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.