MCLC: The coming Chinese crackup (2)

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The coming Chinese crackup (2)
With his permission, I am sharing with the list Sidney Rittenberg’s response to David Shambaugh’s Wall Street Journal essay. Rittenberg is the author (with Amanda Bennett) of The Man Who Stayed Behind (Duke, 2001), and prolific commentator and frequent invited speaker to universities and other venues world wide. He is also the subject of a recent documentary entitled The Revolutionary, released by Stourwater pictures (2011). Rittenberg was a personal associate of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and others, and maintains a close connection with members of Chinese elite ruling class to this day. To my mind, there are few who are in a better position to assess the observations of Professor Shambaugh than Sidney Rittenberg.
-Paul Manfredi <manfrepr at plu.edu>
David Shambaugh Pronounces a Death Sentence on Communist Rule in China.
Those who are concerned about China, but who don’t know much about it, are wondering whether Professor Shambaugh knows what he is talking about.
Considering his academic qualifications and his close government relations in Washington, many of them suspect that he does. Some, however, remember that, only  three years ago, Dr Shambaugh declared that the new leader, Xi Jinping, was unlikely to foster any new policies, and that, in any case, it would take two years before he could consolidate his position of power and make any moves of his own. This, despite the fact that a little research at the time would have  revealed that Xi, as a local leader and as his father’s son, was quite a different kettle of fish from the Hu Jintao conservatives who preceded him. Of course , ink was scarcely dry on these pronouncements when the new leader, Xi, came out of his corner fighting at the sound of the first round bell, obviously espousing a bold new set of policies, markedly different from the previous regime.
(A  general principle here: In analyzing China, an ounce of research is worth  a pound of prophesying.)
The professor adduces five areas of crisis to make his point that the allegedly drowning CPC is now going down for the third time. Let us briefly examine his five points.
(1) The argument here is, “If the rats are leaving, the ship must be sinking.” Not that the wealthy Chinese who are going abroad are by any means “rats”. No, they are not. But Shambaugh’s reasoning is that they are leaving because the Chinese Ship of State is sinking. For the long jump to this conclusion, he presents no evidence. Personally, I have not studied the Chinese emigration issue. But a few facts are fairly well known. The Chinese government has in recent years been vigorously promoting  a “going out” policy for Chinese businesses, encouraging them invest overseas. Many of those who do emigrate continue to be Chinese business people and to maintain close contact with the Mainland. It is true that some are anxious to leave because they are not certain that their wealth, and their personal freedom, will be secure in this reform era, or because they have been engaged in activities which are now suddenly subject to prosecution under charges of corruption.  But all of this is quite a different matter from saying that they are leaving because the Ship of State is sinking.
(2)  Dr Shambaugh maintains that “A more secure and confident government would not” tighten controls over dissident opinion, school curricula, etc. Quite possibly so. But is a government  which is  struggling to carry through fundamental economic and administrative  reforms, against tremendous opposition from entrenched interests both inside and outside of the official bureaucracy—is such a sovereign government not entitled to take steps which it believes are necessary for the success of those reforms? Even though we may feel, as I do, that at least some of the “tightening up” measures are unwise. Why is the resistance to reform so furious? Let me cite two examples: The 18th Party Congress (at which Hu Jintao, as out-going leader, read the main report, but it was actually the new team’s report), and the Third Plenum that followed, decreed that China’s strategic resources (Steel, Copper, Cement etc) would  no longer be allocated by government officials, but would move according to the laws of supply and demand in the marketplace. This, at one fell swoop, deprives the bureaucrats of the “squeeze” they get in return for awarding licenses and purchasing permits. This is only one of the economic reform items against which vested interests fight. Second example: Xi demands that Party members, and first of all officials, strictly, as he puts it, “separate power from money.” He is telling the young people, “If you want to get rich, don’t join the Party.” He demands converting a managerial government into a service government, as ours is called on to be. To this end,  he is struggling to reeducate the cadres and future cadres. But imagine the difficulty in China today (not in Mao’s day) of training officials who are to enforce policies that enable others to prosper, while they themselves are forbidden a place at the trough.
(3)  Dr Shambaugh’s third point is hard to argue with, as it seems to be based on Phrenology. He found the Party representatives “wooden-faced,” their body language “wooden,” their language “mind-numbing.” Perhaps Dr. Shambaugh has, indeed, the gift of being able to judge from such observations that “many regime loyalists are just going through the motions.”  But it sounds suspiciously like what the Confucian Analects call, “cha yan guan se” (察言观色), “weighing words and watching facial expressions,” and it is a form of punditry distinctly frowned upon today as a substitute for down-to-earth research and scholarship.
One wonders whether Dr Shambaugh noticed the enthusiasm among the Chinese public at large, including the students, for the thunderous campaign against corruption and the limiting of cadres’ privileges?  I would guess that some of the very people that he knows in China have changed from cynicism and apathy to a feeling of new hope for their country.
(4)  Here, the professor seems to be saying that fighting corruption in China is hopeless, because, don’t you see, they have a single-party system. Can any of us think of a country (or a hundred) that has a multi-party system but still has wide-spread corruption? Taiwan, anyone? Or (if I may be excused) my native South Caroline? Moreover, does anyone who knows anything about China really believe that installing a multi-party system there today would not greatly increase corruption? Under the leadership of Xi Jinping and Wang Qishan, hundreds of thousands of officials, from top to bottom, are being or have been investigated. Is this aiming at one’s opposition? The reformers have never claimed to be “ending corruption.” They have said repeatedly that this is a very long-term effort.
(5)   Yes, the Chinese economy is “stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit.” By inserting the word “easy” Dr Shambaugh makes it possible for me to concur, at last, with a statement of his.
But when has the emergence of China’s miraculous economy from all sorts of “traps” ever been easy? Since 1949, not a year has gone by without doomsday prophecies of China’s imminent collapse? And when have there not been severe economic challenges that the Chinese were able, not easily, to work around or overcome?
Incidentally, Xi Jinping has repeatedly indicated that the economic reform program will require eight to twelve years to carry through. Progress to date has, while still initial, actually been surprisingly rapid. To say that Xi’s reforms “have been stillborn” is rather like accusing a one-month pregnant mother of failing to deliver her child.
Personally, I believe that we cannot underestimate this fact: The Chinese are intensely patriotic, and when they feel that their leaders have their best interests at heart, they will support those leaders through Hell and High Water.
Shambaugh’s prophecy of impending doom is much less convincing than some in the past. (Yes, my friend, you know who you are!)
But this particular doomsday piece is especially misleading because it appears to offer lots of arguments, and it comes from what is considered an authoritative source. But neither the evidence nor the logic will stand up to careful inspection. More important, the Chinese themselves are, daily, proving the doomsayers wrong.
Sidney Rittenberg
by denton.2 at osu.edu on March 11, 2015
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