Susan Shirk Interview (2007): Conversations with History: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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The Chinese are always embedded in their history, not just recent history, so when you're talking about volatile situations they know that some of the most important moments in modern Chinese history have brought governments down. The May Fourth movement and so on.
Right. This brings us to the question of nationalism, because they're very aware that the previous two dynasties, the Ching dynasty which fell in 1911 to the Republic of China, and the Republic of China which was defeated by the Communists in 1949, both were toppled by national movements in which the specific discontents of different groups within the population, rural/urban, were fused together by this powerful force of nationalism. So, they are very concerned the same thing could happen to the Communist dynasty.
As you describe nationalism in the book it's as if it's a fire that they have lit themselves in the past, and in this era now it's not clear that they can actually control it. Is that their situation, that it will rage out of control on a particular international issue?
Well, they're particularly concerned about Japan and Taiwan issues, but you're right. I don't want to imply that the nationalism and anti-foreign nationalism is intensifying in China because the Chinese people are all brainwashed. Some of this is just the spontaneous result of the revival of Chinese power after what they call the 150 years of humiliation.
That is, the foreigners occupying the country, making war on ...
Being weak and divided, and internationally sidelined, and pressured by external power. So, nationalism was going to rise, no matter what. But then former President Jiang Zemin, who came into office right after Tiananmen (this close call!) was desperate to find a way to mobilize popular support for the Communist Party after Tiananmen. Nobody believes in Communism anymore, so he turned to nationalism as the basis for legitimacy. He launched a patriotic education campaign through textbooks, movies, and other propaganda, to stir up nationalism. He reinforced this spontaneous increase in nationalism, and now it's come back to bite them.
Another factor that they have to deal with is the availability of technology, things like cell phones, the Web, which are being censored but there's a limit to how much censoring you can do. They actually become part of this dynamic and at the same time you're building a middle class that is reading more, and so on. So, the information is something they're losing control of in a way that they're having to deal with seriously. Talk a little about that.
It's very important, this information revolution in China, and in fact, I devote a whole chapter to the growth of the commercial media and the Internet. It's important because people do have access to so much more information than they ever did before, and as a result the leaders can't keep secret from the people what the politicians in Japan, or Taiwan, or Washington are saying, even though it might stimulate nationalist response, it might make people angry. They can't keep it hidden from people, nor can they keep hidden some protest or disaster that occurs in one part of the country from people in another part of the country. And you're right, there is censorship. The coming of the Internet has not caused the end of the Communist regime. There were some Internet optimists who thought this was the magic bullet that was going to change everything. Censorship is actually pretty effective still, but it's not a hundred percent airtight. So, there is definitely more information. People are learning more news about what's going on in their own country and outside.
The control of information in the old days was one of the central pillars of power.
That's right.
You could say something and that was the word, because the country was insulated from the outside.
It's like North Korea, although even in the north of North Korea they're getting information now. But China in the past was more like North Korea is today.
The other element of control has been the military, and military capabilities, as you point out, are increasing. With wealth comes the ability to acquire more sophisticated weaponry and then to have a strategy to use it. How does that pillar of power come to become a double edged sword, or does it?
The military has received double-digit annual increases in their budget since Tiananmen, and Americans look at this and we think China's getting ready to make war on us. Of course, the gap between our capabilities and China's capabilities remains huge. America is really the world's military superpower. But China doesn't have to be our military equal in order to present problems for us.
Why is China modernizing the military this way? I argue that domestic politics, as well as or more than international threats, explain why China is developing its military this way, because China's insecure leaders have to keep the military loyal. They learned from Tiananmen, from 1989, that if you have massive social protest and the leadership splits over what to do about it, the last backstop of power is the military, and the military has to remain loyal. So, these double-digit increases in the military budget are an effort to buy the support of the military. Hu Jintao spends a lot of time cultivating relations with the generals, making sure they remain loyal, not just to the Party but to him personally.
This is an important point, because the fear is of a divided leadership, and the concrete form you suggest that would take is that some item in this pressure cooker begins to boil over and in the struggle for power within the Party one faction could seize on that and embrace it, if everybody isn't moving forward together.
Yes. In a domestic crisis -- first of all, there's normal competition for power, as there is in every political system. But in a Communist political system it's not as rule bound, as institutionalized. So, how do you handle succession? How do you handle who gets promoted to be the number one leader, the number two, then the number three leader? It's not easy for them to manage that and keep it hidden from people. If people know that there are splits in the leadership, that encourages them to come out and protest and demonstrate, because they feel that they may be able to do it safely, they won't be yanked off by the police and punished for demonstrating. So, in the context of this information revolution, how do you prevent leaks about leadership competition? There are a lot of leaks in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong media, and I feel that it's only a matter of time before you get to see that kind of information on the Internet. There are a lot of rumors now, but someday those rumors are going to start appearing on the Internet, and that'll be very hard to manage.
You're suggesting that all of these structural changes, through interfacing with the international economy and with the new technologies that create these pressures, are ultimately going to become more and more difficult to contain domestically without either bringing more democracy to the system, or as we'll talk about in a minute, translating these domestic pressures into some sort of negative international policy.
Right. I'm not arguing that China is on the brink of collapse tomorrow, and in fact, I'm pretty amazed at how resilient the Party has been in a lot of ways, like for example, recruiting college students. Here you have a market economy, and yet it's still very much in the interests of the best and the brightest to join the Communist Party. Now that's interesting. It's kind of a puzzle. I don't think I completely understand why someone who's going to work in a joint venture or a foreign firm -- why should they still think that it's helpful to them to be a Communist Party member. It's certainly not because they have such great enthusiasm for political study, or for the goals of Communism, but they still join the Party. So, there's a lot of resilience in the system. They have adapted surprisingly well, but there are still fault lines that I think will ultimately not be possible to manage without a major political change.
What about the problem of corruption, that is, that families close to the leadership benefit quite a bit economically? Is that an issue that they're addressing, or are there just showcases, so to speak, where they identify somebody who's been seriously inadequate in their job, or have benefited personally in a financial way?
Yes. Just this last week President Hu Jintao called the entire Central Committee, all the leaders of the provinces, the entire Chinese political elite, into a major meeting, and this is in advance of the important Party congress coming up in the fall, to give them a speech about getting a handle on corruption. That was the main focus of it, and also to let people know he has no intention of carrying out real democratic reform. He said that by embracing democracy in name, but it's pretty clear that they're actually too afraid, because they don't know what the consequences will be to even introduce gradual democratic competition in the system.
So corruption is a major problem, and China now is a more unequal society, the wealth gap is bigger, than the United States. There's a lot of discussion in Party meetings and in the media about the problem -- they call it polarization. The reason they're so worried about it, and they think it's potentially politically explosive, is because everybody believes that the wealthy people got their money not through ingenuity and hard work but through official connections and official corruption. And that is really very dangerous. You know, every now and then some big shot in a BMW hits a poor peddler in a Chinese city and the crowd goes wild, starts attacking the police, a violent reaction because of the symbolism of having this big shot act like they don't care about the poor. So, Chinese leaders today are trying to show they care about the poor. They go down to the countryside and they go on television and show their great sympathy for the poor, but they are really worried about this wealth gap because it's tied up with the corruption issue.
You talk about the failure of provision of public goods, and in particular the environment, and there are some figures that you gave of the top twenty most polluted cities. Something like sixteen, or so, were ...
In China. Yes, it is just one big environmental disaster. Why has this happened? It's because the Party leaders have had a single-minded focus on keeping up the growth rates, because growth makes jobs and prevents massive unemployment and unrest from urban labor, which is politically very threatening. So, they're focused on growth, but meanwhile nobody's paying attention to the water, the air. Health is very much affected. The costs of this, estimates of the economic costs, are huge, the human costs are huge. And now you have demonstrations that are starting in reaction to these environmental disasters. So, it's becoming a political threat to the leadership and they're very worried about it and trying to figure out what to do about it.
Let's talk about this dynamic, because this problem gets tied up with the information revolution, so suddenly you have a protest in one small town, in a particular province, and information about that protest can go national, through the "underground media" -- cell phones, websites, and so on -- even as the Party officials are censoring it. One website opens and is closed and another one emerges.
That's right. It inspires people in other localities that have similar problems to feel like, "Well, we can do this, too." So, it can spread. Now so far, there isn't that much of that. Most protest activity in China is pretty small scale and localized. But the Party leaders are very worried about this, because there have been instances in which the information has spread, as you say.
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