While recognizing China's ascent toward the pinacle of global power, it remains important to remember that it is not there yet and there are still some major hurdles remaining. In fact, in an attempt to ease his relationship with George Bush, Hu Jintao recently confided that the Chinese government is presently too concerned with a lot of internal problems to focus overly much attention on expanding its global political power. In other words, he admited that China is not yet ready to confront the United States for global dominance and that China is still very much a developing country, albeit a very big and exceptional one.
In fact, many of the internal problems Hu pointed to mirror some of those discussed in this blog. China's size is its singular source of strength but also of difficulties. Electric power, environmental destruction, health care, rural poverty and underdevelopment are common problems in developing countries but in China these problems occur on an unprecidented scale. In fact, the very size of these problems is such that they cannot nessisarily be addressed simply by scaling up the traditional solutions. But let's put these problems aside and look at another way in which China is a significant exception and which seems to me to have a greater potential to truly upset the internal order of Chinese society.
It is often observed that there is a high degree of correlation between economic and social progress. In the developed world, times of rapid social progress tend to coincide with periods of economic prosperity (take, for instance, the civil rights movement in America which occured during the post-war boom years of the fifties and sixties). Perhaps more importantly, this relationship holds across changes in place as well as changes in time - countries with higher degress of personal and civic freedom tend to be those with higher levels of economic growth and development.
I once came across a "golf course theory of global conflict" which proposed an inverse relationship between incidence of golf courses and of war, which is to say that countries with more golf courses tend to go to war less often and almost never go to war with other countries with a lot of golf courses. Of course, this theory is intended to be somwhat humourous, but it bears out quite well in fact. This is essentially because golf courses are a pretty good proxy for large amounts of leisure and therefore for a high level of economic development, as well as for Westernization. So in other words we could simply say that rich Westernized countries don't go to war very much and almost never go to war with each other.
We could similarly posit a "gadget theory of social freedoms" linking the number of new electronic gadgets purchased by the average person every year to the relative level of social liberties in the society. In this case, gadget purchases are effectively standing in for purchasing power, which is in turn highly correlated overal prosperity (both in terms of income level and income growth). The reasons for this are potentially complex. Economic growth is often assumed to depend on market freedoms as well as on adequate and fair policing; these in turn tend to either cause or result from a free and just society. In The Moral Concequences of Economic Growth Benjamin Friedman proposes the converse, that growth tends to make people happier and more willing to extend help and privelages to others, especially because growth tends to make job competition less fierce by making it easier to get ahead.
Regardless of the reasons, we expect countries with growing prosperity to also expand both personal and civil liberties. By both Friedman's formal comparison of growth rates and my own informal counts of cell phones and MP3 players, this trend seems to bear out. Look at Korea for example: in the South, more and better cell phones and commesurately expanding social liberties; in the North, no cell phones, no freedom. By both of these standards, however, China stands as a major exception; it stands for many practical purposes as the exception.
Why is China such a significant exception? To answer this question, at least in part, we should first look at a time when China was not such a big exception. During the 1980s, following the exconomic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping, China did in fact appear to be on course to expand social and political freedoms as well. Over the course of the decade, there was a continuing push-pull between the progressive and conservative wings of the Chinese Communist Party; first they would give more freedoms, then they would decide they had gone too far and take some back. Overall, the result of this was as sort of "two steps forward one step back" that ultimately was making a slow sort of progress. This was, of course, until the events at Tian'anmen Square.
As pundits like to predict, the gradual liberalization of China brought increased calls for further liberalization. In 1989 this took the form of pro-democracy demostrations by students in Beijing. This type of mass movement made the government very nervous and ultimately led to a major crackdown. Since the crackdown, students have been very wary of demostrating against the government, although in the past several years there has been a steep increase in the number and degree of protest from other segments of society (especially farmers). The received wisdom is that Chinse students were faced on the one hand with the threat of severe crackdowns if they continued to make demands of the government and on the other hand with the prospect of an increasingly promising economy and job market; in this context, they made the obvious choice.
In other words, the CCP discovered that at least a temporary way out of the pressure for liberalization was to make sure that the bulk of students were upwardly mobile and therefore had an invested interest in the maintenence of the current social order. So long as the educated classes remained content with making money, they would not make other demands upon the state. The rest of society, for its part, is easy to keep isolated and unable to form a united movement by the simple policy of inducting any overly ambitious or capable individual into the party structure. As long as the protests remain rural and disconnected, the CCP's control of the state and its resistance to liberalization is safe. If the expanding educated class starts to see lessining prospects for upward mobility, then the Party may be in trouble and China may cease to be the exception. There are some signs that this trouble is on the horizon.
I have to go to class. I will post part 2, with my 3 anecdotal revelations and what i view as their concequences as soon as I get the chance.
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