China and power

Further to the previous post...

'Mr. Sharansky considers the right to make a buck or travel freely as important as political freedoms. His Gulag-mates were almost all "economic prisoners"; the dissident campaign in the 1970s was to let Soviet Jewry emigrate, not bring down the Imperium. With a power like China, the West doesn't need to play down the freedom agenda, he says: Deng Xiaoping's market reforms brought a fair measure of liberty, defusing nationalism and making Beijing easier to work with, and China can be encouraged further down this road. In his view, international donors erred by not pushing the Palestinian Authority to open the economy of the territories for business. '

China is an interesting case. China's power distribution system is tremendously tenuous. At the top you have a tiny cadre of ostensible Communists- some politicians, some Generals. They hold very powerful levers of coercive power. But all the rest of the power in the country is wielded by local politicians. This vast cohort are corrupt, and growing more corrupt by the day. The tiny cadre at the top execute a few of the vast cohort to try to stem the tide but the corruption is vast and just keeps growing. There is nothing tying the vast cohort of local officials to the tiny cadre than habit and fear of the army/secret police. The force keeping the whole ediface in place appears to be inertia and long custom. Thats not very much. One big shock and the whole thing would fly to pieces. Whether the big shock will come nobody knows. But I confidently assert that over the medium term the Chinese system is not sustainable. In a system where no institutions exist to hand legitimate power to new groups of people, pressure will build up in the system, just like it did in Russia in the early 20th century. The new wealthy and even the respectably off in China will want to assert their legitimate right to some power- and there is no mechanism to give it to them. How long they will wait before getting really het up is anybodies guess- but I don't suppose they are more patient than the Russians.

An interesting case!