« Back to Discussion Why China Is Nervous About the Arab Uprising

Not Allowing Another Tiananmen

Updated March 1, 2011, 03:13 PM

Wenran Jiang, an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, is the Mactaggart Research chair and founding director of its China Institute.

Beijing has many reasons to be nervous about potential mass unrest. After all, today's China, despite its impressive economic growth, shares many similarities with the Middle Eastern and Northern African countries now in turmoil: widening inequality, rampant corruption, lack of political transparency, rising inflation and tight government control.

In contrast to the Arab dictators, the Chinese leadership deals with social tensions pragmatically -- that is, never let things get out of hand.

But China is unlikely to experience what the Middle East is going through. First, China's high growth rate in the past three decades have delivered benefits to the majority of Chinese people. Although the income disparity is a serious problem, the poor still benefit from the system.

Second, China has managed to defuse crisis through an effective control system. Even the Internet has been managed and controlled by the authorities with certain efficiency. In contrast to the Middle Eastern dictators, the Chinese leaders learned their lessons more than 20 years ago with the Tiananmen protests. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have emphasized social stability from day one since coming to power, and have been constantly monitoring possible sources of instability.

Third, the Chinese leadership is no longer a single dictatorship that hangs on to power forever, but a collective structure with regular serving terms. The largely technocratic leadership core tends to deal with social tensions in a very pragmatic manner -- that is, never to let things get out of hand and become another Tiananmen. At the same time, these leaders also try hard to show they are engaged with the society and care about ordinary people's lives.

Nonetheless, the Chinese leaders are on high alert. They need to continue to deliver economic growth and benefits to the majority of the Chinese people as they have done in the past 30 years. But they also need to make tangible progress toward a more just and egalitarian society, a less corrupt state, and a more open country. The Middle East uprisings prove that citizens need ways to express themselves through democratic channels, and that absent those means, an entire society can explode. 

Greater Wealth Isn't Enough

Updated February 28, 2011, 10:43 PM

Oded Shenkar is the Ford Motor Company Chair in Global Business Management at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. He is the author of “The Chinese Century” and "Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain a Strategic Edge."

The Chinese leadership is nervously keeping a close watch on the upheaval in the Middle East, and preparing its own response. The Internet police is working overtime, plain cloth policemen are everywhere, and uniformed police forces have been deployed in potential trouble spots. Not since the collapse of the Soviet Union have China’s Communist Party leaders been so worried about “foreign ideas” contaminating the country's “social harmony.”

Inflation, corruption and inequality are good reasons for the Chinese leaders to be anxious.

Economically, China is doing phenomenally well, having just been crowned the world’s second largest economy. Poverty is down and standard of living is way, way up. The country is also increasingly assertive on the world stage, which should feed into nationalist sentiments. It is difficult to see much similarity to Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, whose economies have stagnated for decades. But look closely and you’ll see China has reasons to be anxious.

While the Middle East upheaval started in down-and-under economies, it has since spread to places likes Bahrain and Oman, whose citizens are doing well by almost any economic measure. This, of course, calls into question the Chinese strategy of relying on a full stomach to keep people at bay (not surprisingly, these countries quickly moved to offer higher wages and allowances).

One of the main triggers of the uprisings in the Arab world has been a run-up in food prices, something that is happening in China as well and may get out of control, in my opinion. Inflation is especially worrisome to the Communist Party, who surely remembers that it was associated with a declining Nationalist regime.

The protesters in the Middle East complained of rampant corruption, an ailment widely acknowledged by the Chinese regime as well. Those demonstrations quickly mushroomed from limited expressions of dissatisfaction into all-out rebellion. China, too, has had large numbers of popular demonstrations, often addressing a specific concern (e.g., government land grabs), but those could expand as well.

Beijing’s leaders should also be nervous about the “red eye disease,” the Chinese term for envy, given that Bahrain and Oman, two of the wealthiest places on the planet, have been rocked by protests. Faced with one of the highest levels of inequality in the world in a nominally socialist country, the Chinese leaders must know that a rising standard of living alone is no guarantee of satisfaction. People continuously compare themselves to others, and if they judge that those above them got there by illegitimate means they will be unhappy. This, too, is worrisome to the Chinese leadership.

So could these factors trigger broader unrest in China? That seems unlikely — at least for the near future — for two reasons.

China has long practiced information control, and has been extremely aggressive in monitoring and limiting the way information flows in the Internet age. While Middle East nations took desperate steps to shut down the Internet after it was too late, China has been working on this issue for years and has contingency plans and resources in place to deal with such events.

Finally, many Chinese, possibly most, are busy climbing the economic ladder and seeking out opportunities, and are not very interested in political aspirations -- yet. After all, Hong Kong prospered as a colony and continues to do so as a special enclave of China without a democratic system.

Someone once said that the only thing certain about China was uncertainty. Even if upheaval is not imminent, I do see a regime that will have to make significant changes to ensure that it does not one day end in exile or worse.

Stuck in Panic Mode

Updated March 1, 2011, 03:13 PM

Fei-Ling Wang is professor of international affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of "Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China's Hukou System."

The revolutionary changes sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East have touched raw nerves in China. The struggling Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi's citing of the “lesson of Tiananmen” certainly didn't help.

It is extraordinary to see that the Chinese state, growing rich and powerful, remains easily frightened.

To prevent unrest, the Chinese government has predictably employed sophisticated media and Internet censorship, as well as enhanced police presence in many cities. Yet so far, the calls for gatherings for the "Jasmine Revolution" have seemed more like pranks, attracting the attention of some spectators and journalists but almost no real protesters. Regardless, many in the Chinese government have gone into a crisis mode, leading to, among other things, the “preventive” detention and jailing of some peaceful dissident writers and bloggers, including Ran Yunfei.

It is extraordinary to see that the Chinese state, growing rich and powerful and presiding over remarkable economic growth, remains easily frightened. Oftentimes, we see Beijing exhibit irrational nervousness, as though the government is stuck in perpetual fear of losing control. Despite the huge investments made and the latest technology employed to impose order and stability, the mighty Chinese state often behaves like it is only one tiny misstep away from a total collapse.

A key reason for this paradoxical sense of insecurity, as it has been suggested by many already, is the profound and growing incompatibility between China’s rapidly expanding economy and diversifying society and the essentially unchanged political system and governance structure, which breed corruption and injustice, making social conflicts and tensions worse.

A confident and powerful government should not be so deeply distrustful of its own people, many of whom feel genuinely proud of the country's achievements over the past three decades. A repeat of 1989 is not an option. Festering grievances and conflicts must be taken seriously, and the people given recourse. To head off large disturbances, Beijing must figure out a smarter way to govern a nation of 1.3 billion. 

Fewer Revolutionary Pressures

Updated February 28, 2011, 10:27 PM

Daniel A. Bell is professor of the arts and humanities at Jiaotong University in Shanghai and of political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing. His latest book is “China’s New Confucianism."

Authoritarian regimes seem to be crumbling almost daily. Will China go the way of Middle East dictatorships? The similarities are obvious. China lacks political freedoms. It is plagued by a huge gap between rich and poor, rampant corruption, rising prices of basic food stuffs, and high unemployment among recent university graduates.

Most Chinese people blame lower officials for social problems, not the central government.

But the differences are equally obvious. China is not ruled by a family and hence there is no clear source of blame. Most Chinese people (according to survey data) blame lower officials for social problems, not the central government. Also, there are opportunities for social mobility (via education and/or entrepreneurship) that seem to be lacking in the nations of the Middle East. China’s population is older and less restless. And let’s not forgot that 10 percent growth rates can lead to a more intangible sense of pride and confidence.

So calls for political change are not likely to be as pressing or revolutionary as in the Middle East. What about the question of what kind of change is most appropriate for China? Here too, there are key differences. In Egypt, for example, critics seem to largely agree on the need for free and fair elections to choose the country’s top political leaders.

Inside China, some like Liu Xiaobo, call for multi-party democracy. But most social reformers do not. Pessimists worry about the possible consequences of a transition to democratic rule: chaos followed by strongman rule. Optimists argue for political alternatives that may work better than Western-style democracy, like a legislature composed of a a democratically-elected chamber that would represent the interests of workers and farmers complemented by an appointed chamber (selected on merit) that would represent future generations and other non-voters who are affected by the policies of the government. In short, a pro-democracy uprising is not only unlikely, it may not even be broadly desired as the best means for a transition toward a mixture of democracy and meritocracy.

So why does the Chinese government rely on harsh measures to put down calls for democratic reform? It may be because under the conservative structure of the government nobody wants to be held responsible if things go wrong and hence it errs on the side of caution.

But the best way to deal with grievances is to humanize government, with more freedom of speech, more semi-autonomous organizations, and more social justice. Let bad proposals for political change die a natural death in the marketplace of ideas.That would be far more effective in the long term than top-down control.

Parallels Exist

March 1, 2011

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at U.C. Irvine, a co-founder of “The China Beat” blog and the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. He is the author of “China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

China's sustained economic growth, plus its rising status in global affairs under the watch of the current leadership, would seem to give Hu Jintao and company good reasons to feel confident. Sometimes, the leadership’s handling of acts of protests fits in with what might be expected given this background.

Corruption and high inflation were part of the mix when the U.S.-backed Chinese authoritarian leader, Chiang Kai-shek, lost power to the Communists in 1949.

But there are certain developments that result in responses that reflect a high, even excessive, degree of insecurity. The government gets particularly nervous when there are protests that engage — or have the potential to engage — people of varied classes, or that involve grievances likely to resonate throughout China. The Chinese leadership has also shown a consistent worry about anything that smacks of an organized opposition, something that goes back in part to an appreciation for the role that groups like Solidarity played in bringing down Communist Party systems in Eastern and Central Europe in 1989.

It might seem at first blush that the Egyptian crisis stemmed from factors so different from China’s situation that Beijing would not be troubled by any comparison. After all, Mubarak had close ties to Washington, and his country was in bad shape economically. Nevertheless, a central grievance in Egypt, which resonates powerfully with many Chinese, was official corruption. In addition, one major reason for the protests was inflation — which was part of the economic backdrop to the 1989 demonstrations in China and is again causing distress among some Chinese (especially because of rising food prices). Complaints about corruption and high inflation were also a crucial part of the mix when a U.S.-backed Chinese authoritarian leader, Chiang Kai-shek, lost power to the Communists in 1949.

Taking all this into account, it is not surprising that even whispers of possible protests make China’s leaders distressed. Even though many Chinese have benefited from the country’s growth and rise, and even though there is no sign of any organized opposition at work in China, anything in another country that has parallels to the Chinese case causes concern. So, too, does anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of what happened in China in 1989 and in the late 1940s.

It is no accident, when we take inflation into account, that reports coming out of China by Western journalists have referred both to increased security measures as well as the government’s determination to rein in escalating prices. And it would not be surprising at all if we began to hear renewed talk of the government’s determination to fight corruption, a theme it has periodically stressed ever since 1989. 

It's Not About the Economy

Updated March 1, 2011, 09:44 PM

Murray Scot Tanner, Ph.D., is a China security analyst at CNA Corporation. He has written extensively about social order and law enforcement in China. His views are his own, and not necessarily those of CNA.

Many analysts, both Chinese and foreign, place the primary blame for social protest in China on economic factors — most notably periods of economic downturn and rising unemployment. But what is the relationship between economic growth and social unrest in China? Can sustained rapid economic growth inoculate China against instability and ultimately permit it to “grow its way out” of social unrest?

The political culture of the Chinese people is far more assertive than 30 years ago.

The question is far too complex to be resolved here, but one interesting point is that the Chinese government’s own statistics suggest that the answer is “no." Increases and declines in unrest in China are indeed sensitive to economic downturns, but it’s not just the economy that matters.
If we look at economic growth rates over the past two decades and compare them to the available figures from China’s law enforcement departments on so-called “mass incidents” — the official term for a vast array of group social protest actions — we see that, at least according to these figures, China has seen a persistent increase in social protests every year (or nearly every year) from 1993 when these figures were first collected through at least 2008.
No question about it, unrest statistics have spiked more quickly during major economic crises such as 1997-2000 and 2008. But China has also witnessed increases in unrest during years in which its economy was growing and producing jobs at historic rates well above 10 per cent per year. Nor can Chinese officials assume that “the higher the growth rate, the better.” Very high growth rates risk accelerating inflation — which was one of the major causes of the massive 1989 Tiananmen democracy protests.
Unrest is China is related to many factors beyond economic growth, most notably failures in China’s political and legal institutions that force citizens to take their demands to the street to seek redress. And finally, the political culture of the Chinese people is just far more assertive than the country I started studying more than 30 years ago.