao's rule. The reason usually had little to do with the WestÐwhich Mao, who knew no foreign languages, had never visited (Moscow in the winter of 1949 was his only exposure to it)Ðand everything to do with his never-altogether-secure position at home. Mao and Missed Opportunities This fact has long been understood by Chinese but may come as a shock to some Westerners, for among those most completely taken in by Mao were several well respected Western writers: Edgar Snow, Jack Belden, Theodore White, even the redoubtable Barbara Tuchman, who penned the most eloquent statement of what, until recently, was an article of faith among most China specialists: that the democratically and Western-inclined Mao had been tragically alienated by sins of commission and omission from Washington and forced into the arms of Moscow, with the baleful consequences that ensued. As Japan's defeat neared, out of concern to neutralize the United States in the anticipated Chinese civil war, Mao approached American representatives, according to some reports, seeking an invitation to Washington.7 Suppose he had gone? Tuchman spun the de®nitive ``what if?'' in Foreign Affairs in 1972, just before the Nixon trip to China, asking what would have happened if Mao and Zhou Enlai had been able to persuade Roosevelt of their growing strength relative to the Central Government's. The result, she wrote, would have been the acceleration of the Communists' rise and the Kuomintang's fall, avoidance of three years of civil war, and the United States not incurring the ill-will of the ultimate winner of that war for its aiding the certain loser and thereby prolonging it. The cause for the imprisonment and deportation of American consular of®cials and the seizure of the U.S. consulate in Shenyang would therefore not have existed, and would not have hardened American ill-will toward the Communist government. The Chinese not having been moved to make common cause with the Soviet Union against the United States, the Korean War might never have occurred, nor ultimately Vietnam.8 For most of the past sixty years Western China scholarship on foreign policy has consisted either of anticipations or an elaboration of this thesis. For decades it was taken for granted as an unspoken article of faith in certain 7 8
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Prepare to Deal with the Civil War Situation Which is Certain to Arise, Aug. 4, 1945, pp. 1±2. Notes From China (New York: Collier, 1972), pp. 79±80.
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Review Essay quarters of the Department of State that the United States had got it wrong: that Americans should have been nicer to the Communists and dumped that mediocrity Chiang; that the United States started badly when it missed the friendly signals sent by the early Communist regime in 1949; that American failures to interpret the warnings so carefully conveyed by Beijing not to overstep in Korea led to disaster there.9 And then there was Vietnam: an indigenous revolutionary struggle into which we became embroiled in part out of a mistaken idea that China was somehow trying to expand its in¯uence there. The subtle Chinese repeatedly confronted the quiet or ugly American, and the result was disasterÐat least until they encountered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who established the current relationship, still in many eyes not quite what it should or could be. Or so the academic mainstream thought until the archives began to open up. Now Chen Jian can con®dently dismiss that whole elaborate edi®ce of the ``Lost Chance in China'' as a myth. Mao was a convinced revolutionary and Communist, who assumed as a matter of faith that revolutionary communism would win out: that, as he put it, ``the East Wind will prevail over the West Wind.'' In fact, it is not dif®cult to read Mao in the early years simply as another convinced Third World Communist and idealist, which is in fact what most of his colleagues really were. But as Chen shows, Mao was also different, a Chinese dictator in the mold of Stalin. After Stalin's death, for example, proposals that appeared to Mao's colleagues to be reasonable manifestations of Socialist Internationalism (e.g., cooperation in building and operating radars and submarines) seemed to Mao nothing more than foreign schemes to obtain control over China, to be resisted at all costs. Thanks to the memoirs of Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, and much other new material that has emerged about the Chairman since his death a quarter century ago, it is now clear that the man was far from the genial and affable chain-smoker whose interview with Edgar Snow published in 1938 had such a positive effect on public opinion. He kept up public appearances and fooled many foreigners who should have known better. But he did prove Lord Acton right: as Andrew Nathan puts it in his introduction to Dr. Li's memoir, ``Absolute power affected Mao's mental and physical health, his human relations, and, through these, his country and the world.''10 That Communist China was led by Mao, and not by a more orthodox and educated Communist such as Liu Shaoqi or Zhou undoubtedly made a big difference. The fact probably accounted for the Sino-Soviet dispute. And, ironically, it may well also help explain the survival of communism in China long after the Russians had put it to bed. In the beginning, the fate of 9 See Allen Whiting's RAND Corporation study, published as China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter to Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960). 10 Li Zhisui, The private life of Chairman Mao: The memoirs of Mao's personal physician Dr. Li Zhisui (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. ix±x.
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Review Essay communism in China was tied up with communism in Russia, but Mao gradually broke that connection and set it on its own Chinese foundations. The Soviet conquest of Manchuria in 1945 provided the base for Mao's subsequent conquest of China proper, and Stalin provided both weapons and logistical support. In Korea, a million dead Chinese helped save Stalin's foreign policy, which had assumed the United States would not react. The real trouble began with Khrushchev's ``secret speech'' of 1956, con®rming Stalin's crimes (the Chinese delegation was not invited) and threatening Mao's basic argument for his own power. He was intent on imposing the Soviet system: now the ``center'' in Moscow was in effect issuing a recall notice on the particular model of Stalinism he had just imported and was attempting to retail in China, and urging just the kind of candor and discussion that heÐwho had just lied massively to the Chinese people in order to get powerÐfeared most. That, plus the Soviet fear that Mao would drag them into a war with the United States over Taiwan, caused the fateful rupture. With the external buttresses of Soviet ideological validation and aid removed, Mao had to improvise his own ideology and his own economic system, which he did catastrophically with his Great Leap Forward (which cost tens of millions of lives to starvation), the promulgation of ``Mao Tsetung thought,'' and the renewed attacks on Taiwan's offshore islands. These created the internal tension required to justify the dictatorship. When the more orthodox Communists nevertheless attempted to sideline Mao after the Great Leap, they discovered that he had become such a symbol of legitimacy that he could not be criticized the way Khrushchev had StalinÐand this fact provided the leverage that Mao used to make a successful comeback in the disastrous Cultural Revolution, which conferred on him the godlike status he enjoyed until his death. Maoism, it turns out, was mostly sound and fury. It accomplished nothing of enduring value and did much damage. Success for China today means, effectively, reversing all his policies. Chen is clear about this. While the Communist state has failed, its fall might well lead to disintegration and civil war. So it must somehow be changed, ``derevolutionized'' as Chen puts it, even as it remains in power. This is an entirely domestic matter, albeit having potentially critical external consequences. But reform from above carried out in China is a tall order. Everyone hopes for the transformation of China, by a gradual process of internal reform, into a democratic state that can become, as Chen puts it, a true insider in a world of democratic states. The question is whether such a transformation is possible. Tiananmen, 1989 For more than two decades now we have been hearing that such a transformation of China was already under way, led by the Communist Party. 396
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Review Essay Wisely, so the argument goes, the Party has turned ®rst to reforming and modernizing the economyÐthus avoiding what some saw as Russia's disastrous mistake in ®rst taking down the Communist political command structureÐall leading to the much heralded prosperity of, for example, present day Shanghai. At the same time, gradual administrative and legal changes are reportedly streamlining administration, younger and more well educated cadres were coming to power, the range of permissible expression was expanding, and there was even some experimentation with democracy, albeit at the village level. Over time, so its advocates con®dently maintained, this gradual process, overseen by the Party, would thoroughly renovate China, making it a great economic and even military power within a few decades, and probably bringing democracy as well, though that prospect was usually seen as more distant. All in all it was a rather reassuring scenario and one containing substantial elements of truth. But is the Chinese Communist Party actually capable of leading this change? As the Tiananmen Papers make absolutely clear, the answer is both yes and no. The ``papers'' are a series of top-secret documents (almost certainly authentic) smuggled to the West that present the discussions at the highest level in 1989 over how to deal with the huge pro-democracy demonstrations. Those demonstrations for democracy were the largest in human history, and they swept across China, everywhere from the tiny desert oasis of Dunhuang in the far west to the great metropolises of Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai. Not surprisingly, even though they are now a non-topic, evidently they retain secret sympathizers in ChinaÐone of whom at least has all the clearances necessary to work with top secret documents and whose identity the secret police have not yet managed to establish. This fact alone ought to be enough to cause some nightmares for the current authorities. What we see in the Papers are two very different approaches. One set of leaders, including military leaders, opposed force absolutely and wanted a political solution, which would inevitably have meant dramatic political opening in the direction of accountability, if not immediate democracy. The other set wanted to put the demonstrations down by force and restore the Party's claim to absolute power. The discussions are fascinating and quite moving. First, we have a series of debates over martial law. The Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, who favors compromise: I'm against imposing martial law in Beijing . . . It will only make things more complicated and more sharply confrontational . . . Even among the demonstrators, the vast majority are patriotic and support the Communist Party. Martial law could give us total control of the situation, yes, but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing's citizens and students. Where will that lead? . . . Given the crisis we now face at home and abroad, I think that one more big political mistake might well cost us our remaining legitimacy. (p. 192)
Following a split vote, Zhao attempts to resign but is dissuaded. Spring 2002
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Review Essay The decision will ultimately have to be made by the failing Deng Xiaoping, who detects foreign manipulation behind demonstrations that were patently authentic and is inclined to strike hard. ``Other than those of us here tonight, nobody seems even able to describe the problem correctly . . . The people who promote turmoil have been completely exposed. They've colluded with foreign forces; even the KMT in Taiwan has tried to meddle! Their goals are to overthrow our Party and our state. . .'' (p. 257) ``The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given encouragement . . . to the so-called democrats or opposition in ChinaÐpeople who in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation.'' (p. 358) (This dismaying tendency to attribute domestic problems to foreign machinations is standard in China.) Then comes a series of extra-legal decisionsÐdecisions that are not even made in accord with the Party's own rulesÐwhich do three things. First, they bring out the army, at the behest not of its commanders, but of the ``elders,'' senior Communists who remain the ultimate authority even long after retirement, and the army murders and arrests demonstrators by the thousands in Beijing and in smaller numbers elsewhere. This fact, widely covered in the international and even some Chinese media, is, however, ¯atly deniedÐand that ¯at denial has remained in force ever since. Beijing of®cially insists that accounts of what happened on June 4, 1989, are fabrications and slanders, but cannot present any remotely persuasive alternative narrative. The vain hope is that with time memory of the unpleasantness will fadeÐand to a degree it has. A whole generation of Chinese is now entering its teens which has no memory of it, and whatever stigma once attached to the atrocity has long since disappeared, as a steady stream of foreign leaders, businessmen, tourists, and investors clearly demonstrates. Second, the elders reshuf¯e the leadership and create a new government, headed by the hitherto second-tier ®gure Jiang Zemin of Shanghai, that takes of®ce (and has remained there) even though its creation was in violation of the laws of the People's Republic, which require that the Politburo Standing Committee make such decisions (p. 314). Third, and most importantly, the new regime purges and splits the Communist Party, eliminating the previously strong liberal wing. Zhao Ziyang, the man who had until the massacre been China's top leader, refuses to repent. He tells a meeting in the third week of June that he still believes that ``we must continue to pursue economic and political reform simultaneously; we cannot ignore political work . . . For years I've been a bold activist in economic reform but cautious in the area of political reform . . . But my thinking has changed in recent years. I now feel that political reform has to be a priority; if it is not made a priority, then not only will economic problems get harder to handle but all kinds of social and political problems will only get worse.'' (p. 442) For this Zhao is placed under strict house arrest in BeijingÐwhere he remains today, at age eighty. His top assistants, who 398
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Review Essay until June 4 had been planning genuine reform for China, are arrested and detained. Anyone remotely associated with the demonstrationsÐa very large number of ChineseÐis blacklisted so that they can never obtain government employment. No acknowledgment is made of the crime, and relatives of victims are not compensated, but rather placed under police surveillance. Finally, large numbers of Chinese are forced to ¯ee overseas, where most remain. These forced eÂmigreÂs, by and large, are not marginal ®gures: they are former high of®cials, heads of research institutes, professors in Party academies, most of them raised on communismÐoriginally the most loyal and idealistic cadres of Mao's Communist movement. China's ruling Party has, in other words, been truncated, with consequences to which we shall presently turn. What might be called the ``liberal wing''ÐCommunists who took seriously democratic ideals of the early Mao yearsÐis gone. The followers of former premier Hu Yaobang are absolutely off stage (Hu believed economic and political reform should proceed in parallel; his death in April 1989 set off the ®rst of the protests that culminated in June). This large, disempowered group may well have been able to lead China out of the disastrous detour of communism and back into the mainstream of economic and political freedom. But they are not available, mostly imprisoned or living quietly in China or abroad. The victors are an entirely different group. The coalition that has ruled unconstitutionally from Beijing since 1989 consists of the military and security services, the politicians happy to work with them, and a group of intellectualsÐsome very high powered indeedÐwho believe that authoritarianism is the best path for China, even for reform. Economic change has been their forte, and they have brought in much money and investment and transformed the skylines of a number of cities. Urban Chinese today can get better food, buy more interesting newspapers, and generally enjoy a greater degree of personal freedom than at any time since 1949. These rulers are sometimes still called reformers even though that doesn't really ®t: what they are is opportunistic wielders of authority, who realize that good technical management of the economy is their only hopeÐand who, as they pursue that end with some success, crack down ruthlessly on dissent, even legally sanctioned dissent. By the mid-1990s this leadership group stabilized China and restored controlÐthough having taken to the streets, protesting by the millions, the Chinese people would never feel quite so powerless again as they had before witnessing or joining the democracy movement. Economically there was smooth, indeed very rapid, sailing. From being pariahs, the leaders became popular international ®gures: in London Jiang Zemin rode in a crystal coach normally reserved for royalty, while the British police (who had consulted beforehand with the Chinese) crushed pro-Tibet demonstrators with a most non-British ferocity (for which they were later condemned). The old numbers game got under way once more: if China can grow at the rate of 9 percent per Spring 2002
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Review Essay year for twenty years, then its economy (and its army) would soon be by far the biggest in the world. Indeed, just as Mao's elusive vision of a Communist utopia became a key to his legitimacy, so the vision of ``rising China''Ð sucking investment and jobs in from all directions, quickly mastering the latest technologies, military and commercial, piling up foreign exchange, ¯ooding the world with exports, and just as importantly, ®nally taking its place as a great power, or indeed the great powerÐhas been the cornerstone of Jiang's now very long period of rule. But is this vision any more realistic than was Mao's? The answer is dif®cult, because in Mao's day foreign visitors emerged from his China profoundly impressed and wrote books for which laudatory is a mild adjective. Likewise today, businessmen emerge after seeing Shanghai and Pudong, blinking and shaking their heads over the new skyscrapers and the vast numbers of construction cranes. The tree looks set to grow all the way to the sky. In fact, it is unlikely to do so. Some of China's growth is real, some of it is simple statistical falsi®cation. By all accounts it is out of balance. Generally, growth occurs when entrepreneurs are able to obtain capital, put it to its highest paid use, cash out at some point, and then pass their money on to other entrepreneurs who will carry on the cycle. That is not what is happening in China. Instead, foreign investment (easy to control politically) and massive loans from state banks to state-owned enterprises (which are no match for the private sector) are being favored, and true entrepreneurship being squeezed hard (though it continues to make strides). Much growth is actually investment and not pro®tÐpouring concrete adds to GDP, whether the ultimate structure earns money or not The rural sector, which spurted forward when communes were abolished, is now once again the backwater it has traditionally been in ChinaÐimpoverished, economically stagnant, and overpopulated. ``Reform'' in the cities is meanwhile swelling the ranks of the unemployed (most not easily retrained) to what some academicians estimate is the highest level in the entire history of China since 1949. Vigorous entrepreneurship just might create enough jobsÐbut the present statist, foreign dependent, and anti-entrepreneurial approach most certainly will not. The result? Floating populations of illegal migrants sleeping on the sidewalks of the coastal cities and eking out a bare existence, rising drug use and prostitution, and the sale of women and children. And general dissatisfaction: demonstrations of one sort or another are a daily occurrence, and recently there have been waves of bombings. One senses that, as in 1989, those who rule have no idea of what to do. China in the World Chen Jian points out that the Chinese Communist Party regularly invoked external threats to bolster its rule at home, the war in Korea being 400
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Review Essay but one example. One way of looking at China today is to see that same process in action. After all, the same basic con®guration of power continues in China unchanged from what it was in Mao's day. The Party and its leader claim absolute power; they rely upon the army and security services, not popular support. Nationalism and strength have a strong appeal, and true, a huge economy has grown around this core and it may have different interests, but traditionally security has always trumped economics. The institutional and political bases remain in place, in other words, for today's leaders to adopt the same approach Mao did: to use enemies abroad as the pretext to crush enemies within, and this is one way of reading Steven W. Mosher's book Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. Mosher is not someone most China watchers read: he ran into political dif®culties in his graduate research and was anathematized by several academic authorities; he is regularly outspoken and not quite comme il faut in the academic and Washington mainstreams. But I am not aware of anyone ever actually proving him wrong about a matter of importance: indeed his books, which deal not only with China but with Western writing about China, arguably provide a far better guide to China than do those that Kissinger and Nixon read to prepare for their trips in the 1970s (a mixed bag, good and bad, including Edgar Snow, Ross Terrill, Dennis Bloodworth, John Fairbank, C.P. Fitzgerald, Stuart Schram, and Andre Malraux: they are listed on page 1051 of Kissinger's White House Years). So his views demand attention. Contradictory claims to great power and victim status have characterized China's of®cial political rhetoric ever since 1989, and a belief in both has been relentlessly instilled in the Chinese people since the summer after the massacre, through a variety of new ceremonies (solemn ¯ag-raisings at Tiananmen Square) and a pervasive propaganda campaign of ``Patriotic Education.'' Much of this has convinced not only Chinese but also foreigners, who regularly descant on the humiliations China has long endured, most of which is nonsense, comparatively speaking. China was never colonized: India was. Yet one does not hear lectures from IndiansÐeven diplomatsÐ about the deep wounds and humiliations that the British (undoubtedly) in¯icted. Indians seem comfortable with the country they have now, get on with their lives and enterprises, and without forgetting their history, they are not imprisoned by it. But of course India is a free country, and a program like the one the Party is currently imposing on China would never win at the polls. But the Chinese have no choice. So they read and hear endlessly of an imaginary American plot somehow to frustrate its rise and deny to China its rightful place (notwithstanding the massive evidenceÐvast trade and investment, for exampleÐto the contrary) and are understandably indignant. And while hundreds of millions of Chinese live in absolute poverty, and though China faces no identi®able military threat (all its neighbors, even Spring 2002
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Review Essay Taiwan, seek friendship), tens of billions of dollars are being poured into advanced jets imported from Russia, new generations of submarines, ICBMs, nuclear warheads, and missiles speci®cally designed to hit U.S. aircraft carriers. The People's Liberation Army is the largest in the world, and that does not count the People's Armed Police, the auxiliary (mostly demobilized PLA) intended for use against China's own people. With plenty of money from trade, China is acquiring many state-of-the-art weapons, in a way profoundly disturbing to its neighbors. Why? Some say that the build-up is not real; it is simply routine modernization such as any country would carry out. Others say it is reactive: the United States, so the argument goes, arms Taiwan so China has no choice. But the United States has always been highly prudent in what it has supplied to Taiwan, and never the ®rst to introduce an advanced system (e.g., top-line ®ghters: the SU-27s bought from Russia antedated the U.S. sale of F-16s to Taiwan). My own view is that China's military build-up is intended to bolster state-sponsored nationalism, of which global power is a symbol, to defeat domestic liberalismÐthe same strategy Bismarck adopted when he was called by the Kaiser in 1862 to deal with the Liberals in the Diet who were holding up military appropriations. But I also see some merit in Mosher's view, which is that China seeks once again to exercise the sort of power it imagines it once exercised over AsiaÐbaquan or ``hegemony''Ðas in the days when the Chinese emperor invested the Vietnamese king and provided the calendar, and the Chinese capital generally served as a center of Asian civilization. Historians have picked apart most of this picture, which is usually referred to not as hegemony but as the system of ``tributary states''Ða phrase owed to the Chinese professor Jiang Tingfu and his American collaborator John Fairbank. But what matters here is the myth of gloire. Jiang and his colleagues have a certain idea of China, and it is not a modest one. In fact, if present trends are projected, no reason exists to imagine that China will, of its own accord, limit its military build-up or its ever expanding sphere of international operationsÐas it were, its grab for global power. China's military is developing along lines that could begin to bring it into the old Soviet league, and the international presence of a state traditionally thought of as inward looking is both extensive and slightly puzzling. China does not choose to be friends with the great nations of the worldÐthe Frances, the Germanys, the Japans. Its closest attentions are focused on outcasts: Milosevic's Serbia, scarcely a natural area of Chinese concern, received vast aid, including military and intelligence assistance; Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are part of the inner circle as well; Moscow is being patiently wooed, mostly with large sums of money for weapons and invocation of some sort of American threatÐand recent reports suggest that China, half a world away, is interested in acquiring the massive ex-Soviet signals intelligence installation at Lourdes in Cuba. As a policy serving China's 402
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Review Essay true national interestsÐpeace, development, education, etc.Ðthis approach makes little sense. But viewed in the power political terms that Chen Jian identi®es with Mao, a certain continuity is perhaps apparent. Of course, nothing is foreordained. China's military build-up is already eliciting unwelcome reactions, India's emergence as a nuclear power most importantly, probably the greatest strategic setback China has suffered since 1949, but also growing distrust in Japan and other Asian neighbors, as well as in Russia, Europe, and the United States. This brings unaccustomed new pressures to bear on Beijing. And then there is the economic question: can China afford all this? China's Economy During the boom years of the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that yes, China could afford all those weapons and all the new civilian infrastructure it was building, plus various prestige projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the new opera house in Beijing. Project 7 percent growth out inde®nitely, and you will scarcely lack funds in the future. But if China is really growing as robustly as the of®cial ®gures claim, then why has the government been running a de®cit and raising loans, for the express purpose of stimulating the economyÐ``pump priming''? In theory, at 7 percent growth rates no priming is necessary. The reason is simple: both exports and domestic consumption have been weak in China in recent quarters so ``it is the state that drives the economy.'' ``Walk,'' as they say, the state stimulus component out of the growth rate, and 7 percent becomes a more realistic 3 percent.11 How is that exaggerated growth rate being paid for? To the extent it is not simple statistical falsi®cation, as some economists think it may well be, it rests on borrowing. The latest reports suggest that the 2002 ®scal de®cit of the central government will be ``bloated'' even by the scarcely austere standards of the past several years, which is worrisome. The very narrow de®nition of state debt Beijing follows shows it at 15 percent of GDP, well below the traditional danger level of 20 percent. But add, as some Chinese economists do, a range of contingent but real liabilities, including the immense debts of the state banks, the unfunded pension obligations of the state companies, and so forth, and the ®gure is closer to 70 percent of GDP, which is a real problem.12 Not least, government banks have rendered themselves technically insolvent by lendingÐat Party instructionÐto stateowned enterprises that can never repay: the result is not only to undermine the banks, but also to deny capital to the private sector, which alone can provide the jobs China will need to absorb the growing ranks of unemployed. Even with 7 percent growth claimed, urban unemployment may grow, 11 12
China Watch 4.12 (Dec. 15, 2001), pp. 5±6. See ``China expects `bloated' 2002 budget de®cit,'' Financial Times, Dec. 19, 2001.
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Review Essay according to the Ministry for Labor and Social Security, from 3.4 percent at the end of the third quarter of 2001 to 4.5 percent by the end of 2002.13 Add to this World Trade Organization entry, now a reality. This will expose to competition a host of Chinese economic sectors from agriculture to manufacturing that have never had to compete and may not be able to do so. The result may well be to push the already shaky and overly leveraged Chinese economy over the edge, with profound social as well as economic consequences. This, at least, is the thesis of Gordon G. Chang's book provocatively titled The Coming Collapse of China. Chang is an American lawyer (his father emigrated from China) who spent nearly twenty years practicing law in China and Hong Kong, most recently as counsel to the Paul, Weiss ®rm in Shanghai. Prolonged, close contact with the reality of China persuaded him he had to write. When he ®nished the manuscript he showed it to a Chinese colleague who read it and said: ``That sounds right. Thank goodness someone is saying it''Ðor words to that effect. The book lays outÐand it is marvelously written, destined for classic statusÐwhat most China hands already know perfectly well, but which has not yet been fully grasped by policy circles and the recipients of of®cial hospitality. It is this: the vast changes since Mao's death in 1976 have changed China, for the better in many ways. Urban populations are better fed and housed; consumer goods are widely available; cable television gives you a choice of dozens of local stations from across the country (all state run, to be sure, but incomparably more interesting than before). Intellectuals are full of ideas and the sound of wrecking and construction continuesÐin Beijing, for exampleÐaround the clock. Yet nevertheless all is not well, in part precisely because of change. Rural areas have been left behind as the coast has boomed. No longer bound to the land by the slave plantation-style commune system or internal passports and ration cards, poor farmers and their families ¯ock to the cities to search for work. Meanwhile in the rustbeltÐall that remains of the massive investments China and the U.S.S.R. made in the 1950s in heavy industryÐplant after plant is closed and its workforce left to fend for itselfÐnotwithstanding the implicit contract of socialism, created when they were originally forced to abandon private enterprise and work for the state, decades ago. Street life features as much crime and vice as anywhere in the ``capitalist'' world, while the Party cadres who rule have mostly turned to self-enrichment. New buildings such as the vast new railroad station in Beijing fall apart before they are completed, while much of the money appropriated ends up, one suspects, in Geneva, or perhaps, ``round tripped'' through Hong Kong, as a phony ``foreign investment'' enjoying special treatment. Yet the government continues, seemingly oblivious, incapable of any policy beyond drift. This unsustainable course will have consequences. As Chang sums up: 13
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China Watch 4.12 (Dec. 15, 2001), pp. 5±6.
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Review Essay The Communist Party has struggled to keep up with great change over the last two decades, but now it is beginning to fail as it often cannot provide the basic needs of its people. Corruption and malfeasance erode the Party's support from small hamlet to great city. Central government leaders do not know what to do as the institutions built over ®ve decades become feeble. Social order in their nation is dissolving . . . The people are in motion now, and it is only a matter of time before they get what they want.'' (pp. 284±85)
One can agree with every word, except the concluding phrase. Evidence abounds of dissatisfactionÐriots, bombings, protests, and so forth are almost routine, as is the spectacle of abject deprivation on the doorsteps of great wealth in the cities. And undoubtedly the Chinese people are in motion: in China, abroad, in the Chinese media and television networks, many free of Communist control, that link together the vast overseas world of Chinese. But will they get what they want? They were in motion in 1949, after all, and look what they got then. The best hope is an engineered transition from dictatorship to democracy, such as Franco managed in Spain, and Chiang Ching-kuo in Taiwan, and which was being planned by certain Chinese leaders including the two premiers Hu Yaobang (now dead) and Zhao Ziyang (under house arrest). China needs constitutional rule. Many in Washington will tell you privately that the autocratic rule of the elite is better for China than would be democracy, and that letting farmers (or ``peasants'' as they are usually called) vote could only lead to disaster. But a farmer majority in a Chinese parliament would surely be a good thing. It would insist on more money for the poor and the provinces; for infrastructure, for schools, for hospitalsÐand less for the Olympics, ICBMs, and the space program. Like India, China would become a country whose leaders, seeking popular support, would actually visit remote rural villages instead of swanning around the world capitals, like Jiang Zemin, basking in high status and uncritical receptions. The problems associated with such constitutional transition are both forbidding and inescapable.14 The problem is that nothing worth reporting is happening on the political reform front. Quite the opposite: Jiang has reputedly broken with old and senior colleagues who have urged its necessity upon him. What this means is that when China changes, as Chang clearly sees it must, the change is likely to be unexpected, discontinuous, and without a planÐand it may make things worse. How might such change begin? Chang is aware of how easily the people can be aroused. We saw this demonstrated clearly, on worldwide television, in 1989, yet some seem not to have taken the lesson. China, as Chang remarks, is like a pool of gasoline waiting for a match. But in China, revolts from below are less common than was understood by recent generations of academic historians, for whom ``revolution'' was the watch14
For more, see my essay ``China's Coming Constitutional Challenges,'' Orbis, Winter 1995, pp. 19±35.
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Review Essay word. In China, disagreement at the top that ripple down through the society, polarizing it, has been far more common, not only under the Communists, but before themÐat least since the coup d'etat against the young reforming emperor in 1898 (he spent the rest of his life under house arrest in a tiny pavilion in the middle of a lake near the Forbidden City) and the succession disagreement within the military after the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916. Now another succession is looming. No one as strong as Mao or even Deng is anywhere on the horizon. It is hard to imagine how the hard, ambitious Communist leaders will agree to follow someone who is at best no stronger than they are; even harder to imagine even if they do, how such a leader will lead in the sense of developing policy and not just going with the wind, like Jiang. The alternatives are therefore genuine reform, chaos, or violence. The preferred scenario among China specialistsÐseamless transition, the asymptotic approach with China becoming democratic as time approaches in®nityÐis understandably popular, but unrealistic. Conclusion So where are we left? Notwithstanding all the problems covered in these books, things are generally better than they were under high communism. As a leading foreign banker in Beijing recently remarked to me: ``What China needs is just many more years of what we have now . . . reasonable stability, growth, order''Ðno mass movements, no campaigns, no wars, nothing over-ambitious. We can all share this sentiment. Yet China has now become a society where change is the order of the day. Economic change has been a positive despite the ¯aws of Party direction entailing waste of capital, smothering of entrepreneurship, endless and capricious Party interventions, and a pervasive corruption of a system of power responsible to no one. To Chen Jian and his colleagues we owe the important insight that such a system of power has an internal dynamic that drives foreign affairs as well. China's foreign policy ®ts poorly into the procrustean bed of ``realism'' instinctively embraced by most diplomatic analysts, nor does it ®t any better the ``we act, they react'' interpretation that even today rules in many intellectual circles, in the media, and not least in the Department of State and the Intelligence Agencies. What we see in Chen's book is ChinaÐor rather the Chinese Communist regimeÐacting, not unexpectedly, for its own reasons, reasons cast in the language of diplomacy and foreign affairs but driven in part by internal tensions and needs. Since Mao's death, the Chinese regime has been trying to ®nd its way back onto something like the highway to development and modernity, and with some success. Many of the changes made have been wide rangingÐ abolishing the communes, for example, which the farmers had begun to do 406
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Review Essay even before the of®cials signed off on it. Or permitting a limited amount of religious freedom. But the regime has consistently proved incapable of dealing with the consequences of such changesÐtens of millions of farmers on the road, looking for work; vast crowds thronging the newly reopened temples and cathedrals. Nor has it been able to summon up the internal political strength to push real reformÐfreedom and democracyÐthrough the institutional structures such as the National People's Congress, set up as instruments of Party control and thus obstacles to change even if the leaders wanted it. In its early years, communism believed that foreign connectionsÐ ``imperialism''Ðwere the real challenge, and so cut them all off. But China alone could not stand, particularly after the Soviets ceased to be supportive. So they turned outward. The greatest change so far has been entry into the WTO, which some Chinese no doubt hope will provide enough ``pressure from outside'' to push a genuine reform agenda forward. And so from a posture of rejecting the outside world in the last century, these same Chinese in the new century are hoping that the outside world will save them as they cannot save themselves. But let us not underestimate the task and its dif®culty. In the 1980s and even the early 1990s it may have made sense to talk about incremental and gradual change: state-owned enterprises becoming (state-controlled) corporations whose stock could be traded; elections at the village level, some real intellectual opening in the universities, the hope that all of these in®nitesimals would, when integrated, amount to something. But that was then. Now the situation has become pressing and unstable and the leaders who might have enforced real change, like Franco, using dictatorial power to a worthy end, have all departed the scene. The dif®culties of running an economy and maintaining order in the absence of either genuine law or genuine popular representation in governmentÐand China lacks bothÐare not just proof of certain political science theories, but genuine threats to Chinese cohesion and order. No one wants violence or chaos or bankruptcy or collapse in China. The world is hoping that somehow it will come right. But an observer attempting to be objective may be forgiven for embracing what one long-time student of Chinese ``law'' calls ``guarded pessimism.'' The task of reform while maintaining stability seems so immense as to be impossible. Yet the alternatives seem equally impossible. Sadly, perhaps tragically, China faces the paradox so memorably summed up for Sicily by Prince Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's brilliant novel, The Leopard: ``If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change.''
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Answers to Questions Raised by Reuters News Agency Correspondent Gamble, Sept. 27, 1945.
Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations in the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at FPRI. He is also Director of Asian Studies at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Congressionally-mandated U.S.±China Security Review Commission.Translations of Mao are from the new versions found in Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912±1949 (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, in press), of which volumes IX and X, edited by Stuart Schram and Arthur Waldron, will cover the years 1945±49.
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Review Essay Such words were very much what many in China wanted to hear. Suspicious of communism yet deeply unhappy with Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship, like their fathers and grandfathers in the late Qing dynasty, they hoped to see a China ruled, like other leading states of the world, in a constitutional fashionÐand Mao's unequivocal support for that won many waverers over. Of course, once in power, Mao acted very differently. Up to now few scholars have acknowledged or recognized just how powerfully Mao's subsequent careerÐand thus China's history during his nearly thirty years of unchallenged ruleÐwas affected by his betrayal of these democratic promises. The switch from the democratic program Mao presented as he sought power to the Stalinist program he imposed once he had won it created a structural requirement for some external threat to justify extraordinary measures and provide the occasion genuinely to win the Chinese people over to his vision of the future. Often this requirement was ®lled by con¯ict or war, by enemies internal and external that would provide the justi®cation for dictatorial rule in Communist-ruled China just as they did in the U.S.S.R.2 Indeed, in most Western accounts Mao has been portrayed as a ®gure for whom the question of legitimacy simply didn't arise. He was unchallenged, possessing like an emperor of old the mandates of Heaven. He was swept to power in 1949 by the masses of the Chinese people who adored him until his death, presaged by a great earthquake, like the passing of an emperor. Overlooked in these accounts are the facts that the Chinese civil war was close fought and its outcome far from predestined; that Mao was widely, if privately, criticized and hated while in power, among other things because of the ghastly human toll he took on the Chinese peopleÐmore than even the Japanese had managed to kill. And though his death was a shock, many a Chinese will tell you how he cried crocodile tears that day. Yet this key insightÐthat the domestic illegitimacy of the regime in China as in Russia led both states to adopt confrontational policies externallyÐhas never been fully accepted by students of international relations, not even today as avalanches of con®rmation pour from newly opened archives. Academia and informed public opinion cling to more America-centered explanations, above all the argument that China originally turned against the United States because the United States hurt its feelings by rejecting peace overtures. Also invoked are analyses based on Chinese national character, whether traditional (the ``Chinese world order'' and ``tributary states'' approach) or modern (Communist or Nationalist ideology). But only rarely has anyone taken internal factors as key, and these few have usually been scholars of Chinese heritage. Chen Jian, now professor of history at the University of Virginia, is one such, who has long worked in Chinese, Russian, and other newly available archives, guided by personal intuition about how China actually 2
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George Kennan laid out the dynamic very clearly in his famous ``X Article'' (Foreign Affairs, 1947).
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Review Essay operates. His latest book, Mao's China and the Cold War, is a milestone and a masterpiece. Clearly written and organized thematicallyÐa chapter on China and Vietnam, another on China and Russia, and so forth, and thus uniquely readable, it should lay to rest many misconceptions that have long plagued American understanding of China, while presenting an utterly persuasive and thoroughly documented new account of the original estrangement. This is the ®rst book anyone interested in the subject should read. In 1949 and 1950, for example, American diplomats remained in place in China, waiting to establish contact with the new rulers. Washington had written off Chiang's Nationalists, who had ¯ed to Taiwan. The stage seemed set for a smooth transition. Indeed much hope, and not only in China, was riding with Mao and his Party. When the Communists reached Shanghai, ``the rejoicing'' in the American Chamber of Commerce ``couldn't have been greater if the city had been liberated by American forces. American and British businessmen were convinced,'' reported the U.S. Consul-General, ``that they would do better under the Communists.'' So were a lot of Chinese.3 They would be disappointed. The Provisional Government announced in 1949 was not constituted by elections nor did it countenance power sharing. Many non-Party dignitaries were included in it, but in the supreme decision-making body, the Central People's Government Council, thirty-two out of sixty-three members were CommunistsÐa majority by only one, but an absolutely reliable one nevertheless. The military and security apparatus were, of course, completely under Communist control.4 This established the pattern. In March 1949, Mao told a Party meeting that ``We do not use the system of parliaments of the bourgeois republics, but rather the Soviet system of the proletarian republics.''5 Three months later criticism elicited one of his characteristic bursts of rhetoric: ``Autocrats! . . . That is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, which one could also call the people's democratic autocracy, the two terms mean the same thing, that is to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.'' Semantically convoluted, to be sure, particularly as Mao uses interchangeably the Chinese terms ``dictatorship'' (zhuanzheng) and ``despotism'' (ducai)Ðthough the second has been carefully edited out of of®cial English translations.6 This bait and switch tactic left many Chinese dissatis®ed and worried about the future. Then came the Communist invasion of South Korea, and the various incidents in the Taiwan Strait. Internal illegitimacy was to be cured by external 3
Noel Barber, Fall of Shanghai (New York: Coward McCann, 1979), p. 164. Juergen Domes, The Internal Politics of China 1949±1972 (New York: Praeger, 1973), pp. 23±4. 5 Conclusions at the Second Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Mar. 13, 1949, p. 199. 6 On The People's Democratic Dictatorship, June 30, 1949, p. 215. 4
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Review Essay success. As Chen puts it, ``Mao and his fellow CCP leaders could clearly sense that by ®rmly and successfully confronting `U.S. imperialist aggression' in Korea and Taiwan, they would be able to translate the tremendous pressure from without into dynamics that would help enhance the Chinese people's revolutionary momentum while legitimizing the CCPs authority as China's new ruler.'' (p. 87) And China would go to war as much for domestic as for external reasons, repeatedly during Mao's rule. The reason usually had little to do with the WestÐwhich Mao, who knew no foreign languages, had never visited (Moscow in the winter of 1949 was his only exposure to it)Ðand everything to do with his never-altogether-secure position at home. Mao and Missed Opportunities This fact has long been understood by Chinese but may come as a shock to some Westerners, for among those most completely taken in by Mao were several well respected Western writers: Edgar Snow, Jack Belden, Theodore White, even the redoubtable Barbara Tuchman, who penned the most eloquent statement of what, until recently, was an article of faith among most China specialists: that the democratically and Western-inclined Mao had been tragically alienated by sins of commission and omission from Washington and forced into the arms of Moscow, with the baleful consequences that ensued. As Japan's defeat neared, out of concern to neutralize the United States in the anticipated Chinese civil war, Mao approached American representatives, according to some reports, seeking an invitation to Washington.7 Suppose he had gone? Tuchman spun the de®nitive ``what if?'' in Foreign Affairs in 1972, just before the Nixon trip to China, asking what would have happened if Mao and Zhou Enlai had been able to persuade Roosevelt of their growing strength relative to the Central Government's. The result, she wrote, would have been the acceleration of the Communists' rise and the Kuomintang's fall, avoidance of three years of civil war, and the United States not incurring the ill-will of the ultimate winner of that war for its aiding the certain loser and thereby prolonging it. The cause for the imprisonment and deportation of American consular of®cials and the seizure of the U.S. consulate in Shenyang would therefore not have existed, and would not have hardened American ill-will toward the Communist government. The Chinese not having been moved to make common cause with the Soviet Union against the United States, the Korean War might never have occurred, nor ultimately Vietnam.8 For most of the past sixty years Western China scholarship on foreign policy has consisted either of anticipations or an elaboration of this thesis. For decades it was taken for granted as an unspoken article of faith in certain 7 8
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Prepare to Deal with the Civil War Situation Which is Certain to Arise, Aug. 4, 1945, pp. 1±2. Notes From China (New York: Collier, 1972), pp. 79±80.
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Review Essay quarters of the Department of State that the United States had got it wrong: that Americans should have been nicer to the Communists and dumped that mediocrity Chiang; that the United States started badly when it missed the friendly signals sent by the early Communist regime in 1949; that American failures to interpret the warnings so carefully conveyed by Beijing not to overstep in Korea led to disaster there.9 And then there was Vietnam: an indigenous revolutionary struggle into which we became embroiled in part out of a mistaken idea that China was somehow trying to expand its in¯uence there. The subtle Chinese repeatedly confronted the quiet or ugly American, and the result was disasterÐat least until they encountered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who established the current relationship, still in many eyes not quite what it should or could be. Or so the academic mainstream thought until the archives began to open up. Now Chen Jian can con®dently dismiss that whole elaborate edi®ce of the ``Lost Chance in China'' as a myth. Mao was a convinced revolutionary and Communist, who assumed as a matter of faith that revolutionary communism would win out: that, as he put it, ``the East Wind will prevail over the West Wind.'' In fact, it is not dif®cult to read Mao in the early years simply as another convinced Third World Communist and idealist, which is in fact what most of his colleagues really were. But as Chen shows, Mao was also different, a Chinese dictator in the mold of Stalin. After Stalin's death, for example, proposals that appeared to Mao's colleagues to be reasonable manifestations of Socialist Internationalism (e.g., cooperation in building and operating radars and submarines) seemed to Mao nothing more than foreign schemes to obtain control over China, to be resisted at all costs. Thanks to the memoirs of Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, and much other new material that has emerged about the Chairman since his death a quarter century ago, it is now clear that the man was far from the genial and affable chain-smoker whose interview with Edgar Snow published in 1938 had such a positive effect on public opinion. He kept up public appearances and fooled many foreigners who should have known better. But he did prove Lord Acton right: as Andrew Nathan puts it in his introduction to Dr. Li's memoir, ``Absolute power affected Mao's mental and physical health, his human relations, and, through these, his country and the world.''10 That Communist China was led by Mao, and not by a more orthodox and educated Communist such as Liu Shaoqi or Zhou undoubtedly made a big difference. The fact probably accounted for the Sino-Soviet dispute. And, ironically, it may well also help explain the survival of communism in China long after the Russians had put it to bed. In the beginning, the fate of 9 See Allen Whiting's RAND Corporation study, published as China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter to Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960). 10 Li Zhisui, The private life of Chairman Mao: The memoirs of Mao's personal physician Dr. Li Zhisui (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. ix±x.
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Review Essay communism in China was tied up with communism in Russia, but Mao gradually broke that connection and set it on its own Chinese foundations. The Soviet conquest of Manchuria in 1945 provided the base for Mao's subsequent conquest of China proper, and Stalin provided both weapons and logistical support. In Korea, a million dead Chinese helped save Stalin's foreign policy, which had assumed the United States would not react. The real trouble began with Khrushchev's ``secret speech'' of 1956, con®rming Stalin's crimes (the Chinese delegation was not invited) and threatening Mao's basic argument for his own power. He was intent on imposing the Soviet system: now the ``center'' in Moscow was in effect issuing a recall notice on the particular model of Stalinism he had just imported and was attempting to retail in China, and urging just the kind of candor and discussion that heÐwho had just lied massively to the Chinese people in order to get powerÐfeared most. That, plus the Soviet fear that Mao would drag them into a war with the United States over Taiwan, caused the fateful rupture. With the external buttresses of Soviet ideological validation and aid removed, Mao had to improvise his own ideology and his own economic system, which he did catastrophically with his Great Leap Forward (which cost tens of millions of lives to starvation), the promulgation of ``Mao Tsetung thought,'' and the renewed attacks on Taiwan's offshore islands. These created the internal tension required to justify the dictatorship. When the more orthodox Communists nevertheless attempted to sideline Mao after the Great Leap, they discovered that he had become such a symbol of legitimacy that he could not be criticized the way Khrushchev had StalinÐand this fact provided the leverage that Mao used to make a successful comeback in the disastrous Cultural Revolution, which conferred on him the godlike status he enjoyed until his death. Maoism, it turns out, was mostly sound and fury. It accomplished nothing of enduring value and did much damage. Success for China today means, effectively, reversing all his policies. Chen is clear about this. While the Communist state has failed, its fall might well lead to disintegration and civil war. So it must somehow be changed, ``derevolutionized'' as Chen puts it, even as it remains in power. This is an entirely domestic matter, albeit having potentially critical external consequences. But reform from above carried out in China is a tall order. Everyone hopes for the transformation of China, by a gradual process of internal reform, into a democratic state that can become, as Chen puts it, a true insider in a world of democratic states. The question is whether such a transformation is possible. Tiananmen, 1989 For more than two decades now we have been hearing that such a transformation of China was already under way, led by the Communist Party. 396
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Review Essay Wisely, so the argument goes, the Party has turned ®rst to reforming and modernizing the economyÐthus avoiding what some saw as Russia's disastrous mistake in ®rst taking down the Communist political command structureÐall leading to the much heralded prosperity of, for example, present day Shanghai. At the same time, gradual administrative and legal changes are reportedly streamlining administration, younger and more well educated cadres were coming to power, the range of permissible expression was expanding, and there was even some experimentation with democracy, albeit at the village level. Over time, so its advocates con®dently maintained, this gradual process, overseen by the Party, would thoroughly renovate China, making it a great economic and even military power within a few decades, and probably bringing democracy as well, though that prospect was usually seen as more distant. All in all it was a rather reassuring scenario and one containing substantial elements of truth. But is the Chinese Communist Party actually capable of leading this change? As the Tiananmen Papers make absolutely clear, the answer is both yes and no. The ``papers'' are a series of top-secret documents (almost certainly authentic) smuggled to the West that present the discussions at the highest level in 1989 over how to deal with the huge pro-democracy demonstrations. Those demonstrations for democracy were the largest in human history, and they swept across China, everywhere from the tiny desert oasis of Dunhuang in the far west to the great metropolises of Wuhan, Beijing, and Shanghai. Not surprisingly, even though they are now a non-topic, evidently they retain secret sympathizers in ChinaÐone of whom at least has all the clearances necessary to work with top secret documents and whose identity the secret police have not yet managed to establish. This fact alone ought to be enough to cause some nightmares for the current authorities. What we see in the Papers are two very different approaches. One set of leaders, including military leaders, opposed force absolutely and wanted a political solution, which would inevitably have meant dramatic political opening in the direction of accountability, if not immediate democracy. The other set wanted to put the demonstrations down by force and restore the Party's claim to absolute power. The discussions are fascinating and quite moving. First, we have a series of debates over martial law. The Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang, who favors compromise: I'm against imposing martial law in Beijing . . . It will only make things more complicated and more sharply confrontational . . . Even among the demonstrators, the vast majority are patriotic and support the Communist Party. Martial law could give us total control of the situation, yes, but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing's citizens and students. Where will that lead? . . . Given the crisis we now face at home and abroad, I think that one more big political mistake might well cost us our remaining legitimacy. (p. 192)
Following a split vote, Zhao attempts to resign but is dissuaded. Spring 2002
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Review Essay The decision will ultimately have to be made by the failing Deng Xiaoping, who detects foreign manipulation behind demonstrations that were patently authentic and is inclined to strike hard. ``Other than those of us here tonight, nobody seems even able to describe the problem correctly . . . The people who promote turmoil have been completely exposed. They've colluded with foreign forces; even the KMT in Taiwan has tried to meddle! Their goals are to overthrow our Party and our state. . .'' (p. 257) ``The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given encouragement . . . to the so-called democrats or opposition in ChinaÐpeople who in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation.'' (p. 358) (This dismaying tendency to attribute domestic problems to foreign machinations is standard in China.) Then comes a series of extra-legal decisionsÐdecisions that are not even made in accord with the Party's own rulesÐwhich do three things. First, they bring out the army, at the behest not of its commanders, but of the ``elders,'' senior Communists who remain the ultimate authority even long after retirement, and the army murders and arrests demonstrators by the thousands in Beijing and in smaller numbers elsewhere. This fact, widely covered in the international and even some Chinese media, is, however, ¯atly deniedÐand that ¯at denial has remained in force ever since. Beijing of®cially insists that accounts of what happened on June 4, 1989, are fabrications and slanders, but cannot present any remotely persuasive alternative narrative. The vain hope is that with time memory of the unpleasantness will fadeÐand to a degree it has. A whole generation of Chinese is now entering its teens which has no memory of it, and whatever stigma once attached to the atrocity has long since disappeared, as a steady stream of foreign leaders, businessmen, tourists, and investors clearly demonstrates. Second, the elders reshuf¯e the leadership and create a new government, headed by the hitherto second-tier ®gure Jiang Zemin of Shanghai, that takes of®ce (and has remained there) even though its creation was in violation of the laws of the People's Republic, which require that the Politburo Standing Committee make such decisions (p. 314). Third, and most importantly, the new regime purges and splits the Communist Party, eliminating the previously strong liberal wing. Zhao Ziyang, the man who had until the massacre been China's top leader, refuses to repent. He tells a meeting in the third week of June that he still believes that ``we must continue to pursue economic and political reform simultaneously; we cannot ignore political work . . . For years I've been a bold activist in economic reform but cautious in the area of political reform . . . But my thinking has changed in recent years. I now feel that political reform has to be a priority; if it is not made a priority, then not only will economic problems get harder to handle but all kinds of social and political problems will only get worse.'' (p. 442) For this Zhao is placed under strict house arrest in BeijingÐwhere he remains today, at age eighty. His top assistants, who 398
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Review Essay until June 4 had been planning genuine reform for China, are arrested and detained. Anyone remotely associated with the demonstrationsÐa very large number of ChineseÐis blacklisted so that they can never obtain government employment. No acknowledgment is made of the crime, and relatives of victims are not compensated, but rather placed under police surveillance. Finally, large numbers of Chinese are forced to ¯ee overseas, where most remain. These forced eÂmigreÂs, by and large, are not marginal ®gures: they are former high of®cials, heads of research institutes, professors in Party academies, most of them raised on communismÐoriginally the most loyal and idealistic cadres of Mao's Communist movement. China's ruling Party has, in other words, been truncated, with consequences to which we shall presently turn. What might be called the ``liberal wing''ÐCommunists who took seriously democratic ideals of the early Mao yearsÐis gone. The followers of former premier Hu Yaobang are absolutely off stage (Hu believed economic and political reform should proceed in parallel; his death in April 1989 set off the ®rst of the protests that culminated in June). This large, disempowered group may well have been able to lead China out of the disastrous detour of communism and back into the mainstream of economic and political freedom. But they are not available, mostly imprisoned or living quietly in China or abroad. The victors are an entirely different group. The coalition that has ruled unconstitutionally from Beijing since 1989 consists of the military and security services, the politicians happy to work with them, and a group of intellectualsÐsome very high powered indeedÐwho believe that authoritarianism is the best path for China, even for reform. Economic change has been their forte, and they have brought in much money and investment and transformed the skylines of a number of cities. Urban Chinese today can get better food, buy more interesting newspapers, and generally enjoy a greater degree of personal freedom than at any time since 1949. These rulers are sometimes still called reformers even though that doesn't really ®t: what they are is opportunistic wielders of authority, who realize that good technical management of the economy is their only hopeÐand who, as they pursue that end with some success, crack down ruthlessly on dissent, even legally sanctioned dissent. By the mid-1990s this leadership group stabilized China and restored controlÐthough having taken to the streets, protesting by the millions, the Chinese people would never feel quite so powerless again as they had before witnessing or joining the democracy movement. Economically there was smooth, indeed very rapid, sailing. From being pariahs, the leaders became popular international ®gures: in London Jiang Zemin rode in a crystal coach normally reserved for royalty, while the British police (who had consulted beforehand with the Chinese) crushed pro-Tibet demonstrators with a most non-British ferocity (for which they were later condemned). The old numbers game got under way once more: if China can grow at the rate of 9 percent per Spring 2002
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Review Essay year for twenty years, then its economy (and its army) would soon be by far the biggest in the world. Indeed, just as Mao's elusive vision of a Communist utopia became a key to his legitimacy, so the vision of ``rising China''Ð sucking investment and jobs in from all directions, quickly mastering the latest technologies, military and commercial, piling up foreign exchange, ¯ooding the world with exports, and just as importantly, ®nally taking its place as a great power, or indeed the great powerÐhas been the cornerstone of Jiang's now very long period of rule. But is this vision any more realistic than was Mao's? The answer is dif®cult, because in Mao's day foreign visitors emerged from his China profoundly impressed and wrote books for which laudatory is a mild adjective. Likewise today, businessmen emerge after seeing Shanghai and Pudong, blinking and shaking their heads over the new skyscrapers and the vast numbers of construction cranes. The tree looks set to grow all the way to the sky. In fact, it is unlikely to do so. Some of China's growth is real, some of it is simple statistical falsi®cation. By all accounts it is out of balance. Generally, growth occurs when entrepreneurs are able to obtain capital, put it to its highest paid use, cash out at some point, and then pass their money on to other entrepreneurs who will carry on the cycle. That is not what is happening in China. Instead, foreign investment (easy to control politically) and massive loans from state banks to state-owned enterprises (which are no match for the private sector) are being favored, and true entrepreneurship being squeezed hard (though it continues to make strides). Much growth is actually investment and not pro®tÐpouring concrete adds to GDP, whether the ultimate structure earns money or not The rural sector, which spurted forward when communes were abolished, is now once again the backwater it has traditionally been in ChinaÐimpoverished, economically stagnant, and overpopulated. ``Reform'' in the cities is meanwhile swelling the ranks of the unemployed (most not easily retrained) to what some academicians estimate is the highest level in the entire history of China since 1949. Vigorous entrepreneurship just might create enough jobsÐbut the present statist, foreign dependent, and anti-entrepreneurial approach most certainly will not. The result? Floating populations of illegal migrants sleeping on the sidewalks of the coastal cities and eking out a bare existence, rising drug use and prostitution, and the sale of women and children. And general dissatisfaction: demonstrations of one sort or another are a daily occurrence, and recently there have been waves of bombings. One senses that, as in 1989, those who rule have no idea of what to do. China in the World Chen Jian points out that the Chinese Communist Party regularly invoked external threats to bolster its rule at home, the war in Korea being 400
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Review Essay but one example. One way of looking at China today is to see that same process in action. After all, the same basic con®guration of power continues in China unchanged from what it was in Mao's day. The Party and its leader claim absolute power; they rely upon the army and security services, not popular support. Nationalism and strength have a strong appeal, and true, a huge economy has grown around this core and it may have different interests, but traditionally security has always trumped economics. The institutional and political bases remain in place, in other words, for today's leaders to adopt the same approach Mao did: to use enemies abroad as the pretext to crush enemies within, and this is one way of reading Steven W. Mosher's book Hegemon: China's Plan to Dominate Asia and the World. Mosher is not someone most China watchers read: he ran into political dif®culties in his graduate research and was anathematized by several academic authorities; he is regularly outspoken and not quite comme il faut in the academic and Washington mainstreams. But I am not aware of anyone ever actually proving him wrong about a matter of importance: indeed his books, which deal not only with China but with Western writing about China, arguably provide a far better guide to China than do those that Kissinger and Nixon read to prepare for their trips in the 1970s (a mixed bag, good and bad, including Edgar Snow, Ross Terrill, Dennis Bloodworth, John Fairbank, C.P. Fitzgerald, Stuart Schram, and Andre Malraux: they are listed on page 1051 of Kissinger's White House Years). So his views demand attention. Contradictory claims to great power and victim status have characterized China's of®cial political rhetoric ever since 1989, and a belief in both has been relentlessly instilled in the Chinese people since the summer after the massacre, through a variety of new ceremonies (solemn ¯ag-raisings at Tiananmen Square) and a pervasive propaganda campaign of ``Patriotic Education.'' Much of this has convinced not only Chinese but also foreigners, who regularly descant on the humiliations China has long endured, most of which is nonsense, comparatively speaking. China was never colonized: India was. Yet one does not hear lectures from IndiansÐeven diplomatsÐ about the deep wounds and humiliations that the British (undoubtedly) in¯icted. Indians seem comfortable with the country they have now, get on with their lives and enterprises, and without forgetting their history, they are not imprisoned by it. But of course India is a free country, and a program like the one the Party is currently imposing on China would never win at the polls. But the Chinese have no choice. So they read and hear endlessly of an imaginary American plot somehow to frustrate its rise and deny to China its rightful place (notwithstanding the massive evidenceÐvast trade and investment, for exampleÐto the contrary) and are understandably indignant. And while hundreds of millions of Chinese live in absolute poverty, and though China faces no identi®able military threat (all its neighbors, even Spring 2002
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Review Essay Taiwan, seek friendship), tens of billions of dollars are being poured into advanced jets imported from Russia, new generations of submarines, ICBMs, nuclear warheads, and missiles speci®cally designed to hit U.S. aircraft carriers. The People's Liberation Army is the largest in the world, and that does not count the People's Armed Police, the auxiliary (mostly demobilized PLA) intended for use against China's own people. With plenty of money from trade, China is acquiring many state-of-the-art weapons, in a way profoundly disturbing to its neighbors. Why? Some say that the build-up is not real; it is simply routine modernization such as any country would carry out. Others say it is reactive: the United States, so the argument goes, arms Taiwan so China has no choice. But the United States has always been highly prudent in what it has supplied to Taiwan, and never the ®rst to introduce an advanced system (e.g., top-line ®ghters: the SU-27s bought from Russia antedated the U.S. sale of F-16s to Taiwan). My own view is that China's military build-up is intended to bolster state-sponsored nationalism, of which global power is a symbol, to defeat domestic liberalismÐthe same strategy Bismarck adopted when he was called by the Kaiser in 1862 to deal with the Liberals in the Diet who were holding up military appropriations. But I also see some merit in Mosher's view, which is that China seeks once again to exercise the sort of power it imagines it once exercised over AsiaÐbaquan or ``hegemony''Ðas in the days when the Chinese emperor invested the Vietnamese king and provided the calendar, and the Chinese capital generally served as a center of Asian civilization. Historians have picked apart most of this picture, which is usually referred to not as hegemony but as the system of ``tributary states''Ða phrase owed to the Chinese professor Jiang Tingfu and his American collaborator John Fairbank. But what matters here is the myth of gloire. Jiang and his colleagues have a certain idea of China, and it is not a modest one. In fact, if present trends are projected, no reason exists to imagine that China will, of its own accord, limit its military build-up or its ever expanding sphere of international operationsÐas it were, its grab for global power. China's military is developing along lines that could begin to bring it into the old Soviet league, and the international presence of a state traditionally thought of as inward looking is both extensive and slightly puzzling. China does not choose to be friends with the great nations of the worldÐthe Frances, the Germanys, the Japans. Its closest attentions are focused on outcasts: Milosevic's Serbia, scarcely a natural area of Chinese concern, received vast aid, including military and intelligence assistance; Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are part of the inner circle as well; Moscow is being patiently wooed, mostly with large sums of money for weapons and invocation of some sort of American threatÐand recent reports suggest that China, half a world away, is interested in acquiring the massive ex-Soviet signals intelligence installation at Lourdes in Cuba. As a policy serving China's 402
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Review Essay true national interestsÐpeace, development, education, etc.Ðthis approach makes little sense. But viewed in the power political terms that Chen Jian identi®es with Mao, a certain continuity is perhaps apparent. Of course, nothing is foreordained. China's military build-up is already eliciting unwelcome reactions, India's emergence as a nuclear power most importantly, probably the greatest strategic setback China has suffered since 1949, but also growing distrust in Japan and other Asian neighbors, as well as in Russia, Europe, and the United States. This brings unaccustomed new pressures to bear on Beijing. And then there is the economic question: can China afford all this? China's Economy During the boom years of the 1990s, the conventional wisdom was that yes, China could afford all those weapons and all the new civilian infrastructure it was building, plus various prestige projects such as the Three Gorges Dam and the new opera house in Beijing. Project 7 percent growth out inde®nitely, and you will scarcely lack funds in the future. But if China is really growing as robustly as the of®cial ®gures claim, then why has the government been running a de®cit and raising loans, for the express purpose of stimulating the economyÐ``pump priming''? In theory, at 7 percent growth rates no priming is necessary. The reason is simple: both exports and domestic consumption have been weak in China in recent quarters so ``it is the state that drives the economy.'' ``Walk,'' as they say, the state stimulus component out of the growth rate, and 7 percent becomes a more realistic 3 percent.11 How is that exaggerated growth rate being paid for? To the extent it is not simple statistical falsi®cation, as some economists think it may well be, it rests on borrowing. The latest reports suggest that the 2002 ®scal de®cit of the central government will be ``bloated'' even by the scarcely austere standards of the past several years, which is worrisome. The very narrow de®nition of state debt Beijing follows shows it at 15 percent of GDP, well below the traditional danger level of 20 percent. But add, as some Chinese economists do, a range of contingent but real liabilities, including the immense debts of the state banks, the unfunded pension obligations of the state companies, and so forth, and the ®gure is closer to 70 percent of GDP, which is a real problem.12 Not least, government banks have rendered themselves technically insolvent by lendingÐat Party instructionÐto stateowned enterprises that can never repay: the result is not only to undermine the banks, but also to deny capital to the private sector, which alone can provide the jobs China will need to absorb the growing ranks of unemployed. Even with 7 percent growth claimed, urban unemployment may grow, 11 12
China Watch 4.12 (Dec. 15, 2001), pp. 5±6. See ``China expects `bloated' 2002 budget de®cit,'' Financial Times, Dec. 19, 2001.
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Review Essay according to the Ministry for Labor and Social Security, from 3.4 percent at the end of the third quarter of 2001 to 4.5 percent by the end of 2002.13 Add to this World Trade Organization entry, now a reality. This will expose to competition a host of Chinese economic sectors from agriculture to manufacturing that have never had to compete and may not be able to do so. The result may well be to push the already shaky and overly leveraged Chinese economy over the edge, with profound social as well as economic consequences. This, at least, is the thesis of Gordon G. Chang's book provocatively titled The Coming Collapse of China. Chang is an American lawyer (his father emigrated from China) who spent nearly twenty years practicing law in China and Hong Kong, most recently as counsel to the Paul, Weiss ®rm in Shanghai. Prolonged, close contact with the reality of China persuaded him he had to write. When he ®nished the manuscript he showed it to a Chinese colleague who read it and said: ``That sounds right. Thank goodness someone is saying it''Ðor words to that effect. The book lays outÐand it is marvelously written, destined for classic statusÐwhat most China hands already know perfectly well, but which has not yet been fully grasped by policy circles and the recipients of of®cial hospitality. It is this: the vast changes since Mao's death in 1976 have changed China, for the better in many ways. Urban populations are better fed and housed; consumer goods are widely available; cable television gives you a choice of dozens of local stations from across the country (all state run, to be sure, but incomparably more interesting than before). Intellectuals are full of ideas and the sound of wrecking and construction continuesÐin Beijing, for exampleÐaround the clock. Yet nevertheless all is not well, in part precisely because of change. Rural areas have been left behind as the coast has boomed. No longer bound to the land by the slave plantation-style commune system or internal passports and ration cards, poor farmers and their families ¯ock to the cities to search for work. Meanwhile in the rustbeltÐall that remains of the massive investments China and the U.S.S.R. made in the 1950s in heavy industryÐplant after plant is closed and its workforce left to fend for itselfÐnotwithstanding the implicit contract of socialism, created when they were originally forced to abandon private enterprise and work for the state, decades ago. Street life features as much crime and vice as anywhere in the ``capitalist'' world, while the Party cadres who rule have mostly turned to self-enrichment. New buildings such as the vast new railroad station in Beijing fall apart before they are completed, while much of the money appropriated ends up, one suspects, in Geneva, or perhaps, ``round tripped'' through Hong Kong, as a phony ``foreign investment'' enjoying special treatment. Yet the government continues, seemingly oblivious, incapable of any policy beyond drift. This unsustainable course will have consequences. As Chang sums up: 13
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China Watch 4.12 (Dec. 15, 2001), pp. 5±6.
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Review Essay The Communist Party has struggled to keep up with great change over the last two decades, but now it is beginning to fail as it often cannot provide the basic needs of its people. Corruption and malfeasance erode the Party's support from small hamlet to great city. Central government leaders do not know what to do as the institutions built over ®ve decades become feeble. Social order in their nation is dissolving . . . The people are in motion now, and it is only a matter of time before they get what they want.'' (pp. 284±85)
One can agree with every word, except the concluding phrase. Evidence abounds of dissatisfactionÐriots, bombings, protests, and so forth are almost routine, as is the spectacle of abject deprivation on the doorsteps of great wealth in the cities. And undoubtedly the Chinese people are in motion: in China, abroad, in the Chinese media and television networks, many free of Communist control, that link together the vast overseas world of Chinese. But will they get what they want? They were in motion in 1949, after all, and look what they got then. The best hope is an engineered transition from dictatorship to democracy, such as Franco managed in Spain, and Chiang Ching-kuo in Taiwan, and which was being planned by certain Chinese leaders including the two premiers Hu Yaobang (now dead) and Zhao Ziyang (under house arrest). China needs constitutional rule. Many in Washington will tell you privately that the autocratic rule of the elite is better for China than would be democracy, and that letting farmers (or ``peasants'' as they are usually called) vote could only lead to disaster. But a farmer majority in a Chinese parliament would surely be a good thing. It would insist on more money for the poor and the provinces; for infrastructure, for schools, for hospitalsÐand less for the Olympics, ICBMs, and the space program. Like India, China would become a country whose leaders, seeking popular support, would actually visit remote rural villages instead of swanning around the world capitals, like Jiang Zemin, basking in high status and uncritical receptions. The problems associated with such constitutional transition are both forbidding and inescapable.14 The problem is that nothing worth reporting is happening on the political reform front. Quite the opposite: Jiang has reputedly broken with old and senior colleagues who have urged its necessity upon him. What this means is that when China changes, as Chang clearly sees it must, the change is likely to be unexpected, discontinuous, and without a planÐand it may make things worse. How might such change begin? Chang is aware of how easily the people can be aroused. We saw this demonstrated clearly, on worldwide television, in 1989, yet some seem not to have taken the lesson. China, as Chang remarks, is like a pool of gasoline waiting for a match. But in China, revolts from below are less common than was understood by recent generations of academic historians, for whom ``revolution'' was the watch14
For more, see my essay ``China's Coming Constitutional Challenges,'' Orbis, Winter 1995, pp. 19±35.
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Review Essay word. In China, disagreement at the top that ripple down through the society, polarizing it, has been far more common, not only under the Communists, but before themÐat least since the coup d'etat against the young reforming emperor in 1898 (he spent the rest of his life under house arrest in a tiny pavilion in the middle of a lake near the Forbidden City) and the succession disagreement within the military after the death of Yuan Shikai in 1916. Now another succession is looming. No one as strong as Mao or even Deng is anywhere on the horizon. It is hard to imagine how the hard, ambitious Communist leaders will agree to follow someone who is at best no stronger than they are; even harder to imagine even if they do, how such a leader will lead in the sense of developing policy and not just going with the wind, like Jiang. The alternatives are therefore genuine reform, chaos, or violence. The preferred scenario among China specialistsÐseamless transition, the asymptotic approach with China becoming democratic as time approaches in®nityÐis understandably popular, but unrealistic. Conclusion So where are we left? Notwithstanding all the problems covered in these books, things are generally better than they were under high communism. As a leading foreign banker in Beijing recently remarked to me: ``What China needs is just many more years of what we have now . . . reasonable stability, growth, order''Ðno mass movements, no campaigns, no wars, nothing over-ambitious. We can all share this sentiment. Yet China has now become a society where change is the order of the day. Economic change has been a positive despite the ¯aws of Party direction entailing waste of capital, smothering of entrepreneurship, endless and capricious Party interventions, and a pervasive corruption of a system of power responsible to no one. To Chen Jian and his colleagues we owe the important insight that such a system of power has an internal dynamic that drives foreign affairs as well. China's foreign policy ®ts poorly into the procrustean bed of ``realism'' instinctively embraced by most diplomatic analysts, nor does it ®t any better the ``we act, they react'' interpretation that even today rules in many intellectual circles, in the media, and not least in the Department of State and the Intelligence Agencies. What we see in Chen's book is ChinaÐor rather the Chinese Communist regimeÐacting, not unexpectedly, for its own reasons, reasons cast in the language of diplomacy and foreign affairs but driven in part by internal tensions and needs. Since Mao's death, the Chinese regime has been trying to ®nd its way back onto something like the highway to development and modernity, and with some success. Many of the changes made have been wide rangingÐ abolishing the communes, for example, which the farmers had begun to do 406
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Review Essay even before the of®cials signed off on it. Or permitting a limited amount of religious freedom. But the regime has consistently proved incapable of dealing with the consequences of such changesÐtens of millions of farmers on the road, looking for work; vast crowds thronging the newly reopened temples and cathedrals. Nor has it been able to summon up the internal political strength to push real reformÐfreedom and democracyÐthrough the institutional structures such as the National People's Congress, set up as instruments of Party control and thus obstacles to change even if the leaders wanted it. In its early years, communism believed that foreign connectionsÐ ``imperialism''Ðwere the real challenge, and so cut them all off. But China alone could not stand, particularly after the Soviets ceased to be supportive. So they turned outward. The greatest change so far has been entry into the WTO, which some Chinese no doubt hope will provide enough ``pressure from outside'' to push a genuine reform agenda forward. And so from a posture of rejecting the outside world in the last century, these same Chinese in the new century are hoping that the outside world will save them as they cannot save themselves. But let us not underestimate the task and its dif®culty. In the 1980s and even the early 1990s it may have made sense to talk about incremental and gradual change: state-owned enterprises becoming (state-controlled) corporations whose stock could be traded; elections at the village level, some real intellectual opening in the universities, the hope that all of these in®nitesimals would, when integrated, amount to something. But that was then. Now the situation has become pressing and unstable and the leaders who might have enforced real change, like Franco, using dictatorial power to a worthy end, have all departed the scene. The dif®culties of running an economy and maintaining order in the absence of either genuine law or genuine popular representation in governmentÐand China lacks bothÐare not just proof of certain political science theories, but genuine threats to Chinese cohesion and order. No one wants violence or chaos or bankruptcy or collapse in China. The world is hoping that somehow it will come right. But an observer attempting to be objective may be forgiven for embracing what one long-time student of Chinese ``law'' calls ``guarded pessimism.'' The task of reform while maintaining stability seems so immense as to be impossible. Yet the alternatives seem equally impossible. Sadly, perhaps tragically, China faces the paradox so memorably summed up for Sicily by Prince Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's brilliant novel, The Leopard: ``If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change.''
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