Blogs and Stories
Will China Implode?
Imaginechina / AP Images
Obama and Chinese officials met this week for high-level policy talks, and avoided exchanges on human rights. But China expert Isabel Hilton says minority revolts in China recently show it is an empire in crisis.
There is a story that the Chinese government likes to tell: that China is the world’s oldest continuous, unchanging civilization (the dates vary, according to the exuberance of the moment, from 2,000 to a mythical 5,000 years). This unique history, the story continues, will determine China’s future. In this narrative of Chinese exceptionalism, the leadership remains immune to demands for democracy or any resemblance to other developed countries. The government hopes that this story will prove persuasive enough for the Communist Party to keep the Mandate of Heaven and avoid challenges to its exclusive right to rule for the foreseeable future.
The revolt of the minorities is only a symptom of a wider political malaise.
It’s a curious story for a Communist Party and very different to the earlier myths of origin. Where once it promoted class struggle and revolution, today’s party invokes history and tradition in support of its right to rule. In its latest identification with the imperial orders of the past, the regime is even restoring Confucianism as the core state narrative.
It’s a long way from the Communist Party’s own origins in the revolt in the early 20th century against the suffocating orthodoxies of Confucianism, blamed by the modernizers of the day for China’s slide into stagnation. As recently as the 1970s, Confucius was still thought sufficiently poisonous as an inheritance to merit a virulent campaign of criticism, along with such imported bad hats as the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, the late Ludwig Van Beethoven and the children’s book Jonathan Livingston Seagull. They made an odd quartet, but no odder than the current spectacle of a Communist Party that extols the virtues of Mencius and claims to be building a “harmonious” society.
Remarkably, despite its obvious flaws, this narrative appeals to those Western commentators who believe that China’s rise is, in the Marxist phrase, a historical inevitability, and who accept Beijing’s latest version of history at face value.
Take this recent example, from the British author Martin Jacques’ book When China Rules the World:
“China has existed roughly within its present borders for 2,000 years and only over the last century has it come to regard itself as a nation state.”
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
The Right Dumps Carrie
Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
Geithner's Stock Plummeting
Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
China has already come out of their recession, and currently is growing at a much faster rate than the US. I'd say, with all our economic problems and POOR presidential leadership, we're the country most likely to implode.
"We have an interest in China's success..." ??? Really? An unqualified interest? Do we really want to go on borrowing more than a trillion dollars from China? Do we want it to become a major naval power, with aircraft carriers and a large submarine force? Do we really want them to buy control of essential raw materials around the world?
"China needs to move up the value chain, improve its governance, cut down on the huge waste in the economy, distribute the rewards of the effort more fairly, and inject some justice into its politics and legal affairs. But to do that, the Communist Party has to take on the vested interests on which it depends for its power".
You could say the exact same thing about the United States and the democrats/republicans.
China's three biggest power firms produced more greenhouse gas emissions last year than the whole of Britain, according to a Greenpeace report published today.
The group warned that inefficient plants and the country's heavy reliance on coal are hindering efforts to tackle climate change. While China's emissions per capita remain far below those of developed countries, the country as a whole has surpassed the United States to become the world's largest emitter.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/28/china-greenhouse-gas-e missions-greenpeace
all these facts are true, but we mustn't forget that no great nation has modernized itself without leaving a huge global footprint. From a chinese standpoint, they see how America and the west has polluted itself to the top, why can't they? Sure, China is the biggest polluter in the world now, but they also house the biggest population, and spend a large portion of their energy to manufacture foreign goods.
until China's per capita emissions surpasses the west, it'll be hard for me to point fingers at them.
China is the "Middle Kingdom", and its rulers rule by divine right.
They don't need no stinkin' beliefs, or conscience.
Until that mindset changes or dies away, China will be the 5000 pound dragon in everyone's living room.
This piece wouldn't be prompted by Chinese rebuke of our fiscal policy, would it?
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.