When Power Comes from the Wire of a Modem

The Washington Post has a fascinating look at how the Internet forced the Chinese government to retreat – partially – in its censorship of the journal “Freezing Point” (previous posts here). Why didn’t Beijing simply follow Mao’s old “barrel of a gun” formula this time? Because the Chinese economy must sustain sufficiently high growth to absorb a flood of excess laborers from rural areas to preserve social stability, which places China between the Scylla of rising dissent and the Charibdis of economic recession. For Beijing, responding to dissent isn’t just more complex on a technological level; it must increasingly weigh the political costs, too.

With rising unrest in rural areas and widespread corruption in the government, China’s greatest fear is that the urban disillusioned or dissidents will ally themselves with dispossessed peasants and offer a more effective way to challenge the state’s power than sporadic riots and uprisings. Thus, we see the Chinese government’s desperation to control the Internet, the one tool by which its isolated bands of the discontented could coordinate their opposition and genuinely threaten the regime’s control. The Financial Times has an excellent article on the technological challenges of the Chinese campaign, for which the goverment has rolled out Jingjing and Chacha – “Jingcha” means police – the adorable little cute-as-a-baby-viper pixie faces of Big Brother’s all-seeing eye. (There is something suspiciously self-serving about business interests proponents of realpolitik saying that China’s net censorship is technologically doomed ab initio, but that’s another discussion).
But what happens when the ruthlessness of China’s control methods creates a direct political threat to the rate of growth China must sustain to survive? Consider the question in the context of two trends. The first is the rapid aging of China’s population due to the one-child policy, as documented in this study by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute (I interviewed Mr. Eberstadt here, last August).

China: Of all the impending Third World aging tsunamis, the most massive is set to strike China. Between 2005 and 2025, about two- thirds of China’s total population growth will occur in the 65-plus ages–a cohort likely to double in size to roughly 200 million people. By then, China’s median age may be higher than America’s. Notwithstanding the recent decades of rapid growth, China is still a poor society, with per-capita income not much more than a tenth of the present U.S. level.

How will China support its burgeoning elderly population? Not through the country’s existing state pension system: That patchwork, covering less than a fifth of the total Chinese workforce, already has unfunded liabilities exceeding China’s current GDP.

Since the government pension system is clearly unsustainable, China’s social security system in the future will mainly be the family unit. But the government’s continuing antinatal population drive makes the family an ever-frailer construct for old-age support. Where in the early 1990s the average 60-year-old Chinese woman had five children, her counterpart in 2025 will have had fewer than two. No less important, China’s retirees face a growing “son deficit.” In Chinese tradition it is sons, rather than daughters, upon whom the first duty to care for aged parents falls. By 2025, a third or more of Chinese women approaching retirement age will likely have no living sons.

. . . .

On the current trajectory, the graying of China thus threatens many tens of millions of future senior citizens with a penurious and uncertain livelihood in an increasingly successful emerging economy. The looming fault lines for “impoverished aging” promise to magnify yet further the social inequalities with which China is already struggling.

What that study means is that if China doesn’t reach a high state of development in twenty years, it hits the wall. China’s development must be both a sprint and a marathon.

Second, China won’t be able to sustain that rate of growth if it loses the highly favorable trade terms it currently enjoys with its American market. Still unable to shake the political spectre of Tienanmen Square, China’s clumsy, brutal, and thuggish behavior toward its own people is catalyzing the formation of an unlikely coalition of labor unions, protectionists, classical human rights liberals, and religious conservatives in Congress. One possible effect is to force the Administration to take tougher positions in its trade negotiations with China. The other, more direct, effect is proposals like the Scoop Jackson Bill, which must scare the bejeebers out of well-connected, politically powerful factory owners in China – not to mention potential investors. (The bill, partly inspired by China’s ruthless treatment of North Korean refugees, is a long-shot, but a Chinese crackdown could revive it like a phoenix). High fuel prices have further reduced the Chinese economy’s margin of error.

Thus is China forced to tread more carefully than in 1989. Another Tienanmen would be more than murder. It would be murder-suicide.
—–