China's President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump

Politics

الصين كما تُرى من بيت زجاجي

Mar 20, 2018 Stephen S. Roach

نيوهافين ــ جاء حذف المادة التي تنص على تقييد ولاية الرئيس بفترتين مدتهما خمس سنوات من الدستور الصيني بمثابة صدمة للكثيرين. فبالنسبة للصين، كان ترسيخ صفة المؤسساتية بالنسبة لمسألة تعاقب القادة إرثا بالغ الأهمية خلّفه دينج شياو بينج، وإشارة لنهاية حقبة من التقلب المؤلم تحت القيادة المضطربة للزعيم الأوحد ماو تسي تونج. أما بالنسبة للغرب، فقد كان تحديد الفترات جسرا إيديولوجيا قاد إلى طريق من التفاعل والالتحام. فهل يكون إلغاؤه نقطة التحول في علاقات أمريكية-صينية غير مستقرة بالفعل؟

لنبدأ بالصين وما تعنيه هذه الخطوة لمستقبلها. لكي نفهم ما سيتغير في ظل إطار مختلف لتداول الزعامة، ينبغي لنا أن نتجاوز بسرعة خطاب السلطات المبهم ــ بخصوص انتقال "المجتمع الذي يتمتع بوضع مُرض لدرجة معقولة" إلى "العصر الجديد" ــ وأن نُخضع استراتيجيتها الأساسية للتنمية لاختبار جاد وصعب.

رغم اتساع باب الاحتمالات ليشمل أي شيء، والإقرار بإمكانية وقوع أخطاء في أي وقت، فإني أراهن على ثبات الصين على مسارها الحالي. وسواء كان هناك تداول للسلطة أم لا، فلا يمكن أن يكون هناك تراجع عن تحولٍ قاد دولة نامية كبيرة فقيرة إلى حافة الرخاء متمثلا في اقتصاد حديث عالي الدخل.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 16 Comments on this article

Alex Aslanidis Mar 22, 2018

Lol at this terrible article that not only justifies China's authoritarian shift, but also claims that somehow the US needs China due to it's lack of savings, when in fact the opposite is true. If China stops exporting capital to the United Staes then the US' current-account will once again balance.
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C. Hazen Mar 21, 2018

My reading of Chinese history and culture leads me to conclude that this post by Prof. Stephen Roach, will probably eventually be seen to have stood the tests of time, and come to be regarded as prescient and of great value.
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Kevin Lai Mar 21, 2018

Many of us expected Xi Jinping to be the next Gorbachev or Chiang Kai-shek in China. Time and time again we have been disappointed. Worse, signs are all showing that things are all going backward. Xi is someone who is turning China into a highly nationalistic totalitarian state. Signs are showing that he has ambitions and is ready to export his model to the rest of the world. Australia is a good example of being a Chinese target. Sooner or later, the US will be next...

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-03-09/how-china-interferes-australia
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David Donald Mar 21, 2018

Excellent article. Project Syndicate is just about the only published source of real knowledge on China outside of academic works and reports by international institutions. I'd just add that at least since the US 'pivot to Asia' commenced in 2011, China also sees the wolf at the door, with the US pressing in from bases in Korea, Japan, the Philippes and (soon) Vietnam, as well as good control over the Malacca Strait via Singapore. Japan has also been encouraged to rearm. Chinese leaders must be well aware that if their management of the economy and social problems starts to slip they will feel a taste of the whirlwind that can be whipped up Cambridge-Analytica-style. Hong Kong has already experienced that (which the media dare not call populism provoked by enormous economic inequality in an unaffordable city, but rather freedom fighting against Chinese encroachment).

From a non-partisan point of view, the choice between having 300 million (and growing) new entrants to the middle class or China reduced to a giant and painful (probably bloody, as well) breakup USSR-style is not difficult.
- C. Hazen Mar 21, 2018
  
  Amen.
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Godfree Roberts Mar 20, 2018

Sound conclusion, weak supporting arguments. To wit:

1. 'the wrenching instability of the chaotic leadership cult of Mao Zedong'. Other developing nations should pray for such 'wrenching instability'.

When Mao stepped onto the world stage in 1945 his country was convulsed by civil war, Russia had taken Mongolia and a piece of Xinjiang, Japan still occupied three northern provinces, Britain had taken Hong Kong, Portugal Macau, France pieces of Shanghai, Germany Tsingtao, and America dominated the opium trade.

In 1949 China was agrarian, backward, feudalistic, ignorant and violent. Of its four hundred million people, fifty-million were drug addicts, eighty percent could neither read nor write and life expectancy was thirty-five years. Peasants paid seventy percent of their produce in rent, women’s feet were bound, desperate mothers sold their children in exchange for food and poor people, preferring slavery to starvation, sold themselves. U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart reported that, during his second year in China, ten million people starved to death in three provinces. The Japanese had killed twenty-million and General Chiang Kai-Shek wrote that, of every thousand youths he recruited, barely a hundred survived the march to training base.

Despite a continuous vicious embargo on grain, agricultural and technical equipment, finance and participation in international bodies, in a single generation, by 1974 Mao had doubled the population, doubled life expectancy, reunited, reimagined, reformed and revitalized the largest, oldest civilization on earth, modernized it after a century of failed modernizations, liberated more women than anyone in history and ended thousands of years of famines. A strategist without peer, political innovator, he was a master geopolitician and a Confucian peasant, under crushing embargoes Mao had grown GDP by 7.3 percent annually and left the country debt-free.

Harvard’s professor of Chinese Studies, John King Fairbanks, summarized[1] his legacy: “The simple facts of Mao's career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28 with a dozen others to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung's scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao's achievement is almost beyond our comprehension”. [Fairbanks, The United States and China].

2. "it is important to cut through the authorities’ opaque rhetoric – the “moderately well-off society” transitioning into the “new era”. There's nothing opaque about it. 'The Chinese know exactly what he's talking about: In 2011 PM Wen described it as ‘a society in which no one is poor and everyone receives an education, has paid employment, more than enough food and clothing, access to medical services, old-age support, a home and a comfortable life’. Xi will deliver that, gift-wrapped, on June 1, 2021. Opaque, indeed.
- C. Hazen Mar 21, 2018
  
  The Cultural Revolution was a hideous blot on Mao's otherwise unimaginable record of accomplishments. To his intellectual credit, if not to the succor of those who suffered, he is said to have admitted that to some degree the C. R. was an error.
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- Nikolas P Mar 21, 2018
  
  I think these are all excellent points. Roach is trying to make a point, but ideological blinders rarely, if ever, allow for thorough and clear analysis and judgment.
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Robert Attrill Mar 20, 2018

Presumably, according to Roach, people in glasshouses should do what? Criticise each other? But if I mustn't point my finger at you because my hands are dirty and you shouldn't point your finger at me because you also have dirty hands, then nothing will change. If you want clean hands you have to wash them, and if you want others to know it, you must wash them in public. China's perpetual rulers permit no real criticism at home and ignore it from abroad. Trump only wishes he could be like them but cannot and that remains America's strength. Roach's analogy is inept.
- Robert Attrill Mar 20, 2018
  
  Oops. Clearly people should also edit their comments before they upload them. That "should" in the first sentence was meant to be "shouldn't".
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d clark Mar 20, 2018

Stephan Roach’s economic telescope focuses on the internal Communist China. Trump’s binoculars homes in on both internal and international spheres. Xi Jinping’s new dictatorial mandate is a formalization of his previous quasi-mandate. He is now mandatorily, openly, and happily compared to Mao the killer, although the new Mao and his regime kills and jails in a more elegant manner. As he tightens his country’s internal reins, Xi Jinping continues to tighten the worldwide girdle of Communist China’s present and future power. No country save America seems the least concerned about halting Communist China’s cancer. Can one imagine continuing these days the Obamaesque wobbliness, with Communist China as one of the world’s three hardcore dictatorial, hungrily acquisitive countries? Trump has his limitations. But at least he knows the only thing that dictators respect: confrontation, not supplication.
- Nikolas P Mar 21, 2018
  
  This is verbal-ism.
  - d clark Mar 21, 2018
    
    please explain what you are trying to say
    - Nikolas P Mar 22, 2018
      
      Really? You think that attacks, insults and name calling, “killers”, “dictators” “cancer” are essential parts to intelligent discussion and dialogue?
      - d clark Mar 22, 2018
        
        Part of an intelligent discussion is calling a spade a spade. Mao was the worse killer of the 20th century. Xi Jinping is, in fact, Communist China’s unchallenged dictator. Communist China’s evil aggressiveness fits the definition of 'cancer' to a T. Communism is not nice.
        
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