For the rest, see Ponto Final, March 27 2015
My original text in English:
On the eve of the convening of the National People’s Congress in March, the publication of an op-ed penned by one of the United States’ most prominent specialists of contemporary China and predicting the crumbling of communist rule in the near future created quite a stir among the many circles of China watchers. Timing was of the essence, of course, as this was prior to an occasion for the regime to showcase its determination and prowess and the article was thus somehow creating a cognitive chasm, and so was the channel: The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) is indeed an authoritative daily and has built a reputation of excellence when it comes to China matters, and not only in the financial sector.
Then the personality of the author added an extra layer of loudness in what was intended as an awakening call. David Shambaugh is a professor of political science at George Washington University, and benefits from a high degree of recognition both internationally and in China proper, and was even recently distinguished by a Chinese government think-tank as the second-most influential China expert in the United States. Moreover, Prof. Shambaugh is a regular invited guest to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Communist Party School in Beijing. One of his recent books, published in 2008, was indeed describing how the Party had taken “a number of ‘adaptive’ steps to legitimize, reinstitutionalize and save itself”, largely because of the lessons learnt from the demise of the Soviet Union and its neighboring lookalikes.
Indeed, Prof. Shambaugh does not belong to a well-established tradition of “collapsists” and he even warns in his WSJ’s essay that “predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is a risky business.” Clearly, what he means by “risky” essentially involves the complete failure to observe and characterize an upcoming watershed—the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 or the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011—, to miss out on the obvious, even though he aptly recognizes that ever since “the regime’s near-death experience in Tiananmen Square in 1989, […] several seasoned Sinologists have risked their professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was inevitable.” The term “collapsist” is derived from the famous 2001 book by Gordon Chang, an American Lawyer, entitled The Coming Collapse of China, in which he argued that communist rule in China would disintegrate by 2011 because of state-sponsored economic inefficiencies and the incapacity of the regime to reform itself towards a more opened polity. Chang tried to convince his readership in 2011, at the occasion of a re-edition, that his prediction was wrong by only a year, but then he was again off the mark.
Prof. Shambaugh’s estimates are of course of a different nature and he purposely does not provide a precise time frame for what he calls “The Coming Chinese Crackup”. Yet, he delineates “five telling indications of the regime’s vulnerability and the party’s systemic weaknesses” that seem to have become ever more pressing since the rise to power of President Xi Jinping. First, there is the idea that the economic elites have lost confidence in the regime and “are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble.” Second, the government is believed to be insecure because of the multifaceted and severe crackdown that has affected civil society in its many guises — lawyers, journalists, scholars, bloggers, militants, etc. With confidence in oneself should comes tolerance of others. Third, the support of the regime is characterized as “simulated” or purely perfunctory, and thus slogans do not permeate the mind and heart of the cadres anymore. Fourth, the fight against corruption, even if Prof. Shambaugh’s fully acknowledges its unprecedented scope and depth, is a lost battle as it has to do with a systemic problem, and thus require the establishment of transparency mechanisms that suppose the institution of the rule of law. And finally fifth, the proposed economic reforms are failing to materialize to the full because their ambitious goals are challenging much too powerful and deeply entrenched interest groups.
In an interview given to the wonderful China matters blog of The New York Times, Sinosphere, Prof. Shambaugh further explains the motivations behind his article and somehow his disappointment at the reverse course observed after the fading away of Vice-president Zeng Qinghong in 2007. In fact, the stiffening of the regime does not date back to 2012, but rather to 2009, when what he calls the “Iron Quadrangle” — propaganda, internal security, the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Armed Police, state-owned enterprises — managed to convince President Hu Jintao that further crack down and control over society was a matter of survival for the Party.
There are of course limits — robust ones — to Prof. Shambaugh’s arguments. Geremie Barme, a great Australian observer of political culture in contemporary China, is absolutely right in remarking that “officials are always bored” and that “the leader’s works never sell” (I would add, willingly). He is equally right when he states “Xi's China is uglier, more repressive and narrow, yet it's more confident, more articulate and more focused than at any time since Mao Zedong.” Additionally, as remarked by an astute blogger well versed in Chinese politics, “the collapse of a political force does not necessarily mean the CCP’s collapse” and the Party is indeed “like an octopus with many arms, […] depending on its political objective at a given moment, it decides which arms must be tough and it keeps switching arms”. Yet, Prof. Shambaugh’s call resonate, and not because “the West” simply cannot see a political future beyond democracy, but rather because the systematic unforgiving repression of what is deemed “abnormal” or “dissenting” necessarily ends up as some form of new totalitarianism, and that, we know it collapses.
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