China's Peaceful Rise in Global Context is a diverse collection of essays. Chapters range from advice on how the government should deal with the world's largest number of prostitutes to why David Aikman is wrong to believe that China is rapidly Christianizing and that Christians will democratize China. The book is tenuously held together by an argument that because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is decaying, it is important to save the Chinese people and the people of the world from the horrendous consequences of chaos by promoting gradual democratization beginning with media freedom.
Zhou wishes to persuade CCP leaders that democracy would be good for China. They should do it. Other parts of the book contend that media marketization joined with information technology in combination with the growth of religion in response to a crisis of faith, in a nation dominated by a delegitimating money-grubbing materialism, if aided by the example of religious practice and respect by democratic leaders when visiting China, will unleash democratization. Every chapter has interesting facts. But does the case for why China should or will democratize survive scrutiny?
Do power holders believe, as Zhou finds, that corruption is undermining governance and leading to chaos? He is persuasive that China is pervasively corrupt. But ruling groups act as if corruption is inevitable in the transition to modernity and will no longer be a problem when China is modernized.
Zhou finds that because corruption is pervasive, Chinese tend to believe that the ruling party is immoral. A survey shows that people find prostitutes more worthy of respect than members of the CCP. This implies that other survey data showing Chinese as seeing the CCP regime as legitimate, and as a source of help in resolving local difficulties, may be misleading. Positive support for the central leadership may be diffuse and superficial. It could be trumped by passionate angers exploding against hated corruption and monstrous cruelty, as shown by how netizens and citizens side with Chinese who are sentenced to death after killing CCP officials or police officers. This rage, Zhou establishes, is not merely directed at bad local officials, as others claim.
Jinghao Zhou is quite aware that the CCP apparatuses of control and repression are working efficiently and being strengthened. He knows that popular patriotism legitimates the regime. After all, despite the Wenchuan earthquake killing little children because of sweetheart contracts that enriched CCP officials and permitted shoddy construction, and despite trumped-up charges leading to the jailing of good people who tried to expose the CCP's crimes on shoddy construction in the earthquake region so as to help the families of the victims, the central government's postearthquake performance actually strengthened regime legitimacy. The author has no illusions about a people suddenly rising up and demanding freedom.
Zhou also details how China's phenomenal economic rise has improved life for hundreds of millions. He does not expect the expanding middle class to demand democracy. Given all this, it is not obvious why the author is persuaded that CCP leaders would opt for democratization to avoid chaos. Despite a spread of violence and local clashes, as a nation, China seems super-stable. The “should” argument for democratization cannot persuade CCP leaders to find that democratization is the only way to stave off chaos, as chaos does not seem imminent.
The “will” argument for democracy also is iffy. Media marketization revs up chauvinistic passions, not freedom. Indeed, media and information technology controls, Zhou's own data establish, are intensifying. China is becoming more repressive. Obstacles to democratization in any foreseeable future seem formidable.
Zhou offers one more reason why the CCP should democratize. Without a political transition, with China instead seen as a war-prone regime massively violating human rights, China will not gain the international respect it craves. The authoritarian regime may even clash with the industrialized democracies.
But military clashes, unless a war is lost, will only strengthen the regime. CCP leaders do not see China's soft power in trouble, as does Zhou. Instead, they are persuaded that when China spends the money to better tell its story, the international community will be persuaded that Chinese culture is uniquely wonderful and that Chinese policy, such as aid to Africa to help its people rise out of poverty, and China's mediating of disputes to keep the peace in Korea, Iran, and Sudan, will lead the international community to conclude that China is a global moral pole.
The regime contends that it is democratization that would bring chaos. Chinese-style authoritarianism increasingly is experienced, even outside of China, as a success story from a government that looks nothing like Uzbekistan, Burma, or North Korea.
Zhou is a well-informed, hard-headed analyst. His book synthesizes important data into an interesting case. He argues for democratization lucidly and vividly, just not persuasively.
