Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

The Chinese Communist Party, the world’s largest political organization, no longer has much legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people. Although it came to power in 1949 as the leader of the largest and most complex revolution of all, it squandered its great popularity: in rural China because of the famine that followed the Great Leap Forward; among hard-core Communist revolutionaries because of the Cultural Revolution; and, finally, among urban intellectuals and a burgeoning middle class because of the repression at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the nearly simultaneous collapse of communism in Europe.

The Chinese Communist Party continues to rule through a combination of inertia, improving economic conditions, favorable comparisons with the past, nationalism, and a complex set of inducements and penalties. There is every reason to believe that it will be able to do so for the foreseeable future, despite occasional periods of instability. Taiwan, whose government comes from a similar background (single-party rule by Sun Yat-sen’s political party, the Kuomintang, which Chiang Kaishek inherited), offers strong evidence that the mainland could also slowly evolve into a prosperous, relatively open society. Pressure for democratization will probably become a serious internal issue, if it ever does, only around the year 2010, when some 30 percent of the mainland population might have reached a per capita income of about $4,000. Until then, the bulk of the Chinese population will probably remain content with economic progress, better health care, and other practical concerns.

From the Politburo down, most Chinese now believe in pursuing economic reforms, even if different groups support the reform process for different reasons. There is also something of a consensus on the necessity of maintaining a powerful, independent political authority to implement such reforms. The Chinese leaders are firmly convinced that authoritarian rule is indispensable to the success of their market-driven policies, and there is evidence that the Chinese population accepts this view because of the economic achievements of recent years. In this view, without authoritarian political control, economic reform will rapidly breed new economic interests and corruption, already a serious problem. Long-term success requires some authority capable of occasionally cracking down on corruption, complete with public executions as warnings to others. The more corrupt interests become entrenched, the more resentment against them is likely to generate a cycle of political protest, followed by economic instability. Always before the Chinese leadership is the example of the virtual collapse of the former Soviet Union and the resulting impoverishment of large sectors of the Russian population when authoritarianism was allowed to lapse and the economy was “reformed” in accordance with the theories of American economists.

In general terms, the greatest weakness of the development-state strategy is that it both causes and can be crippled by domestic political turmoil. In the other East Asian economic success stories, turmoil has been kept in check by authoritarian political systems of various sorts, the reasonably equitable distribution of incomes, and the promotion of distinctive “Asian values” focused on condemning the alleged selfishness of Western individualism and sometimes of Western democratic institutions as well. Asian leaders have often argued that democracy undercuts development. Lee Kuan Yew, the legendary first prime minister of the rich city-state of Singapore and a persistent critic of U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia, is the most articulate exponent of this view. As Lee has put it, “With few exceptions, democracy has not brought good government to new developing countries. Democracy has not led to development because the governments did not establish [the] stability and discipline necessary for development.”⁵ It should be noted that in the 1990s, Singapore, which may not be as pleasant a place for an individualist to live, nonetheless has had a higher per capita income ($23,565) than Australia ($19,960), something that lends a certain credibility in Asian eyes to what its leader has had to say.