He also admits that ‘today, ordinary people eat better and live better than at any time in 5000 years of Chinese civilisation. They live and work where they please and the neighbourhood spies are a thing of the past.’
And he also concedes that ‘China has sheathed the sword, pledged to negotiate its differences, and smiles beatifically on its neighbours. Rather than threatening them with guns and rockets, China now offers them free trade agreements and big investment projects. This is the policy that China’s leaders called its “peaceful rise”. The word “rise”, however, was considered too intimidating. The approved rubric is now “peaceful development”‘.
But, he reckons, in a country run by a tiny, unelected clique, we cannot know whether China will continue its benign evolution or be convulsed by internal ructions.’
What, on earth, does this mean? Does it mean that here is no means by which we can seek understanding of what might happen, on the balance of probabilities? Does it mean that it is not worth the effort to try to know? Is there a dynamic in political transition that it is impossible to fathom?
There is actually a fair bit of rigorous argument out there on these issues, including in China iteself.
But wait for it: by its genes, Hartcher apparently believes, China is locked out of that subtle and complex range of options that are revealed in the choice of representative political systems among all the democratic polities of the world. China is confined, by his account, to choices that have been so far been made by ethnic Chinese nations, of which there are two existing models! ‘If China’s political evolution comes to resemble democratic Taiwan, we can expect a China that looks very much like the rest of the world’, he says. Not quite right, but you get the drift. ‘But if it chooses to model itself on the tight state control and the quasi-democratic trappings of authoritarian Singapore (the other choice), the picture is far murkier.’ Again not quite right. Hartcher might be surprised to learn that the theoriticians of political transition in the CCP would agree with him that Singapore is not a viable model to adopt for China.
Hartcher concludes that ‘Deng, who may yet go down as the single most important historical figure of the 20th century, predicted in 1987 that China would be a democracy within 50 years; it’s now 21, and counting.’
Counting according to what metric? Towards some undefined endpoint progress towards which is unfathomable unless your hold the key to Hatcher’s political metric?
We need analysis of political transition in China that is more refined and transparent than Hartcher’s if we are going to make the punt we had to take to engage with China pay-off.
Hartcher can hanker for the days of securing power in a world in which there was ‘no moral equivalence’ if he likes. But that world has gone and we are in another world altogether now. We had better get used to working hard on how to get to where we want to it in it, both politically as well as economically.
[…] Let me be clear. My view is that the imperative of political reform will come sooner rather than later, and that it is indeed critical to the sustainability of Chinese economic performance in the medium term. It is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘how and when’. But that is another and much larger story and the idea that nothing changes until that story is complete is a faulty one on which to base a whole raft of important policy judgments (link). […]