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Fifth, the country stands on the edge of a monumental environmental crisis, perhaps the worst in world history, or at least the worst since the flood in Biblical times. Sixteen of the world’s twenty dirtiest cities are located in the People’s Republic.
China’s most pressing environmental problem involves water, either too much or too little of it. This year, the country suffered from the worst flooding in a decade, perhaps longer. The flooding follows this year’s drought, the worst one since the Ming dynasty. The drought in the northern part of the country is, from year to year, so bad that some people think the government should move the capital to an area with more water.
Parts of the Yellow River, China’s second longest, have dried up since the early 1970s. It ran dry every year in the 1990s but one. Since then, the government has remedied the problem by releasing water from reservoirs, but that has only masked conditions. The outflow of the river is about 10 percent of what it was in the 1940s.
The Yangtze, China’s longest, also dries up these days.
Rivers are dry, and deserts advance from the north. Today, they cover more than 27 percent of the country’s land. The figure increases by a couple hundred square miles each year as the sands move south, both in the eastern and western portions of the country. This relentless process has seen China’s deserts merge as they swallow up more precious land.
A few summers ago the science and technology ministry warned, “The water resources crisis even threatens the future survival of the Chinese nation.” If anything, things have gotten worse since then. Central government policies are leading the Chinese state to an ecological disaster for which there is no remedy.
Chinese leaders say they’re trying to conserve water and clean up the environment,
but they’re not really serious. For most of them, economic development is far more important than anything else. And now that the economy needs state investment to grow, the environment is becoming even less of a priority for government at all levels. To get stimulus projects going, Beijing is ignoring the environmental restrictions put in place in recent years with so much fanfare from the West.
Sixth, China has never been more corrupt in its history. Unfortunately, corruption is one problem the Communist Party cannot solve. There have been anti-corruption campaigns since 1951, just two years after the founding of the People’s Republic, but China has only become more diseased over time.
The new $586 billion stimulus campaign, according to analysts, may be triggering the biggest surge of corruption in Chinese history as governments throw money at state projects with few controls. A senior economist at one of the state’s most prominent financial institutions says he can personally document that $294 billion of Beijing’s money “went private”—in other words, was stolen.
We know a lot of cash has been misdirected, to use a polite term. How do we know that? Macau casinos, which had been languishing before the announcement of the stimulus program, now are turning profits hand over fist. Why? Officials are gambling with state stimulus funds that they have diverted from government projects to their own pockets.
The late Party statesman Chen Yun once astutely remarked, “Not fighting corruption would destroy the country; fighting it would destroy the Party.”
So China has problems. Any one of them—and I have not listed them all—would be difficult for the Communist Party to take. Add them all together, and we can see why the regime will fail. Scholars dismiss talk of China’s collapse as they downplay one concern or another. The point is that China faces these challenges all at once, not one challenge at a time.
Yet this is not just a question of specific problems. Even if it could solve each and every one of them in short order, the Communist Party would still face one insurmountable challenge. Those who are optimistic about the future of the People’s Republic point to all the economic growth and progress of the last three decades. I agree that China has come a long way—and that is precisely why I think the country’s one-party state is in such jeopardy.
Change, in general, is tough for reforming regimes. There is nothing so destabilizing as modernization, which can radicalize even the beneficiaries of progress—and especially them.
Those wanting to know the future of China may want to brush up on Tocqueville, who noted that peasants in pre-revolutionary France detested feudalism more than their counterparts in other portions of Europe, where conditions were worse. Discontent was highest in those parts of France where there had been the most improvement. Moreover, the French Revolution followed an economic advance as rapid as it was unprecedented. So, as Tocqueville notes, “steadily increasing prosperity” doesn’t tranquilize citizens. On the contrary, it promotes “a spirit of unrest.”
Chinese leaders should not take comfort from the fact that Tocqueville was writing about 18th century France, another continent and another century. We saw these same trends play out in late 20th century Thailand and, more important, both in the Confucian society of South Korea a mere two decades ago and the Chinese-dominated society of Taiwan just a little later.
Senior Beijing officials now face the dilemma of all reforming authoritarians: economic success endangers their continued control. Sustained modernization is the enemy of one-party systems. Revolutions occur under many conditions, but especially when political institutions do not keep up with the social forces unleashed by economic change. Nothing irritates a rising social class like inflexible leaders.
Beijing’s policies seem designed to widen this gap between the people and their government, thereby ensuring greater instability for the foreseeable future. Today there’s unimaginable societal change at unheard of speed thanks in large part to government-sponsored economic growth and social engineering. Yet at the same time the Communist Party stands in the way of meaningful political change.
So it should come as no surprise that as China grew more prosperous in recent years, it also became less stable. Last year, there were 230,000 protests according to one report. That’s way up from 127,000 in 2008 and the 80,000 to 90,000 a year during the earlier part of this decade.
Strikes, which began at a Honda plant in Guangdong province in May, spread to the Yangtze delta, and then up to Tianjin. The strikes then cascaded across the nation. The speed at which they raced across the country is just an indication of the volatility of Chinese society.
And it is an indication that the Chinese people are beginning to find their courage. When that happens, societies change. Authoritarian governments tremble when common folk begin to feel the safety of numbers. “Chinese don’t protest when they are most upset, but when they think they can get away with it,” notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. If Beijing wants to learn anything from the Soviet collapse, it is once fear is gone, the system cannot last.
Just before the Beijing Olympics, I was talking with a prominent businessman in his spacious office in a Shanghai skyscraper, and he acknowledged how much China had changed in the last twenty years. “No one fears the government any more,” he noted with a broad smile.
The Chinese government, although it tries to be more coercive, is losing its ability to intimidate. As a consequence, the Chinese people have become self-aware, assertive, and defiant.
In June, a security officer at a government office in Hunan province, the home of Mao Zedong, stole an automatic weapon and killed three judges while wounding three others. He has since become a hero on the internet for his attack on hated judicial personnel. You know something is fundamentally wrong when many of society’s heroes are killers of government officials.
Clearly, the country’s ruling organization has lost legitimacy, even among the relatively well-to-do.
Middle-class Chinese, the beneficiaries of decades of reform, are taking to the streets. They act like peasants and workers whenever they think their rights are threatened. If there is one unifying theme for unrest today, it is the desire for justice, the demand to be treated fairly. That’s a hopeful sign for society in general but not for the Communist Party.
The Communist Party has remained in power by preventing competitors from banding together to form nationwide organizations. Yet today on the internet and in other forums, the Chinese people are having national conversations for the first time since the Tiananmen massacre two decades ago. As a result, citizens with common grievances are beginning to act in unison, posing a challenge of the first order to the regime.
Mao Zedong consolidated his power by dividing up the Chinese people into small units and isolating them from each other. Now, in a modernizing society, they are putting themselves back together. This is perhaps the most important legacy of thirty years of reform—and what Mao feared most.
Mao also feared the Chinese people trying to govern themselves. Many say the Chinese are not ready for democracy. That’s not true. The electrifying response of the Chinese people to the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo is a clear confirmation that China is ready for real elections, a free press, and the rule of law.
How do I know this? I went back to Rugao, my dad’s hometown, just before the Olympics. No one wanted to talk about the event, which was derided as “the government’s games.”
Instead, almost everyone asked my wife and me how the American political system worked and who would win the presidential election. They wanted to know everything we could tell them about John McCain and Barack Obama.
In short, the Chinese people want something new. And one way or another, they will prevail.
China will one day be free. And that day will be soon.
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