China’s Return to Global Glory

Edward Friedman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

China is again a world power. The policies of its ruling Communist Party have a global impact on everything from commodity prices to human rights, raising the former and weakening the latter. China has defeated the international human-rights movement. When Denmark in the late 1990s introduced a motion at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to investigate systemic abuses of human rights in China, Beijing blocked a Danish trade mission. It cost Denmark to promote human rights. France then announced it would no longer support investigations of Chinese human-rights abuses. Paris was swiftly rewarded with billions of dollars’ worth of new business in China. When the United States still sought to have the United Nations look into China’s massive violations of fundamental rights, especially the brutal suppression of Uighur Muslims, Beijing got the United States voted off the Human Rights Commission.

 

The West got the message. No one publicly embarrasses Beijing without paying a price. Actually, the newly risen People’s Republic of China is even eroding democracy in the democracies, forcing them to keep human-rights supporters far away from visiting Chinese dignitaries, pressuring them to ban visits by Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize–winner, and spying on and harassing human-rights activists who were born in China and now live in the West. Beijing has applied such tactics both East and West, from Mongolia and Thailand, to the United States, Britain and France. Authoritarian China’s rise is a world-changing event. 

Regional Clout 

Of course, superpower China’s greatest impact is among its immediate neighbours in Asia. The United States is involved in the region because of its military alliances with Japan and South Korea and because it is the military guarantor of democratic Taiwan. The United States is also involved because Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War have led to the view that peace and prosperity are most likely when no single power tries to dominate the entire region. The international community as a whole is involved because Asia is the most economically dynamic region of the world, such that global prosperity seems conditional on deep interdependence with Asian growth. China is far and away the most important power in Asia, although its economy is still much smaller than Japan’s.

 

The members of ASEAN (the Association of South-East Asian Nations), like many other countries, want to take advantage of China’s economic rise, seen as an engine of growth. But Vietnam, Indonesia, and the other ASEAN states do not want to be left alone with a would-be hegemonic China. Their history books recount tales of Chinese invasion, slaughter, atrocity and conquest. The ASEAN nations therefore naturally seek balance and room for manoeuvre by engagement not only with China but also with Europe, India, Japan and the United States. They want to see the United States and virtually all other countries involved in the region. That ASEAN interest would seem to produce policies fostering peace, co-operation and prosperity.

 

Democratic India, long regarding itself as a competitor with China, also appreciates co-operation with the United States. In today’s globalised world, newly shrunk by revolutions in communications and transport, where most of its people live in Asia and where Asia is its fastest-growing region, China and the United States cannot help but be entangled. In a real world of conflicting interests, tensions are inevitable. War, sadly, is possible. But co-operation, peace and prosperity should be the goals. The ASEAN agenda should be embraced by China, Japan, the United States, Europe and India.

 

Much of Asia wishes that the United States were doing more to advance this agenda. People are upset that President George W. Bush has so involved the United States in Iraq that it is distracted from dealing with important issues in Asia, such as reinforcing institutions and policies that foster peace, co-operation and prosperity. But Beijing sees Bush’s Iraq catastrophe as making China a more welcome and unchallenged actor in Asia. The peoples of Asia, by 2005, had a much more positive image of President Hu Jintao’s China than of Bush’s America. 

Building Bridges 

China has worked to earn this trust. When Mao’s Stalinist group first seized power in 1949, it helped arm communist insurgents in Burma, Thailand and Malaysia. It was involved with anti-regime forces in Cambodia and Indonesia. But by the 1970s, worried about a Vietnam that was part of a Soviet bloc anti-China coalition, Beijing dropped its backing for insurgents and began supporting anti-Soviet governments. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978, China was helpful to the anxious government in Thailand. With Thailand central to the ASEAN project, the ASEAN nations began to see China in a more positive light.

 

Then, in the 1980s, when the reformed Chinese economy began to take off, Thai and Singapore capital did very well in China. By the 1990s, China was joining bodies facilitating regional economic co-operation. Everyone wanted the cash spent by Chinese tourists and investors and the money to be had from exporting to China. The Beijing regime was suddenly awash in hard currencies, accumulating foreign exchange to become the largest holder of such wealth in the world.

 

Finally, the Asian financial crisis of 1997–8 persuaded Beijing that multilateral economic co‑operation could serve Chinese interests. When the Clinton administration, backing the International Monetary Fund as a major intermediary, blocked Japan from a bilateral bailout of the wounded ASEAN nations, Chinese leaders concluded that financial co-operation even with Japan could provide ASEAN with safety nets that would make stability more likely and a crisis leading to democratisation—as had occurred in Indonesia in the wake of the Asian financial crisis—less likely. What China’s rulers will not do is anything which seems even remotely to challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy and monopoly of power. 

The Party Inviolable 

Beijing has exerted its new power and prestige to protect this prime interest, obstructing the spread of democracy in Asia so that China does not become the odd nation out. China backs the military tyrants in Burma and deflects ASEAN efforts to support Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The Communist Party took the surge of democratic forces in Lebanon, Georgia, the Ukraine and elsewhere as a direct threat to its monopoly of power in China, viewing democratisation in Asia as a US plot to control the country.

 

The Communist Party has been preoccupied with opposing democracy since even before it seized power in 1949. At the end of the Second World War, as fascism crumbled and the United Nations ratified a Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Japan, Germany, Italy and Austria democratised, the Chinese, too, sought democracy. Communist Party leader Mao Zedong claimed that his regime would be truly democratic, as proved by its support for some village elections. Mao backed a “New Democracy” with a coalition government of all progressive forces, including eight other political parties.

 

By 1957–8, these parties complained publicly that the “New Democracy” had been a sham, that Mao’s China was a Stalinist single-party dictatorship. Mao responded by attacking, vilifying and imprisoning these democrats, denouncing them as rightists. Many subsequently died in labour camps.

 

Nonetheless, many Chinese continued courageously to struggle for democracy and human rights, culminating in a 1989 nationwide democracy movement. More Chinese took to the streets to demonstrate for democracy than in many east European countries which successfully democratised. Having brutally crushed that democracy movement with the massacre of Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, Beijing hopes that a passionate nationalism will combine with higher living standards to relegitimate the Communist Party and discredit a democratic alternative. Growth of 10 per cent or so a year for over a quarter of a century has more than quadrupled per capita income in China. The rapid and huge transformation this has wrought is mind-boggling, almost incomprehensible. 

Seeking Wider Bounds 

Most observers do not yet fully grasp China’s economic rise. China’s performance is at or near the top of almost any list of economic indicators. While most people may think the richest woman in the world is the children’s novelist J. K. Rowling or US chat-show host Oprah Winfrey, it actually is Zhang Yin. She owns 72 per cent of Nine Dragons Paper, China’s largest paper-recycling business. She is worth US$3.2 billion. In 2006, the most money raised on a stock market for initial public offerings was not in New York or London but in Hong Kong, where Chinese enterprises raised tens upon tens of billions of dollars in capital.

 

Because of its rapid economic rise, China is now the world’s second-largest consumer of petroleum. This has foreign-policy consequences. China is not happy that the oil it imports from the Middle East must be transported across waters dominated by the US Navy, the military of a democracy which helps maintain a balance of power in the region and which supports democratisation in Burma and elsewhere. Therefore, China is building pipelines through central, south and South-East Asian countries in order to secure that oil. It is also seeking to invest in oil production in Central Asia and Russia, where pipelines into China would be beyond the reach of the US Navy. In case of war with the United States, China wants a secure oil supply.

 

The Chinese leadership has complex attitudes towards the United States. On the one hand, it sees that China’s rapid rise is facilitated by access to the US market, US technology, foreign direct investment and knowledge. China therefore needs and seeks good relations with the United States. China does not want war.

 

On the other hand, China wants to annex Taiwan, a flourishing democracy of twenty-three million people protected by the US Navy from Chinese military threats. Taiwan lies one hundred miles across the Taiwan Strait from the Chinese mainland. Chinese military journals portray Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines as an island chain of US-backed lands to China’s east which somehow “contains” China. Beijing wants to break out of this so-called containment, viewed as a constraint on China ever since Harry Truman’s presidency. Once China absorbs Taiwan, as the Chinese military sees it, the Chinese navy will become a “blue water” fleet, capable of operating well out into the Pacific Ocean.

 

Beijing believes that the annexation of Taiwan and uninhabited islands in the South China Sea and the East China Sea will further China’s regional predominance. It regards these islands as “unsinkable aircraft carriers”, bridgeheads that will enable China to cross the Pacific and extend its power in the world.

 

Once such islands are incorporated, China could treat the waters, islets, fisheries and energy resources of the South China Sea, claimed also by ASEAN nations, as Chinese. That sea would become a Chinese lake. China would dominate Asia.

 

In like manner, the East China Sea, including Japan’s Senkaku Islands and the energy resources of those waters, would fall into China’s sphere of power. If Taiwan were incorporated into China and the United States were pushed out of the region, then China, as in pre-modern times, would overwhelmingly be the dominant regional power. For Chinese patriots, such an outcome is natural. Other nations would have to accede to Chinese policies and positions. The ASEAN project of balancing and manoeuvring to secure independence would be defeated. China would be at least the equal of the United States.

 

Consequently, Communist Party strategists perceive an island chain of US containment, focused on Taiwan, as the major obstacle to China’s proper place in the sun. A state-promoted Chinese chauvinism teaches patriots to hate Americans, Japanese and Taiwanese for supposedly containing, humiliating and weakening China. Japanese are portrayed as a war-mongering people, and Taiwanese as traitors to the pure Han Chinese race because the Taiwanese embrace multiculturalism. The real, ulterior purpose of the 1999 US-led NATO military campaign to stop ethnic cleansing by Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo was said by Beijing to be to detach Tibet and Xinjiang (a largely Muslim Turkic region) from China. Chinese citizens have been prodded to compete in providing evidence of Japanese insults, a policy which produced anti-Japan race riots in 2005.

 

As with its contradictory attitudes towards the United States, both a needed economic partner and a hated military constrainer, China also has contradictory attitudes and policies towards Japan. Beijing sees Japan as a potential challenger for regional hegemony in Asia. It has therefore portrayed the democratic Japanese of today as unchanging vengeful militarists, an immoral people unworthy of a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, despite Japan’s generous international contributions, especially on vital matters such as refugees. China, in contrast, despite its economic rise, has contributed relatively little to the United Nations. Whereas no Japanese soldier since the end of the Second World War has killed a foreigner, Chinese troops since the inauguration of the People’s Republic in 1949 have attacked South Koreans, Americans, Indians, Vietnamese and Russians, in wars, skirmishes and ambushes. 

Opposing Democracy 

However, the chief imperative of the international realists who run the Communist Party regime is not a foreign-policy issue, but domestic. It is to preserve the party’s monopoly of political power. The regime, therefore, does not want to see democratisation in Burma or Uzbekistan or North Korea, for fear of the spread of the democratic contagion to the People’s Republic. Beijing did not want North Korea to go nuclear because that might lead Beijing’s neighbours in Tokyo or Taipei to follow suit. But it also does not want to see the brutal, cruel and useless regime in Pyongyang fall. China will even court Japan to co-operate on matters regarding North Korea if that helps keep Japan from going nuclear. China wishes to remain the sole nuclear power in its region.

 

But the bottom line for the authoritarian rulers in Beijing is to do nothing to advance the cause of democracy and human rights in Asia. The Communist Party would prefer to foster a military coup in Pyongyang which would empower a ruling group similar to that in Beijing before it would agree to a toppling of the Kim Jong-il regime, an unwelcome event that could open the way towards democratisation. Democracy is the number one threat for the party leaders, who enjoy the perks of unaccountable power.

 

Beijing’s fear of democratisation also informs its attitude towards democratic Taiwan. It portrays small, poorly armed Taiwan, which seeks mutually beneficial economic relations with China, as provocative and irresponsible. Taiwan’s attempt to survive independently of China is treated by Beijing as a dangerous madness. China hopes to deny all possible breathing space in the international community to the government of Taiwan and to court Taiwanese tycoons and the Nationalist Party of the late dictator Chiang Kai-shek, the Kuomintang (KMT), which is led by families from the mainland, to betray the Taiwanese people and sell out to China. The KMT is still dominated by old-guard descendants of the elite families who lost a civil war in mainland China to Mao’s communist forces in 1949. Some Taiwanese fear that these racist, reactionary Chinese mainlanders who fled to Taiwan have no deep loyalty to a democracy dominated by supposedly racially inferior Taiwanese.

 

Whether it is the Democratic Progressive Party, the Taiwan-identified party of President Chen Shui-bian, or the KMT, neither major political party in Taiwan’s democracy could or would do anything to threaten China. In fact, Taiwan’s military budget has been declining for over a decade. Taiwan won’t even purchase weapons systems offered by the United States. Yet Beijing amasses missiles across the sea from Taiwan to make the point that military defeat is the alternative to surrender to communist China for a weak and ever more isolated Taiwan. 

A Rise to Be Feared? 

So far, China is succeeding very well in all its regional efforts. Given how disastrous, alienating or useless Bush administration policies have been, China could yet succeed and become the dominant power in Asia and, indeed, a world power. It already is a powerhouse. Those who dismiss regional worries over China’s rise to predominance tend to misread Chinese history and assume that China, uniquely of all world powers, has somehow never expanded by military might, which is what Chinese propaganda claims. To get a more accurate view of Chinese history, a view in which Chinese are human beings, not saints, one should consult serious scholarship on Chinese expansion, prize-winning works like Nicola Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in East Asian History (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Morris Rossabi, ed., China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbours, 10th–14th Centuries (University of California Press, 1983); Alistair Iain Johnston, Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton University Press, 1995); and Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Belknap Press, 2005). China did not reach its present large size by pacifism. Those with power in China have acted pretty much as have other ruling groups, whether American or British or Japanese or Ottoman. Great concentrations of power are not to be trusted.

 

Besides treating idealised myths about China as realities, the views of those who will not comprehend the concerns of Asians about China’s return to regional predominance are permeated by self-interested, wishful thinking. For those looking through rose-tinted spectacles, China is in the process of democratising, and a democratic China will not go to war with Taiwan, would welcome the liberation and political ascendancy of democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, and would co-operate with South Korea and Japan to maintain regional peace and prosperity. But is China actually democratising today any more than it was in the era of Mao’s fraudulent “New Democracy”?

 

China’s rulers make clear in word and deed that democracy is enemy number one. Almost every day some good-hearted Chinese is seized, threatened or imprisoned for promoting democracy. Yet the erroneous belief that China is already democratising is embedded in a particular spin regarding the policy of engagement. While I, too, believe in full engagement with China, the policy’s super-salesmen see it not as the least-bad alternative in a real world of limited options, which it is, but rather as a magic potion capable of peacefully promoting China’s democratisation.

 

We have seen this chicanery before. The same sorts of government and business interests that promoted “constructive engagement” with apartheid South Africa as an alternative to support for the anti-racist forces of democratisation are repeating their fraud in dealings with China, claiming that ignoring systemic human-rights abuses is actually promoting democracy. There is no persuasive evidence that these interests are more concerned about the human rights of the Chinese people than they were about the human rights of black South Africans. Their argument that engagement is already producing a democratic China is tragically laughable. 

Democratic Shoots? 

To show that democracy is being born, they point to the growing middle class in China and claim that it will demand democratic rights and freedoms. In fact, the newly enriched urbanites of China see themselves as an isolated meritocracy surrounded by the ignorant peasant poor. The middle class opposes democracy, fearing that it will bring to power irrational and vengeful folk from the uncultured countryside.¹

 

But proponents of engagement as a supposed cure-all for the ills of Communist Party tyranny insist that democracy is already emerging in China. The proof, repeating the propaganda fraud of the “New Democracy” line at the end of the Second World War, is that villagers can vote for some local officials. In addition, it is said, Chinese citizens are now allowed to travel and go to school abroad. This is indeed true. But it is quite a leap of faith to go from these facts to the claim that democracy is winning out—that, as the proponents of engagement insist, the imperatives of a commercial order will bring about the rule of law in China. Beijing actually studies the regimes of authoritarian marketeers such as Chile’s General Pinochet to learn how not to democratise.

 

Actually, village elections of administrators to carry out central government policies are a reform meant to strengthen the Communist Party’s monopoly of power and have nothing to do with democracy. The party apparatus has the means to sabotage its challengers. When the unfairly defeated complain, they are railroaded into prison. The elections are indeed very popular as a means of trying to check brutally corrupt local officials who ignore central government policy. But the party centre keeps backing off from challenging the party base when the latter sabotages reforms that just might permit a small opening in a democratic direction. Aware of this, local authorities are ever nastier and more arbitrary. Increasingly, local government in China is thug government.

 

In fact, rather than moving towards democracy, the Communist Party regime jails democrats. It leads the world in terms of the number of journalists and Internet bloggers it imprisons. The party explicitly declares that it has no intention of democratising. Its preference is a relatively clean and efficient technocratic authoritarianism, as in Singapore. Such a transition might be a great improvement over today’s pervasively corrupt and brutal regime, but it is not democracy. It is also unlikely, given how different the party’s institutional heritage is from Singapore’s as a city-state that emerged from British colonial rule.

 

The wishful thinkers who would conceal a nasty Chinese reality also claim that China’s free-market economy is inherently in conflict with China’s authoritarian polity. They argue that economic freedoms must win out, that China will eventually have to democratise in order to maintain the growth needed for the jobs which guarantee social stability. How China, where autonomous trade unions in Chinese-owned factories are outlawed, can be characterised as “economically free”, assuming that phrase has some meaning, is not obvious. Fearing a popular backlash against allegedly exploitative foreign business-owners, the Beijing regime attempts to prove its patriotic mettle by encouraging its official unions to challenge foreign “exploiters”.

 

This claim that China must inevitably democratise is such an ideological argument so divorced from reality that it is difficult to know which piece of its illogic to deconstruct first. In reality, a very stable China has moved from one form of authoritarianism to another, one that is quite compatible with continuing economic growth. The Communist Party regime has abandoned a Soviet-style command economy to become globally competitive. It has also dispensed with a Stalinist polity. China’s political system today can be understood as something of an amalgam of three different, non-democratic, polities: the economic reformism of Janos Kadar’s communist-era Hungary; the corrupt military dictatorship of pre‑1987 South Korea, which had patronage ties to huge economic conglomerates; and authoritarian and amazingly inegalitarian Mexico under the presidentialism of the PRI party. But while China’s political system today may still be authoritarian and replete with systemic abuses of human rights and other tensions, it is not the monstrous dictatorship of the Mao era. Life is much improved. Chinese people truly appreciate the extraordinary change for the better they have experienced in recent decades. They are afraid to risk what they have won for a democracy which seems not only uncertain or impossible but also a challenge to the Communist Party that could produce a backlash in which they would lose their post-Mao gains. 

Reading China 

What educated publics demand of analysts of Chinese politics is what all this change means for China and the world’s future. To be honest, I do not know. Politics is a very contingent arena. It is impossible to figure out long-term futures.

 

Besides, as the analysis above shows, China is replete with complex and contradictory forces. How can one know whether its policies towards the nations to its south in ASEAN will build on new and successful economic co-operation or on chauvinistic passions, desires and interests to seize waters, islets and energy resources to make China the region’s hegemon, a world superpower?

 

These complex and contradictory factors and forces pervade politics in China. On the one hand, for example, there is cruel religious repression in authoritarian China. Lama Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, and autonomous Christians suffer grievously. Yet it is also the case that most Han Chinese Buddhists, Daoists and Confucians are almost totally free to practise their religions, which tend to be very local and have no national hierarchy. Given this not untypical mix of good and bad in China, how should international actors respond? Obviously, they should try not to act in ways that advance the cause of the nastier forces in China. But given the regime’s sensitivity to any opening to democracy, international actors can do very little on behalf of the better forces.

 

To highlight sources of stability in the system, as this essay has done, is not to deny the deep problems and conflicts which follow when a corrupt, greedy and brutal ruling party imposes so much change in such a short period. Naturally, there are tensions in the new system. The Chinese leadership could mishandle problems and create a regime-threatening crisis. It is possible. But so far it has handled challenges quite ably. Major academic analysts of politics in China tend to agree on the success of the country’s political transition.

 

Of course, the future is an uncharted country. But if the party-state is toppled, the victor is most likely to be, not democrats, but hard-line chauvinistic security forces denouncing China’s joining of the world market as a betrayal of the country’s vulnerable poor. A “red–brown” alliance of right-wing nationalists and old-style communists would stand up for China against its enemies. A fascist-like state would emerge and insist on strong action against a splitist Taiwan, an unrepentant Japan, and a hostile United States.

 

At that point, too many new factors would be in play and interacting for anyone to foresee with confidence the longer-term consequences. Today, however, whatever their discontents, most politically conscious Chinese see the post-Mao amalgam, despite its failings or horrors, as their best hope. They fear instability and political change, democratic or otherwise. It is enough for now, they feel, that they have the social space to raise their families as they wish, to plan their futures, and to enjoy the blessings of China’s new wealth and prestige—everything from foreign travel to the sense of dignity in being Chinese today, citizen of a growing economic giant and world power. Politically conscious Chinese, much as the French philosophes in the eighteenth century, can feel good about supporting what they see as an enlightened despotism. To them and to people everywhere, China is a great success.

 

The premiss of the claim that China must inevitably democratise is that only democracies can deliver sustained growth. But more than a quarter of a century of fabulous post-Mao growth testifies to the contrary. There is no reason why authoritarian regimes cannot do well economically. Nineteenth-century Germany and Japan performed brilliantly. So has Singapore. And so has the Beijing regime since 1978–9. Political authoritarianism is not an inherent obstacle to successful economic growth. And contrariwise, democracies are quite capable of making a mess of economic policy.

 

Actually, Beijing’s authoritarian model is succeeding globally, not just in China. Humanity is not enjoying ever more democracy. Elections are widely seen as harbingers of instability. Authoritarian China, by contrast, is seen as a success, and is attracting imitators all around the world. China’s Communist Party seems to know how to achieve economic growth, maintain stability, become a global power, and hold on to a monopoly of power at home. To most of the world, as to the Chinese people, that seems quite a successful record. Authoritarian China seems glorious.

Endnotes

1. For a more realistic view of Chinese villagers, see two studies by Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden: Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005), and Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991).