There is a proliferation of books on China these days. A recent one, Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos, a US journalist who reported from China from 2005 to 2013 consecutively for the Chicago Tribune and the New Yorker, raises some important issues.
The fact that China is attracting so much attention is not surprising considering that the country is now an economic powerhouse. China’s economic success owes much to former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), who took over after Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) death and propagated the motto “To get rich is glorious.” His successors have since built on it, following the same precept and broad policies.
However, the accelerated process of economic growth has created some serious problems. The most dangerous, in some sense, is the ever-widening income disparity between rich and poor people, between urban and rural areas as well as between coastal regions and the nation’s interior. It is dangerous because it engenders social instability about which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) remains extremely worried.
The culture of greed and moneymaking has also entrenched corruption, which is self-perpetuating at the higher political levels. That, in turn, tends to reinforce cynicism about the political system.
Even though Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is said to be undertaking an anticorruption drive, there is also a strong view that such campaigns are highly political. Take, for instance, the highly publicized corruption investigation of Zhou Yongkang (周永康), the country’s former security czar and a member of the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee, as well as his family and inner circle. He is in serious trouble because of his association with former CCP secretary Bo Xilai’s (薄熙來) failed attempt to hijack the political transition and leadership from Xi.
Bo is now serving a long prison term. Xi obviously feels secure and confident to take on and snuff out the dangerous political cabal around Bo, apparently led by the former security chief. There is now a highly publicized campaign under way to root out high-level corruption, intended to burnish Xi’s credentials as a new-age leader to reform and modernize the party.
While this is going on, another of Xi’s worries is the slowing growth of China’s economy. By the standards of other countries, China’s economy is still putting up stellar growth performances of more than 7 percent, but that is down by about 3 percent from an average growth of 10 percent over the past three decades. And the worry is that it might slow down even more in the coming years. At about 7 percent, it will still be healthy growth by international standards, but China is said to need a consistent growth rate of more than 7 percent to absorb 10 million new entrants to the labor market every year.
The old model of growth through exports, investment in heavy industry and infrastructure, and real estate has run out of steam. Indeed, the real-estate sector has built up a bubble that might burst creating serious problems for the economy. According to reports, there is a glut of flats and apartments in new housing complexes that remain unoccupied.
Therefore, there is a need for restructuring or “rebalancing” the economy away from exports and investment in heavy industry. There is over-supply in sectors like steel. The country needs to reorient more toward consumer spending and services sectors like education and health.
That is where new jobs will need to be created for the new labor force. The Chinese government is aware of this and other related economic problems and is taking measures to restructure the economy. However, the problem is that pressing a button here and there cannot achieve job creation. It would take time and might not always produce the desired results.
So it is a time of some economic uncertainty in China, where much of the legitimacy of the CCP’s rule has come to be identified with healthy economic growth. Combined with this is the deeply entrenched culture of widespread corruption.
And it does not help when, even as China’s GDP rises, the wealth gap is widening. In other words, the country’s leadership has a lot on their plate not only to stimulate the rate of growth, but also to deal with some of its unintended — but serious consequences — such as growing economic inequality and systemic corruption.
At the same time, there is considerable concern about the danger to China’s political system from Western notions of universal values and human rights, and the need to guard against their “subversive” effects.
According to Document No. 9, which was circulated at a CCP forum, the party members were cautioned against the “subversive” nature of values such as “universal values [of human rights], Western ideas of the freedom of the press; civil society, civic rights ... and judicial independence.”
The Chinese leadership has long regarded the collapse of the Soviet Union as occurring precisely because former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sought to politically liberalize the system, bringing it under tremendous strain. China is determined not to repeat the Gorbachev experiment with what they regard as disastrous results.
The way China dealt with the 1989 democracy movement by using the army was a clear indication that then-leader Deng was not interested in the Western experiment. And as the danger from Western “universal values” persists, the Xi regime has clearly articulated its position that it would not stand for a move toward them. It will take all necessary measures to prevent the CCP’s political monopoly from being subverted.
The question then is how to separate the economic and political aspirations of the Chinese? One way is to control the flow of information from the West, which is being tried in all sorts of ways. However, a growing economy exposed to Western influences by way of trade and cultural exchanges, like, for instance, thousands of Chinese students studying in the West now and over the years, including children of the top leadership, tends to create its own momentum for liberal political values.
Whether Western “universal values” are superior or not is not the question. As Osnos wrote: “The party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history — and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.”
This struggle between people’s soaring aspirations, and the limits of monopoly power to mediate and guide, will define where China will go into the future.
Sushil Seth is a commentator in Australia.
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