China's future matters more than it ever did. Now increasingly taking up the mantle of global leader in areas from environment to infrastructure development, the pressure on it to be an even greater stakeholder has increased in the two years since this book by veteran China expert David Shambaugh was written.
Shambaugh is shrewd and experienced enough to avoid talking of imminent Armageddon or global domination. His scenarios, set out in the first chapter, are: neo-totalitarianism, similar to the situation China was in after the 1989 uprising; hard authoritarianism, which prevails under Xi Jinping; soft authoritarianism, which was the situation during the late Jiang and early Hu eras; and then the as-yet-unfulfilled semi-democratic possibility. Using these four as a framework, Shambaugh works through economic, social, political and diplomatic options in the coming decades. After describing some of the context and current data for China's position in each of these realms, he then works through the possible impact of the four options given above.
Shambaugh's key argument – and the reason why China's future does have global importance above and beyond what it contributes to international stability and security – is that the likelihood of the country dealing with its immense challenges across each of these four areas is significantly reduced, and in the worst cases impeded, by failure to introduce democratic reforms. “China's future,” he states in the introduction, “is … going to be the test of longstanding debates among social scientists over whether political democratization must accompany economic modernization” (xv – italics in original). This conviction gives the book its polemical and impassioned tone. Not that the author is unacquainted with the currently powerful argument, deployed in particular by the leaders currently in charge of China, that since 1978 China has followed its own unique path and disproved the theories of modernization – so far. But the constellation of issues, ranging from the creation of a new urban-living, service-sector-working middle class, the need to have a properly innovative culture and an education system to support that, the need for the regime to seek legitimacy beyond more than just raw economic growth (which is currently falling) and a long list of other pressing matters all point, for Shambaugh, towards the urgent need for political, not just administrative, solutions. These, he states very clearly, have proved elusive to non-existent under Xi Jinping, despite moves in the era of Hu to at least try to introduce some political reforms.
This is not a message that Beijing would welcome. Shambaugh himself refers earlier in this work to a period when he did embrace the idea that the Communist Party was developing its own resilient, more indigenous method of reform, putting politics on hold while it enriched the country. But it seems over his time in Beijing from 2009 to 2010 he modified his views, and it would have been good to know more about why he did this. He does refer later in the book to the ways that, for instance, the Arab Spring and other external events effectively spooked the leaders of the Party. All of this pre-dated Xi's ascendency, and it seems that, despite Shambaugh seeing him as an almost dictatorial figure who has accrued immense powers, much of the context of his time in power has to be seen as the result of a consensus reached before 2012 about how the Party needed to retrench, focus on its own effectiveness and administration, and harden its line towards civil society and other actors that might attempt to contest its political monopoly. That was a collective decision by the Party, not a personal one by Xi.
For an overview of four very plausible scenarios for China's future, this is succinct and well informed. As Shambaugh himself says, despite Sinologists' cautiousness and their awareness that many attempts to plot out China's future have fallen by the wayside, this group still have a responsibility to use their hard-won knowledge to offer some informed speculation about the country's destiny.
The one qualm this reader had about the argument, though, was that it took very little account of the rising tide of emotion, and of the nationalism and narratives of national regeneration attendant upon this, which has been so noticeable in the last decade, and certainly since Xi took over. Many things can be driven along when the Party has a monopoly on these narratives, and they have the power to override crises and other unexpected issues. They suspend normal business, as it were.
In the end the tactical decision by the Communist Party after the fall of the USSR in 1991 to simply decimate all organized opposition has so far proved effective, however morally difficult that evidently is to accept. Even were the Communist Party to collapse tomorrow, there would be nothing else to take its place – meaning Chinese people are likely to make the pragmatic decision, however hard things get, to stick with the devil they know. We have to be appreciative that the ability to tolerate the imperfections of the current system might be incredibly high. As the old joke in the former Soviet Union went, the only thing worse than communism was what followed it. And the Chinese leaders now are evidently banking on that.
