Not mine but an interview by a famous sinologist
China: Fragile Superpower
New Book by UCSD Political Scientist Takes a Look at the New China
Susan Shirk
Professor Susan Shirk, UCSD China scholar
Susan Shirk, director of the University of California system-wide Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, first traveled to China in 1971 and has been doing research there ever since. She served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for relations with China during 1997-2000. Now, Shirk has published a new book entitled "China: Fragile Superpower" that looks at how the country's internal politics could derail its peaceful rise. The book is published by Oxford University Press. Shirk is a a professor in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. Here, Barry Jagoda sits down to talk with Shirk about her views on the political challenges China faces.
This Week (TW): You write of a paradoxical China, one that is strong abroad but fragile at home.
Shirk: China has a very large economy and it will be the largest economy of the world by the middle of this century, but in per capita income terms it is still a very poor country. It is near the bottom of the rankings in terms of the living standards of its 1.3 billion people.
China: Fragile Superpower
The domestic political challenge is really what my book is about. In 1989, when pro-democracy demonstrations occurred in Beijings Tiananmen Square and 132 other cities, the Communist Party almost fell but remained standing only because the military stayed with the Party. At almost the same time, the communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe fell. So, ever since then, the leaders have felt that their days were numbered. They have felt a tremendous sense of insecurity. They could see that economic reform had turned society upside down. The Communist Party does not control what people see and do very much anymore. You have the same authoritarian rule but now people are living in a society which is open to the world and very much changed. The fragility is the political fragility of the government and of the Communist Party.
TW: You describe Chinas governing process as less than a dictatorship but what is meant by this term of yours, reciprocal accountability referring to the Communist Party process?
Shirk: Its kind of like the Catholic Church in the Vatican. The Pope appoints the cardinals but when its time for a new Pope, the College of Cardinals choose the Pope. The relationship between Chinas leaders and the Communist Party Central Committee is like that. The 300 officials in the Central Committee are appointed by and accountable to the top leaders, but the Central Committee also has the power to choose the top leaders.
TW: How would you compare the current leaders with Mao, Zhou Enlai and the revolutionary founders?
Shirk: Regardless of what you think of what a tyrant Mao was, or what you think of Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded him and was the architect of Chinas economic reform but still focused on keeping the Communist Party in power, they were the founding fathers, members of what is called the Long March generation. They were like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. They had tremendous personal authority as a result of that history. But todays leaders did not go on the Long March, did not fight in the revolution. These are people who joined the Party when it was already in power. They are technocrats, organization men. They dont have a personal following throughout the country. They rule by virtue of the posts they hold and people dont have the same personal feeling for them or the same respect for them.
Communist Political Leaders of China
Left to right: Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao
TW: Are there term limits now?
Shirk: There are. Its a non-democracy, an authoritarian regime, but it has more rules and regulations than before and one of those rules is that you can only serve in a senior government position for two five year terms. Also, there are retirement ages in order to move the next generation up. The previous president, Jiang Zemin, actually stepped down in 2002 and that was the first time a leader of a large Communist Party had actually walked away from his office and retired, bringing in the countrys current party leader and president, Hu Jintao.
TW: You have suggested some main considerations for survival of the Party and its leadership?
Shirk: There are some precepts they follow to stay in power. Much of this comes from the close call of the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989. First, they have to forestall large scale popular protests. The second rule is to keep the leadership publicly united so there is no opening for people to mobilize popular opinion to oppose the party. And the third thing is to keep the army loyal so if push comes to shove there is no gun to back up opposition.
TW: Why does nationalism play such a large role in todays China?
Shirk: This occurs for two reasons. Chinese was an historically important country for 2000 years, but from the mid-19th century on until just recently, for about 150 years, the country was weak, internally divided, and on the sidelines internationally Now that the countrys power is reviving, people naturally feel very proud and also have a sense of resentment of the countries that kicked them when they were down, particularly of Japan. But nationalism is also being engineered by the Communist Party because nobody believes in Marx and Lenin and Mao Zedong ideology anymore. So, the Party has had to find a substitute source of legitimacy and theyve turned to nationalism.
TW: What steps can American leaders take to make China a more stable society?
Shirk: There is not much we can do related to Chinas domestic politics, but what we can do is to be sure that the fragility of Chinas domestic situation does not lead to aggressive behavior internationally. We have to worry that in distracting their people from domestic problems, or in response to provocations from Taiwan and Japan, Chinas leaders might make threats that their domestic situation makes them feel that they are compelled to follow through on. I have focused on what can be done to prevent a war with China and these issues are discussed in the book
TW: Is it true that as a student you met Premier Zhou Enlai?
Susan Shirk and Zhou Enlai
Susan Shirk and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, July, 1971
Shirk: I had the opportunity to visit China in 1971 as part of a group of American PhD students. We were doing research in Hong Kong because we couldnt get into China. At that point, ping-pong diplomacy came along, with the planned visit of President Nixon, and we were a handy group to also invite in. We met with Zhou Enlai for four hours one evening.
TW: You dedicate this book to your husband and children. Where are the three of them now and why do you refer to your son as the newest China hand in the family?
Shirk: My husband, Sam Popkin, is a political science professor at UCSD, hes my colleague. My daughter is a lawyer in New York. She went to kindergarten in China during one of my research trips there. My son, after years of my suggesting, decided to study Chinese. He finally succumbed not because of me but because his girlfriend decided to go to China and he followed her and now, of course, hes hooked and he loves it and hes studying Chinese at Duke.
TW: Congratulations on publication and thank you for this introduction.
Shirk: My pleasure.
China: Fragile Superpower
If you can think this is not credible enough you can also see this link
COVER STORY: CHINA 2008
The Rise of a Fierce Yet Fragile Superpower
The much-heralded advent of China as a global power is no longer a forecast but a reality. Now we, and they, must manage its triumph.
For Americans, 2008 is an important election year. But for much of the world, it is likely to be seen as the year that China moved to center stage, with the Olympics serving as the country's long-awaited coming-out party. The much-heralded advent of China as a global power is no longer a forecast but a reality. On issue after issue, China has become the second most important country on the planet. Consider what's happened already this past year. In 2007 China contributed more to global growth than the United States, the first time another country had done so since at least the 1930s. It also became the world's largest consumer, eclipsing the United States in four of the five basic food, energy and industrial commodities. And a few months ago China surpassed the United States to become the world's leading emitter of CO2. Whether it's trade, global warming, Darfur or North Korea, China has become the new x factor, without which no durable solution is possible.
And yet the Chinese do not quite see themselves this way. Susan Shirk, the author of a recent book about the country, "The Fragile Superpower," tells a revealing tale. Whenever she mentions her title in America, people say to her, "Fragile? China doesn't seem fragile." But in China people say, "Superpower? China isn't a superpower."
In fact it's both, and China's fragility is directly related to its extraordinary rise. Lawrence Summers has recently pointed out that during the Industrial Revolution the average European's living standards rose about 50 percent over the course of his lifetime (then about 40 years). In Asia, principally China, he calculates, the average person's living standards are set to rise by 10,000 percent in one lifetime! The scale and pace of growth in China has been staggering, utterly unprecedented in historyand it has produced equally staggering change. In two decades China has experienced the same degree of industrialization, urbanization and social transformation as Europe did in two centuries.
Recall what China looked like only 30 years ago. It was a devastated country, one of the world's poorest, with a totalitarian state. It was just emerging from Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which had destroyed universities, schools and factories, all to revitalize the revolution. Since then 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in Chinaabout 75 percent of the world's total poverty reduction over the last century. The country has built new cities and towns, roads and ports, and is planning for the future in impressive detail.
So far Beijing has managed to balance economic growth and social stability in a highly fluid environment. Given their challenges, China's political leaders stand out for their governing skills. The regime remains a dictatorship, with a monopoly on power. But it has expanded personal liberty in ways that would be recognizable to John Locke or Thomas Jefferson. People in China can now work, travel, own property and increasingly worship as they please. This is not enough, but it is not insignificant, either.
But whether this forward movementeconomic and politicalwill continue has become the crucial question for China. It is a question that is being asked not just in the West but in China, and for practical reasons. The regime's main problem is not that it's incurably evil but that it is losing control over its own country. Growth has empowered localities and regions to the point that decentralization is now the defining reality of Chinese life. Central tax collection is lower than in most countries, a key indicator of Beijing's weakness. On almost every issueslowing down lending, curbing greenhouse-gas emissionsthe central government issues edicts that are ignored by the provinces. As China moves up the value chain, so the gap between rich and poor grows dramatically. Large sectors of the economy and society are simply outside the grip of the Communist Party, which has become an elite technocracy, sitting above the 1.3 billion people it leads.
Political reform is part of the solution to this problem. China needs a more open, accountable and responsive form of government, one that can exercise control in what has become a more chaotic and empowered society. What such reform would look like remains an open question, but one that is being debated within the seniormost levels of the regime. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, John Thornton, an investment banker turned China expert, traces how Beijing is taking hesitant but clear steps toward greater rule of law and accountability.
China's sense of its own weakness casts a shadow over its foreign policy. It is unique as a world power, the first in modern history to be at once rich (in aggregate terms) and poor (in per capita terms). It still sees itself as a developing country, with hundreds of millions of peasants to worry about. It views many of the issues on which it is pressedglobal warming, human rightsas rich-country problems. (When it comes to pushing regimes to open up, Beijing also worries about the implications for its own undemocratic structure.) But this is changing. From North Korea to Darfur to Iran, China has been slowly showing that it wants to be a responsible "stakeholder" in the international system.
Some scholars and policy intellectuals (and a few generals in the Pentagon) look at the rise of China and see the seeds of inevitable great-power conflict and perhaps even war. Look at history, they say. When a new power rises it inevitably disturbs the balance of power, unsettles the international order and seeks a place in the sun. This makes it bump up against the established great power of the day (that would be us). So, Sino-U.S. conflict is inevitable.
But some great powers have been like Nazi Germany and others like modern-day Germany and Japan. The United States moved up the global totem pole and replaced Britain as the No. 1 country without a war between the two nations. Conflict and competitionparticularly in the economic realmbetween China and the United States is inevitable. But whether this turns ugly depends largely on policy choices that will be made in Washington and Beijing over the next decade.
In another Foreign Affairs essay, Princeton's John Ikenberry makes the crucially important point that the current world order is extremely conducive to China's peaceful rise. That order, he argues, is integrated, rule-based, with wide and deep foundationsand there are massive economic benefits for China to work within this system. Meanwhile, nuclear weapons make it suicidal to risk a great-power war. "Today's Western order, in short, is hard to overturn and easy to join," writes Ikenberry.
The Chinese show many signs of understanding these conditions. Their chief strategist, Zheng Bijian, coined the term "peaceful rise" to describe just such an effort on Beijing's part to enter into the existing order rather than overturn it. The Chinese government has tried to educate its public on these issues, releasing a 12-part documentary last year, "The Rise of Great Nations," whose central lesson is that markets and not empire determine the long-run success of a great global power.
But while the conditions exist for peace and cooperation, there are also many factors pointing in the other direction. As China grows in strength, it grows in pride and nationalist feelingwhich will be on full display at the Summer Olympic Games. Beijing's mandarin class is convinced that the United States wishes it ill. Washington, meanwhilesitting atop a unipolar orderis unused to the idea of sharing power or accommodating another great power's interests. Flashpoints like human rights, Taiwan or some unforeseen incident could spiral badly in an atmosphere of mistrust and with domestic constituencieson both sideseager to sound tough. Two thousand eight is the year of China. It should also be the year we craft a serious long-term China policy.
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//www.newsweek.com/id/81588/page/3
Well Two different countries two different dynamics ,two different philosophies.You can't compare apples with oranges.
Most important of all two different types of governance