Author: Jim Sojourner

More Shambaugh and American democracy through the lens of environmental crisis

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Foreign Policy has an excellent reader discussing that Shambaugh piece about China’s future.

From Ho-fung Hung at Johns Hopkins, this is a key point:

Finally, there is no evidence that the biggest and most important political constituency in China — the rising urban bourgeoisie — has much interest in changing the system. In my conversations with members of this class, I hear many complaints, but more generally a satisfaction with the material progress China has made in the last two decades. Except for a tiny group of brave dissidents, this group in general displays little interest in political reform and none in democracy. One reason may be that they find uninspiring the record of democratic governance in other big Asian countries, such as India. More important is probably the fear that in a representative system, the interests of the urban bourgeoisie (at most 25 percent of the population) would lose out to those of the rural masses.

The party may well be somewhat insecure, but the only force that might plausibly unseat it is more insecure still.

It’s also interesting to consider what kind of model American-style democracy provides. Undoubtedly, China faces some enormous challenges, most worryingly the environmental catastrophe in which we live but also a bevy of others, economic and social. To tackle these problems, the government is going to have summon massive willpower, spend substantial political capital, and force reforms through the often-sclerotic systems. It won’t be easy and it will make a lot of people unhappy.

When faced with, for example, the air, water, and soil pollution that threaten to make parts of China nigh unlivable unless something colossal and immediate is done to stop it, if you’re the Chinese leadership which model looks best to you? A system like America’s that seems to spend most of its willpower and political capital squabbling about the president’s religion? A system that is so deeply ideologically divided that it cannot pass even the simplest of legislation? A system that makes international news when its legislators usurp the president’s authority to send pedantic and poorly written letters to the leaders of other countries? A system the primary purpose of which might seem to be election campaigning rather than governing? A system that even at its best is a messy and slow and given to factionalism?

Or, if you’re the Chinese leadership, does embracing such a system seem like lunacy, especially given the scale of your country’s challenges?

I also think that Shambaugh is wrong — or at least not emphatic enough — about the primary cause of the flight of money, people, and brains out of China.

My students never stop talking about the pollution. In fact, it’s often difficult to get them to say anything positive about Beijing, so much does the pollution cloud their feelings about life here. Nearly without exception, they want to leave China someday soon, and nearly without exception, the biggest reason is not economic or educational but environmental. If that’s what’s on their minds, it’s on their parents’ minds, too. It’s heavy on the mind of the urban bourgeoisie.

Unless the government can find a way to make China livable again, those cracks that Shambaugh points to will continue to widen. The Chinese leadership knows that, and it simply doesn’t see political liberalization as a good way to seal them back up. It may be right.

The Chinese crack-up? A few perspectives.

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I just caught wind yesterday of this article by one of the world’s top Chinese politics scholars, David Shambaugh.

The whole thing is worth a close read, but the thrust of his argument:

Despite appearances, China’s political system is badly broken, and nobody knows it better than the Communist Party itself. China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping, is hoping that a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party’s rule. He is determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party’s collapse. But instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr. Xi may well wind up having the same effect. His despotism is severely stressing China’s system and society—and bringing it closer to a breaking point.

…

The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think. We don’t know what the pathway from now until the end will look like, of course. It will probably be highly unstable and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way, those inside of it will play along—thus contributing to the facade of stability.

Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign—a focus of this week’s National People’s Congress—he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies.

I’ve thought about and discussed round and round some of the trends around which Shambaugh builds his argument. I’m not plugged into to the political scene here at all enough to offer a good opinion, but I will say that many those trends — especially among the educated middle class — definitely are a real phenomenon. Where they lead, I cannot really guess, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere good for China, except maybe in the long term.

That, in fact, may be the plan. The main counterarguments to Shambaugh seem to follow two lines. The first is simply that China remains firmly in the tightening grip of the Communist Party, strengthened by the stronger-than-anticipated leadership of Mr. xi, who has no plans of seeing Party control erode even as his party can no longer count on a thrumming economy to hide the noise of political dissent.

The second, laid out in a letter to the WSJ responding to Shambaugh, is that Mr. Xi and the Party leadership really are playing the long game.

Jon Huntsman Jr. (Yes, that one) and Daniel J. Arbess:

China’s leaders correctly concluded the Eastern European experience with simultaneous political and economic reform didn’t work. China chose something resembling Singapore’s reform path, sustaining centralized control to drive economic reform first, while building a foundation for political reforms. The pace of progress has been slow and important voices calling for change have been muted, but the reforms have vastly improved the average Chinese standard of living, buying time for the foundation for democracy to develop.

China’s economic reforms have reached their most critical stage, where a strong force will be required to break the entrenched interests of the corrupt state-enterprise sector and privatize it. If these efforts succeed, China’s economy will have completed its decades-long evolution from the farm to the factory to prosperous consumers fully participating in the global consumer economy. Real political reforms would likely then be unstoppable.

Noted China scholar Thomas Metzger also adds in another letter that’s worth a read his few cents about the relationship between Chinese culture and the current state of Chinese political life.

Finally, there’s the state-endorsed counterargument laid out in the China Daily:

For example, the anti-corruption campaign launched by President Xi Jinping has raised hope for many Chinese that the thorny issue is being tackled. The campaign has been popular both at home and abroad, including winning support from senior Obama administration officials and many China scholars in Washington. In the past days, US scholars, both on the right and left, have questioned Shambaugh’s logic.

I believe Xi and many Chinese know that fighting the war on corruption is really hard. Yet Shambaugh seems to suggest that doing nothing is probably a better way forward.

…

If Shambaugh is to be regarded a serious scholar, he has certainly not shown it in his latest article.

I’ve got no idea who’s right, but I sure hope it’s Huntsman and Arbess. I also tend to be more bullish than not about the Party’s ability to survive and prosper given it’s nimbleness over the last 20 years.

One way or the other, it’s important to remember that what’s good for China is good for the rest of us, too.

The Ratio of Success

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One of my friends, who has lived in Beijing for the last five years or so, likes to talk about what he calls “The Ratio of Success”. By that he means, in any given system or society, when an individual sets out to accomplish a task, how often do they succeed. Usually this task is something like paying the water bill or, more typically, finding an item you want to buy or even the place where you want to buy it.

In America, the ratio of success is pretty high: The systems and culture make it easy to know what to expect when you try to get something done and generally make getting that thing done pretty seamless. Places are open when they say they’ll be open. They don’t usually disappear without warning. They usually have the things you expect them to have. It’s easy to find information on the internet. Maps and addresses are accurate. Customer service is good.

In China, the ratio of success is much lower. It’s one of those things that can either been somewhat endearing or damningly frustrating, depending on your personality and mood.

Monday was a typical, if mild, example.

My friend CH accompanied me on a much-less-wandery-than-usual trip to find a coffee shop somewhere in town where we could study and actually study. I often try this kind of thing on my days off. And I often walk around for three or four hours having passed on every coffee shop I pass only to somehow — regardless of which side of town I began my walking in — turn a corner to find myself at Great Leap Brewing’s hutong location. Then I often convince myself that even though it’s only 2 p.m., I can manage a beer or two while writing Chinese characters. That often ends with me spending three hours wagging my jaws with some British businessmen before wandering bleary eyed into the setting sun already sporting a headache. Often, I get very little actual studying done. If I do, I can’t read anything I’ve written.

But Monday was going to be different, even though I still didn’t even pick a neighborhood until we sort of ambled whichever subway train arrived first at Xizhimen Station. In the end, after only one wrongly chosen train and 15 minutes of walking, near the Confucian temple we found a nice enough place, which had the standard pairing of too many cats and too-expensive coffee. But the lighting and location were nice so we hung out for a few hours.

CH really likes studying languages. He can speak about 10 to some degree or another, but he also seems to have trouble really settling in to learn one. He’s studied at least five in the seven months I’ve known him, only one of them Chinese. (Japanese, Korean, German and some Slavic language make up the other four, but I’m sure the list is longer). In similar style, he’s always trying to find new, more effective methods of language learning by buying trunkfulls of books and scouring internet forums. If any of his preferred methods have anything in common, though, its their near absolute reliance on notecards. You know, the cardstock, flashcardy ones that I’m pretty sure you can buy in 100-packs at any gas station, craft store, Walmart, K-Mart, Office Max, Office Depot, King Soopers, Safeway, Albertsons, or wherever.

Well, as far as I knew, China just doesn’t have them. Jordyn spent half a year looking.

Well, the lack of flashcards had really been grinding CH’s gears so at the coffee shop he spent some time using the wifi to try to find a place in Beijing that sells notecards. Short of that, he started looking for Staples-like stores around the city, settling on one called “O’Mart”, which said it’s website sells all sorts of American-style office supplies. Despite the cold, CH really wanted to try to find it. Notecards on the brain. So off we set.

We knew the store was near the Liangmaqiao subway station, but that was it. The only English-language information we could find was just that: “In the Lufthansa Center Area.” We also were able to find the Chinese address. With that we set out, making the best use of maps and people we could manage. Addresses are notoriously difficult to pin down in Beijing. Streets run for kilometers upon kilometers and sometimes many different streets share the same name.

We couldn’t find the street on the map. No one seemed to know where we wanted to go. One lady who worked at the information desk in the Lufthansa Center, simply wrote a number on a piece of paper, pointed at it, and refused to say any words. When it was clear we didn’t understand, she just pointed at the paper and shook her head. The number was the address of the Lufthansa Center. We already knew this.

To add to the confusion, the address we had from the internet had two different numbers. We walked up the road from the Lufthansa Center in one direction and the numbers shrank. One of the numbers in our address was larger, the other smaller. We decided to try the larger one first — that direction had more businesses — and set off. After about forty minutes, we felt no closer to finding our store.

(We did find Great Leap Brewing’s newest location. What did I tell you?)

Finally we hailed a cab. He didn’t understand where we wanted to go. “Two numbers,” he said, pointing at CH’s phone. “Go to the small one,” we said. Soon we passed the Lufthansa Center again. Then we stopped at a stoplight. A minute went by. Two. Suddenly, the cab driver announced: “It’s right there,” gesturing nebulously toward a building corner the 2 o’clock position. (Nebulous handwaving is standard practice in China’s ratio-of-success puzzles, but that’s for another post.) He asked if we saw it. I stupidly said that I did. We got out in the middle of the street.

Upon reaching the corner that was the object of the nebulous waving, we came to see that the number of the corner building was nothing in the ballpark of the number we’re looking for. 42. We wanted 33. But he told us it was over there before he took our money, so we strolled down the side street, shivering. The numbers started climbing again. The street name changed too.

We eventually asked a parking attendant if he knew where we wanted to go. He looked at the address.

“You’re on the wrong street,” he said, then pointed back where we came from confirming our suspicions. “That’s the street you want.” We walked back to the corner and started walking the way our money-fattened cabbie would’ve kept driving.

A block and a half later we spotted it: A sign on the other side of the road that looked like newspaper left too long in the back window of a Subaru. “O’Mart”, CH said it said on the peeling canvas. There were also some pictures that looked vaguely like they might have been copy machines or something.

We crossed the street, and started back the other way, murmuring all the while about how dark it looked inside and how it was already just after 6 p.m. CH grumbled something about suicide if the place is closed after all this time. Or if doesn’t have notecards. But no, the lights, however dim, were definitely on.

Then as we started up the ramp, a man walked out of the store. He grabbed a loud, blocky thing grumbling along just out of the entrance way. A generator. Off it went. Off went the lights. Out came a pair of women. Six p.m. closing time said the paper sign taped to the door. “F**k f**k f**k f**k f**k f**k f**k f**k f**k,” yelled CH, hopping up and down and thrusting his finger at me as. The women spared him a glance, kind of. The man, who I believe was the manager, did not. We turned around and walked away.

I don’t think it would’ve mattered. The place was about as big as a kitchen and most of its selves were at least half empty. Maybe it was better to get locked out than to get in, spend another half hour looking and still walk away without notecards. Still, after three full hours of failure, it was something of a blow to CH.

In the end it worked out: he found his notecards at a local shop the next day, and I didn’t care anyway. I just like wandering.