JULY/AUGUST 2011
Boston Review
China’s Other Revolution
Boston Review, pp. 12—26.
Edward S. Steinfeld
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Heads of State
On April 3, 2011, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police just prior to boarding a flight to Hong
Kong. He has been held incommunicado since. [Ed. note: He was released on June 22, after this article
went to press.] Ai—known internationally as much for his far-ranging artistic projects as his criticisms of
the Chinese government—is but one of many, perhaps thousands, of “troublemakers” rounded up by the
Chinese government in recent months. Ai may be the most recognizable name globally, but other detainees
have included rights activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, and academics. Some have been formally
charged with “creating a disturbance” or “inciting subversion”; others have been disappeared through extrajudicial procedures.
The exact motivations behind the government’s expanding crackdown are uncertain, but it is safe to assume
that images of Egypt and Tunisia loom large. Indeed, back in February and March, China too appeared
caught in the undertow, with hints of a homegrown “Jasmine Revolution.” But the Jasmine Revolution
drew small crowds and little energy. The dominant story soon became one of unyielding political
repression and conspicuous public silence.
In the West this situation has inspired renewed focus on repression in China, with extensive coverage in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, Le Monde, and elsewhere. At one level
is concern for the detainees themselves, individuals who appear to have done nothing wrong but have been
swallowed up by a criminal justice system affording them neither due process nor mercy. At a deeper level
are geopolitical or even existential worries about what the Chinese government’s behavior signifies for a
nation that is now a leading global power. Seemingly out of nowhere, China has emerged as the world’s
fastest-growing major economy, the largest overseas holder of U.S. government debt, the largest exporter,
and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And along with jaw-dropping technological advancement in
the domestic economy, China has invested in military modernization. Yet even as China becomes a nation
of global caliber, it appears governed by individuals determined to play by their own rules and to respect no
limits to their exercise of power.
But why should the recent detentions arouse particular anxiety? After all, it is hardly news that China is
governed by an authoritarian system. Extrajudicial detentions and reflexive repression of dissent—whether
real or imagined—have always been the method of authoritarian regimes. We see it today in Syria, Libya,
Russia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. And we saw it just a few decades ago in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and
even Mexico.
The variety of nations (and political outcomes) on this list suggests that abuse of dissenters—conspicuous
in spite of overseas condemnation—is characteristic of not just sclerotic, immovable regimes, but also of
authoritarian systems undergoing profound processes of change and liberalization. It would be wrong to
read the current crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression. Though there has been no “Chinese Spring,” in
fundamental institutional, organizational, and behavioral terms, it would be hard to describe what has
transpired in China over the past twenty years as anything but a revolution.
Lessons From South Korea and Taiwan
Those who doubt that profound change and harsh repression can coexist in China should look to the history
of South Korea and Taiwan. In January 1987, just seven years after a democratic uprising was crushed in
the South Korean city of Gwangju and a few months before the military-backed regime would yield to
popular demands for open elections, student protestors were being summarily rounded up by the police. At
least one of the students died during interrogation. That same year Taiwan’s Kuomintang government
announced the end of 38 years of martial law, a key step toward the establishment of democracy there. But
in the months before the announcement, dissenters were still being shipped off, often by secretive military
tribunals, to the notorious gulag on Green Island. Crackdowns on opponents, extrajudicial detentions, and
violence are often the last-ditch efforts of authoritarian regimes.
Those who doubt that change and repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea
and Taiwan.
Perhaps because of their willingness to use force even in their final days, these regimes can appear
impervious to change and determined to remain in power. Given the empirical evidence available in the
mid-1980s, one could reasonably have described Taiwan’s single-party state as “flexibly” authoritarian:
grudgingly willing to mollify the populace with marginal institutional changes, but prepared to employ the
gun to defend its grip on power. No one could have been sure whether the Taiwanese government—or
South Korean, for that matter—would hold onto power indefinitely, succumb to violent overthrow
precisely because of its resistance to change, or yield peacefully and voluntarily to popular desires for
liberalization. The same can be said of China today.
The cases of Taiwan and South Korea also suggest that we should be cautious about the frequent
observation that politics in China has lagged economics. Both Taiwan and South Korea, right up until the
end of the democratization process, were successful and creative on the economic front but politically
retrograde. At minimum the lesson here is that the absence of overt regime change doesn’t tell us much.
That leads to a final point about the Taiwanese and South Korean experiences, one equally applicable to the
contemporary Chinese scene. Even as authoritarian regimes and their supporting institutions remain in
place, subtle political shifts may be under way. Such shifts can include recomposition of the ruling
establishment (i.e., the ruling party stays in place, but it ends up populated by new kinds of members),
societal pluralization, depoliticization of daily life, and evolving efforts at regime legitimization—efforts
that often lead to major changes in political discourse and participation. Ruling elites may push such
changes with the most conservative intentions. The goal may be nothing more than regime survival.
However, as the cases of Taiwan and South Korea show, such processes can take on a life of their own with
members of the state and ruling establishment swept up in the wave of new attitudes, aspirations, and
values. And that wave may crest suddenly or over the course of years.
The Economy Reaches Out
There are undoubtedly numerous differences between the China of today and the South Korea and Taiwan
of yesterday. But in terms of sociopolitical change, China is increasingly looking like its previously
authoritarian East Asian neighbors.
Since the early 1980s China has experienced no political revolution, no definitive ideological break from
the past, and nothing even resembling a nationwide political movement. Since Deng Xiaoping’s death in
1997, the country’s leaders have been conspicuous for their lack of charisma and vision. The sprawling
Communist Party-state—inheritor of a 1400-year-old tradition of technocratic and highly interventionist
bureaucratic rule—grinds on. On the surface, nothing has changed.
But under the surface, virtually everything has. The transformations are particularly striking in the urban
industrial economy. At one time China exported almost no manufactured goods; now Chinese industry is
deeply immersed in global supply chains. At the dawn of reform in 1978, virtually all Chinese industry was
owned by the state. By 2008, in an industrial economy that had grown more than 25-fold, private firms
were the dominant players, with foreign firms not far behind. That which was once allocated hierarchically
by the state—basic commodities, industrial inputs, manufactured goods, labor (both high-skilled and low),
housing, and health care—is now purchased in commercial markets. All manner of new rules have been
developed to manage these markets: enterprise law, contract law, labor law, environmental regulations, and
so on. And new actors populate core industrial and bureaucratic structures: private entrepreneurs, elite
returnees from overseas, domestically trained technocrats, multinational commercial and financial elites,
legal professionals, media professionals, and even self-described policy activists and social entrepreneurs.
Once-taboo business entities are now vital to the national economy. In 2001, private entrepreneurs—
capitalist roaders par excellence—were officially welcomed into the Chinese Communist Party.
Economic changes strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen and state.
And China’s new professionals are not just in business. Of the 1.6 million citizens China has sent abroad
for a year or more of study over the past 30 years, approximately 500,000 have returned, and a portion of
these returnees now accounts for about a fifth of government ministers and vice-ministers. As Huiyao
Wang of the Center for China and Globalization has documented, 78 percent of university presidents and
72 percent of directors of key state-run research labs are returnees. The Party has publicly declared a goal
of recruiting 20,000 returnee scholars, entrepreneurs, researchers, and corporate executives to serve in
positions of public administration.
With these changes in economic organization and labor, everyday habits have been radically transformed.
Finding a job on one’s own, living in a dwelling of one’s own, communicating routinely with
acquaintances extending beyond the workplace, working closely with global counterparts, expecting that
the wealth and social circumstances enjoyed abroad are China’s destiny as well—all were unimaginable 30
years ago but today are routine. Hardly relegated just to the economic realm, these changes strike at the
heart of the relationship between citizen and state.
New Ways of Life
The hierarchical structures of the command economy bound citizen and commercial producer alike directly
to the state. In the “old” days, from the 1950s through the early 1990s, if you were an urban citizen, you
were most likely assigned to your employer—for life—by the state, housed by the state, and provided
health care by the state. As Andrew Walder has described, these were mechanisms of political control that
enforced citizen dependency upon the state. If you misbehaved politically, you could be squeezed out of
your job, your home, etc.
Under this regime your social interactions were mostly limited to the physical confines of your workplace:
not only did you work there, you lived there, and your future was determined there. In all likelihood, you
would have had no telephone, no form of transport save a bicycle, and few social ties that would have
encouraged you to travel. If you did want to travel, you probably would have needed your employer’s
permission to buy the train ticket.
Today, for better or worse, virtually all of those control mechanisms are gone, replaced with freewheeling
markets. As a Chinese citizen you now live where you can afford; work where you can find a job, often in a
highly competitive labor market; and secure life necessities—everything from education to health care—
primarily by shelling out cash. Whether rich or poor, you will almost certainly have a cell phone, and you
will likely have a wide variety of social contacts.
In this new system state authority and the nature of state-society relations are radically different, a reality
confirmed by the state’s frenetic effort to develop new rules to maintain control and influence. As a
response to changing expectations of the role of the state, a new discourse of law-based governance has
emerged. In addition to new tax, contract, property, and environmental laws, the state has promulgated
national regulations on open government information—China’s Freedom of Information Act, in a sense.
Some provinces, such as booming Fujian, have new labor rules that emphasize collective bargaining.
This does not mean that the system is fair or that the state has abandoned coercive and arbitrary
intervention. Nor is every element of the state apparatus fully committed to implementing and enforcing
these rules. But they would not exist at all if the state were still the main producer, wage payer, housing
provider, and on-the-job enforcer in the industrial economy. And, by expressing rules in the language of
law, the state, whether intentionally or not, has legitimized a broad discourse about the appropriate bounds
of political authority and the responsibilities of an effective government.
This novelty and diversity—in organizations, actors, laws, discourses, and life choices—has created space
for the reconfiguration of informal norms and deep-seated values. For instance, in the 1980s to label
oneself a private entrepreneur, let alone entrepreneurial tycoon, was to invite arrest. Today that label invites
admiration and elevated status.
New-Look State
China’s institutional transformation is hard to see in part because it has diverged from standard theoretical
accounts of how change is supposed to take place. In China institutional change has been incremental and
evolutionary, radical in its ultimate effect, but hardly in its origin and unfolding. Change has not come in
response to exogenous shocks or what Ira Katznelson has called “unsettled times.”
It is also difficult to identify who is responsible for change. For at least fifteen years, there has been no
charismatic leader or coherent group of reformers of the type associated with post-Soviet Russia. There are
no visionary policy elites negotiating the complex terrain of domestic politics. None of the recent
“administrations” have had a discernible institutional mission, whether to end socialism, build capitalism,
privatize industry, or seek any of the other systemic transformations articulated by post-socialist reformers
elsewhere.
More than a third of Communist Party members hold a college degree or higher, a far cry from the party’s
peasant roots.
But—despite the persistence of an authoritarian, single-party state—the composition of elites drawn into
the policy process has evolved. Whereas in the early 1990s, for example, overseas-trained returnees were
held suspect, barred from positions of influence, today such individuals routinely populate the high
echelons of the state economics bureaucracy. The minister of science and technology earned a PhD in
Germany, where he subsequently worked for a decade at Audi. The number-two official at the central
bank—and the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange—earned a PhD in the United States,
where he was a tenured professor of economics. The head of the government’s banking regulatory
commission has an MBA from the University of London; the head of the Shanghai government’s Office for
Financial Services is a Stanford-trained economist; and the list goes on. Twenty years ago, these people
would not have returned to China, let alone been appointed to positions at the core of the state.
The absorption of trained professionals into the state bureaucracy does not alone make for political
transformation, but this pattern is consistent with a broader shift within the Communist Party to a more
urbanized, professionalized, and educated membership. By 2010 the Party had grown to a record 78 million
members, nearly a quarter of whom—at least by official accounts—are under the age of 35. More than a
third of all Party members hold a college degree or higher and by 2007 just under 3 million Party members
were working in private companies and an additional 800,000 or so Party members were self-employed, all
of which suggests that the Party’s ideological roots in the rural peasantry and military are withering. And
demand for Party membership is up. In 2009 only 10 percent of the applicant pool was admitted. We can,
and probably should, argue about the quality of the data, but the overall trends seem fairly clear: the kinds
of people who were running away from the Party—and China more broadly—following the Tiananmen
crackdown are now the kinds of people competing to enter it.
Some might interpret this as Party-state co-optation. In the 1970s and ’80s, one could have said the same
about the efforts of the Kuomintang to recruit technocratic elites, particularly native Taiwanese who had
previously been shut out. Co-optation may well have been the intention, but the ruling establishment ended
up populated by professionals who, while not revolutionaries, harbored no personal loyalty to the existing
system and had little to gain by fighting for it. For many of these technocrats, the Kuomintang was just a
vehicle for effecting change in the present. Once its utility in that role had been exhausted, it could be
abandoned.
Driving Evolution
While there have been changes within the Party, and there is potential in that change, it is clear that the
political establishment is responding to day-to-day institutional evolution elsewhere, not leading it. The
example of Delta Electronics illustrates the point and brings together the disparate strands of economic,
social, and political change in China.
The assembly of power supplies (the transformer “bricks” and accompanying cords) for laptops is typical
of the kind of electronics manufacturing that takes place in China today. Most of these power supplies are
produced by a single Taiwanese-owned conglomerate, Delta, which does much of its manufacturing
assembly on the Chinese mainland. Fifteen years ago “manufacturing assembly” in China meant screwing
together finished, imported parts. The institutional demands of accommodating these low-skill activities
were relatively unobtrusive: sweatshop manufacturing did not challenge the establishment’s social and
political comfort zone.
Today manufacturing assembly means something else, in part because manufacturers have sought to
redefine it, and also because institutional changes have enabled and even forced that redefinition. In order
to stay competitive and hold on to key customers such as Apple, HP, and Dell, Delta has to be able to
design new power supplies, often on very short notice. This is because customers—the brand-name firms
that conceptualize products—are increasingly pushing design tasks downward to their suppliers. The
suppliers respond by enhancing their design capabilities in order to bind the customer more closely to them
and increase the burden of switching to another supplier.
In Delta’s case customers have been demanding smaller and smaller power bricks. In a matter of weeks,
Delta must be able to make a product to-spec, at low-cost, and in enormous quantity. In order to meet the
engineering challenges these demands present, Delta has established research-and-development centers
within easy driving distance of its manufacturing operations. Those R&D centers are run not by Taiwanese
citizens, but by returnees from the United States: Chinese citizens who, after receiving advanced
engineering degrees and working in Silicon Valley or other high-tech regions, have elected to return home.
But if they are to come back, Chinese society has to accommodate the salary structures and housing they
want, as well as the information access—and therefore high-tech infrastructure—they need in order to do
their work. (Accommodation of this societal group overlaps with that of purely domestic entrepreneurs and
researchers who are diving into global business operations.)
China has not surged forward economically while remaining frozen in place politically.
Returnees alone, though, do not make R&D centers function. They lead a staff, which today is composed of
young graduates from China’s top science and technology universities: Tsinghua, Zhejiang, and Shanghai
Jiao Tong. In order to take on the advanced design challenges Chinese companies now face, these young
engineers needed an education decidedly different from the kind Chinese universities provided even fifteen
years ago. The curricula of China’s top universities had to be revamped. More important, the criteria for
selecting faculty were transformed as well.
Chinese universities—all state-controlled—were once closed-off communities shaped by rigid systems of
seniority and internal promotion. Curricular reform—not to mention the hiring of outside experts—was
aggressively resisted. In recent years, that resistance has been effectively quashed. The state has made overt
efforts to break down barriers: the Chinese ministry of education requires—through the use of quotas—that
universities have both overseas-trained faculty and domestic PhD recipients on their staffs. More subtly,
many of these highly trained individuals—whether through their roles as policy advisors, public
intellectuals, or commercial consultants—have become increasingly influential in shaping public attitudes
and expectations.
All of these activities have been possible only because so much of the old system—economic, social, and
political—has been tossed into the dustbin of history. For China to maintain its position as a center for
high-tech manufacturing, commercial producers and the institutional environment both needed, and
continue to need, upgrades. The aggressive and purposeful fostering of this dynamic has in turn led to
surprising reconfigurations of societal power and unexpected openings for previously shunned individuals.
None of these changes, substantial though they may be, prove that China is on a path of democratization
exactly like that traveled earlier by Taiwan and South Korea. What the changes do suggest, however, is that
we should be cautious about reading too much into immediate political circumstances, such as the recent
crackdown. In normative terms, we are right to condemn the crackdown. We are right to be concerned and
to voice those concerns publicly. At the same time, we end up on shaky ground if we treat the events of the
day as prima facie evidence of political stasis or institutional rollback. China has not surged forward
economically while remaining frozen in place politically, and it is hard to argue that the Chinese
government will tolerate only those changes that do not threaten its fundamental hold on power, the
implication being that China has yet to experience anything approaching real political change. It would
certainly be unwise to base public policy upon such premises.
Nobody can say for sure where China is headed. The real issue, though, involves interpreting where China
is today and how it has arrived at this point. Whether with regard to China’s growth story or its current
stifling of dissent—and especially with regard to the relationship between them—this is not about
connecting the obvious dots. Rather, it is about correctly identifying, with plenty of room for debate, what
the dots are and how they relate to one another causally. To make sense of what is unfolding right now, and
to fully appreciate the range of possible outcomes, we have to acknowledge that profound change, both
economic and political, has taken place in China in recent years. In places such as Taiwan and South Korea,
brutal crackdowns on dissent were among the last vestiges of authoritarian rule. In contemporary China that
could also be true. Indeed, given the last twenty years of change, it seems not just possible but likely.
Holding Strategy
Andrew G. Walder
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Andrew G. Walder
Edward Steinfeld’s account of revolutionary changes in China’s economy and society over the past 30
years is compelling and on the mark. He is correct to warn that we should not underestimate remarkable
cumulative changes in Chinese society and the economy, which have important and largely irreversible
political implications. But his argument avoids an elephant in the room: China still has a Soviet-style
political system that has changed little over the past two decades.
This is not a garden-variety personal or military dictatorship. There are only four other regimes structured
like China’s, in Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba. China’s network of Communist Party
organizations, its conservative leadership in a national politburo, the preeminence of Party organizations
over all government institutions, its subservient legal system, and its massive and growing security
apparatus are all familiar to those who recall communist systems of 30 years ago. The recent crackdown is
a symptom of the survival, indeed the revitalization, of a Soviet model of governance. The continuing
strength of that model is not altered by revolutionary changes in the economy or by the staffing of
government institutions by younger, better educated, and more worldly administrators. China’s economy
and society may remind us of South Korea’s and Taiwan’s in an earlier era, but the core political
institutions, and in recent years the political attitudes of the leaders, are more reminiscent of the Soviet
Union during the late Brezhnev era. This makes China a deeply paradoxical polity, presenting its leaders
with a real dilemma.
China today is indeed unlike China 25 years ago, and it is far more open and dynamic than the Soviet
Union ever was. But political change, when it does occur, may not turn China into Taiwan or South Korea
writ large. Our discussions of Chinese political change often appear to adopt an unconscious default
position: China’s leaders are holding back a tide of change that leads to liberal multiparty rule, better
governance, the elimination of corruption, political stability, the rule of law, and greater economic
prosperity. But other political futures are just as likely.
The fate of the former Soviet Union and similar regimes is more relevant to China’s political dilemma and
is surely paramount in the minds of China’s leaders. Out of some 30 independent states that emerged from
the collapse of communism in Eurasia, no more than a third are now prosperous and well-governed
multiparty democracies. Almost all of these success stories are small, ethnically uniform states on the
periphery of the European Union—a “democratic crescent” that stretches from Estonia to Slovenia. Many
of the other post-Soviet countries experienced dismemberment, civil war, and long periods of instability.
Russia and Ukraine have undergone severe and prolonged recessions; their political systems are illiberal
and deeply corrupt, though surely more “pluralistic” than before.
China’s leaders understand and are haunted by this history. Even if they secretly believe that a multiparty
political system is desirable, they know the perils of a botched attempt at political change. Stability is the
overwhelming priority of China’s leaders. It is seen, justifiably, as the foundation for China’s economic rise
and growing geopolitical importance. The trajectory of Russia—the comparison that really matters to
China’s elite—has been in the opposite direction.
So the prescription is: don’t rock the boat. Soviet-style political structures have well-known problems, but
they have held China together for the past 30 years of wrenching social and economic change.
Experimenting with democracy within the Communist Party, limited electoral mechanisms at the provincial
and national level, a freer press, designing effective anti-corruption measures that tie the Party’s hands, and
a broader openness in intellectual and political life are unnecessary gambles that risk everything China has
accomplished. The elite don’t want to repeat Gorbachev’s naïve mistakes.
The fate of the former Soviet Union is paramount in the minds of China’s leaders.
What are China’s leaders so afraid of? Long before the attempted Jasmine Revolution, they knew how
quickly and unexpectedly political challenges can arise. They were just as surprised as everyone else by the
collapse of their brethren Soviet-style political systems from 1989 to 1991. And they had their own major
crisis in May–June 1989, which escalated out of their control, split their top leadership, and forced a
draconian military response.
Continuing social changes, not just history, leave the regime skittish. Waves of local protest—by farmers
concerned with taxation and land tenure, urban homeowners expelled with little compensation in corrupt
urban redevelopment schemes, tens of millions of state-sector workers laid off in enterprise restructuring
and privatization since the mid-1990s, unprotected workers in export industries and the transport sector
opposing unfair pay and poor working conditions—do not amount to a unified political movement to
challenge Party rule. But China’s leaders believe that they make any kind of political opening a hazardous
venture.
What China’s leaders fear is large and prolonged protests in key cities. Precisely because of the changes
sketched so clearly by Steinfeld, these would be much harder to control than the protests 22 years ago, and
would force the leadership once again to confront a choice between compromise (and perhaps spiraling
demands for liberalization and political change) and brute force. This is the choice that has loomed
suddenly for dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere. The same choice openly split China’s
Politburo Standing Committee in 1989, which led to even larger protests and surprisingly strong popular
resistance to the initial attempt to impose martial law.
What to do? For the time being, postpone any tinkering with core political institutions, and double down on
surveillance and repression. China’s leaders have been far more creative at finding ways to monitor the
Internet, curb the mass media, and halt incipient protest than at creating credible institutions to deter
corruption and abuse of power by their own officials at the local levels. The strategy is conservative and
corporate, designed to preserve the rise of a new Chinese state capitalism on a global scale by deploying
refurbished Soviet-style institutions as enforcers. This strategy avoids the risks of liberalization and reform
and postpones the structural changes necessary to create a genuinely Chinese political system that
overcomes the flaws of the Soviet import.
This is, in short, a holding strategy, one that betrays a lack of confidence and political imagination. One
might ask, if not now, with China’s economy riding high and public support for the regime strong, when?
Incremental political reform will be much harder when the economic juggernaut begins to falter, the
population begins to age, and the educated urban middle classes take prosperity for granted. By that point
China’s political system—and perhaps with it the economy—may be in for a hard landing.
The Rise of the Middle Class
Helen H. Wang
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Helen H. Wang
No one in China believes in communism anymore. The Communist Party has abandoned Communist
ideology. A friend of mine joked that the Chinese government wears a Polo shirt and Nike shoes, but still
has a communist hat. The Party is simply a ruling outfit that practices what seems to be quasi-capitalism.
To a certain degree, I agree with Edward Steinfeld that China has gone through profound changes in recent
years. However, China’s political system is ill fitted to address the needs of an increasingly pluralized
society. The government has not allowed any political opposition that could become a rival of the
Communist Party.
With or without its defining ideology, the Party has shown no sign of loosening control. Even the increased
efforts to recruit members from private and foreign-owned companies don’t reflect outreach so much as
assertion of power. Party organizations were traditionally strong in state-owned enterprises, and with the
growing presence in China of private and foreign-owned firms, the Communist Party was concerned about
losing support from young people. So it has sought out the best of them: the Party has been adamant about
qualifications, such as academic achievements or career credentials.
Young people recognize that Party membership offers significant advantages, such as opportunities for
career advancement, social status, and government connections. China: the Dragon’s Ascent, a 2003
History Channel documentary, provides some illustrative anecdotes. In it an ambitious young student at
China’s highly regarded Fudan University said, “I really want to do something for the country. I want to
join the Communist Party so that I can better serve my country.” Another student, who was planning to go
overseas to study, said, “If I go abroad, I won’t join the party. But if I cannot go overseas, I may join the
party.” Other students agreed with him that if he stayed in China, he should join the party and reap the
benefits.
One of the critical conditions of democracy is present in China: a large and stable middle class.
The campaign to recruit new members has proved successful. According to The Economist, by the end of
2006, party organizations had been established in more than two-thirds of private enterprises and foreign
companies. If the Communist Party can still recruit the best young people, how will a viable opposition
grow, who will lead it, when will it arrive? There are no strong opposition parties in China to make
democratic reform a reality.
Nonetheless, I agree with Steinfeld that China’s rise does not necessarily threaten the West. For better or
worse, westernization is everywhere in China. As Steinfeld points out, China’s new generation of leaders
all seem to have postgraduate degrees, often from the United States. I have met many young Chinese who
adopt English names and pride themselves on being westernized because they associate the West with
sophistication and advancement. A young vice president at the Internet company BlogBus proudly showed
me her office, where a model of Capitol Hill—not the Forbidden City—stood on her desk. Bill Gates is a
greater hero among Chinese youth than he is in the United States. Young people celebrate Christmas more
than Chinese New Year.
China even has its own wildly successful American Idol-type TV show. The 2005 edition of Super Girl
drew an audience of 400 million, and the media covered it like an American presidential campaign.
Thousands of young talents competed for votes as well as the spotlight. The top three performers received
eight million votes by text message, and the winner, 21-year-old Li Yuchun from Sichuan province,
became one of the most popular stars in China.
Despite recent crackdowns on dissidents, many people in China told me the trend toward democracy is
unstoppable. That democracy probably won’t emerge from the views of imprisoned dissidents such as Liu
Xiaobo and Ai Weiwei, who represent what many Chinese consider an unrealistic solution. But one of the
critical conditions of democracy is present in China: a large and stable middle class. Currently the middle
class is estimated at up to 300 million people. This comprises less than 25 percent of the population, but as
the middle class continues to grow, it is only a matter of time before opposition to the state arises.
Evidence from elsewhere, such as South Korea and Taiwan, suggests that countries begin to democratize
when average income reaches somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. In 2010 China’s per capita
income was about $4,300. If this rule applies to China, it will not be long before we see some sort of
democracy movement there. However, Chinese democracy may look very different from the version we
know in the West.
Moving forward, I see two possible outcomes: either the Chinese government will gradually be forced into
political reform, or change will come more radically because of an economic breakdown. It depends on
when the government will have the courage to throw away the Communist hat.
Tightening Control
Baogang He
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Baogang He
How do we interpret the recent crackdown in China? Unlike most commentators who foresee a coming
dark age of Chinese authoritarianism, Edward Steinfeld argues, “It would be wrong to read the current
crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression.” He offers convincing evidence such as the pluralization of
actors and institutions and the coexistence of “profound change and harsh repression” in China, backed by
a comparative perspective. But while I agree with his assessment, I think that his evidence, which is
primarily focused on economic and social changes, is incomplete. He doesn’t delve deeply enough into the
“profound change” that has also taken place in Chinese politics.
Despite tightening its authoritarian control after 1989, the Chinese government introduced a wide variety of
local mini-democratization practices, including village elections, township elections, intra-party
democracy, participatory budgeting, and participatory and deliberative forums that enable citizens to meet
with government officials and express their voice on local affairs. In 2004 the total number of such forums
at the village level was estimated at 453,000—considerably more than the government’s estimated number
of protests (74,000) for that year. While these reforms do not jeopardize the Party’s domination, they are
helping to define the characteristics of future Chinese democratization.
I partially agree with Steinfeld’s assessment that the crackdown is not a sign of “institutional rollback” in
the sense that some political reforms are still evolving. Experiments in the public nomination and election
of Party secretaries and higher officers at the town, township, and city levels were underway in more than a
dozen provinces in the first half of 2011. In the coastal province of Zhejiang, participatory budgeting was
introduced in Xinhe and Zeguo townships in 2005, extended to eight neighboring townships in 2009, to 79
more in 2010, and to the city level in Wenling in 2011.
Even the phrase ‘civil society’ has been banned by propaganda officials.
Nevertheless the crackdown can and should be seen as a signal of rollback in several ways. Rather than
expand consultation and deliberation practices nationwide, the government has primarily relied on control
and suppression to maintain political stability. In China political relaxation typically is followed by tighter
control, which is then followed by a new period of relaxation, in an ongoing cycle. In the period since
2008, however, there has been no relaxation, only a period of control followed by even tighter control. The
source of this problem is the impending leadership change in 2012 and the need to ensure a smooth
transition of power. The continuation of this worrisome trend over a number of years suggests that the
crackdown is not simply a response to the threat of a revolution like those in the Middle East.
Internal debate concerning political reforms has continued amid the repression, but to little effect. Premier
Wen Jiabao has made public statements in favor of reforms, and Yu Keping, a pro-reform scholar and
official, has floated the concept of co-governance, which involves both government and civil society. But
these discussions gain little traction outside the confines of the Party; even the phrase “civil society” has
been banned by propaganda officials, making it clear that the concerns of the security apparatus trump
reformist ideas.
The tightening of control also reflects the social unrest attending China’s rising power. There have been
roughly 80,000 protests per year since 2005. The government has responded according to its traditional
methods: asserting the power of the administration and deploying the security apparatus. A powerful
political institution, the Wei Wen Ban, or Office of the Maintenance of Social Stability, has led the charge.
Each level of government appoints a secretary to head its Wei Wen Ban. Also, heads of public security
organs are now appointed to Party standing committees, an organizational shift that gives greater power to
the security apparatus. New control mechanisms have tightened bureaucratic procedures and made much
harder formerly routine matters, such as organizing university conferences on Chinese political issues. The
public-security system penetrates deeply into the intellectual community; scholars worry that their
colleagues might be agents of the authorities, and, through this fear, the government attempts to control
collective action. The frequency with which such methods are used confounds the Western expectation that
economic development will lead to political liberalization.
Controlling society and maintaining stability is the Chinese government’s major task, and it inevitably
raises the issue of state violence. Beijing is still learning how to use violence in a more selective and
constructive way and how to maintain order without resorting to dramatic acts of coercion. While the
leadership tries to find new governance methods through consultative and deliberative forums, participatory
budgeting, and limited elections, it largely relies on the public-security system to govern through fear.
The crackdown should be the subject of serious concern. The way in which the Chinese government treats
its own people provides an indication of how it will behave internationally as China’s power grows and
international constraints on its exercise decrease.
A More Targeted Repression
Ying Ma
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Ying Ma
Over the past three decades, China’s rulers have relinquished a vast amount of political authority in order to
pursue breakneck economic development. Unlike Maoist totalitarianism modern Chinese authoritarianism
does not demand total submission from its subjects. It has innovated, gained in sophistication, and gathered
more diverse tools for repression. Edward Steinfeld overlooks this essence of Chinese authoritarianism as
he forecasts its end, and he mistakes its willingness to adapt for its potential for demise.
Conventional wisdom holds that political liberalization in China has lagged behind economic reforms.
Steinfeld disputes this claim and contends that numerous shifts underway in China—including the changing
composition of the ruling elite, the pluralization of society and politics, and the dynamism of the
economy—contain the ingredients for the country’s transition out of authoritarian rule.
Of the political shifts he describes, Steinfeld finds bottom-up changes spurred by economic modernization
most impressive. As China’s command economy comes crumbling down, Chinese citizens have
increasingly shaken off the state’s control of their most basic daily activities, such as finding a job,
choosing a place to live, deciding what to wear or with whom to be friends. These types of changes,
Steinfeld declares, are not purely economic, but also “strike at the heart of the relationship between citizen
and state.”
In reality the political dimensions of China’s vast transformations, revolutionary though they may be, do
not flourish unhindered, but are obsessively managed and, if necessary, suppressed by the regime. In this
effort the regime does not need to fear every personal opinion uttered or every personal choice made, but
wields its repression in a much more targeted fashion. Instead of all-out suppression at all times, it bribes
protestors in addition to crushing them; uses propaganda and fans nationalism rather than banning all forms
of offensive speech; responds to public outcries on the Internet even as it tirelessly censors online political
content; emphasizes its seriousness about rooting out corruption even though it has refused to grant the
judiciary the independence to help; and nurtures and promotes skilled technocrats even as it rejects free and
fair elections.
Amid the bottom-up changes Steinfeld describes, the state has continually enforced and refined its
repression and even improved its governance in its quest to maintain control. As political scientist Andrew
Nathan has written, the regime “is willing to change in any way that helps it to stay in power,” but it will
not “relax the ban on autonomous political forces” that threaten its rule.
Many of the capitalist roaders co-opted by the Party echo the government’s refrain that China is not ready
for democracy.
State control exists not just in the political realm but also in the freewheeling business and economic realms
where Steinfeld identifies signs of political liberalization. He marvels at the pace with which China’s
economy has seen the replacement of ailing state-owned enterprises by private companies, foreign firms,
and modernized state conglomerates. He is even more amazed by the export sector, which, once negligible,
now boasts suppliers that serve brand names such as Apple, HP, and Dell.
Yet increased competitiveness in China’s export sector, or in the economy as a whole, does not signal the
potential for political change. As China’s rulers eagerly incorporate new knowledge and expertise from the
West to promote technological and economic progress, they have been just as eager to thwart the potential
for democratic change.
Examples abound. Though the government has embraced the Internet as a vehicle for economic
modernization and technological advancement, it has deployed sophisticated censorship technology and a
vast army of online police to stem the Internet’s democratizing effects. Individuals seeking to spread
democracy on the Web have been arrested, and Internet companies dutifully delete, filter, and censor
sensitive content on their sites.
The government has similarly invested heavily in modernizing its financial sector, but the cash-rich
Chinese financial system functions as a tool of Communist Party rule. In their book Red Capitalism, Carl
Walter and Fraser J.T. Howie point out that state banks may enjoy billion-dollar public listings overseas,
but they continue to lend at low interest rates, as directed by the state, to companies owned or favored by
the government. Small and medium-sized private enterprises that could garner higher returns face far more
trouble securing capital. Meanwhile, as Richard McGregor has chronicled in The Party, China’s publicly
listed state-owned companies continue to operate under management selected by the Party on the basis of
political criteria.
In this light the changing composition of China’s governing elite looks less like a threat to the ruling
regime, as Steinfeld claims, and more like another effort to incorporate new knowledge, new energy, and
new ideas to boost the regime’s strength. Steinfeld should not be so excited that the Communist Party
officially welcomed private entrepreneurs—once banned and denounced as “capitalist roaders”—into its
membership in 2001. Nor ought he overstate the political ramifications of the return of hundreds of
thousands of Chinese who had studied and worked at elite Western institutions and now populate senior
positions in government.
As political scientist Minxin Pei has argued, by doling out everything from Party membership to senior
government positions to financial perks, the state has rendered moot the political threat from potential
opposition groups, including intellectuals and the rising middle class. Many of the capitalist roaders coopted by the Party echo the government’s refrain that China is not ready for democracy. Many other
members of the new governing elite—including those who advocate a less corrupt, more responsive
government—also do not appear convinced that democracy is the right political model for China.
These complex realities indicate that China’s path to political liberalization will not be straightforward and
is not preordained. History and recent events in the Middle East offer a powerful reminder that even longstanding and seemingly stable authoritarian regimes are not immune to popular pressures for political
accountability. Even so, Steinfeld’s analysis of Chinese authoritarianism belittles its strengths, ignores the
nuances of its repression, and oversimplifies the conditions that might lead to its downfall.
Social Empowerment and Disempowerment
Guobin Yang
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Guobin Yang
Edward Steinfeld’s article is an important contribution to current debates about political change in China.
Where others see only economic growth, Steinfeld argues that genuine political change is underway. And
his conception of that change encompasses institutional, behavioral, and attitudinal dimensions: the
recomposition of the ruling establishment, societal pluralization, new forms of political discourse and
political participation, and new legal, regulatory, and market structures. This is a broad but fitting
understanding of political change in contemporary China. In a society under epochal transformation,
change in one field necessarily impinges on others.
Steinfeld focuses mainly on the urban industrial sector, the state bureaucracy, the export sector, and the
higher education system. I largely agree with his insights there. He argues that all kinds of new actors,
including foreign-trained professionals, now populate these core sectors. To absorb these people, new rules
and structures, largely market-based, have been introduced, and the hierarchical structures of the socialist
command economy have been replaced. Consequently, new types of state-society relations have evolved,
and the state no longer controls its citizens as it used to.
These changes had no clear logic, and yet their cumulative effects are revolutionary. As Steinfeld points
out, new actors may introduce change through existing institutions. To some observers the employment of
Western-trained professionals by state institutions may indicate the co-optation of the new educated elites.
But Steinfeld hints that these educated elites are becoming increasingly influential in moving public
attitudes and expectations in new directions.
The focus on the urban-economic and bureaucratic sectors, however, leaves out other important
institutional developments—in particular the incipient non-governmental sector and the lively, albeit
censored, Internet-based citizen media. Both have grown rapidly despite serious political challenges. In
December 1997 China had about 670,000 Internet users. By December 2010 this number had shot to 457
million. The numbers for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are less clear because numerous
organizations operate in grey zones, without official registration. But even the number of registered NGOs
has increased quickly, reaching 447,243 by early 2011.
Emerging in the mid-1990s—the first influential NGO was founded in 1994, the year China was linked to
the Internet—NGOs have exerted influence on state regulatory agencies and empowered citizens to a
previously unknown degree. A good example of the growing impact of the non-governmental sector on
Chinese institutional structures is the fate of the One Foundation, launched in 2007 by the movie star Jet Li.
It had to operate under the auspices of the quasi-governmental Red Cross Society of China because Chinese
regulations stipulate that NGOs must be overseen by a government agency. In January of this year the One
Foundation successfully registered as an independent private foundation in the large coastal city of
Shenzhen. Shenzhen has a new system that requires NGOs only to register with the municipal civil affairs
department, without a supervisory government agency. This system is at odds with national regulations,
suggesting that, as Steinfeld argues, non-governmental actors are inducing institutional evolution.
So disempowering are Chinese markets that a term was invented for ‘powerless social groups.’
This evolutionary process is similarly evident in online engagement. Chinese citizens have successfully
used online forums, blogs, and increasingly microblogs, to expose corrupt officials, challenge government
policies, and seek political change. The most recent case is the ongoing election campaign launched by
independent candidates for seats in local people’s congresses. The last time independent candidates entered
an election campaign so publicly was in 1980. The enthusiasm and audacity of those candidates led to a
crackdown, and the few who won the elections were barred from assuming their posts. Today’s candidates
are relying heavily on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging service, with more than a hundred
million registered users. As soon as the campaign started in April, Sina Weibo became a publicity and
organizing platform for independent candidates. The most visible such candidate, the popular writer and
sports commentator Li Chengpeng, has three million followers on Sina Weibo and is using the service to
discuss political participation. Searches on Sina Weibo for “independent candidates” and “people’s
congress election campaign” yield tens of thousands of results, indicating lively discussions about
campaign issues. Official news media have begun to chastise the independents for their unruliness, and the
campaign is arousing citizens’ consciousness of their rights to vote and stand for election.
Despite the changes clearly afoot, Steinfeld may overstate the discontinuity between past and present. He
rejects the “old” days too easily. True, those days were materially constrained and politically controlled.
But Steinfeld overlooks astounding social inequality in contemporary China when he claims that today you
“secure life necessities—everything from education to health care—primarily by shelling out cash.”
Certainly—if you can afford them. Many Chinese, especially the older generation, who experienced the
socialist era, and the rural poor, are not happy about their economic prospects.
A related weakness is Steinfeld’s emphasis on the empowerment of new actors, such as foreign-trained
returnee technocrats in the state bureaucracy; returnee engineers, social scientists, and managers in business
and finance; multinational business leaders; social entrepreneurs; and media professionals. He leaves out
migrant workers, villagers, laid-off workers, and other disempowered social groups. Indeed,
disempowerment is so much a part of the increasingly market-driven process that a new term, ruoshi qunti
(“powerless social groups”), has become a key word in contemporary Chinese discourse. Thus the broad
trend of social empowerment has been accompanied by a worrisome counter-process.
Finally, Steinfeld seems to view the market as a uniformly positive driver of political change. Many of the
beneficial institutional changes he identifies pertain to markets, such as those for labor, housing, and health
care. These may well be among the most important new developments, but in view of growing labor unrest,
a deeply troubled health-care system, and a predatory real estate market that not only far exceeds the means
of ordinary citizens but has dire ecological consequences, we have yet to gauge the depths of the human
costs of these market-driven changes and the kinds of political change they may give rise to.
The Big Gamble
Edward S. Steinfeld
This article is part of China’s Other Revolution, a forum on political and social change in China.
Edward S. Steinfeld
The commentaries on my article raise a number of thought-provoking points. I would like to concentrate on
one: the notion of stability and conservatism as organizing principles of Chinese governance. In Andrew
Walder’s view, the essence of Chinese politics is Soviet-style governance, rule by a senior leadership and a
vast party network united in their unwavering focus on self-preservation. Ying Ma echoes the view, arguing
that the Chinese state tolerates only those changes that buttress its power and resists anything that imperils
single-party rule. And both Ma and Baogang He, with plenty of solid evidence, point to the state’s
obsessive efforts to manage change, the Wei Wen Ban being just the latest.
Walder, Ma, and He are absolutely correct: the Chinese government, not unlike many of its counterparts
globally, is focused on maintaining order and its own position atop the hierarchy. For at least twenty years,
the need for stability has been used to justify all manner of political repression, from the nationwide
crackdown in 1989 to the more targeted detentions of recent months.
But is this focus on stability really the defining feature of Chinese politics? Does it circumscribe Chinese
sociopolitical change? Here, I am much more skeptical.
Why should we believe that conservatism limits the possibilities for the future when it has been so
inadequate to explain what has unfolded in the not-so-distant past? The state’s obsession with stability
could have been marshaled to preclude every major reform measure of the last twenty years. At each step
the government’s desire to avoid disruption, to appeal to loyal constituencies, and to maintain effective
institutions of control should have thwarted the radical policy initiatives that eventually were implemented:
layoffs of millions of state-enterprise employees, liberalization of commodity prices, elimination of the
work-unit system for urban citizens, rapid urbanization of previously rural populations, and redevelopment
of urban centers at the expense of incumbent industries and entrenched locals.
Far from prioritizing self-preservation, the Chinese government has gambled on radical and socially
destabilizing reforms.
These moves and others like them would have appeared impossibly risky to a system bent on selfpreservation. Until they happened. After the fact, they could be explained away as the efforts of a
conservative leadership to preserve its rule through the promotion of growth. That is, one could argue that
the Chinese state undertakes only those measures that foster growth and maintain the existing hierarchy.
But that argument begs the question.
It makes sense only in hindsight, amid continued growth and Communist Party rule, to suggest that recent
Chinese reforms have been geared only toward stability. As the policies were being rolled out, the political
leadership was effectively throwing the dice, gambling on the idea that radical and socially destabilizing
reforms would sustain growth. And when growth resulted, new problems were created, ones that demanded
ever more radical solutions—and tolerance of once-vilified classes of problem-solvers. Such willingness to
take risk is not characteristic of systems focused exclusively or even primarily on maintaining stability and
order. Want to see systems that are truly seeking self-preservation through order and control? Look to those
that are desperately clinging to life by fending off growth and improved living standards: North Korea and
Cuba. But that is not China.
What is so distinctive about the Chinese political system is not that it is one of the few remaining in the
Soviet mold (it is), but rather that it is developmental. China—not unlike Taiwan and South Korea before
it—is trying simultaneously to pursue stability and transformative growth, outcomes that are in some sense
opposites. We are not talking about the kind of 2 or 3 percent yearly growth to which advanced industrial
societies are accustomed. China’s growth is on a scale that is intrinsically deracinating and destabilizing; it
involves the kind of transformative processes of industrialization and urbanization that shook Western
societies to their cores over the course of centuries, but that China has undergone in the span of mere
decades. The Chinese state and the Party may think they are preserving order. So did the state in South
Korea and in Taiwan. The Chinese have proven willing to suppress dissent, often brutally. Ditto South
Korea and Taiwan. But at each key decision point, China, like its fellow East Asian developers, has opted
for growth rather than order. In doing so the Party and the government have willingly exposed themselves
and society to an unpredictable and uncontrollable future. That is the defining feature of a developmental
state: for all its conservatism, it pursues revolutionary ends.
Of course, Guobin Yang is right that economic development in China has been uneven. The newly
disempowered—migrants, low-skilled wage laborers, the rural poor, the elderly, the infirm—are every bit
as central to the contemporary Chinese milieu as newly empowered entrepreneurs and real estate
developers. Yet such patterns of inequity are unfortunately not unique to the Chinese experience, but are
instead characteristic of economic development everywhere. One need look no further than the United
States and Western Europe for developmental histories replete with exploitation, abuse, violence, and
environmental degradation. Indeed, one need look no further than those advanced industrial societies today
for evidence of the propensity of markets to fail, regulators and commercial actors to become enmeshed in
double dealing and conflicts of interest, and accumulated liabilities to be conveniently hived off to the least
empowered segments of the population.
Similar—and similarly distressing—phenomena from the West do not justify what is happening in China
today. They do, however, tell us two things. First, economic development is always deeply destabilizing. It
is hard to control, and its benefits are not shared equally.
Second, under conditions of uncertainty, sociopolitical change can proceed even in the face of seemingly
unassailable hierarchies of power. In a few notable cases, change has come through revolution, the direct
overthrow of long-standing institutions. However, for the reasons that Walder and Helen Wang point out, I
don’t believe that is a likely outcome in China today. As both Walder and Wang suggest, the Chinese
Communist Party-state is not merely a governmental bureaucracy and set of coercive control mechanisms.
It has increasingly become a social establishment. It is now the organization that young strivers join in their
effort to make a difference, to acquire status, and to gain influence. Interestingly, so too has it become the
organizational home for many of the progressive social entrepreneurs and NGO founders whom Yang
describes.
Yet, while the Party is unquestionably an establishment with rules, incentives, and subtle mechanisms of
socialization and indoctrination, the young business people, academics, and social entrepreneurs now
joining are not unreflective sell-outs ready and willing to be co-opted. They appreciate a mode of change
that takes place incrementally and thoroughly within the existing order. It would be wrong to dismiss such
change simply because it takes time: institutions can gradually erode and be reoriented from within, often
to a point where they cease to resemble their earlier selves.
In almost all cases, this happens despite the original preferences of those at the top of the hierarchy.
Sometimes the powerful don’t perceive what is happening until it is too late. Sometimes they see what is
going on, their priorities evolve, and they embrace change. And sometimes the old guard simply dies off
and is replaced by new generations with new concerns. The strong do not always win. And the winners are
not always the strong. That in some ways has been the story of the empowerment of marginalized groups in
the United States: women, African Americans, gays and lesbians, etc. So too has it been the story of the
reorientation of institutions such as the House of Lords in the United Kingdom. And finally, most relevant
for China, so too has it been the story of the democratization of once authoritarian developmental states in
East Asia.