Why China Won't Reform
Facing up to the new threat
In 1994, US President Bill Clinton gave a press conference in China to discuss relations between the two countries, and the state of human rights development. Five years after thousands had been gunned down in the streets of Beijing and hundreds more killed in Tibet, they were looking less than optimal.
Ever the optimist though, Bill made it clear that although there were serious human rights abuses continuing in China, he was sure they were dreadfully sorry about what had happened in 89, and felt things were improving. Just like Korea and Taiwan, he said, it was clear that as Western products flooded into China, democratisation would inevitably follow. China even enjoyed most favoured nation status with the US all throughout the 1990s in an attempt to accelerate this process. Putting up with the show trials and labour camps were just the cost of doing business.
A few years later, China would be admitted into the World Trade Organisation (despite failing to meet almost all the requirements for membership), and the economy would see a meteoric rise lifting 800 million people out of poverty. Something that is now repeated by every Chinese politician every time they speak to a journalist ever, with all the credit of course given to the CCP.
Other Asian democracies aside, China in the 2000s did give some real signs that it was at least trying to liberalise. President Jiang Zemin would step down in 2002 after an orderly term limit. His successor Hu Jintao would encourage the growth of NGOs, and allow limited congressional elections in Beijing. His outgoing premiere Wen Jiabao even made many shocking statements while in office like “democracy, human rights and the rule of law are the fruits of civilisation”, and that China should even allow a separate judicial system.
Things may have been moving at a snail’s pace, but the Western press felt all the signs were there that China was slowly edging towards liberal reform. Analysts like Fareed Zakaria repeatedly made the case that more trade meant more democracy, and especially with the internet, we would see a flourishing civil rights movement emerge soon.
The Beijing Olympics were China’s chance to show to the world how much it had changed since the bad old days. The 2008 games were being organised by the then new vice president Xi Jinping, allegedly set as a competence test by other party leaders. Rumours were already around that Xi was being set up as the next president. Little was known about him except that he was anti corruption and keen on free market reform. To the liberal press, this surely meant that he was the one to finally set China on the path to democracy.
Many were to be disappointed then, when the first thing Xi did after coming to office was to instigate an anti-corruption campaign that somehow never managed to uncover wrongdoing on any of his political allies and condemned many of his rivals to life imprisonment. Things were looking even gloomier during his crackdown of human rights lawyers and new legislation that made it easier for police to imprison dissidents.
Even so some analysts maintained their optimism. What anti-corruption campaign wasn’t over-zealous at times? Legal reform was never perfect. So what if Xi’s face was beginning to appear on every Chinese news publication and on billboards all across the country? These were just bells and whistles covering up a bold reform agenda.
The promised free market reform somehow never materialised, Xi instead opted to take the approach of centralising state bureaucracies and tightening control over the private sector with mandatory state mergers. The “Made in China 2025” program accelerated intellectual property theft and labour camps all reopened across Xinjiang that has sent over one million minority Uyghurs into mandatory re-education facilities without charging them with any crimes.
If there was any hope left that the new leader was a liberal at heart, it ended with his decision to suspend the term limits in 2017 that had been kept to for 15 years. It turned out that Xi really was a reformer, just not the kind the world had been hoping for.
How did it all go so wrong? China now is more repressive than at any time since the 89 crackdown. In fact the optimism of Bill Clinton and others has probably been the worst prediction of the 21st Century, and seems to have dragged the Western World into a long conflict with the most powerful authoritarian government of all time.
The Cost of Doing Business
So why were so many duped by China? Was it an unforeseeable power-grab by an elite group? Or was it the plan all along? Why did the country not liberalise as Korea and Taiwan had done?
Some people point to China’s history of militarised governments and Confucian traditions of hierarchy to explain why China is naturally resistant to democracy. But this is to forget that China has actually had democracy in its recent history.
Just after the revolution of 1911, the Koumintang (KMT), now government in exile in Taiwan, held an election to gain legitimacy over the flailing Qing Empire. The KMT won by a landslide, but the president elect was quickly assassinated out of spite by the Qing military general Yuan Shikai. If one compares the death toll of nearly 44 million from both world wars, to the estimated 65 million dead under Mao’s China, Yuan Shikai has far more to answer for than the assassin of Franz Ferdinand.
When the KMT ruled China in 1912 they held local elections and reached a democratic representation of 12% of the population. Something that wasn’t achieved in Japan until 1928 and India until 1935. Under Republican rule China had freedoms that were comparable to most western nations of the time like a free press, right to a fair trial, free speech and right to assembly. Taiwan today is a reflection of what China would have been, had Roosevelt not decided to stop funding the nationalists after the war, and stood by as the Stalin-armed communists starved the country into submission.
Before the army’s withdrawal, Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife unveiled a vision for their plan to see China move from authoritarianism to democracy. Which is exactly what had happened in Taiwan by the 1980s, proving that democratisation does not just arise from the air, it takes leadership willing to implement it.
Nor was this the last time that China experimented with democratic reform. After Mao died and Deng Xiaoping took power behind the scenes he appointed two liberal reformers as head of the party during the 1980s, and truly committed the party to separation of powers. One of those leaders, Hu Yaoban, oversaw attempts to change China’s political system for the better. Before his forced resignation in 87 he was in charge of drafting a resolution for a committee which included this paragraph:
“In the history of mankind, in the struggle of the newly emerged bourgeoisie and the working class against feudal dictatorship, the formation of the ideas of democracy, freedom, equality, and fraternity greatly liberated the human spirit. The most important lessons learned during the development of socialism were: first, neglecting development of the economy, and second, failing to build real democratic politics. After the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, our Party has stressed that without democracy there can be no socialist modernization.”
His successor, Zao Ziyang, came to the same conclusions while in office about the future path that China should take. But Zao, being only the party figurehead, was powerless to stop the massacre that took place in 89. He met with the students many times, telling them that the party planned to change and that reform was imminent. Such efforts led to his arrest by the senior members of the party, just hours before the tanks rolled into Beijing.
Zao was kept under house arrest until his death in 2005. His posthumous memoir tells a tragic story of how he had tried to convince the other leaders within the party like Deng Xiaoping of how the protests could be alleviated with sufficient reforms. But all they could see was the chaos of the Cultural Revolution come back to life. Debate and argument would only divide the party further, decided Deng, real action had to be taken.
The Tiananmen protests remain, the largest pro-democracy protests in history. Ever since then, the party line has been do not argue in public about policy differences. The education system was overhauled with nationalist training and today many Chinese school children are forced to do flag raising and ceremonial marches to instill patriotic loyalty. The way to be a good citizen is of course, improve the efficiency of the state bureaucracy.
The Technocracy
Xi Jinping is the final product of this ideology. As disagreements within the party became taboo, the only way to advance in Chinese politics became to be an efficient administrator. A technocrat who could deliver better GDP growth and employment figures.
Put into practice on a national level, the perfect technocrat in China is simply someone who propagates its authoritarian system on a much grander scale. Xi in his speeches often addresses the need for reform, but details about what reform is never arises. There is no ideology underpinning his motivations except for a desire to make China as it is now, but stronger, richer, and more technologically advanced. Even his propagandistic “Chinese Dream”, is so void of content that it could apply to almost any country. His speeches seem perfectly calculated to say nothing of any substance and just repeat the same party lines that have existed for decades. The party often claims to have transcended ideology which makes it all the harder to know what goes on behind the scenes.
It’s an open question whether the current state of the regime is more due to the leader’s personality, or to the logical conclusion of the government’s structure. Is Xi a power hungry maniac that is consolidating power, or is he doing the bidding of a behind the scenes clique?
We can never know for sure, but there are several signs that the current policy was not a long term plan. One thing is that his style of politics is radically different from the previous eras of Hu Jintao in terms of global outreach. Another factor was the financial crisis that persuaded many within the Chinese leadership (most prominently current Vice President Wang Qisheng) that China could not integrate its economy with those of the West and should forge its own path, which is partly what led to the currency wars earlier in the decade. The economic slowdown that began in 2015 seems to have been the catalyst for the nationalist resurgence and the more violent crackdowns on dissidents. The change in projecting power abroad is also brought on by a sense that China can pull its own weight, and must assert its dominance before it’s too late.
Xi has not personally set most of these plans in motion, but he appears to be an accelerationist who believes China’s rise should happen sooner rather than later. This is supported by his ramping up military spending, tech development strategy and militarisation of the South China Sea. His directives in Xinjiang and Hong Kong shows a leader who believes he should always press his advantage.
Many of his other actions have put him in direct confrontation with previous leaders such as Jiang Zemin. Popular opinion among many mainlanders has it that Zemin’s “Shanghai Clique” from the 1990s had created an unaccountable and corrupt elite that had governed China for too long, and that Xi represented an iron fist that would purge the corrupt from the party and get things done where others could not act. The thinking goes that the same business classes are still trying to oust Xi, and his removal of term limits is his way of out maneuvering them by not allowing a successor to be chosen by others.
Before Xi came to power it was possible to discern slight differences in policy within the leadership. The Chongching model espoused by Bo Xilai (now in prison for life) that favoured massive public programs and Maoist slogans, and the Guandong model, attributed to Wang Yang, which favoured more liberal free market policies and leniency with trade unions. Xi has attempted to adopt elements from both these models, investing largely in both public projects like high speed rail, and more effective legal administration.
Therefore Xi can cast himself as both the party traditionalist, bringing back the times when political leaders were principled, and the great reformer who will overhaul the legal system, purge corruption, and make China the decisive leader of the 21st Century. He is no doubt the man in control of the party, and has managed to consolidate power around himself very successfully.
China will never be a democracy under Xi, and the party will never willingly reform itself to produce such an outcome. If such elements ever existed within the party, they are now silenced.
The Slowdown
When one peers beneath the veneer of Xi’s ambitious program they will find some revealing flaws. His anti-corruption purges of 2013 did little to stop the business and judicial corruption and simply drove most bribery underground. China is now ranked just as corrupt by Transparency International as it was in 2012 before the campaign began. His high speed rail projects have put China into massive amounts of debt, and the country is now growing at its slowest rate since 1992.
The president is a surprising emergence in modern China but his actions have plenty of parallels in the country’s long history. 6th Century Emperor Sui Yangdi was also someone who took a recently unified and economically prosperous empire and pushed it to breaking point. Yangdi bet his legacy on massive infrastructure and transport projects that indebted the country. He overhauled and purged the legal system with new bureaucracy but was always frustrated by Chinese citizens natural tendency for favouritism. He even expanded military power, refortified the defences in the west, and fought off a rebellion from the southern provinces.
Sui Yangdi is seen in retrospect as someone who took a newly prosperous Empire and pushed it beyond its limits for his own personal gain. Even though his infrastructure projects were beneficial in the long run, they played a large part in the downfall of his dynasty. Yet within a few years after the collapse of the Sui, China was under the rule of the Tang, and more powerful than ever.
In light of the current protests in Hong Kong, ongoing trade war, and economic slowdown, many commentators have already predicted the imminent downfall of the CCP or at least ongoing decline, but this diagnosis may be a bit too optimistic.
Firstly, writers have been predicting the economic “collapse” of China for more than 20 years and it hasn’t happened. The party is not so ideological blind that it can’t change economic policy when it needs to. Secondly, the protests in Hong Kong are exclusively confined to Hong Kong. The reason we haven’t seen the protests spread to the mainland is that Hong Kongers have had a long history of liberal rights, access to a Western education and high standards of living. On the mainland, support for the regime is relatively high. Living standards for ordinary citizens have nearly doubled in the last 10 years, most people can afford household appliances that would have been unimaginable in their parent’s lifetimes.
The human rights abuses, outside of ethnic enclaves like Tibet and Xinjiang, effect no more than a few thousand people a year. Most mainlanders neither know nor care about the imprisonment of dissidents and mass internment, and are too apathetic about politics to ever bother to use a VPN to search outside the Great Firewall.
This is the reality that strategists must come to terms with. Modern Chinese people are taught from a young age to be patriotic and that the party and country are inseparable. If a large protest ever did break out, state surveillance would mean that it would be cut off at the knees before it could spread. There is no secretive mass support for democratic transition, no citizen body waiting to take to the streets at the first opportunity, and thinking one will materialise soon is simply wishful thinking.
None of this is to say that China will never reform. Just that it will not happen in the near future. If there is hope, it lies in the younger generation. Many young people raised with social media are far more aware of international affairs than their forbearers, and are capable of thinking independently. One day the CCP will reap what they have sown, but until then the democratic world must have a plan for dealing with the most powerful authoritarian state it has ever faced.
What the Democratic World Can Do
The first thing that should be done is to contain China’s ability to project its power and expand its influence. The trade war style tariffs should be adopted by other countries that would slow China’s economy further, and deny them further trade capabilities unless certain human rights abuses are ended. If this were made part of an international agreement it would lessen the economic impact on individual states. Exports and manufacturing are already shifting to other Asian countries like Vietnam and this could be made part of public policy.
Commitment to human rights in China should be openly stated as a policy by democratic countries, and asylum granted to Chinese citizens unjustly persecuted by the regime. Especially for residents in Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang.
Funding from organisations linked to the Chinese government or major Chinese companies should be banned from political campaigns and large Western companies. Companies of a certain size could have to uphold a commitment to free speech in response to taking Chinese investment. Other measures to stop the propaganda tools of the CCP from censoring academia could be strongly considered, such as banning Confucian institutes and preventing students with close links to the party from studying in Western Universities.
All this would be a start, but it has to come with a long term strategy of the media classes addressing issues in China head on. Media organisations need to cover events in China with Chinese speakers so that real information about world events can be made more available to mainland citizens. This should be met at the same time with a containment strategy from all free countries, where Chinese money is only ever allowed to be taken with a commitment to human rights.
This may seem like an impossible task to get international consensus on at the present moment, but so did a China-US trade war a few years ago. The Quadrilateral Security Organisation (QUAD) signed between the US, Japan, Australia and India, already is starting to appear as a kind of Asian NATO to curb Chinese military expansion. But such efforts need ideological commitments to sustain them.
The history of authoritarian regimes shows that they are internally far less stable than they may appear on the surface. The Soviet Union once seemed like an eternal and unassailable force, until the public lack of faith with its system dissolved it from the inside. Democracy now exists in Eastern Europe because of a commitment from the free world for decades to support the reformers inside it. If reform is ever to happen in China, it will take the same effort.