Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, September 20, 2012

One man's analysis

Thomas Friedman's analysis of change coming to China seems a bit optimistic to me. That's par for the course. One big thing to remember, besides his optimism, is that he's much better informed and more experienced than I am.

Can your students track the changes he expects and evaluate his analysis?

The Talk of China

HERE is the story of today’s China in five brief news items.

STORY NO. 1 For most of the last two weeks, Xi Jinping, the man tapped to become China’s new Communist Party leader, was totally out of sight… I have a theory: Xi started to realize how hard the job of running China will be in the next decade and was hiding under his bed. Who could blame him?

Chinese officials take great pride in how they have used the last 30 years to educate hundreds of millions of their people, men and women, and bring them out of poverty. Yet, among my Chinese interlocutors, I find a growing feeling that what’s worked for China for the past 30 years — a huge Communist Party-led mobilization of cheap labor, capital and resources — will not work much longer… More and more, the Chinese people, from microbloggers to peasants to students, are demanding that their voices be heard — and officials clearly feel the need to respond…

Alleged Ferrari crash

STORY NO. 2 In March, Chinese authorities quickly deleted from the blogosphere photos of a fatal Beijing car crash, believed to involve the son of a close ally of President Hu Jintao… It was the latest in a string of incidents spotlighting the lavish lifestyles of the Communist Party elite.

Chinese authorities are so sensitive to these stories because they are the tip of an iceberg — an increasingly corrupt system of interlocking ties between the Communist Party and state-owned banks, industries and monopolies, which allow certain senior officials, their families and “princelings” to become hugely wealthy and to even funnel that wealth out of China…

As a result, you hear more and more that “the risks of not reforming have become bigger than the risks of reforming.” No one is talking revolution, but a gradual evolution to a more transparent, rule-of-law-based system, with the people having more formal input…

STORY NO. 3 Last week, the official Xinhua news agency reported that authorities in the city of Macheng, in Hubei Province in central China, agreed to invest $1.4 million in new school equipment after photos of students and their parents carrying their own desks and chairs to school, along with their books, “sparked an outcry on the Internet…

STORY NO. 4 President Hu Jintao suggested that it would be good if the people of Hong Kong learned more about the mainland, so Hong Kong authorities recently announced that they were imposing compulsory “moral and national education” lessons in primary and secondary schools… High school students from Hong Kong… organized a protest against Beijing’s “brainwashing” that quickly spread to parent groups and universities. As a result… Hong Kong’s chief executive… announced the compulsory education plan was being dropped…

Deng Yuwen

STORY NO. 5 A few weeks ago, Deng Yuwen, a senior editor of The Study Times, which is controlled by the Communist Party, published an analysis [which]… argued that President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao “had ‘created more problems than achievements’ during their 10 years in power. ... The article highlighted 10 problems facing China that it said were caused by the lack of political reform and had the potential to cause public discontent… ‘The essence of democracy is how to restrict government power; this is the most important reason why China so badly needs democracy,’ Deng wrote. ‘The overconcentration of government powers without checks and balances is the root cause of so many social problems.’ ” The article has triggered a debate on China’s blogosphere.

This is just a sampler of the China that Xi Jinping will be inheriting. This is not your grandfather’s Communist China. After three decades of impressive economic growth, but almost no political reforms, there is “a gathering sense of an approaching moment of transition that will require a different set of conditions for Chinese officials to maintain airspeed,” observed Orville Schell, the Asia Society China expert. The rules are going to get rewritten here. Exactly how and when is impossible to say. The only thing that is certain is that it will be through a two-way conversation.