How long can China live in fear of its own people?
While I don’t believe that this story means that the Chinese political system is in imminent danger of collapse, I do think it illustrates that as technology advances, the system is one recession away from a political cataclysm.
Jittery Chinese authorities wary of any domestic dissent staged a concerted show of force Sunday to squelch a mysterious online call for a “Jasmine Revolution” apparently modeled after pro-democracy demonstrations sweeping the Middle East.
Authorities detained activists, increased the number of police on the streets, disconnected some mobile phone text messaging services and censored Internet postings about the call to stage protests at 2 p.m. in Beijing, Shanghai and 11 other major cities. [….]
On Sunday, police took at least three people away in Beijing, one of whom tried to lay down white jasmine flowers while hundreds of people milled about the protest gathering spot, outside a McDonald’s on the capital’s busiest shopping street. In Shanghai, police led away three people near the planned protest spot after they scuffled in an apparent bid to grab the attention of passers-by.
Many activists said they didn’t know who was behind the campaign and weren’t sure what to make of the call to protest, which first circulated Saturday on the U.S.-based, Chinese-language news website Boxun.com.
The unsigned notice called for a “Jasmine revolution” — the name given to the Tunisian protest movement — and urged people “to take responsibility for the future.” Participants were urged to shout, “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness” — a slogan that highlights common complaints among Chinese.
Pressures that can’t be released only build, and given the cyclical nature of economies, it’s inevitable that economic pressures will eventually cause political pressures to peak, too. Nations can delay those cycles — the familiar tricks include subsidies, loan guarantees, low interest rates, currency manipulation, and price supports — but these tricks only stretch out the very contradictions that will eventually snap and unleash an even deeper recession later. We saw this with the demise of managed economies in Japan and Korea in the 1990’s, and in our own over-managed economy in 2008. Europe’s economy, which was even more over-managed than our own, may consequently take longer to recover. The Euro may never recover at all. Unless you believe that the Chinese Communist Party has found a formula for repealing the laws of macroeconomics, we’ll eventually see it there, too.
By the way, if you’re thinking that this all sounds like an inversion of Marxist crisis theory, I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you.
How will China cope with its own great recession? In the long term, there are really only three ways for political systems to survive economic fluctuations. On one extreme, a nation can opt for an elastic (read: democratic) political system that can bend to the popular will without fracturing. The other extreme is the North Korean example, the cost of which is isolation, long-term decline, and famine. In the middle is the course that most repressive regimes choose, which is the gradual relaxation of their authoritarian character to allow for economic growth and some tolerable degree of political ventilation. But can China, a nation with endemic corruption and poverty, ever evolve into something like Singapore? I doubt that it could evolve enough to survive the next recession, much less the demographic threat of its one-child policy.
But then, with reform comes dissent. With dissent comes the formation of organizations that may challenge the state. And with openness comes innovative (and subversive) technology that propagates dissent. And of course, no authoritarian leader ever thinks that a society is quite ready for self-government without him. Yet always before The Leader concludes that his statesmanlike work is done, some unexpected provocation will arouse the masses to challenge his rule. When that happens, the existential question is whether the soldiers fire on the crowds as ordered. The paradox is that they won’t if they’ve grown up in a system that’s liberalized enough to regard the people in those crowds as human beings. That was Mubarak’s downfall, and eventually, it will be Xi Jinping’s downfall, too.
Hu Jintao has Xi Jinping’s back. “The overall requirements for enhancing and innovating social management are to stimulate vitality in the society and increase harmonious elements to the greatest extent, while reducing inharmonious factors to the minimum.†A system that produces deep thoughts like that can never fail. Here’s the NY Times story by Andrew Jacobs.
“How long can China live in fear of its own people?” Do you really think leadership in China is shaking in its boots now? The blockers blocked a CNN article on Chinese inflation last week, but they didn’t even bother to block CNN coverage of the so called “Jasmine Revolution” Chinese style, where no one showed up.
There’s really no cult of personality here the way there is in NK…. people are pretty apolitical… they just want to make money. It remains true that I’ve never heard ANYONE speak here seriously about wanting regime change in the near future (and they voice little complaints about the gov’t all the time, e.g., taxes, blocked sites, etc., without any fear of retribution)–but even if they did, I don’t think it would be an “off with their heads” scenario for party members, unless all the corporate big wigs, who are totally complicit with the government, also got the axe. I don’t know what kind of economic recession could totally change all that, but it would have to be pretty nasty–and would probably lead to a nasty regional war (not something I would wish for). Right now, as someone on the ground, I can say that most Chinese people are definitely happier with their government than people in the U.S. are.. and Obama might even get re-elected.
Organized protests in China occur at the municipal or county level as a consequence of specific perceived injustices by local authorities, but not on a national level against the central government. The broad concept of a “Jasmine Revolution” in China was initiated by Chinese living overseas and not the idea of activists or intellectuals in Beijing.
Economic discontent could lead to regional protests at the local level by affected groups, but similar demonstrations could not be initiated by trying to get random urban residents to gather nationwide at designated McDonalds, KFC, and Starbucks around the country at an appointed time. No way.
I wouldn’t call the 2008 U.S. -led financial crises due to “overmanaging the economy.” It seems Wall Street, and practically the whole world financial system, melted down from not being managed very much at all. Very different from the Asian crisis of the late 90s.
I’m looking at this from a different angle than you are. I mean the “overmanagement” of central bank manipulation of the marketplace, as in passing regulations that required lenders to lend to people who can’t make house payments, and then making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back those loans.
Joshua Stanton, remember, the crash affected commercial real estate, too. Look at it from Steve Feldman’s angle. You may learn something.
Steve and Joshua. here is the best explanation of the crisis — from 2008
http://www.getsmartaboutbanks.com/2009/10/hysterical-the-two-johns-john-bird-john-fortune-george-parr/
I lived in Florida for most of the 2000s. Nobody was forcing anybody to take out or make these ridiculous loans. Banks offered those 3-year low rate ARMs with oppressive balloon terms for the same reason they offer 59% credit cards now: it wasn’t illegal, and there were people stupid enough to take them.
There was a brief time where you could buy a home, take out a 3-year teaser mortgage, sit around and do nothing while it appreciated in value, and exit profitably before the oppressive terms kicked in. It was all just a big tulip mania — the huge increase in the value of Florida real estate until about 2006 was driven by absolutely nothing — but for awhile, you could play the bank for chumps.
The problem was that everyone assumed these crazy growth conditions would last forever. Banks loaned out more money than the homes were really worth, to people who couldn’t escape the note when the house failed to double in value as they had predicted. They had no common ground to negotiate, because neither the buyer nor the bank even wanted the house, and certainly not at that price. Then the foreclosures started, with tales of “rocket dockets” and other abuses.
And that still isn’t over. You know what’s happening in Florida now? Foreclosed people are going to court and saying “excuse me, Mr. Bank, you can’t foreclose me, because you don’t own the note.” And they’re right. The bank sold the note to 100 different groups in mortgage-backed securities, and Lord knows who they sold it to in turn. The once-vibrant street of my youth is now an empty row of abandoned houses that can’t be bought because nobody knows who owns them. It’s sad, really.
So I bristle at arguments that the housing collapse was driven by too much or too little or the wrong kind of regulation. It was driven by millions of ordinary hard-working Americans, the kind of people we love to lionize, making spectacularly stupid decisions with their and other people’s money. And if you ask me, they didn’t get nearly blame for it.
Perry Link at Nybooks gives us the lowdown on China’s latest crackdown. He quotes a posting on Boxun: The politburo decided “that all of the major newspapers under the Propaganda Department must strengthen their guidance of public opinion and stress the theme that the current turmoil ‘is plotted by the United States behind the scenes.’ ” Here’s a link to Link.
Chinese security forces have smashed a protest that didn’t even happen. Let Ian Johnson explain it.
The Chinese government is intimidating foreign journalists. They’ve even descended to racial profiling.
“Throngs of shoppers and tourists strolled the street, which is lined with luxury stores and includes a food alleyway with live scorpions squirming on a stick. The police seemed to be resorting to racial profiling in an attempt to weed out foreign journalists. While Asians appeared to encounter little or no harassment, officers flanked by burly Chinese men pulled aside white foreigners to check their passports.”
Here’s the story by Sharon la Franiere and Edward Wong in the NY Times.
If you read about it at Monster Island, kushibo will treat you to a pun so subtle he has to explain it.