Posted by Evan Osnos
For China, 2012 was a humbling year. When the history of China’s reform
era is written, this moment may prove to be a pivot point, a time when
the myths that China and the world had adopted about the politics and
economics of the People’s Republic began to wash away, leaving blunt
facts about what China’s idiosyncratic national system has and has not
achieved. Here are some of the myths that collapsed this year:
1. China’s political system has the efficiency and consensus to produce far-sighted decisions that Washington can only envy.
Faced with our own gridlock and polarization, Americans are
understandably eager to find a rhetorical cudgel, and we entered 2012
repeating the line that Chinese leaders had become all that ours were
not: ambitious, visionary, willing to pull for a larger purpose. In last
year’s State of the Union, President Obama invoked China as the “home
to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s
fastest computer. “So, yes,” Obama said, “the world has changed.” And he
was not wrong. But this year added some sobering facts about the haste,
waste, and corruption associated with China’s Great Leap. When a bridge
collapsed in August, killing three people and injuring five, it was the
sixth bridge collapse in a little over a year. The authorities blamed
overloaded trucks, but it turned out that the concrete had been
adulterated with sticks and plastic bags, the kind of corner-cutting
that Chinese regulators have found in the nation’s enormous railway construction project. For this and other reasons that follow, the myth of China’s political efficiency can be retired.
2. China is destined for a hard landing. Take your
pick—manufacturing, retail sales, investment—all signs suggest China has
postponed another opportunity to go over an economic cliff. “Economic
activity is back, and growth has bottomed out,” the economists Xianfang
Ren and Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight wrote this week. But,
while a recovery is welcome, there is little sign that Beijing has made
the hardest decision of all: to upend powerful state-owned enterprises
and unlock the dynamic private sector. Until then, China’s economy will
still look an awful lot like an overloaded eighteen-wheeler on a
mountain road.
3. There is good corruption and bad corruption, and China’s corruption hasn’t slowed things down.
Economists see signs that so much money has gone to waste and
corruption or simply to poor uses that China now needs to spend two or
three dollars in financing to generate a dollar of growth in the G.D.P—a
ratio that is up from one to one just six years ago.
4. The U.S.-China relationship is too broad and pragmatic to be shaken by human rights.
In May, the blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng escaped house arrest and,
after a car chase, ended up in the care of the American embassy in
Beijing at the very moment that the United States and China were
supposed to be talking about strategy and economics. After what seemed
to be an elegant solution to get him out of the embassy, he upended the deal
by phoning a Capitol Hill hearing from his hospital bed to advocate on
his own behalf: “I want to come to the U.S. to rest. I have not had a
rest in ten years,” he said. He prevailed, and he is now a fellow at
N.Y.U. Most recently, after Chen’s nephew was sentenced to three years
in jail, Chen released a video
to urging his countrymen to follow his lead: “Don’t expect some good
emperor to bestow the right upon us, or some upright officials to defend
our rights. God helps those who help themselves. Our fate is actually
in our own hands.”
5. In the fast-changing relations between men and women in China, the losers are the “leftover women.”
For all the inches of text devoted to the subject, “leftover women”—a
pool of educated thirtyish women who can not find a partner in China—is a
concept invented and sustained largely by men. Take a look at the numbers, and you find real demographic challenge: leftover men.
6. Finally, China has a political leader who thinks like us.
Xi Jinping, who took the helm of the Chinese Communist Party this
month, has the bearing and style of a man from this planet. Where Hu
Jintao, his predecessor, exuded a kind of bloodless pallor, Xi moves
with the bodily vocabulary that pleases American politicians: he watches
sports; he kicks a ball when it is presented to him. But behind the
Brylcreem, Xi has the makings of a more complicated figure for a more
complicated time, a nationalist with strategic and historical
motivations to assert a more muscular Chinese position on the world
stage. As the economy slows, Xi may face more pressure to seek refuge in
the flag, and that may come to shape his image more than his facility
on the rope line. One of the first actions on his watch—raising the stakes in the South China Sea—has not reassured the United States.
7. Compared to Americans, the Chinese are cautious, risk averse. We think of ourselves as the rugged individualists, but, as I discovered in Macau,
China’s boom runs on risk. In a set of experiments, the behavioral
scientists Elke Weber and Christopher Hsee looked at Chinese and
American attitudes toward financial risk and found that Chinese
investors overwhelmingly described themselves as more cautious than
Americans. (The Americans agreed.) But when they tested the groups, the
cliché proved to be false, and the Chinese took substantially larger
risks than Americans of similar means. What does it mean? More to learn,
but it’s a good place to start.
8. The Party has succeeded in blunting the transformative effect of the Internet. With
the departure of Google, and the expanding censorship apparatus, it was
beginning to look as if China’s digital strategy of allowing the
Internet to exist within the confines of Party control was working. That
verdict was premature. The Arab Spring demonstrated that a motivated,
angry minority can have a disproportionate effect on political
stability, and in China that means that the Internet doesn’t need to be
unrestricted to have outsized impact. Middle-class environmental
protests in Ningbo; repeated exposures of official corruption; and many
other cases coördinated and amplified by the Web demonstrate a new form
of leverage on the regime that will only grow. More important, a
generation is growing up to believe that official information is
inherently suspect.
9. The Party itself will be transformed by the Internet.
Precisely because the Party realizes the potential power of the Web, it
has moved effectively to erect the world’s most formidable obstacles to
connectivity. Censors, slowdowns, arrests—it has a powerful effect.
Whether political activism will change China will hinge on how many
people take their actions offline—and how the Party responds when they
do.
10. Local bureaucrats might be corrupt, but decision-makers at the top are carefully selected and have deep public approval. “If we speak candidly,” wrote Deng Yuwen, a deputy editor of the Party-run newspaper called Study Times,
“this decade has seeded or created massive problems, and the problems
are even more numerous than the achievements.” The Bo Xilai debacle
exposed a gangland element to Party politics that reaches to the top,
and the revelations about Wen Jiabao’s family wealth leaves no doubt
about the extent of self-dealing. Inside and outside the Party,
reformists are calling not only for economic liberalization but also for
credible efforts to end the two-tiered society, to resume political
reform, and to narrow the widening wealth gap. China faces more urgent
threats to growth and social stability than any time since the uprising
at Tiananmen Square, in 1989. Between 2006 and 2010, the number of
strikes and riots and what Chinese officials call “mass incidents,”
doubled to a hundred eighty thousand a year—and that will continue to
grow until the political culture improves.
Illustration: A. J. Frackattack; Photograph: AFP/Getty.
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