With China presenting such a strong, confident, and formidable picture to the outside world, it might seem odd to make doomsday predictions about it. But some observers of the country interpret its strength as masking deep internal weaknesses. In 2007 Susan Shirk wrote a book, China: Fragile Superpower, that argued that the ruling Communist Party is actually deeply concerned and vulnerable and that its aggressive overtures are attempts to compensate for its weaknesses. Chinese tend to react with unusual hostility to any criticism of China, and that’s partially because of historical reasons, but it’s also a sign of profound uncertainty over its own stability. People get defensive when their weak points are probed.
While most scholars acknowledge this and admit that China isn’t as sturdy and monumental as it seems, a few go even further and predict that the whole system — the Party and its monopoly on power at least, maybe even the whole state — will collapse. Normally this is dismissed as a fringe theory, but last year David Shambaugh reopened the debate with such a provocative article in the Wall Street Journal: “The Coming Chinese Crackup“.
Shambaugh makes five main points to demonstrate his thesis:
- An unusually high number of rich Chinese are either emigrating to places like Australia or America or moving key assets and buying property there.
- Xi Jinping, the Party chairman and overall dictator, is intensifying the Party’s usual strict censorship and repression of dissent or even uncomfortable facts.
- Even Party apparatchiks don’t care about Communist propaganda (or Xi’s propaganda) anymore.
- The whole system is hopelessly corrupt and Xi’s purge will just hollow it out instead of fixing it.
- Xi’s economic reforms from 2013 aren’t going anywhere fast (see also William Ide and Saibal Dasgupta, “Worries About China’s Economic Reform Progress Grow“, Voice of America, 10.03.2016).
The looming historical precedent here, of course, is the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Russia and China have many parallels. Both are vast empires ruling over huge populations and a lot of minorities; both were mostly poor and behind the times; both underwent violent convulsions in the early 1900s that replaced sclerotic emperors with fanatical Communists. Mao Zedong, China’s dictator, consciously modelled his new country after the Soviet Union (although with major differences). Both seemed unshakable, monolithic, and fearsomely strong to foreigners. Both had state-run economies, narrow and totalitarian political elites, and limited access to foreign media or information to keep the system insulated from external influences.
But the Communist Bloc, the Soviet empire, collapsed in a few short years. When the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev introduced reforms to free up the political system and allow free speech, first the Soviet satellites broke away, then the whole Communist system melted down. Six years after he came to power, one of the two superpowers was gone. Foreign observers were flummoxed. They predicted that Gorbachev’s reforms would change the game, for sure; they didn’t think it would cause a total collapse.
Haunted by this failure, they look to China due to its similarities. Its economy is still mostly directed by the state. The Party still controls everything and tightly regulates information. The flag is unchanged; the anthem is unchanged; Mao statues dominate city squares; students study Communist literature like Marx and Lenin.
Meanwhile, economic reforms have made China hardly a Communist country anymore, and information on the outside world is readily available. Chinese can travel abroad (and are doing so in increasing numbers) and foreigners can visit and tell them how different things are back where they come from.
So it’s natural to think it’s only a matter of time before the system falls apart. It’s certain that China’s leaders are scared and nervous, and their anxiety motivates them in their policies. The Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989 was crushed to avoid any developments that might lead to what happened in the USSR shortly thereafter. China’s rigid censorship and tight secrecy are motivated by fear that too much criticism could rock the boat and start the process of collapse. The feverish nationalism that the Party perpetuates is meant to bolster its grass-roots support and distract from unresolved unpleasantness. Beijing’s refusal to even discuss the demands of the “Umbrella Revolution” in Hong Kong last year shows that it sees that movement as the top of a slippery, catastrophic slope.
So is China about to crack up? Well… it’s not that simple. Some of Shambaugh’s arguments do sound fairly unconvincing. A stack of unsold Xi books in a campus bookstore might not be a reliable indicator of impending regime collapse. In fact, Xi enjoys some popularity and presents a more warm, accessible father figure than the dour leaders of the ’00s. Chinese emigration is also nothing new. The millionaires are probably hedging their bets in case of a disaster or emergency, but Chinese have sent their kids to foreign schools and worked overseas for years.
Macau-based professor Chen Dingding makes these points and more in a rebuttal of Shambaugh’s piece in the National Interest. He thinks Chinese officials are delighted by Xi’s “Chinese Dream” and see his policies as dramatically reforming the country. The anti-corruption campaign, he maintains, is a necessary measure meant to shore up the Party’s credibility, since a traditional Chinese hatred of inequality (which is where the Communist movement came from in the first place) was sparking undeniable resentment at crooked fatcats. The economic slowdown is inevitable and a growth rate of 7% is still really fast.
Chen and other Chinese scholars also take issue with Shambaugh’s implied criticism of the whole system and point out that America has problems with corruption and inequality too. The notion that an American-style system would do just the trick for curing China’s malaise (although Shambaugh never actually states this) is obnoxious, imperialist, arrogant, and ignores the fact that most Chinese aren’t really clamouring for democracy, just stability and prosperity. They think that the root of Shambaugh’s and other Westerners’ opinions is a profound discomfort with a powerful China and a refusal to acknowledge that an authoritarian, non-Western social model could actually be succeeding.Recent events have added an interesting twist to the tale — and on the face of it, seem to bolster Shambaugh’s argument. Rapid growth in stock trading, huge piles of local government debt, and a real estate bonanza fuelled a giant, increasingly obvious economic bubble. Persistently high growth figures (like 7%), ongoing construction and investment made a lot of onlookers suspicious that China’s economic joyride would last forever. Sure enough, beginning in July 2015 the stock market finally crashed. While only a small percentage of Chinese own stocks, it’s a sign that China’s boom years are done. The government also panicked and engaged in emergency measures to shore up the stock market, which not only put off investors even more, but made a mockery of its hopes to let markets play a “decisive role” in the Chinese economy. Suddenly China’s leaders weren’t all-knowing and wise when it came to economics anymore.
It’s way too early to make any statements about the stock market crash’s effects on China’s long-term economic prospects, but it’s obvious that its growth rate is slowing down and will slow down further. Since a robust economy is the most important pillar of the Party’s legitimacy and popular support, its leaders are even more rattled than before. This moment could be looked back on as the beginning of the end for Communist-ruled China, as Shambaugh writes.
And yet sceptics of the doomsday narrative make good points. A bungled bubble burst won’t seriously damage decades of impressive progress and smart decisions from the Beijing elite. Sceptical scholars like Gordon Chang have predicted the apocalypse for years now with no blatant signs of demise yet. When comparable crises hit the West, only cranks foretell the imminent collapse of the whole system. It’s also worth keeping in mind that, since it’s a one-party state, China has no viable opposition movements, so a political collapse could bring about new bosses who are more or less the same as the old bosses. Don’t expect a quick, painless transition to Taiwan-style democracy and pluralism.
So how long will the Chinese political system endure? The Soviet collapse was really, in hindsight, a historical anomaly. Great powers have collapsed before, but never so fast or entirely due to internal erosion. The miasma left in the wake of the Arab Spring has shown the world that pro-democracy uprisings don’t always have happy endings. But Shambaugh makes good points, and it’s worth keeping his arguments in mind as Xi, Li Keqiang, and the rest of the Politburo navigate the dangerous waters ahead by steering China into the modern world without loosening their rigid control of the system. There’s a reason Sinologists are often called “China watchers”: it’s a country that demands close attention.
- The government’s economic plan for the next five years will not live up to its promises of bold reform. Instead of focusing on economic reform, Xi appears more preoccupied with tightening his political grip. Only days before the National People’s Congress opened in early March, the authorities closed a social-media account with 38m followers operated by Ren Zhiqiang, a former property developer and party member. Ren had used it to criticise Xi’s recent efforts to tighten the party’s control over the media. During the NPC censors removed an online article published by Caixin, a business magazine in Beijing. It was accused of posting “illegal content”, apparently by quoting an adviser to the NPC as saying “the right to speak freely must be protected”. (Source: “The National People’s Congress: Unlucky for some“, The Economist, 12.03.2016).
- Tyler Headley and Cole Tanigawa-Lau, “Measuring Chinese Discontent: What Local Level Unrest Tells Us“, Foreign Affairs, 10.03.2016.