From: Bill Douglass (douglassbill@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jun 28 2001 - 12:30:51 MDT
I wrote,
"As I've mentioned before, when relations with the West are poor and the
Chinese economy isn't doing well, is when the Communist hard-liners in
Beijing tend to gain power, and liberals (in the true sense of the word)
such as Zhu Rongzhi tend to lose it."
J. R. Molloy wrote,
"That means the more the US strangles them, the more they cut their own
throats with the idiotic Marxism that toiletized the (former, remember why)
USSR.
Consequently, the most powerful move Americans can make is to economically
intimidate Chinese policy makers, thus pushing them into Marxist
self-destruction."
- --J. R.
Hmm... America purposefully pushing China back towards Marxism. Well, I
can't say I agree with you, but it's original, I'll give you that!
There's a great article on this subject in the new issue of _Foreign
Affairs_. I came across it yesterday, right after I posted my first message
on this thread. One would have to purchase the journal to read the whole
article, but I'll copy the 500-word preview from their site, below.
I think it's relevant to this list, since the focus is on future trends in
China and Sino-US relations.
from http://www.foreignaffairs.org
China's Coming Transformation
by George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham
>From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2001
500-word preview
George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham are Ph.D. candidates in political
science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gilboy studies
industrial technology development and economic institutions in China.
Heginbotham studies Chinese civil-military relations and grand strategy.
Both have lived in China for more than five years.
THE MAIN EVENT
Social forces unleashed by China's economic reform over the last 20
years are now driving inexorably toward a fundamental transformation of
Chinese politics. Since the suppression of the 1989 student protests in
Tiananmen Square, China's leaders have struggled to maintain the political
status quo, even while pursuing rapid economic reform. The result today is a
nonadaptive, brittle state that is unable to cope with an increasingly
organized, complex, and robust society. Further efforts to resist political
change will only squander the benefits of social and economic dynamism,
perpetuate the government's costly battle to contain the populace, drive
politics toward increasingly tense domestic confrontation, and ultimately
threaten the system with collapse.
Many of today's senior Chinese officials recognize this dilemma but have
powerful personal motivations to resist change. The next generation of
Chinese leaders, however -- set to take office in 2002-3 -- is both more
supportive of reform and less constrained by Tiananmen-era political
baggage. These new leaders will likely respond to the dilemma, therefore, by
accelerating political liberalization.
This does not imply that China will soon become a Western-style
democracy. Rather, the coming steps in reform will likely include
measures to legitimize independent social organization, give citizen groups
increased input in policymaking (in exchange for some limits on their
activities), and develop greater intraparty democracy. These changes will be
difficult, and in the near term, they are as likely to throw China into
domestic turmoil as they are to create a stable partial democracy.
This coming political reformation is the main event in China, and it has
critical implications for Sino-U.S. relations. Events such as the recent
collision of a U.S. spy plane with a Chinese fighter jet near Hainan Island,
the detention of foreign academics in China, or even rhetorical skirmishes
across the Taiwan Strait cannot by themselves derail or even significantly
delay the forces of change. The event most likely to disrupt the coming
reform effort would be the emergence of a clearly adversarial relationship
between the United States and China -- a new cold war. Such a development
would reinforce the position of Chinese conservatives and militarists and
weaken the forces that are currently driving change. Accordingly, U.S.
policy should be restrained and carefully calibrated to maintain regional
security while encouraging continued reform and liberalization in China.
BRITTLE STATE
China's current leaders view politics through the prism of two central
episodes in their political lives: the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s
and the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations. The Cultural
Revolution made today's leaders averse to radicalism and mass action,
and the Tiananmen demonstrations made them wary of social and
political liberalization. These two experiences have framed the
boundaries of "safe" and "stable" politics in China -- not too radical, not
too liberal.
In the days leading . . .
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