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The internal logic of China's political development

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2011-6-6 15:19

By J. Stapleton Roy


The idea that China has experienced two to three decades of rapid economic growth without corresponding political changes is nonsense, according to J. Stapleton Roy, who has represented the U.S. government in Beijing and other Asian capitals. In fact, he writes, China's government has a remarkable ability to adapt to changing economic and social pressures — a skill the U.S. government should envy.


China, as we all know, has gone through an extraordinary economic transformation over the last 30 years. This transformation has remade the face of coastal China. It's now spilling over into the interior and it's raised, literally, hundreds of millions of people to an unprecedented level of affluence.


Conventional wisdom, however, shared by many Americans and much of the media, is that China's political system has remained frozen and that there have been no significant political reforms to match those in the economic sphere. This, of course, is nonsense. Political change in China has occurred on a vast scale, in a number of vitally important areas affecting the day-to-day existence of ordinary Chinese.


These changes encompass, first, the relationship of the government to the people. In the 1970s, China still had a totalitarian political system in which the government controlled literally every aspect of people's lives. Now, the Chinese have significant freedom of choice on such matters as where they can live, where they can travel, what they can wear, what they can read, where they can work and where they can be educated.


Even with the censorship that remains in place, the Chinese have access to a wider range of information than ever before, and social networking and the blogosphere have become significant factors influencing government attitudes and behavior.


The second change is in the age and educational characteristics of the country's national leaders. China is alone among modern countries in having a system of rigorously enforced age limits that apply even to its top political leaders. As for the characteristics of the leaders themselves, not only are they younger, they are much better educated.


A third area of change is in the ideology of the Communist Party itself. In essence, the Chinese Communist Party has abandoned traditional communist ideology. Instead of class struggle, it preaches a harmonious society. Instead of claiming to be the vanguard of the proletariat, it now admits capitalist entrepreneurs to the party and claims to represent all of the people. It has embraced market economics. It has instituted an orderly process for the selection of top leaders.


A fourth area of change is in the way Chinese think about political issues. This is the result of many factors, including the hundreds of thousands of students who have studied abroad and the millions who travel abroad on official trips for business or for tourism every year. This allows for greater access to information and greater freedom for discussion. Tens of millions of Chinese can compare conditions in China with conditions in other countries on the basis of personal experience and observation.


China's leaders have been remarkably adaptable


In essence, the party is determined to avoid the mistakes the Soviet Union made under Mikhail Gorbachev, who, in their eyes, committed the cardinal error of loosening the political reins too quickly and then losing control.


Political change in China is likely to be driven by such generational changes in the top leaders. The fifth-generation leaders who will take over next year will be the first leaders in China to have spent most of their adult careers during the period of reform and openness.


The sixth-generation leaders who will take over in 2022 — 11 years from now — will be too young to have any memories of the Cultural Revolution. These leaders will be confronted with the never-ending sets of problems generated by China's rapid transformation, but their responses will be influenced by their different generational perspectives, their greater familiarity with the outside world and China's growing integration in the global economy.


Why has China been able to sustain rapid growth for such an extended period? The answer is that China's leaders have been remarkably adaptable in adjusting the system to accommodate the changes that are taking place. The altered mindsets in China are enormous, far greater than many Americans realize.


In essence, the party has been bold and imaginative in responding to the challenges it faced. It is too little appreciated in the United States that for the last 30 years, China has been constantly adapting as its domestic and international circumstances have changed. This has included major government reorganizations every five years for three decades. Ministries have been created or abolished. State agencies have been turned into quasi-private corporations.


attended a conference in Hainan Island in January 2010, and it was literally stunning to find Chinese at all levels of participation assuming that China would simply change their institutions if necessary to cope with new problems — whereas nobody in Washington thinks that our institutions can be changed, or at least nobody has found a way to do that yet.


Conceivably, this same adaptability could eventually emerge in the political sphere. We should remember that within greater China there are already two alternative political systems. You have the multi-party democratic system in Taiwan, and you have the mixed — elected and non-elected — systems in Hong Kong and Macao. How these political systems function over the next several decades will have an influence over political developments in the rest of China.


The vast majority of Chinese recognize that stability is a precondition for continued economic growth. This perception unites Chinese of widely varying political views. Does this mean that meaningful political reform will not take place? The answer is no.


China has only moved 15 to 25 years along this path, depending on whether you start counting the period of rapid growth from 1979 or from 1993. I prefer the 1993 date because if you look at the charts, you see that that's when China experienced a really sharp rise in the growth of its GDP.


To the extent that these Asian models have any relevance for China, this means that it's premature to expect significant systemic political change to occur in China in the near future. Indeed, if we want positive political change to occur in China, this will more likely be the result not of outside pressure, but of continued rapid economic growth and generational changes within the Chinese leadership.


Inevitably, the world will be watching what happens.



This article is adapted from Ambassador Roy's presentation at a Brookings Institution panel discussion, "Evolution of China's Governance: Chinese and American Perspectives" on May 9, 2011
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