One of Washington’s leading sinologists is predicting the “crackup” of China.
“The endgame of Chinese Communist [Party] rule has now begun,” George Washington University professor of international affairs and China Policy Program director David Shambaugh said.
In an essay published this weekend in the Wall Street Journal, Shambaugh wrote that Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly.
“Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent,” he wrote, adding that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) could be deposed in a power struggle or coup.
“With his aggressive anticorruption campaign — a focus of [last] week’s [Chinese] National People’s Congress — he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies,” he wrote.
Shambaugh has a reputation for caution and his view is surprising.
A US Department of State official refused to comment for the Taipei Times, but said that Shambaugh’s “warning words” were being read with “great interest.”
The academic gives five “telling indications” of what he calls the regime’s vulnerability and the party’s systemic weaknesses.
“First, China’s economic elites have one foot out of the door and are ready to flee en masse if the system begins to crumble,” he wrote. “It is a telling sign of lack of confidence in the regime and the country’s future.”
Second, since taking office in 2012, Xi has greatly intensified political repression, Shambaugh wrote, calling it “a symptom of the party leadership’s deep anxiety and insecurity.”
Third, the academic asserts that many apparent regime loyalists are insincere.
“Propaganda has lost its power and the emperor has no clothes,” Shambaugh wrote in reference to the behavior of Chinese officials at a conference about Xi’s signature “China Dream” concept that he attended in the summer last year.
Shambaugh then asserts that the alleged corruption affecting the party-state and the military also pervades wider Chinese society, saying: “It is stubbornly rooted in a single-party system, patron-client networks, an economy utterly lacking in transparency, a state-controlled media and the absence of the rule of law.”
“China’s economy is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit,” Shambaugh wrote. “These five increasingly evident cracks in the regime’s control can be fixed only through political reform.”
Shambaugh acknowledges that he cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, “but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase.”
“We should watch for the day when the regime’s propaganda agents and its internal security apparatus start becoming lax in enforcing the party’s writ — or when they begin to identify with dissidents,” he wrote. “When human empathy starts to win out over ossified authority, the endgame of Chinese communism will really have begun.”
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