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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
The West alternates between seeing China as weak and friendly and fearing it as strong and dangerous. The notion of China as a threat revived after Tiananmen, and today it is nourished by Beijing's upgrading of its navy and air force, its sales of arms around the world and its assertiveness in making territorial claims to parts of the South China Sea. China-threat theory is congenial to the defense bureaucracy, to American industries threatened by Chinese exports, and to some sections of the labor movement.
Two recent books usefully confuse the debate. They portray China as booming and collapsing at the same time. Orville Schell, our most durable China observer, describes the events he witnessed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the desolate aftermath, the economic boom since 1992, and its puzzling accompaniment of "heterodox ideas, weird fads, errant cultural tendencies and unorthodox economic hustles." 1 Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the energetic married team who won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting in The New York Times , write about their five-year tour of duty, marked by economic dynamism and continuing political repression. 2
Of course, we have heard about China waking before, during the reforms of the late Qing in 1900-1910 and the Kuomintang revival of the 1930s--episodes that scholars often compare to Deng Xiaoping's reforms--and during the early years of Mao's reign. In each episode, political wreck brought economic ruin. On the whole, both books give more testimony against a brilliant future for China than in favor. If Deng's regime proves to have been a collapsing dynasty, a monarchical metaphor that both books use, then China should face several more decades of chaos and poverty before it can make another attempt to fulfill its potential as a world power.
On the other hand, powerful forces are pushing China toward "peaceful evolution," which is what Chinese reformers want, and what Chinese conservatives fear. Economic reform is ushering in the rule of law; modernization is creating social pluralism; prosperity encourages the assertion of individual interest; and the post-Deng political succession is likely to expose the need to find a new basis for legitimizing the regime. And yet, as the political scientist Adam Przeworski has argued, liberalization never saved a dictatorship. In Eastern Europe and Latin America, liberalization was always a way station to popular mobilization followed by renewed repression, or to authentic democratization. 3 China has already had the former experience, and it could have it again. Or it could democratize.
Both books trace the current Chinese boom to Deng's "talks on a Southern tour" in early 1992. During visits to Shanghai and the Special Economic Zones, Deng made a series of pronouncements, among them, "Only development is hard logic," "Anyone who doesn't reform can get out of office," and "Policies are good if they are good for liberating the productive forces, increasing comprehensive power of the socialist state and raising the people's living standards." These slogans became the mantras of provincial officials and enterprise managers in their race for growth.
Twelve percent growth has brought goods to the markets, construction cranes to the streets and tales of giddy achievement to the official press. The numbers are real, if rough; but much of what they measure is fake. Some state enterprises consist of waste piles of spoiled goods surrounded by subsidized workers on permanent smoking break, but the output, jobs, and cigarettes increase the respective national numbers. Pirated CD's, counterfeit jeans, and poisoned medications count in production statistics. Investment capital that flows into the country is tallied, but capital flight is not. The economy is bloated with unrecoverable state-bank loans, "triangle debts" among enterprises and their suppliers, and "black" and "gray" speculative capital.
Some Chinese economists believe that, as one of them told me, "those who think Russia is in worse shape than China are wrong. We have a larger population, a lower ratio of industrial to agricultural employment, weaker institutions of macroeconomic control, and fewer social-welfare programs. After forty-five years of socialism, we still need to industrialize."
China has been industrializing for a long time, but the task only gets more pressing. Mao's policy of breakthrough modernization, which was inaugurated in the 1950s, left the peasants to raise themselves by their bootstraps while putting state resources into large factories. This gave China a big industrial sector, but left 80 percent of the population living on the land in poverty. Deng's reforms in the late 1970s and early 1980s freed the peasants from the collectives in order to raise rural living standards. This brought brick homes and television sets to the villages, but it also meant diminishing returns once the land was made as productive as possible under the given technology.
Today Chinese reformers believe that neither strategy any longer meets China's needs. One told me, "Now we see the problem in terms of employment structure. If we let our growth rate go below 6 percent, we cannot keep up with the demand for jobs and will fall into social disorder due to unemployment." Actually, even at 12 percent growth it's hard to see how the economy can ever provide enough good jobs for the several-hundred-million strong army of the underemployed bequeathed to China by its socialist past.
Eight hundred million Chinese rural residents live on about half as much arable land as about some 5 million farming Americans. Eighty million to 120 million, depending on whose figures you choose, are stuck in poverty that is irremediable unless they move, because their soil, water, and transport resources are too meager to support them. Even those living in fertile areas farm an average of only 100 days a year because their plots are so small. Reformers estimate that to transfer enough people from the land to make agriculture efficient will require from 150 million to 300 million new jobs in other fields. From 40 million (officially) to 100 million (unofficially) peasants are already roaming the country looking for work in factories, construction sites, private households, or as farm hands. The higher estimates amount to 5 to 8 percent of the country's population.
Many workers in the cities are also underemployed or unemployed. The streets are filled with peddlers and bicycle- and shoe-repairmen. Factories and schools run small shops to employ staff or dependents as clerks. On the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a soft-drink vending machine is staffed by two young women who take your coins, drop them in the machine and hand you the can. The reformers are like Buster Keaton on the railway tracks: no matter how fast they run, the population keeps gaining on them.
In the days of the command economy, the regime provided full employment (more precisely, fully disguised unemployment) without inflation; it did so by controlling prices, at a high cost in inefficiency. Deng's reforms dismantled most of the command mechanisms. China's leaders now maneuver between inflation and unemployment as leaders in democratic countries do.
Events like Tiananmen--or the peasant uprising in Renshou County, Sichuan, in 1993, or rural protests and spontaneous factory strikes, each recently reported to number in the thousands each year--are China's moral equivalent of off-year elections, but they are a lot scarier and less predictable. This is one reason (along with the weakness of the central bank) that inflationary and deflationary policies oscillate more violently in China than in the West. A large instance of this oscillation in 1988 lay behind the demonstrations in 1989.
The major divide between reformers and conservatives in Beijing in the 1990s has been over whether faster or slower growth is more risky to the regime. Inflation in 1994 was said to be around 20 percent. Some said 30 percent, and it was far more in the foodstuffs sector, which is especially visible because most people pay little for housing. Yet real incomes in the cities grew in 1993 and 1994. People may complain, but they have more money than they can spend (not least, because there are so few good things to buy). Savings deposits have surged, and money has flowed into two new official stock markets and many unofficial ones, bidding prices to ridiculous heights. Rural real income growth is slow, but the peasants are too dispersed to present much of a threat. Reformers believe the party can survive inflation as long as winners substantially outnumber losers in the cities.
Conservatives see inflation as the main threat. The unemployed can be scattered and suppressed. Inflation upsets everyone: even the winners see other people getting ahead faster than themselves, and the government's share of the pie seems to take more diverse, unfair, and irritating forms even as it shrinks in relation to GNP. If the government tries to smooth imbalances by helping the losers, it moves toward indexation and hyperinflation. But if it lets the winners win, those who benefit most are private and semiprivate entrepreneurs who can never be firm allies of the regime.
Conservatives point to a second cost of the reformers' strategy of stimulating growth by weakening state control: a scramble to privatize state assets. When state enterprises set up subsidiaries and subsidiaries of subsidiaries, the government ends up with an empty shell whose contents have slipped into the hands of the managers and their friends and relatives. The same thing happens when a government enterprise's money is sent abroad to be invested, or is put into the stock market to "stir-fry stocks" (the Chinese financial though not culinary equivalent of "churning"). Land-use rights are also stir-fried. Since all urban and most rural land belongs to the government, people with official connections can acquire such rights, get development licenses, and raise investment money from Governmental Organs and state enterprises looking for fast returns. They don't necessarily develop the land. All these devices lead to assets moving beyond state control.
The reformers know these tricks; but they see them as necessary methods of transition to a more efficient property rights system, like the Enclosure Movement in eighteenth-century England. Scams grow faster than laws, so it is seldom clear what is illegal. Many entrepreneurs brag about the social wealth and the jobs they create, and their public-spiritedness in working closely with local officials. Because the current state of Chinese law leaves private capital legally and politically insecure, many of the purloined assets are consumed in the form of cars, housing, and foreign trips instead of being reinvested. This creates an expense-account frenzy that makes the American two-martini lunch look like the cottage cheese diet plate at a local diner.
The third cost the conservatives see in all-out growth is the decay of moral values. Their idea of decay consists of one part traditionalist revival (old novels, Daoist fortune-tellers, Mao images used as lucky charms), one part foreign influence (rock music, porn videos), one part human nature. A Communist official who specializes in ideological education for a large government bureaucracy explained that "for several decades we were able to keep China the cleanest society in history. Now that we have reduced control to let the economy grow, human nature being what it is, unclean things have developed, like drugs, gambling and prostitution. If we're going to bring in foreign capital we have to accommodate the Westerners' life styles. After all, they can't bring their wives with them to China." Deng belittled such trends as "flies coming in an open window." Schell is a skillful entomologist of such flies. His chapters on publishing and music sketch a popular culture that is vulgar, vibrant and despairing.
Finally, the conservatives fear the growth of an independent legal system. The reformers think the growth-generating benefits of entrepreneurship can be reaped only if the government protects the rights of property owners with a reliable system of laws and courts. The Administrative Litigation Law and economic courts operate under party guidance and are limited in mission. But conservatives argue that full legal protection for private property will doom the Communist system, not only economically but also politically. It will set up independent power centers hostile to the party on which the party must rely for economic results and hence legitimation. They fear the regime is making its survival hostage to antagonistic forces.
The reformers are up to more than providing a safety valve for social discontent, as Schell surmises, but less than Kristof implies when he says in one of the chapters he authored, that "even [some] senior party officials were against the party." The reformers' strategy is to weaken party control and install a market and even multiparty democracy, so the party can regain its legitimacy and survive. As a senior reformist told me, "Our current leaders are not legitimate in the eyes of the people, but they can become legitimate if they continue reform and develop a degree of democracy. We will support them in this. It's no good to negate the authority of the Chinese Communist Party because then China would dissolve." In effect, the reformers believe that the price of continuing Communist power is an end to communism as China has known it.
As Deng's illness deepened, the struggle between development and control intensified. While the provinces and enterprises fought for more credit, the central authorities led by Vice Premier Zhu Rongji tried to restrict it. Beijing ordered limits on markets in stocks, commodities, futures, and real estate; provincial officials circumvented them. Beijing tried to increase the share of taxes passed on to the central government by local tax collectors; regional authorities and local enterprises fought for rebates and postponements.
At the level of ideology, the conflict took the form of debates over property rights and privatization, the nature of socialism, and the degree to which the party's values should limit economic dynamics. In these polemics the conservatives' voices were loudest. They controlled the Central Committee Propaganda Department and through it the main Beijing print media, known as the "two newspapers and seven magazines." Their outlets argued that, in the words of Premier Li Peng, "No state industry, no Chinese-style socialism."
The conservatives' constituencies included state enterprise workers who had lost out in the reforms, farmers stuck on the land, retired people left adrift by the collapse of the communes and hollowing of state enterprises, some retired cadres and intellectuals who believe in the vision of the 1950s. Incredible though it seems to anyone who knows history, many Chinese--especially those too young to remember them--think of the Mao years as a time of social fairness, order, equality, incorruptibility and government concern for the common man. They trace the abandonment of Maoist values in the 1980s to Western economic pressure and cultural subversion and not to the failure of the system itself.
The most important conservative power base remained the elders. They were seven or eight men, in or near their 90s, who poked their noses into everybody else's business. Their graceless calligraphy was all over Beijing, on highway overpasses, magazine titles, book covers, and office nameplates. Their lurching brushwork silently reminded the public that Big Brother was not dead yet. The atmosphere in Beijing was so tense that some reformers feared a possible Soviet-style conservative coup after Deng's death, though this fear was more a measure of reformist anxiety than conservative strength.
In the provinces, the debates in Beijing were irrelevant. "Since Comrade Deng Xiaoping went on his Southern tour," a local official told me, "our thought has been liberated. All that counts here is economic growth." Referring to the chief conservative ideologist in Beijing, this official continued, "Let Deng Liqun serve as a mayor and he would give all that up." In this respect, the Beijing focus of both books is a disadvantage. Neither makes clear that the provincial and lower-level bureaucracies are reformist-controlled, or that this is important for understanding the explosive response to Deng's Southern sayings.
When reformist leaders Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang fell from power in 1987 and 1989 respectively, their followers below the central level stayed in place. All the local cadres one meets today were promoted by Hu and Zhao during the vast personnel turnovers they carried out in the party and state bureaucracies in the 1980s. The mayors and county chiefs around the country, who are now in their thirties and forties, come from industrial backgrounds, unlike their predecessors who were fifty or older and had agricultural backgrounds. The old cadres tried to meet Deng's goal of "doubling and redoubling GNP" by developing agriculture. The new men try to put factories in every mountain and valley. Even among the vast mass of CCP officials, only growth makes their own rule legitimate. Local officials will be sacked by superiors if they fail to meet demanding targets of local development.
The Chinese seem universally to believe that the sole bottleneck to economic growth is lack of capital for investment. Neither the country as a whole nor any administrative unit within it thinks it has enough local money to meet its growth targets. Many tacitly (and wrongly) attribute China's growth to money from abroad, which (counting both loans and investment) totals roughly $90 billion since the start of the reforms, or about $5 per year per Chinese citizen. Local officials have become fund raisers as tireless as American university presidents. For a given city or county, outside capital can come from government banks (whose lending ceilings, however, are tied to local savings), the provincial or central governments (say, by way of a dam project), mainland Chinese enterprises in other provinces (which may want access to a local raw material, for example), or investors abroad, including Taiwan and Hong Kong (who invest for cheap labor or access to Chinese markets). In a manner reminiscent of the pledges of higher production targets during Mao's Great Leap Forward, local officials call meetings to stoke investment fever. Growth is not the most important thing, it is the only thing.
Toting Motorola cellular phones and riding in a hierarchy of cars--from joint venture-produced Jeeps and VW Santanas to imported Lexuses and Mercedes (stratified less by rank as in the past than by enterprise profitability)--local party members do whatever works. They set up private factories disguised as collective enterprises; establish false-front joint ventures with local capital laundered through Hong Kong; commandeer peasants' land without adequate compensation to build factories; import contract workers from poor villages nearby and poor provinces far away; ignore environmental regulations; and sell public land to foreign investors at low prices in the guise of land-use leases. Then they treat themselves to overseas inspection tours paid for by local entrepreneurs, especially to Thailand, where they can study both light manufacturing and the sex industry.
On a visit to a small Chinese provincial city I was honored at a banquet with a live fish that had been held briefly in boiling oil from the gills down and was served staring and gulping for air, lifting its head in a vain attempt to move the rest of its body. The Chinese Communist Party is like this fish: although the head in Beijing is alive, the apparatus in the provinces does not respond. Provincial officials know there are rules against all sorts of things that they do, but they have also learned that Beijing loves a fait accompli. As the saying goes in Guangdong, "Go on green, speed on yellow, go around on red."
Kristof calls the result of this activity "market Leninism." It is a catchy term, but not entirely correct. If a market is an exchange mechanism open to all participants on an equal basis, China does not have many markets. If Leninism is a system of centralized political control, China no longer has much Leninism. What governs China today is more like a network, a kind of Chinese six degrees of separation in which everyone who counts works through links to everybody else who counts. Buying and selling are done through friends and involve commissions. An enterprise may need the help of someone who knows someone to solve problems with land rights, roads, water, electricity, labor, pollution, or taxes. To prepare for this, managers sound out influential people socially to see if they are "the kind of person one can talk to." Any exchange of favors occurs as between friends. In these transactions it doesn't matter whether one is a reformer or a conservative. Nobody is against "human feelings."
"The collective is a great invention," one entrepreneur told me. (This is the term for enterprises that are neither state-owned nor openly private; their aggregate output value now approximately equals that of the state sector.) "It borrows from the bank, expands into a group company, spends money directly on its officers in the form of expense money, and keeps all profits after taxes. Yet it is registered with the state, and supervised by local government in a friendly, helpful way."
"Many organs are supposed to supervise us, but none does," said another manager. "I have no mothers-in-law [government organs meddling in my management of my business]. I don't have to pay assessments. But I voluntarily gave 450,000 yuan [about US$53,000] to a school. I paid 40,000 yuan for roads for two villages, and gave several thousand yuan to the peasants living in the mountains."
A rough kind of ward-boss democracy is developing out of the influence market of officials and entrepreneurs. In one village a farmer made 3 million yuan in private enterprise, then built a road and office building for the village and invested in a collective cement factory. He was selected village chief and party secretary. Such acts may be in the spirit of Mao's adage, "serve the people." But a Chinese friend pointed out, "Everyone would be coming to him for money anyway. Once they have this much money, they have enough to spend and they need political power so other people won't oppress them."
Ordinary people have to be just as deferential to the new entrepreneur-officials as they were to the old commissars. Whatever their benevolence toward clients and friends, the new men are no more subject to checks and balances than the old were. They often represent the interests of a dominant clan. In the worst cases, some of which Kristof and WuDunn report, they act like a "thugocracy."
Networks do not function just among the elite. Migrant workers from different provinces have their capos; gangs who kidnap and sell women as wives to poor villagers have their links across the country; underground publishers and book distributors have their systems of connections. As WuDunn shows in her description of kidnappers and Schell in his description of booksellers, the outlaw and underground networks are as liable to link themselves back to party members as are more respectable entrepreneurs. China doesn't have a Mafia like Russia because in China the Communist Party is the Mafia.
This doesn't mean the state is rotting, as Kristof says it is. In Governing China, Kenneth Lieberthal provides an insightful description of the structure and working of the Chinese government. 4 He shows that the apparatus is much changed from the rigidities of the Mao era, thanks to Hu Yaobang's and Zhao Ziyang's replacement of commissars with technocrats and to the decentralization of administrative power. The party-state has become flexible, adaptable, and effective.
But without a charismatic leader like Mao and a driving ideology, this complex, multifunctional bureaucracy--the largest in the world, with the widest-ranging duties--has become overloaded at the top and gridlocked below, a system Lieberthal calls "fragmented authoritarianism." This has given rise to decisionmaking by negotiation and consensus. Since the bureaucracy covers almost all of society and the economy, almost all of society and the economy participate in the negotiations. The process is slow. Efficiency comes by accelerating bureau-to-bureau, region-to-region, and government-to-society interactions through the use of informal mechanisms. Whatever their functional necessity, to many Chinese these interactions look, walk, and quack like corruption. A popular ditty goes, "A sharp new car, shiny and fine, the guy inside is on the take / Shoot him first and later try him, guaranteed there's no mistake."
If China has neither markets nor a Leninist bureaucracy, it also lacks a civil society, another concept both books try to employ. In the West, civil society grew from within the market, which operated apart from the state. The concepts of market, state, and society lack clear referents in the Chinese situation. In "the economy," the relationship between enterprises and the bureaucracies that either "own" or regulate them is so negotiable that the Chinese analogue to civil society exists within the ambit, and even inside the formal confines, of the bureaucracy. In "society," almost every ostensibly independent organization--institutes, foundations, consultancies--is linked into the party-state network through formal registration, informal patronage, or both. It is hard to say whether the state penetrates society or society penetrates the state.
The ambiguity of the boundaries between state and society may explain why the Chinese value their dissidents so much less than the West does. Wei Jingsheng, China's candidate for a Nobel Peace Prize, was released from fifteen years' imprisonment in September 1993, but insisted on speaking his mind with foreign reporters, including Kristof and WuDunn, and on sending prison manuscripts to Hong Kong journals. He was detained again in the spring of 1994. Han Dongfang, the labor leader who is the subject of a chapter in Schell's book, got early release from prison because of tuberculosis with which the jailers purposely infected him, came to the United States for medical treatment and has since been trying to return to resume his work as an organizer.
Most Chinese are unmoved by such heroism. They think the network provides the best way to do things. Just as in Chinese religion the gods are pleased by ritual conformity rather than by inner faith, so in political society the security ministry doesn't seem to care what people think or even what they say, as long as they don't say it in the wrong time and place. Tact is more important than substance in a network society. Virtually anything can be said in private, and radical ideas can even be published in academic journals, in appropriate language. The same sentiments become political crimes when voiced to foreign reporters. The dissidents court repression because they insist on their rights. It is hard for most Chinese to see why this is worth doing. That is why so few of them need to be repressed.
Repression looms large to foreign reporters because they are, along with the dissidents, its main targets. The government marks Western journalists who fail to play by Chinese rules as hostile. Even the sophisticated Ministry of Foreign Affairs seemed not to understand why people like Schell, Kristof, WuDunn and former Washington Post reporter Lena Sun refused to help their minders do their jobs. They went after them not with the gray routine of Smiley's war but with an authentic sense of outrage. (The stories are told well in both books.) Reporters treated this way see the negative side of the system in more detail than most Chinese. As Kristof observes, the regime "has the worst public relations sense of any major government in the world."
Many human rights promised in the Chinese constitution do not exist at all, such as the right to a free press, to assembly and demonstration, to a fair and public trial. Yet in other ways Chinese society is free. Says Schell, "A combination of freedom in the marketplace and response to foreign pressure made it possible for Chinese to buy what they wanted, enjoy private lives, speak more openly, and even to travel abroad more freely than ever before." Jobs and inflation, housing and traffic, noise and bad air worry most Chinese. They often greet Western human rights concerns with hostility. This is not a reason for the West to reduce its attention to human rights problems in China, but it suggests why the language of rights gets a limited response among the mass of those deprived of many of their rights.
Not that the public's complacency about rights makes the regime feel secure. There are "live volcanoes everywhere," a social scientist told me. Factory workers feel powerless within their enterprises. Farmers resist government orders on what to plant and how much to sell. Financially burdened local governments multiply assessments on villagers, who have started to resist. June 4 remains an unsettled issue, both inside and outside the party. The government was rumored to have spent 8 billion yuan (nearly $1 billion) in the spring of 1994 preparing to put down potential demonstrations on the anniversary of June 4. A reversal of the goverment's verdict that Tiananmen constituted "turmoil," rather than a patriotic action, is widely expected with Deng's death.
And yet the authors of these books did not discover anybody who was trying to overthrow the Chinese Communist Party. The dissidents remain peaceful and moderate. Many intellectuals are rethinking their role in 1989, in a trend called neoconservatism which supports the idea of authoritarian development. One researcher who predicted the disturbances of 1989 told me that another outbreak is not in the cards today. In 1987 his public opinion surveys showed parallel rising lines representing people's wants for the future and their expectations. In late 1988 the lines suddenly diverged. Wants were still rising, but the abortion of price reform and subsequent economic shakeout pushed hopes down. According to a formula as old as Machiavelli, desire minus anticipation equals trouble. It was the collapse of hope more than rising anger at inflation or corruption that led people into the streets in 1989. The lines returned to their parallel course after the crackdown, mainly because people reduced their hopes while the government managed to deliver more than they expected. Surveys then showed expectations rising again, but optimism for the future kept pace, at least while Deng still lived.
Some Chinese believe that economic backwardness dooms the country to dictatorship indefinitely. As a party official said, "Our people are not ready for democracy. They aren't interested. Their educational standard is too low, and they don't know anything about politics. They are too poor; their bellies are not yet full." But it is also true that many ordinary Chinese are more optimistic than their masters. A Beijing resident remarked to me, "Of course we mind our own business: the 1989 demonstrations showed that the people have no power. But change is inevitable. People say the Chinese people don't know enough to be voters, but that's because they put up some candidate nobody knows, they don't explain what he stands for, and you have to vote for him anyway. If there was an election campaign people would see what the candidates could do for them, and they would know how to vote."
So what is the Party afraid of? Projecting blame on foreigners for prostitution, corruption, dissent, bad art, the high cost of international capital, the Tibetan independence movement, and for China's poverty--whether traced to the Opium War, Bush's sanctions, or Washington's demand that China open its market as a precondition for joining the World Trade Organization (formerly GATT)--seems to hide the Party's bad conscience. As a Chinese friend remarked, "The CCP's problem is CCP."
Kristof and WuDunn consider a number of scenarios for China's future. Some are more blood-curdling than most China specialists are willing seriously to envision: the loss of Tibet and Xinjiang, Cantonese independence, and a national coalescence of worker and peasant uprisings to overthrow the regime. But they give greatest emphasis to the scenario suggested by their title, that the economic boom will continue, making China in the next century "the biggest player in the history of man," in the words of Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew. Kristof portrays a possible resurgent China of "blood and iron," armed with enough nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers and burning enough oil to destabilize the world's military balance, oil markets, and environment.
Meanwhile, many Chinese regard outsiders' fear of China as the instrument of malicious intent, designed to sow discord between China and its neighbors, spur a regional arms race, and obstruct China's development. If mutual fear is not alleviated by more openness on both sides, the two devil theories may cycle with one another until they produce a mutual paranoia.
"You thought you could strangle us with your sanctions," a factory manager bellowed at me between challenges to drain cups of maotai. (The misunderstanding is widespread in China that George Bush's post-Tiananmen sanctions restricted U.S. trade and investment; they didn't.) "China is the best country in the world. Neither you nor anybody else can stop our growth. America and China are different. One side will never understand the other. I don't care if 300 or 3,000 people were killed in Tiananmen. It's a small matter." On occasions like this, one glimpses the specter of a possible Chinese national socialism, a frightening mix of Confucian and Marxian anti-individualism, statism, irridentism, and xenophobia.
China today can be described accurately only by self-contradiction. Autonomous forces are inside the party-state; operation outside the network of power is permitted by linkages within it; insiders are the most successful outsiders. Such eluding of our categories of thinking is disturbing partly because we are anxious to reach a judgment. "We wish we could balance good against evil on a single scale and come up with a net positive or negative reading," writes Kristof. He knows that such a balance is impossible. Still, both books are testimony to the desire for it; they are like diaries of their authors' contradictory emotional responses to contradictory realities. Yet China's paradoxes may be more than a feature of transition. They may be constitutive of a system in which power is so all-encompassing yet decentralized that the trinity of state, society, and economy have become one. This may just be the way China works.
Note 1: Orville Schell, Mandate of Heaven: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs, Dissidents, Bohemians, and Technocrats Lays Claim to China's Future (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), p. 325. Back.
Note 2: Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Times Books, 1994). Back.
Note 3: Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 2. Back.
Note 4: Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform (New York: Norton, 1995). Back.
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