China S Other Revolution

JULY/AUGUST 2011 Boston Review China’s Other Revolution Boston Review, pp. 12—26. Edward S. Steinfeld This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Heads of State On April 3, 2011, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police just prior to boarding a flight to Hong Kong. He has been held incommunicado since. [Ed. note: He was released on June 22, after this article went to press.] Ai—known internationally as much for his far-ranging artistic projects as his criticisms of the Chinese government—is but one of many, perhaps thousands, of “troublemakers” rounded up by the Chinese government in recent months. Ai may be the most recognizable name globally, but other detainees have included rights activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, and academics. Some have been formally charged with “creating a disturbance” or “inciting subversion”; others have been disappeared through extrajudicial procedures. The exact motivations behind the government’s expanding crackdown are uncertain, but it is safe to assume that images of Egypt and Tunisia loom large. Indeed, back in February and March, China too appeared caught in the undertow, with hints of a homegrown “Jasmine Revolution.” But the Jasmine Revolution drew small crowds and little energy. The dominant story soon became one of unyielding political repression and conspicuous public silence. In the West this situation has inspired renewed focus on repression in China, with extensive coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, Le Monde, and elsewhere. At one level is concern for the detainees themselves, individuals who appear to have done nothing wrong but have been swallowed up by a criminal justice system affording them neither due process nor mercy. At a deeper level are geopolitical or even existential worries about what the Chinese government’s behavior signifies for a nation that is now a leading global power. Seemingly out of nowhere, China has emerged as the world’s fastest-growing major economy, the largest overseas holder of U.S. government debt, the largest exporter, and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And along with jaw-dropping technological advancement in the domestic economy, China has invested in military modernization. Yet even as China becomes a nation of global caliber, it appears governed by individuals determined to play by their own rules and to respect no limits to their exercise of power. But why should the recent detentions arouse particular anxiety? After all, it is hardly news that China is governed by an authoritarian system. Extrajudicial detentions and reflexive repression of dissent—whether real or imagined—have always been the method of authoritarian regimes. We see it today in Syria, Libya, Russia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. And we saw it just a few decades ago in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and even Mexico. The variety of nations (and political outcomes) on this list suggests that abuse of dissenters—conspicuous in spite of overseas condemnation—is characteristic of not just sclerotic, immovable regimes, but also of authoritarian systems undergoing profound processes of change and liberalization. It would be wrong to read the current crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression. Though there has been no “Chinese Spring,” in fundamental institutional, organizational, and behavioral terms, it would be hard to describe what has transpired in China over the past twenty years as anything but a revolution.

Lessons From South Korea and Taiwan Those who doubt that profound change and harsh repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea and Taiwan. In January 1987, just seven years after a democratic uprising was crushed in the South Korean city of Gwangju and a few months before the military-backed regime would yield to popular demands for open elections, student protestors were being summarily rounded up by the police. At least one of the students died during interrogation. That same year Taiwan’s Kuomintang government announced the end of 38 years of martial law, a key step toward the establishment of democracy there. But in the months before the announcement, dissenters were still being shipped off, often by secretive military tribunals, to the notorious gulag on Green Island. Crackdowns on opponents, extrajudicial detentions, and violence are often the last-ditch efforts of authoritarian regimes. Those who doubt that change and repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea and Taiwan. Perhaps because of their willingness to use force even in their final days, these regimes can appear impervious to change and determined to remain in power. Given the empirical evidence available in the mid-1980s, one could reasonably have described Taiwan’s single-party state as “flexibly” authoritarian: grudgingly willing to mollify the populace with marginal institutional changes, but prepared to employ the gun to defend its grip on power. No one could have been sure whether the Taiwanese government—or South Korean, for that matter—would hold onto power indefinitely, succumb to violent overthrow precisely because of its resistance to change, or yield peacefully and voluntarily to popular desires for liberalization. The same can be said of China today. The cases of Taiwan and South Korea also suggest that we should be cautious about the frequent observation that politics in China has lagged economics. Both Taiwan and South Korea, right up until the end of the democratization process, were successful and creative on the economic front but politically retrograde. At minimum the lesson here is that the absence of overt regime change doesn’t tell us much. That leads to a final point about the Taiwanese and South Korean experiences, one equally applicable to the contemporary Chinese scene. Even as authoritarian regimes and their supporting institutions remain in place, subtle political shifts may be under way. Such shifts can include recomposition of the ruling establishment (i.e., the ruling party stays in place, but it ends up populated by new kinds of members), societal pluralization, depoliticization of daily life, and evolving efforts at regime legitimization—efforts that often lead to major changes in political discourse and participation. Ruling elites may push such changes with the most conservative intentions. The goal may be nothing more than regime survival. However, as the cases of Taiwan and South Korea show, such processes can take on a life of their own with members of the state and ruling establishment swept up in the wave of new attitudes, aspirations, and values. And that wave may crest suddenly or over the course of years. The Economy Reaches Out There are undoubtedly numerous differences between the China of today and the South Korea and Taiwan of yesterday. But in terms of sociopolitical change, China is increasingly looking like its previously authoritarian East Asian neighbors. Since the early 1980s China has experienced no political revolution, no definitive ideological break from the past, and nothing even resembling a nationwide political movement. Since Deng Xiaoping’s death in 1997, the country’s leaders have been conspicuous for their lack of charisma and vision. The sprawling Communist Party-state—inheritor of a 1400-year-old tradition of technocratic and highly interventionist bureaucratic rule—grinds on. On the surface, nothing has changed. But under the surface, virtually everything has. The transformations are particularly striking in the urban industrial economy. At one time China exported almost no manufactured goods; now Chinese industry is deeply immersed in global supply chains. At the dawn of reform in 1978, virtually all Chinese industry was owned by the state. By 2008, in an industrial economy that had grown more than 25-fold, private firms were the dominant players, with foreign firms not far behind. That which was once allocated hierarchically by the state—basic commodities, industrial inputs, manufactured goods, labor (both high-skilled and low), housing, and health care—is now purchased in commercial markets. All manner of new rules have been developed to manage these markets: enterprise law, contract law, labor law, environmental regulations, and so on. And new actors populate core industrial and bureaucratic structures: private entrepreneurs, elite returnees from overseas, domestically trained technocrats, multinational commercial and financial elites, legal professionals, media professionals, and even self-described policy activists and social entrepreneurs. Once-taboo business entities are now vital to the national economy. In 2001, private entrepreneurs— capitalist roaders par excellence—were officially welcomed into the Chinese Communist Party. Economic changes strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state. And China’s new professionals are not just in business. Of the 1.6 million citizens China has sent abroad for a year or more of study over the past 30 years, approximately 500,000 have returned, and a portion of these returnees now accounts for about a fifth of government ministers and vice-ministers. As Huiyao Wang of the Center for China and Globalization has documented, 78 percent of university presidents and 72 percent of directors of key state-run research labs are returnees. The Party has publicly declared a goal of recruiting 20,000 returnee scholars, entrepreneurs, researchers, and corporate executives to serve in positions of public administration. With these changes in economic organization and labor, everyday habits have been radically transformed. Finding a job on one’s own, living in a dwelling of one’s own, communicating routinely with acquaintances extending beyond the workplace, working closely with global counterparts, expecting that the wealth and social circumstances enjoyed abroad are China’s destiny as well—all were unimaginable 30 years ago but today are routine. Hardly relegated just to the economic realm, these changes strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.

New Ways of Life The hierarchical structures of the command economy bound citizen and commercial producer alike directly to the state. In the “old” days, from the 1950s through the early 1990s, if you were an urban citizen, you were most likely assigned to your employer—for life—by the state, housed by the state, and provided health care by the state. As Andrew Walder has described, these were mechanisms of political control that enforced citizen dependency upon the state. If you misbehaved politically, you could be squeezed out of your job, your home, etc. Under this regime your social interactions were mostly limited to the physical confines of your workplace: not only did you work there, you lived there, and your future was determined there. In all likelihood, you would have had no telephone, no form of transport save a bicycle, and few social ties that would have encouraged you to travel. If you did want to travel, you probably would have needed your employer’s permission to buy the train ticket. Today, for better or worse, virtually all of those control mechanisms are gone, replaced with freewheeling markets. As a Chinese citizen you now live where you can afford; work where you can find a job, often in a highly competitive labor market; and secure life necessities—everything from education to health care— primarily by shelling out cash. Whether rich or poor, you will almost certainly have a cell phone, and you will likely have a wide variety of social contacts. In this new system state authority and the nature of state-society relations are radically different, a reality confirmed by the state’s frenetic effort to develop new rules to maintain control and influence. As a response to changing expectations of the role of the state, a new discourse of law-based governance has emerged. In addition to new tax, contract, property, and environmental laws, the state has promulgated national regulations on open government information—China’s Freedom of Information Act, in a sense. Some provinces, such as booming Fujian, have new labor rules that emphasize collective bargaining. This does not mean that the system is fair or that the state has abandoned coercive and arbitrary intervention. Nor is every element of the state apparatus fully committed to implementing and enforcing these rules. But they would not exist at all if the state were still the main producer, wage payer, housing provider, and on-the-job enforcer in the industrial economy. And, by expressing rules in the language of law, the state, whether intentionally or not, has legitimized a broad discourse about the appropriate bounds of political authority and the responsibilities of an effective government. This novelty and diversity—in organizations, actors, laws, discourses, and life choices—has created space for the reconfiguration of informal norms and deep-seated values. For instance, in the 1980s to label oneself a private entrepreneur, let alone entrepreneurial tycoon, was to invite arrest. Today that label invites admiration and elevated status.

New-Look State China’s institutional transformation is hard to see in part because it has diverged from standard theoretical accounts of how change is supposed to take place. In China institutional change has been incremental and evolutionary, radical in its ultimate effect, but hardly in its origin and unfolding. Change has not come in response to exogenous shocks or what Ira Katznelson has called “unsettled times.” It is also difficult to identify who is responsible for change. For at least fifteen years, there has been no charismatic leader or coherent group of reformers of the type associated with post-Soviet Russia. There are no visionary policy elites negotiating the complex terrain of domestic politics. None of the recent “administrations” have had a discernible institutional mission, whether to end socialism, build capitalism, privatize industry, or seek any of the other systemic transformations articulated by post-socialist reformers elsewhere. More than a third of Communist Party members hold a college degree or higher, a far cry from the party’s peasant roots. But—despite the persistence of an authoritarian, single-party state—the composition of elites drawn into the policy process has evolved. Whereas in the early 1990s, for example, overseas-trained returnees were held suspect, barred from positions of influence, today such individuals routinely populate the high echelons of the state economics bureaucracy. The minister of science and technology earned a PhD in Germany, where he subsequently worked for a decade at Audi. The number-two official at the central bank —and the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange—earned a PhD in the United States, where he was a tenured professor of economics. The head of the government’s banking regulatory commission has an MBA from the University of London; the head of the Shanghai government’s Office for Financial Services is a Stanford-trained economist; and the list goes on. Twenty years ago, these people would not have returned to China, let alone been appointed to positions at the core of the state. The absorption of trained professionals into the state bureaucracy does not alone make for political transformation, but this pattern is consistent with a broader shift within the Communist Party to a more urbanized, professionalized, and educated membership. By 2010 the Party had grown to a record 78 million members, nearly a quarter of whom—at least by official accounts—are under the age of 35. More than a third of all Party members hold a college degree or higher and by 2007 just under 3 million Party members were working in private companies and an additional 800,000 or so Party members were self-employed, all of which suggests that the Party’s ideological roots in the rural peasantry and military are withering. And demand for Party membership is up. In 2009 only 10 percent of the applicant pool was admitted. We can, and probably should, argue about the quality of the data, but the overall trends seem fairly clear: the kinds of people who were running away from the Party—and China more broadly—following the Tiananmen crackdown are now the kinds of people competing to enter it. Some might interpret this as Party-state co-optation. In the 1970s and ’80s, one could have said the same about the efforts of the Kuomintang to recruit technocratic elites, particularly native Taiwanese who had previously been shut out. Co-optation may well have been the intention, but the ruling establishment ended up populated by professionals who, while not revolutionaries, harbored no personal loyalty to the existing system and had little to gain by fighting for it. For many of these technocrats, the Kuomintang was just a vehicle for effecting change in the present. Once its utility in that role had been exhausted, it could be abandoned.

Driving Evolution While there have been changes within the Party, and there is potential in that change, it is clear that the political establishment is responding to day-to-day institutional evolution elsewhere, not leading it. The example of Delta Electronics illustrates the point and brings together the disparate strands of economic, social, and political change in China. The assembly of power supplies (the transformer “bricks” and accompanying cords) for laptops is typical of the kind of electronics manufacturing that takes place in China today. Most of these power supplies are produced by a single Taiwanese-owned conglomerate, Delta, which does much of its manufacturing assembly on the Chinese mainland. Fifteen years ago “manufacturing assembly” in China meant screwing together finished, imported parts. The institutional demands of accommodating these low-skill activities were relatively unobtrusive: sweatshop manufacturing did not challenge the establishment’s social and political comfort zone. Today manufacturing assembly means something else, in part because manufacturers have sought to redefine it, and also because institutional changes have enabled and even forced that redefinition. In order to stay competitive and hold on to key customers such as Apple, HP, and Dell, Delta has to be able to design new power supplies, often on very short notice. This is because customers—the brand-name firms that conceptualize products—are increasingly pushing design tasks downward to their suppliers. The suppliers respond by enhancing their design capabilities in order to bind the customer more closely to them and increase the burden of switching to another supplier. In Delta’s case customers have been demanding smaller and smaller power bricks. In a matter of weeks, Delta must be able to make a product to-spec, at low-cost, and in enormous quantity. In order to meet the engineering challenges these demands present, Delta has established research-and-development centers within easy driving distance of its manufacturing operations. Those R&D centers are run not by Taiwanese citizens, but by returnees from the United States: Chinese citizens who, after receiving advanced engineering degrees and working in Silicon Valley or other high-tech regions, have elected to return home. But if they are to come back, Chinese society has to accommodate the salary structures and housing they want, as well as the information access—and therefore high-tech infrastructure—they need in order to do their work. (Accommodation of this societal group overlaps with that of purely domestic entrepreneurs and researchers who are diving into global business operations.) China has not surged forward economically while remaining frozen in place politically. Returnees alone, though, do not make R&D centers function. They lead a staff, which today is composed of young graduates from China’s top science and technology universities: Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiao Tong. In order to take on the advanced design challenges Chinese companies now face, these young engineers needed an education decidedly different from the kind Chinese universities provided even fifteen years ago. The curricula of China’s top universities had to be revamped. More important, the criteria for selecting faculty were transformed as well. Chinese universities—all state-controlled—were once closed-off communities shaped by rigid systems of seniority and internal promotion. Curricular reform—not to mention the hiring of outside experts—was aggressively resisted. In recent years, that resistance has been effectively quashed. The state has made overt efforts to break down barriers: the Chinese ministry of education requires—through the use of quotas—that universities have both overseas-trained faculty and domestic PhD recipients on their staffs. More subtly, many of these highly trained individuals—whether through their roles as policy advisors, public intellectuals, or commercial consultants—have become increasingly influential in shaping public attitudes and expectations. All of these activities have been possible only because so much of the old system—economic, social, and political—has been tossed into the dustbin of history. For China to maintain its position as a center for high-tech manufacturing, commercial producers and the institutional environment both needed, and continue to need, upgrades. The aggressive and purposeful fostering of this dynamic has in turn led to surprising reconfigurations of societal power and unexpected openings for previously shunned individuals. None of these changes, substantial though they may be, prove that China is on a path of democratization exactly like that traveled earlier by Taiwan and South Korea. What the changes do suggest, however, is that we should be cautious about reading too much into immediate political circumstances, such as the recent crackdown. In normative terms, we are right to condemn the crackdown. We are right to be concerned and to voice those concerns publicly. At the same time, we end up on shaky ground if we treat the events of the day as prima facie evidence of political stasis or institutional rollback. China has not surged forward economically while remaining frozen in place politically, and it is hard to argue that the Chinese government will tolerate only those changes that do not threaten its fundamental hold on power, the implication being that China has yet to experience anything approaching real political change. It would certainly be unwise to base public policy upon such premises. Nobody can say for sure where China is headed. The real issue, though, involves interpreting where China is today and how it has arrived at this point. Whether with regard to China’s growth story or its current stifling of dissent—and especially with regard to the relationship between them—this is not about connecting the obvious dots. Rather, it is about correctly identifying, with plenty of room for debate, what the dots are and how they relate to one another causally. To make sense of what is unfolding right now, and to fully appreciate the range of possible outcomes, we have to acknowledge that profound change, both economic and political, has taken place in China in recent years. In places such as Taiwan and South Korea, brutal crackdowns on dissent were among the last vestiges of authoritarian rule. In contemporary China that could also be true. Indeed, given the last twenty years of change, it seems not just possible but likely.

Holding Strategy Andrew G. Walder This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Andrew G. Walder Edward Steinfeld’s account of revolutionary changes in China’s economy and society over the past 30 years is compelling and on the mark. He is correct to warn that we should not underestimate remarkable cumulative changes in Chinese society and the economy, which have important and largely irreversible political implications. But his argument avoids an elephant in the room: China still has a Soviet-style political system that has changed little over the past two decades. This is not a garden-variety personal or military dictatorship. There are only four other regimes structured like China’s, in Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. China’s network of Communist Party organizations, its conservative leadership in a national politburo, the preeminence of Party organizations over all government institutions, its subservient legal system, and its massive and growing security apparatus are all familiar to those who recall communist systems of 30 years ago. The recent crackdown is a symptom of the survival, indeed the revitalization, of a Soviet model of governance. The continuing strength of that model is not altered by revolutionary changes in the economy or by the staffing of government institutions by younger, better educated, and more worldly administrators. China’s economy and society may remind us of South Korea’s and Taiwan’s in an earlier era, but the core political institutions, and in recent years the political attitudes of the leaders, are more reminiscent of the Soviet Union during the late Brezhnev era. This makes China a deeply paradoxical polity, presenting its leaders with a real dilemma. China today is indeed unlike China 25 years ago, and it is far more open and dynamic than the Soviet Union ever was. But political change, when it does occur, may not turn China into Taiwan or South Korea writ large. Our discussions of Chinese political change often appear to adopt an unconscious default position: China’s leaders are holding back a tide of change that leads to liberal multiparty rule, better governance, the elimination of corruption, political stability, the rule of law, and greater economic prosperity. But other political futures are just as likely. The fate of the former Soviet Union and similar regimes is more relevant to China’s political dilemma and is surely paramount in the minds of China’s leaders. Out of some 30 independent states that emerged from the collapse of communism in Eurasia, no more than a third are now prosperous and well-governed multiparty democracies. Almost all of these success stories are small, ethnically uniform states on the periphery of the European Union—a “democratic crescent” that stretches from Estonia to Slovenia. Many of the other post-Soviet countries experienced dismemberment, civil war, and long periods of instability. Russia and Ukraine have undergone severe and prolonged recessions; their political systems are illiberal and deeply corrupt, though surely more “pluralistic” than before. China’s leaders understand and are haunted by this history. Even if they secretly believe that a multiparty political system is desirable, they know the perils of a botched attempt at political change. Stability is the overwhelming priority of China’s leaders. It is seen, justifiably, as the foundation for China’s economic rise and growing geopolitical importance. The trajectory of Russia—the comparison that really matters to China’s elite—has been in the opposite direction. So the prescription is: don’t rock the boat. Soviet-style political structures have well-known problems, but they have held China together for the past 30 years of wrenching social and economic change. Experimenting with democracy within the Communist Party, limited electoral mechanisms at the provincial and national level, a freer press, designing effective anti-corruption measures that tie the Party’s hands, and a broader openness in intellectual and political life are unnecessary gambles that risk everything China has accomplished. The elite don’t want to repeat Gorbachev’s naïve mistakes. The fate of the former Soviet Union is paramount in the minds of China’s leaders. What are China’s leaders so afraid of? Long before the attempted Jasmine Revolution, they knew how quickly and unexpectedly political challenges can arise. They were just as surprised as everyone else by the collapse of their brethren Soviet-style political systems from 1989 to 1991. And they had their own major crisis in May–June 1989, which escalated out of their control, split their top leadership, and forced a draconian military response. Continuing social changes, not just history, leave the regime skittish. Waves of local protest—by farmers concerned with taxation and land tenure, urban homeowners expelled with little compensation in corrupt urban redevelopment schemes, tens of millions of state-sector workers laid off in enterprise restructuring and privatization since the mid-1990s, unprotected workers in export industries and the transport sector opposing unfair pay and poor working conditions—do not amount to a unified political movement to challenge Party rule. But China’s leaders believe that they make any kind of political opening a hazardous venture. What China’s leaders fear is large and prolonged protests in key cities. Precisely because of the changes sketched so clearly by Steinfeld, these would be much harder to control than the protests 22 years ago, and would force the leadership once again to confront a choice between compromise (and perhaps spiraling demands for liberalization and political change) and brute force. This is the choice that has loomed suddenly for dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The same choice openly split China’s Politburo Standing Committee in 1989, which led to even larger protests and surprisingly strong popular resistance to the initial attempt to impose martial law. What to do? For the time being, postpone any tinkering with core political institutions, and double down on surveillance and repression. China’s leaders have been far more creative at finding ways to monitor the Internet, curb the mass media, and halt incipient protest than at creating credible institutions to deter corruption and abuse of power by their own officials at the local levels. The strategy is conservative and corporate, designed to preserve the rise of a new Chinese state capitalism on a global scale by deploying refurbished Soviet-style institutions as enforcers. This strategy avoids the risks of liberalization and reform and postpones the structural changes necessary to create a genuinely Chinese political system that overcomes the flaws of the Soviet import. This is, in short, a holding strategy, one that betrays a lack of confidence and political imagination. One might ask, if not now, with China’s economy riding high and public support for the regime strong, when? Incremental political reform will be much harder when the economic juggernaut begins to falter, the population begins to age, and the educated urban middle classes take prosperity for granted. By that point China’s political system—and perhaps with it the economy—may be in for a hard landing. The Rise of the Middle Class Helen H. Wang This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Helen H. Wang No one in China believes in communism anymore. The Communist Party has abandoned Communist ideology. A friend of mine joked that the Chinese government wears a Polo shirt and Nike shoes, but still has a communist hat. The Party is simply a ruling outfit that practices what seems to be quasi-capitalism. To a certain degree, I agree with Edward Steinfeld that China has gone through profound changes in recent years. However, China’s political system is ill fitted to address the needs of an increasingly pluralized society. The government has not allowed any political opposition that could become a rival of the Communist Party. With or without its defining ideology, the Party has shown no sign of loosening control. Even the increased efforts to recruit members from private and foreign-owned companies don’t reflect outreach so much as assertion of power. Party organizations were traditionally strong in state-owned enterprises, and with the growing presence in China of private and foreign-owned firms, the Communist Party was concerned about losing support from young people. So it has sought out the best of them: the Party has been adamant about qualifications, such as academic achievements or career credentials. Young people recognize that Party membership offers significant advantages, such as opportunities for career advancement, social status, and government connections. China: the Dragon’s Ascent, a 2003 History Channel documentary, provides some illustrative anecdotes. In it an ambitious young student at China’s highly regarded Fudan University said, “I really want to do something for the country. I want to join the Communist Party so that I can better serve my country.” Another student, who was planning to go overseas to study, said, “If I go abroad, I won’t join the party. But if I cannot go overseas, I may join the party.” Other students agreed with him that if he stayed in China, he should join the party and reap the benefits. One of the critical conditions of democracy is present in China: a large and stable middle class. The campaign to recruit new members has proved successful. According to The Economist, by the end of 2006, party organizations had been established in more than two-thirds of private enterprises and foreign companies. If the Communist Party can still recruit the best young people, how will a viable opposition grow, who will lead it, when will it arrive? There are no strong opposition parties in China to make democratic reform a reality. Nonetheless, I agree with Steinfeld that China’s rise does not necessarily threaten the West. For better or worse, westernization is everywhere in China. As Steinfeld points out, China’s new generation of leaders all seem to have postgraduate degrees, often from the United States. I have met many young Chinese who adopt English names and pride themselves on being westernized because they associate the West with sophistication and advancement. A young vice president at the Internet company BlogBus proudly showed me her office, where a model of Capitol Hill—not the Forbidden City—stood on her desk. Bill Gates is a greater hero among Chinese youth than he is in the United States. Young people celebrate Christmas more than Chinese New Year. China even has its own wildly successful American Idol-type TV show. The 2005 edition of Super Girl drew an audience of 400 million, and the media covered it like an American presidential campaign. Thousands of young talents competed for votes as well as the spotlight. The top three performers received eight million votes by text message, and the winner, 21-year-old Li Yuchun from Sichuan province, became one of the most popular stars in China. Despite recent crackdowns on dissidents, many people in China told me the trend toward democracy is unstoppable. That democracy probably won’t emerge from the views of imprisoned dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, who represent what many Chinese consider an unrealistic solution. But one of the critical conditions of democracy is present in China: a large and stable middle class. Currently the middle class is estimated at up to 300 million people. This comprises less than 25 percent of the population, but as the middle class continues to grow, it is only a matter of time before opposition to the state arises. Evidence from elsewhere, such as South Korea and Taiwan, suggests that countries begin to democratize when average income reaches somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. In 2010 China’s per capita income was about $4,300. If this rule applies to China, it will not be long before we see some sort of democracy movement there. However, Chinese democracy may look very different from the version we know in the West. Moving forward, I see two possible outcomes: either the Chinese government will gradually be forced into political reform, or change will come more radically because of an economic breakdown. It depends on when the government will have the courage to throw away the Communist hat.

Tightening Control Baogang He This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Baogang He How do we interpret the recent crackdown in China? Unlike most commentators who foresee a coming dark age of Chinese authoritarianism, Edward Steinfeld argues, “It would be wrong to read the current crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression.” He offers convincing evidence such as the pluralization of actors and institutions and the coexistence of “profound change and harsh repression” in China, backed by a comparative perspective. But while I agree with his assessment, I think that his evidence, which is primarily focused on economic and social changes, is incomplete. He doesn’t delve deeply enough into the “profound change” that has also taken place in Chinese politics. Despite tightening its authoritarian control after 1989, the Chinese government introduced a wide variety of local mini-democratization practices, including village elections, township elections, intra-party democracy, participatory budgeting, and participatory and deliberative forums that enable citizens to meet with government officials and express their voice on local affairs. In 2004 the total number of such forums at the village level was estimated at 453,000—considerably more than the government’s estimated number of protests (74,000) for that year. While these reforms do not jeopardize the Party’s domination, they are helping to define the characteristics of future Chinese democratization. I partially agree with Steinfeld’s assessment that the crackdown is not a sign of “institutional rollback” in the sense that some political reforms are still evolving. Experiments in the public nomination and election of Party secretaries and higher officers at the town, township, and city levels were underway in more than a dozen provinces in the first half of 2011. In the coastal province of Zhejiang, participatory budgeting was introduced in Xinhe and Zeguo townships in 2005, extended to eight neighboring townships in 2009, to 79 more in 2010, and to the city level in Wenling in 2011. Even the phrase ‘civil society’ has been banned by propaganda officials. Nevertheless the crackdown can and should be seen as a signal of rollback in several ways. Rather than expand consultation and deliberation practices nationwide, the government has primarily relied on control and suppression to maintain political stability. In China political relaxation typically is followed by tighter control, which is then followed by a new period of relaxation, in an ongoing cycle. In the period since 2008, however, there has been no relaxation, only a period of control followed by even tighter control. The source of this problem is the impending leadership change in 2012 and the need to ensure a smooth transition of power. The continuation of this worrisome trend over a number of years suggests that the crackdown is not simply a response to the threat of a revolution like those in the Middle East. Internal debate concerning political reforms has continued amid the repression, but to little effect. Premier Wen Jiabao has made public statements in favor of reforms, and Yu Keping, a pro-reform scholar and official, has floated the concept of co-governance, which involves both government and civil society. But these discussions gain little traction outside the confines of the Party; even the phrase “civil society” has been banned by propaganda officials, making it clear that the concerns of the security apparatus trump reformist ideas. The tightening of control also reflects the social unrest attending China’s rising power. There have been roughly 80,000 protests per year since 2005. The government has responded according to its traditional methods: asserting the power of the administration and deploying the security apparatus. A powerful political institution, the Wei Wen Ban, or Office of the Maintenance of Social Stability, has led the charge. Each level of government appoints a secretary to head its Wei Wen Ban. Also, heads of public security organs are now appointed to Party standing committees, an organizational shift that gives greater power to the security apparatus. New control mechanisms have tightened bureaucratic procedures and made much harder formerly routine matters, such as organizing university conferences on Chinese political issues. The public-security system penetrates deeply into the intellectual community; scholars worry that their colleagues might be agents of the authorities, and, through this fear, the government attempts to control collective action. The frequency with which such methods are used confounds the Western expectation that economic development will lead to political liberalization. Controlling society and maintaining stability is the Chinese government’s major task, and it inevitably raises the issue of state violence. Beijing is still learning how to use violence in a more selective and constructive way and how to maintain order without resorting to dramatic acts of coercion. While the leadership tries to find new governance methods through consultative and deliberative forums, participatory budgeting, and limited elections, it largely relies on the public-security system to govern through fear. The crackdown should be the subject of serious concern. The way in which the Chinese government treats its own people provides an indication of how it will behave internationally as China’s power grows and international constraints on its exercise decrease. A More Targeted Repression Ying Ma This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Ying Ma Over the past three decades, China’s rulers have relinquished a vast amount of political authority in order to pursue breakneck economic development. Unlike Maoist totalitarianism modern Chinese authoritarianism does not demand total submission from its subjects. It has innovated, gained in sophistication, and gathered more diverse tools for repression. Edward Steinfeld overlooks this essence of Chinese authoritarianism as he forecasts its end, and he mistakes its willingness to adapt for its potential for demise. Conventional wisdom holds that political liberalization in China has lagged behind economic reforms. Steinfeld disputes this claim and contends that numerous shifts underway in China—including the changing composition of the ruling elite, the pluralization of society and politics, and the dynamism of the economy —contain the ingredients for the country’s transition out of authoritarian rule. Of the political shifts he describes, Steinfeld finds bottom-up changes spurred by economic modernization most impressive. As China’s command economy comes crumbling down, Chinese citizens have increasingly shaken off the state’s control of their most basic daily activities, such as finding a job, choosing a place to live, deciding what to wear or with whom to be friends. These types of changes, Steinfeld declares, are not purely economic, but also “strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.” In reality the political dimensions of China’s vast transformations, revolutionary though they may be, do not flourish unhindered, but are obsessively managed and, if necessary, suppressed by the regime. In this effort the regime does not need to fear every personal opinion uttered or every personal choice made, but wields its repression in a much more targeted fashion. Instead of all-out suppression at all times, it bribes protestors in addition to crushing them; uses propaganda and fans nationalism rather than banning all forms of offensive speech; responds to public outcries on the Internet even as it tirelessly censors online political content; emphasizes its seriousness about rooting out corruption even though it has refused to grant the judiciary the independence to help; and nurtures and promotes skilled technocrats even as it rejects free and fair elections. Amid the bottom-up changes Steinfeld describes, the state has continually enforced and refined its repression and even improved its governance in its quest to maintain control. As political scientist Andrew Nathan has written, the regime “is willing to change in any way that helps it to stay in power,” but it will not “relax the ban on autonomous political forces” that threaten its rule. Many of the capitalist roaders co-opted by the Party echo the government’s refrain that China is not ready for democracy. State control exists not just in the political realm but also in the freewheeling business and economic realms where Steinfeld identifies signs of political liberalization. He marvels at the pace with which China’s economy has seen the replacement of ailing state-owned enterprises by private companies, foreign firms, and modernized state conglomerates. He is even more amazed by the export sector, which, once negligible, now boasts suppliers that serve brand names such as Apple, HP, and Dell. Yet increased competitiveness in China’s export sector, or in the economy as a whole, does not signal the potential for political change. As China’s rulers eagerly incorporate new knowledge and expertise from the West to promote technological and economic progress, they have been just as eager to thwart the potential for democratic change. Examples abound. Though the government has embraced the Internet as a vehicle for economic modernization and technological advancement, it has deployed sophisticated censorship technology and a vast army of online police to stem the Internet’s democratizing effects. Individuals seeking to spread democracy on the Web have been arrested, and Internet companies dutifully delete, filter, and censor sensitive content on their sites. The government has similarly invested heavily in modernizing its financial sector, but the cash-rich Chinese financial system functions as a tool of Communist Party rule. In their book Red Capitalism, Carl Walter and Fraser J.T. Howie point out that state banks may enjoy billion-dollar public listings overseas, but they continue to lend at low interest rates, as directed by the state, to companies owned or favored by the government. Small and medium-sized private enterprises that could garner higher returns face far more trouble securing capital. Meanwhile, as Richard McGregor has chronicled in The Party, China’s publicly listed state-owned companies continue to operate under management selected by the Party on the basis of political criteria. In this light the changing composition of China’s governing elite looks less like a threat to the ruling regime, as Steinfeld claims, and more like another effort to incorporate new knowledge, new energy, and new ideas to boost the regime’s strength. Steinfeld should not be so excited that the Communist Party officially welcomed private entrepreneurs—once banned and denounced as “capitalist roaders”—into its membership in 2001. Nor ought he overstate the political ramifications of the return of hundreds of thousands of Chinese who had studied and worked at elite Western institutions and now populate senior positions in government. As political scientist Minxin Pei has argued, by doling out everything from Party membership to senior government positions to financial perks, the state has rendered moot the political threat from potential opposition groups, including intellectuals and the rising middle class. Many of the capitalist roaders co- opted by the Party echo the government’s refrain that China is not ready for democracy. Many other members of the new governing elite—including those who advocate a less corrupt, more responsive government—also do not appear convinced that democracy is the right political model for China. These complex realities indicate that China’s path to political liberalization will not be straightforward and is not preordained. History and recent events in the Middle East offer a powerful reminder that even long- standing and seemingly stable authoritarian regimes are not immune to popular pressures for political accountability. Even so, Steinfeld’s analysis of Chinese authoritarianism belittles its strengths, ignores the nuances of its repression, and oversimplifies the conditions that might lead to its downfall.

Social Empowerment and Disempowerment Guobin Yang This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.

Guobin Yang Edward Steinfeld’s article is an important contribution to current debates about political change in China. Where others see only economic growth, Steinfeld argues that genuine political change is underway. And his conception of that change encompasses institutional, behavioral, and attitudinal dimensions: the recomposition of the ruling establishment, societal pluralization, new forms of political discourse and political participation, and new legal, regulatory, and market structures. This is a broad but fitting understanding of political change in contemporary China. In a society under epochal transformation, change in one field necessarily impinges on others. Steinfeld focuses mainly on the urban industrial sector, the state bureaucracy, the export sector, and the higher education system. I largely agree with his insights there. He argues that all kinds of new actors, including foreign-trained professionals, now populate these core sectors. To absorb these people, new rules and structures, largely market-based, have been introduced, and the hierarchical structures of the socialist command economy have been replaced. Consequently, new types of state-society relations have evolved, and the state no longer controls its citizens as it used to. These changes had no clear logic, and yet their cumulative effects are revolutionary. As Steinfeld points out, new actors may introduce change through existing institutions. To some observers the employment of Western-trained professionals by state institutions may indicate the co-optation of the new educated elites. But Steinfeld hints that these educated elites are becoming increasingly influential in moving public attitudes and expectations in new directions. The focus on the urban-economic and bureaucratic sectors, however, leaves out other important institutional developments—in particular the incipient non-governmental sector and the lively, albeit censored, Internet-based citizen media. Both have grown rapidly despite serious political challenges. In December 1997 China had about 670,000 Internet users. By December 2010 this number had shot to 457 million. The numbers for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are less clear because numerous organizations operate in grey zones, without official registration. But even the number of registered NGOs has increased quickly, reaching 447,243 by early 2011. Emerging in the mid-1990s—the first influential NGO was founded in 1994, the year China was linked to the Internet—NGOs have exerted influence on state regulatory agencies and empowered citizens to a previously unknown degree. A good example of the growing impact of the non-governmental sector on Chinese institutional structures is the fate of the One Foundation, launched in 2007 by the movie star Jet Li. It had to operate under the auspices of the quasi-governmental Red Cross Society of China because Chinese regulations stipulate that NGOs must be overseen by a government agency. In January of this year the One Foundation successfully registered as an independent private foundation in the large coastal city of Shenzhen. Shenzhen has a new system that requires NGOs only to register with the municipal civil affairs department, without a supervisory government agency. This system is at odds with national regulations, suggesting that, as Steinfeld argues, non-governmental actors are inducing institutional evolution. So disempowering are Chinese markets that a term was invented for ‘powerless social groups.’ This evolutionary process is similarly evident in online engagement. Chinese citizens have successfully used online forums, blogs, and increasingly microblogs, to expose corrupt officials, challenge government policies, and seek political change. The most recent case is the ongoing election campaign launched by independent candidates for seats in local people’s congresses. The last time independent candidates entered an election campaign so publicly was in 1980. The enthusiasm and audacity of those candidates led to a crackdown, and the few who won the elections were barred from assuming their posts. Today’s candidates are relying heavily on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging service, with more than a hundred million registered users. As soon as the campaign started in April, Sina Weibo became a publicity and organizing platform for independent candidates. The most visible such candidate, the popular writer and sports commentator Li Chengpeng, has three million followers on Sina Weibo and is using the service to discuss political participation. Searches on Sina Weibo for “independent candidates” and “people’s congress election campaign” yield tens of thousands of results, indicating lively discussions about campaign issues. Official news media have begun to chastise the independents for their unruliness, and the campaign is arousing citizens’ consciousness of their rights to vote and stand for election. Despite the changes clearly afoot, Steinfeld may overstate the discontinuity between past and present. He rejects the “old” days too easily. True, those days were materially constrained and politically controlled. But Steinfeld overlooks astounding social inequality in contemporary China when he claims that today you “secure life necessities—everything from education to health care—primarily by shelling out cash.” Certainly—if you can afford them. Many Chinese, especially the older generation, who experienced the socialist era, and the rural poor, are not happy about their economic prospects. A related weakness is Steinfeld’s emphasis on the empowerment of new actors, such as foreign-trained returnee technocrats in the state bureaucracy; returnee engineers, social scientists, and managers in business and finance; multinational business leaders; social entrepreneurs; and media professionals. He leaves out migrant workers, villagers, laid-off workers, and other disempowered social groups. Indeed, disempowerment is so much a part of the increasingly market-driven process that a new term, ruoshi qunti (“powerless social groups”), has become a key word in contemporary Chinese discourse. Thus the broad trend of social empowerment has been accompanied by a worrisome counter-process. Finally, Steinfeld seems to view the market as a uniformly positive driver of political change. Many of the beneficial institutional changes he identifies pertain to markets, such as those for labor, housing, and health care. These may well be among the most important new developments, but in view of growing labor unrest, a deeply troubled health-care system, and a predatory real estate market that not only far exceeds the means of ordinary citizens but has dire ecological consequences, we have yet to gauge the depths of the human costs of these market-driven changes and the kinds of political change they may give rise to.

The Big Gamble Edward S. Steinfeld This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China. Edward S. Steinfeld The commentaries on my article raise a number of thought-provoking points. I would like to concentrate on one: the notion of stability and conservatism as organizing principles of Chinese governance. In Andrew Walder’s view, the essence of Chinese politics is Soviet-style governance, rule by a senior leadership and a vast party network united in their unwavering focus on self-preservation. Ying Ma echoes the view, arguing that the Chinese state tolerates only those changes that buttress its power and resists anything that imperils single-party rule. And both Ma and Baogang He, with plenty of solid evidence, point to the state’s obsessive efforts to manage change, the Wei Wen Ban being just the latest. Walder, Ma, and He are absolutely correct: the Chinese government, not unlike many of its counterparts globally, is focused on maintaining order and its own position atop the hierarchy. For at least twenty years, the need for stability has been used to justify all manner of political repression, from the nationwide crackdown in 1989 to the more targeted detentions of recent months. But is this focus on stability really the defining feature of Chinese politics? Does it circumscribe Chinese sociopolitical change? Here, I am much more skeptical. Why should we believe that conservatism limits the possibilities for the future when it has been so inadequate to explain what has unfolded in the not-so-distant past? The state’s obsession with stability could have been marshaled to preclude every major reform measure of the last twenty years. At each step the government’s desire to avoid disruption, to appeal to loyal constituencies, and to maintain effective institutions of control should have thwarted the radical policy initiatives that eventually were implemented: layoffs of millions of state-enterprise employees, liberalization of commodity prices, elimination of the work-unit system for urban citizens, rapid urbanization of previously rural populations, and redevelopment of urban centers at the expense of incumbent industries and entrenched locals. Far from prioritizing self-preservation, the Chinese government has gambled on radical and socially destabilizing reforms. These moves and others like them would have appeared impossibly risky to a system bent on self- preservation. Until they happened. After the fact, they could be explained away as the efforts of a conservative leadership to preserve its rule through the promotion of growth. That is, one could argue that the Chinese state undertakes only those measures that foster growth and maintain the existing hierarchy. But that argument begs the question. It makes sense only in hindsight, amid continued growth and Communist Party rule, to suggest that recent Chinese reforms have been geared only toward stability. As the policies were being rolled out, the political leadership was effectively throwing the dice, gambling on the idea that radical and socially destabilizing reforms would sustain growth. And when growth resulted, new problems were created, ones that demanded ever more radical solutions—and tolerance of once-vilified classes of problem-solvers. Such willingness to take risk is not characteristic of systems focused exclusively or even primarily on maintaining stability and order. Want to see systems that are truly seeking self-preservation through order and control? Look to those that are desperately clinging to life by fending off growth and improved living standards: North Korea and Cuba. But that is not China. What is so distinctive about the Chinese political system is not that it is one of the few remaining in the Soviet mold (it is), but rather that it is developmental. China—not unlike Taiwan and South Korea before it —is trying simultaneously to pursue stability and transformative growth, outcomes that are in some sense opposites. We are not talking about the kind of 2 or 3 percent yearly growth to which advanced industrial societies are accustomed. China’s growth is on a scale that is intrinsically deracinating and destabilizing; it involves the kind of transformative processes of industrialization and urbanization that shook Western societies to their cores over the course of centuries, but that China has undergone in the span of mere decades. The Chinese state and the Party may think they are preserving order. So did the state in South Korea and in Taiwan. The Chinese have proven willing to suppress dissent, often brutally. Ditto South Korea and Taiwan. But at each key decision point, China, like its fellow East Asian developers, has opted for growth rather than order. In doing so the Party and the government have willingly exposed themselves and society to an unpredictable and uncontrollable future. That is the defining feature of a developmental state: for all its conservatism, it pursues revolutionary ends. Of course, Guobin Yang is right that economic development in China has been uneven. The newly disempowered—migrants, low-skilled wage laborers, the rural poor, the elderly, the infirm—are every bit as central to the contemporary Chinese milieu as newly empowered entrepreneurs and real estate developers. Yet such patterns of inequity are unfortunately not unique to the Chinese experience, but are instead characteristic of economic development everywhere. One need look no further than the United States and Western Europe for developmental histories replete with exploitation, abuse, violence, and environmental degradation. Indeed, one need look no further than those advanced industrial societies today for evidence of the propensity of markets to fail, regulators and commercial actors to become enmeshed in double dealing and conflicts of interest, and accumulated liabilities to be conveniently hived off to the least empowered segments of the population. Similar—and similarly distressing—phenomena from the West do not justify what is happening in China today. They do, however, tell us two things. First, economic development is always deeply destabilizing. It is hard to control, and its benefits are not shared equally. Second, under conditions of uncertainty, sociopolitical change can proceed even in the face of seemingly unassailable hierarchies of power. In a few notable cases, change has come through revolution, the direct overthrow of long-standing institutions. However, for the reasons that Walder and Helen Wang point out, I don’t believe that is a likely outcome in China today. As both Walder and Wang suggest, the Chinese Communist Party-state is not merely a governmental bureaucracy and set of coercive control mechanisms. It has increasingly become a social establishment. It is now the organization that young strivers join in their effort to make a difference, to acquire status, and to gain influence. Interestingly, so too has it become the organizational home for many of the progressive social entrepreneurs and NGO founders whom Yang describes. Yet, while the Party is unquestionably an establishment with rules, incentives, and subtle mechanisms of socialization and indoctrination, the young business people, academics, and social entrepreneurs now joining are not unreflective sell-outs ready and willing to be co-opted. They appreciate a mode of change that takes place incrementally and thoroughly within the existing order. It would be wrong to dismiss such change simply because it takes time: institutions can gradually erode and be reoriented from within, often to a point where they cease to resemble their earlier selves. In almost all cases, this happens despite the original preferences of those at the top of the hierarchy. Sometimes the powerful don’t perceive what is happening until it is too late. Sometimes they see what is going on, their priorities evolve, and they embrace change. And sometimes the old guard simply dies off and is replaced by new generations with new concerns. The strong do not always win. And the winners are not always the strong. That in some ways has been the story of the empowerment of marginalized groups in the United States: women, African Americans, gays and lesbians, etc. So too has it been the story of the reorientation of institutions such as the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. And finally, most relevant for China, so too has it been the story of the democratization of once authoritarian developmental states in East Asia.