March 17, 2015
Chinese paramilitary officers marching on Tiananmen Square before the opening session of the National People’s Congress on March 5.
How Hwee Young/European Pressphoto Agency
David Shambaugh, a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, is one of the United States’ most prominent experts on contemporary China. He has also been prominent in China. His books have been translated and published there, and his views cited in the state media. He was profiled by the overseas edition of People’s Daily, and in January researchers at the China Foreign Affairs University, which comes under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, named him the second-most influential China expert in the United States, behind David M. Lampton at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.Hence the intense debate ignited by Prof. Shambaugh’s recent essay in The Wall Street Journal, where he argued that the “endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun” and the Communist Party’s possible “demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent.” Some experts have endorsed his view that China’s outward order and prosperity mask profound risks for the ruling party. Others have argued that the party is more robust, politically and economically, than Prof. Shambaugh asserts. In an interview, he answered some questions raised by his essay:
Q: Several years ago you published a book titled “China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation,” which highlighted the party’s potential to overcome or contain its problems, such as corruption and eroded authority, through learning and adaptation. Your latest assessment of the party’s long-term prospects of surviving in power seems much bleaker. What prompted you to shift your views?
Courtesy of David Shambaugh
David Shambaugh
A: My book on the Communist Party was completed in 2007 and published in 2008. The publication date is important because, as you note, I emphasized in that analysis that the party was taking a number of “adaptive” steps to legitimize, reinstitutionalize and save itself. The book analyzed in detail the reasons for the adaptation — largely the results of the party’s study of the causes of collapse of the Soviet Union and other Leninist states, but also because the party had persons in the top leadership during the period I studied, notably the president and party leader, Jiang Zemin, and his ally Zeng Qinghong, the vice president, who derived the main lesson from the Soviet post-mortem that the party had to be proactive and dynamic in its leadership.
So, the book was mainly about the “adaptation” the party was undertaking. But remember the other word in the subtitle: “atrophy.” The reason that is important is that I argued then, and argue now, that atrophy of late-stage, single-party Leninist, and other authoritarian, states is a normal, natural and ever-present condition. The question is: What do Leninist parties do to cope with the atrophy and stave off inevitable decline? Essentially, they can be reactive and defensive — ruling by repression, in effect — or they can be proactive and dynamic, ruling through opening and trying to guide and manage change. From roughly 2000 through 2008, under Zeng Qinghong’s aegis, the party chose the latter. But in the middle of 2009, after Zeng had retired, it abruptly shifted, in my view.
One can date it very precisely — Sept. 17, 2009 — the day after the Fourth Plenum of the party’s 17th Central Committee closed. That plenum meeting, which was on “party building,” put out a very progressive “decision” basically codifying everything Zeng and the party had been undertaking the previous eight years. I was living in Beijing that year, and when I read it I thought, “Great!”
But it was not to be. The party had, in fact, already grown very nervous during the previous spring and summer with riots in Tibet and Xinjiang. So, my guess is that the Plenum document was a kind of summary of previous years’ reforms, but had to be released because it had been in preparation for nearly a year and it was difficult to publicly announce that the party was going to reverse course, turn towards harsh repression and abandon the proactive political reforms. But that is what happened.
I have my theories about why they reversed course, essentially having to do with the coming together of strong bureaucracies that have a vested interest in control — propaganda, internal security, the People’s Liberation Army and People’s Armed Police, state-owned enterprises — what I call the “Iron Quadrangle” — being able to persuade the party general secretary, Hu Jintao, who no longer had to deal with Zeng Qinghong, that the party was losing control if it did not crack down and get better control over a variety of spheres. There were other factors as well, but in Chinese politics bureaucratic explanations are usually important. There is also big money in repression. Those bureaucracies’ budgets all ballooned as a result.
So, there has been a shift in my views of China and of the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy and tactics of rule — simply because China and the party changed! No China watcher can remain wed to arguments that have lost their empirical basis. I have, in fact, been speaking publicly, teaching and publishing along these lines for the past five years. I am the first one who would applaud a return to Zeng Qinghong-like political reform. The party has choices. Repression may be its “default mode,” but it is not its only option. Opening and proactively managing political change is an alternative.
True, if they tried that — again — there is no guarantee that they could keep control of the process and, as in the Soviet Union, the reforms could cascade out of control, and they would fall from power anyway. So, they have a kind of Hobson’s choice or Catch-22. They can repress and bring about their own demise or they can open up and still possibly bring about their own demise.
But it is not quite so simple. That is, even if they lightened up on the repression, the other elements affecting the party, economy and society are already hemorrhaging to the point that they may not be able to reverse or halt the slide. This is where the exodus of the elite and the systemic traps in the economy come in. I would add other factors that are contributing to public discontent with the regime: high levels of social inequality, inadequate provision of public goods, pervasive pollution and stagnating wages along with a slowing economy. For these reasons, this is why I see the “endgame” of the Communist Party as being underway. That said, my views about the protracted process of atrophy and decline of the party are more nuanced than the catchy headline used by The Wall Street Journal.
