Posted on 08/08/2002 7:00:00 PM PDT by Lessismore
OVER the coming decades, China will become a thoroughly new form of political and economic entity. Brutally competitive in both politics and world markets, innovative and resilient, China will be more dominant than any nation except America.
Such a shift in the global balance of power occurs only about once every century and is comparable to the emergence of the United States as a world power a century ago.
The magnitude of this change is due, in part, to a radical and rapid shift in China's governance.
Because the shift has been so sudden, it is tempting to write it off as a fluke. But China's restructuring is permanent and will affect all aspects of national life, as well as its global standing.
The People's Republic now embodies two systems: the centralised, autocratic communist administration, dominated by an outdated ideology and military interests, and the decentralised, free-market economic regime.
Whether deliberately or not, China is reorganising itself to balance central authority and common purpose with decentralised freedom, in the same way that nimble companies balance home-office and divisional control.
The result is a new geopolitical model - the country as corporation.
Call the new China 'Chung-hua, Inc'. (Chunghua translates as 'China' and actually means 'the prosperous centre of the universe'.) Like many corporations, China is moving most decision-making to the 'business unit' level - semi-autonomous, self-governing economic region-states that compete fiercely against each other for capital, technology and human resources (just as American states do).
This new, decentralised free-market regime encompasses only a small part of China's vast territory, and many Chinese officials still refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Indeed, only seven years ago, the word 'federation' was banned from the Chinese language; companies like Federal Transport or Federation Merchants were required to change their names. Today, China has the most federal governance structure of any large nation except the US.
Two broad categories of region-states exist.
The first are relatively small, comprising cities and their surrounding areas, generally with a population of five to seven million people. Some of these - Shenzhen, Shanghai, Dalian, Tianjin, Shenyang, Xiamen, Qingdao and Suzhou - are now growing economically at a rate of 15-20 per cent a year - faster than such Asian 'tigers' as Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and Korea ever did. These smaller region-states, in turn, are propelling the growth of larger mega-regions, with populations approaching 100 million each.
The mega-regions, which tend to share common dialects, ethnic identities and histories, are becoming economic powerhouses in their own right. If they were separate nations, five of them - the Yangtze Delta, the Northeastern Tristates area (formerly known as Manchuria), the Pearl River Delta, the Beijing-Tianjin corridor and Shandong - would rank among Asia's 10 largest economies.
Regional governments also have been toughened up by the Chung-hua, Inc ethic. Most officials are appointed, not elected, but their posts are not sinecures. Not only are they held to targets of 7 per cent annual economic growth or better (like many corporate executives), but they must also improve environmental quality, build better infrastructure, and reduce local crime levels. Last October, a half-dozen bureaucrats were expelled from one of China's major cities for not meeting their economic-growth and security targets.
Local officials are often considered heroes, not oppressors. In January last year, Mr Bo Xhi Lai, then mayor of Dalian, was promoted to governor of Liaoning province. Thousands of women, many in tears, spontaneously came to a park to bid him farewell.
During Mr Bo's nine-year tenure, Dalian evolved from a ramshackle port into one of the cleanest and most prosperous cities in Asia. It now has a street life more vibrant than Singapore, a layout reminiscent of Paris before the car, and a reputation among Japanese tourists for high-quality hotels and restaurants.
All of this is taking place in a nation where communist ideology is still strong. Introduction of foreign companies, technologies, and unfettered mobility for corporations and people would be seen as a threat to the communist system if publicly acknowledged.
Instead, China's highest officials insist they run the most centrally controlled government in the world, with full authority to appoint or dismiss mayors, governments and bureaucrats.
Strictly speaking, they are right. But they dare not overrun the open, commercial ethic of China's region-states - the source of their country's prosperity.
So debates about China should not be cast as a simple matter of right or wrong, but of when and how.
A decade or two of economic freedom and growth will give China's people an appetite for self-determination and participation that may surprise the rest of us. Already, some village leaders are elected; this may slowly spread to regional officials, and then upwards to the central government.
Even top communists appear to acknowledge and embrace change. Recently, China's head of state, Mr Jiang Zemin, said that the Communist Party 'represents' every good aspect of China, including wealthy capitalists, not just the poor and the proletariat.
We should not be surprised if soon - perhaps at the party's 2002 General Assembly - China's leaders call for a new doctrine to match its new model.
The writer is one of the world's leading business strategists. He is President of Ohmae & Associates and has advised many of Japan's governments.
Embracing change
Mister Jiang Zemin
postpones first
peaceful transition
Dr. Sun was heavily influenced by America. He went to school in Hawaii where he met many American 'elites' and became friends with many Americans.
His vision was not totally 100% "American" style of democracy,but more European and American mix, and far different than what goes on now in the PRC.
The Taiwanese way, as far as I can tell, is by far closer to what Dr. Sun wanted, than ever has been the one party communist ideologues of the PRC.
In China now, if you preach local governance over "party control" get prepared for subversion charges.
None.
But China isn't Communist. Its Fascist....And with a fiscal burden of government 2X lower than the Socialist States of America, we had better get our arse in gear.
You should have quoted the entire sentence.
-PJ
I haven't heard of a book called "White Swan," but I have heard read "Wild Swans," one of the best books available on the Cultural Revolution and earlier Communist history. The author writes of her own experience as a Red Guard and also about her mother and grandmother's experiences covering several decades.
Corruption is a pretty major unknown quantity in this whole equation. China's efforts to rid itself of corruption have so far come up short. It does appear that corruption has less of a weighing down effect on their economy and some progress has been made, but if they let corruption increase, it will absolutely kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In re Clinton's giveaways to China, he's certainly the one American most responsible for empowering China militarily, but we've made a lot of policy blunders towards China going back many years now. When Nixon and Kissinger opened up China, they did so with the clear understanding that this was a maneuver against the Soviets, a move that would essentially put the pressure on the Soviets the more we increased ties with China. But either Nixon or Kissinger said (and they clearly understood) that this relationship would only continue as long as it was mutually beneficial and that implies the threat of the "other" superpower, the Soviet Union.
Somewhere along the line that basic tenet was forgotten and we began to see the Chi-Coms through different eyes and let other factors guide our relationship with them. They have benefitted far, far more than we have, of course, but now it seems too late to stop it. The things that should have been done would have been to have a cooling of relations with China simultaneous with the increase of our relationship with the Soviets through Perestroika.
My biggest beef in our dealings with China is that the same thinking seems dominant in among all the policy wonks. Every one of them seems to be taking the same overly optimistic view of China. I suspect it has to do with some fairly heady ideas that they get filled with in the CFR.
Those "downtrodden" all have cell phones and go to Starbucks these days.
We'll see.
Representative democracy is great in theory, but most of today's Third World republics are dysfunctional jokes. China's achieved more in 20 years than democratic India has in 50. Just today, democratic Brazil needed a $30 bil. IMF bailout. Third World republics have majority-poor populations and, consequently, majority-socialist populations who oppose capitalist reforms and maintain their beloved welfare states in perpetuity. It's like if the US had a majority-poor population, Gephardt and Daschle would have a lock on Congress almost forever.
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