I'm Actually Not Surprised

Mrs. Du Toit and Dean Esmay are agog at this Samizdata post.

Communist leaders plan to amend China's constitution to formally enshrine the ideology of Jiang Zemin, the recently retired leader who invited capitalists to join the Communist Party. Despite sweeping economic and social changes, the political status of China's entrepreneurs is still ambiguous.

There have been no details of the possible changes although foreign analysts say they include the communist era's first guarantee of property rights. Certain amendments are still needed to promote economic and social development [emphasis in original], said the party newspaper People's Daily. It said the changes were meant to cope with accelerating globalization and advances in science and technology.

Jiang's theory, the awkwardly named "Three Represents," calls for the 67 million-member party to embrace capitalists, updating its traditional role as a "vanguard of the working class" and for the constitution to formally uphold property rights and the rights of entrepreneurs.

Actually, it doesn't surprise me one bit. I've been arguing for years that China is likely on the road to becoming a free capitalist country, which is why I said this in March: "those nations which adopted Western values (including Israel, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan - and possibly including China)".

Before I get into why and when I came to this conclusion, I should disclose that I lived in Taiwan for 4 years, though I was young enough that I mostly remember the NCO club, where I won a prize for the best joke ("Why did the elephant sit on the fence? So he wouldn't fall into the hot chocolate." -- I told you I was young!), the one-handed monkey in the cage outside the ground-floor garage of the Hai Shan guest house, the pigs in the alley behind it, picking up tile pieces with my Dad near where they were building the apartments, our dog, the nuns at the Catholic kindergarten, breaking my arm - in other words, no hint of politics. Even the language is fairly completely gone now. I don't claim special understanding of China from this.

When the Tiananmen Square disaster happened, I was horrified, believing that China's actions were totally without merit or redemption. While I still believe that the killing of students in cold blood - using the PLA against the people for the first time - was immoral and reprehensible, I do understand its one merit, now: China is not Russia. Could you imagine the disaster that would have befallen Asia had China liberalized a la perestroika? China is far more backwards even now than Russia was in the late 1980s, and has less coping mechanisms against disaster. The fault in Russia and much of the rest of the former USSR (and to a much lesser extent the Eastern European countries) was that they went from near-total state control to near anarchy without any intervening cushion or even education. As a result, Russia was effectively taken over by gangsters, and almost fell into civil war and utter disaster. The ongoing fighting in Chechnya shows how close Russia can still be to that abyss.

Had that happened in China, with its 1 billion population, and a still mostly-agrarian and rural economy, the dead would have numbered in the tens of millions - possibly in the hundreds of millions if the society dissolved into another civil war. If nothing else, Tienanmen gave the Chinese leadership - at that time already beginning liberalization - the ability to ease into the process.

The Chinese have never been free. Even in Taiwan, under US tutelege, freedom only really came in the last 15 to 20 years. Hong Kong, under the British, and Macao, under the Portugese?, were too small to provide examples to a country the size of China. In the West, before the idea of freedom became established, there were about 700 years of increasing freedom and the building of institutions to allow a country to stably exist with political and economic freedom. Increasing property rights, rights of trade, limitations of the rights of the nobility, the rise of banking and the middle class, the standardization of rates of exchange and all of the the other myriad items that make it possible to have a free nation, were built up slowly in the West.

The USSR had tried to build up parallel institutions, with similar names but dissimilar attitudes, rights, powers and behaviors. As a result, suddently set free, the system imploded. The same or worse would have happened in China - particularly in the aftermath of the "Great Leap Forward." If you look at China's actions - gradual implementation of a limited free market in a limited area, then expanding both the area and the freedom of the market, putting Western banking structures (including lending, interest and contract enforcement rights) further into effect and the like - well, to me anyway it looks like China is on a 50-year program to become a capitalist, multiparty, probably-federal republic. I believe that the next steps we will see, as the economy grows and the population begins to urbanize, is an expansion of the local voting for councils, followed by the establishment of semi-autonomous provinces (still under the Communist Party) with their own governments and powers. Greater industrialization, driven from the ground up by the opening market and from the top down by divestiture of industries over time, will bring greater wealth, and with it a true middle class. The growth of the middle class and the decreasing control of the central government will bring calls for greater and greater degrees of representation by the people. In particular, it will bring calls for a loosening of the very controls that keep the government in power: control over the press, the religions and so on.

At this point, China will face a crisis, and the Communist Party will have two choices: allow multi-party elections or fall to internal revolution. And because China has not yet faced that crisis, and we don't know what sort of leader will be in power when they do, it's too soon to tell whether or not China will eventually be a free nation.

Posted by Jeff at August 12, 2003 08:11 PM | Link Cosmos