Is China Changing Direction?

Many China watchers seem to have come to the conclusion that China is no longer on the road toward moderate, semi-democratic liberality, but is passing into a point of no return toward permanent strongman dictatorship.  

The change is clearly related to Trump’s election, although the reasons why this is true are somewhat complex.  The event that most illustrates this sea change is the recent CCP decision to remove the term limits on its Premier.  Everyone seems to assume that this is solely Xi Jinping's decision and that he wants to be the "Maximum Leader" for life, whether as Premier, head of the military or Party Chairman or all three.  But, as far as western analysts go, no one really knows exactly why this was done, or even if it is definitely a done deal. Nor does anyone know what it really means for China’s future.

There is a multitude of China pessimists on the scene now, you see them on Fox and some of the financial networks. They have been emboldened to criticise those who had more or less subscribed to the theory that as China’s middle class prospers and becomes educated and connected in various ways with the west, that it would slowly become more democratic, and liberal regarding human rights, censorship, and economic policy.  

While I worry about recent trends being fostered by Beijing, I am not convinced that there will be a major retrenchment in the political culture that has taken hold there, especially in the affluent cities. China has come too far and is too highly integrated with the west to risk becoming isolated again.  Relationships on every level are still in place, and while the computerized control of information is pervasive (not just in China), computerized tools, such as private VPN's needed for business, also allow people to know more about what is going on both inside and outside their country. That newly minted class of professionals doesn’t and I believe will not accept blatant propaganda anymore. People can only live with falsehoods so much before the absurdity can no longer be tolerated. I do believe this is true in China, but that it will express itself differently than how we would expect it to unfold in the West.

We can't fool ourselves and whitewash history. Ten thousand people died in the streets of Beijing in June 1989, and the Chinese people, for the most part, know that. But those events proved that they are not a fearful people, and they don’t have infinite patience, particularly if they begin to lose any ground economically. There are real limits to what the CCP can do.

Perhaps it is time to change the context of the conversation. The United States has been the prime mover in China’s sudden rise and in my opinion, especially on a people-to-people level, the Chinese know and appreciate this.  They know we were responsible for beating Japan in 1945 and ending its occupation of China.  The US gradually opened its markets, its universities, and its corporations to China over the last 30 years.  In the 19th Century, the US was perhaps the least egregious in its grabbiness toward the weakened Qing Dynasty. We never had any territorial claims on China, and in fact, John Hay’s Open Door policy was the only Western initiative that respected China's administrative and territorial integrity.  In many ways, China’s reclamation of its own destiny began with that.

The CCP has moved on from its revolutionary paranoia and jingoism and now for better or worse, represents historical China. The Party functionaries are chosen primarily by merit now and they understand the importance of stability and continuity in its relationships with the outside world. Taking the long view, China through its history has not had an inclination toward far-flung aggression.  They eventually overwhelmed Genghis Khan's Mongols by absorbing them, and they primarily see their real power to be based on its way of life and its people. While in the long run, this might actually be more threatening to "our way of life", that is something future generations will have to decide based on the cards they have to play.  One thing we do know is China is and will continue to be a fact of life. I am convinced our progeny will be worse off if we position ourselves as an enemy of China. 

China is really a vulnerable and fragile country, and that also will continue to be a fact. Its first responsibility is to feed its own population and to manage their own wealth gap that has massively widened in the last decade.  In that regard, they are not out of the woods yet, in spite of their fat bank accounts. It is a country at great risk for devastating drought, as its three major rivers all are sourced within a few hundred miles of each other in the Himalayas.  On their borders, they have potentially powerful and at times unfriendly neighbors in India and Russia as well as a host of smaller powers (Vietnam, Korea, Japan, even Taiwan) that are perhaps more dangerous.  China has very legitimate security concerns that have little or nothing to do with the United States.

China absolutely needs to keep exporting and depends on free navigation of the seas. While they are building a new navy, they are decades away from being able to militarily threaten the US, nor does that appear to be their aim.  Our two economies are in a symbiotic relationship, (or if you prefer, a mutual death grip, the fight between the snipe and the clam, 鹬蚌相争.)  This relationship between China and the US was Henry Kissinger’s legacy project in many ways, and if you read his book On China, published in 2011, you can see that while understanding the dangers, he doesn’t think that conflict is inevitable. 

We have to continue to forge a peaceful relationship with China. We have come too far to bail out now.   China will sink into chaos if we suddenly stopped buying stuff from them, and our bond markets will collapse if they stopped buying our financial paper.  Anyone who wants to take us to that point, (as Trump seems to with his tariff proposals) is the enemy of the majority of Americans who would (at best case) be sunk into penury as a result of those actions.  

It is true the United States soon won’t have overwhelming and unchallengeable power in East Asia.  To that I say, welcome to the normal course of history America. The last seventy years of American dominance has been the exception to history, and it is unsustainable. We are going to need sophisticated diplomats and a coherent long-term policy, that is clearly understood by all if our children are to thrive in the coming century. China, or any other country for that matter, has a right not be subject to threat and intimidation, and when we announce the kind of military expansion Trump is calling for, that is what he is signaling.   

If we do make it to a post-Trump era, we will have to become a normal nation that lives with the rest of the world as a neighbor, hopefully in a measure of peace and friendship.  The alternative is to live in a militarized state, with no say in the larger existential questions that hang over our society.  And if that alternative is the course we choose, then what exactly is it that we were complaining about regarding China?