Jottings from the Granite Studio

David Lampton, dean of faculty and a professor at SAIS, takes Jim Mann to task over Mann’s recent book, The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression. In the book, Mann argues that the two dominant competing schools on China, one arguing that China is on a path of increasing democratization, the other (think Gordon Chang) arguing that China’s growth obscures some deep systemic problems that will lead to a “collapse,” have missed the point. What if, Mann wonders, China doesn’t change? What if it we wake up in 2050 with a rich, powerful China still under the one-party authoritarian rule of the CCP?

This week, Lampton and Mann went toe-to-toe in the online edition of Foreign Policy.

Lampton accuses Mann of playing the same cards as the 1950s “Who Lost China?” crowd in blaming China hands for the current state of affairs in China: “It’s like the foreign-policy equivalent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: For describing what they see, observers of China are somehow blamed for the events that follow.”

Unsuprisingly, Lampton ascribes to a theory of incremental change, arguing that China observers have far less power to influence policy than some (including Mann) seem to assume:

“Mann seems somehow to have misunderstood that the notion that China would steadily open up politically was (and remains) an expectation to be realized over a long period of time, not a guarantee. The purpose of engagement is more to achieve U.S. interests, only one of which is democratization, and perhaps not even the most important interest. In fact, few China experts (beyond Bruce Gilley and Henry Rowen) have predicted that China would democratize quickly. Even so, there is moderate good news to report: Today’s China is much more cooperative on issues important to the United States than it was in the past; it is less of a proliferation danger; its people have much more freedom to realize their individual potential; and, significantly, the Chinese system has moved from totalitarian rule under Mao Zedong to an authoritarian system in which an entrenched but growing elite evinces greatly diminished ambitions for control of society.”

In examining China’s many remaining shortcomings, it is easy to become impatient with U.S. policy. But as Mann’s efforts prove, it is far harder to come up with a viable alternative strategy.

Mann responds, for his part, that comparisons to the 1950s state departments witch hunts are both unwarrented and unfair. As for the possibilities for incremental change, Man repeats an observation made both in his book and before a Congressional sub-committee in January:

“[Lampton] also writes that the Chinese people today “have much more freedom to realize their individual potential.” Lampton is no doubt sincere in believing this. I think it reflects a top-down view of what is happening in China today. Many of China’s new urban elites would agree with him, but it’s possible that many hundreds of millions of others in China would not see things in this way. Of course, we don’t know for sure—and that’s precisely the point: We can’t tell what people in China really think about their lives and their government until they are given an opportunity to register their own views. That is what the Chinese Communist Party continues to prevent at all costs.”

Perhaps Mann’s most interesting rebuttal involves the comparisons to the 1950s:

“In fact, if the experience of the United States and China in the 1940s and 1950s has any relevance at all to current events, it is this: The China specialists Lampton mentions were attacked after they warned Washington that the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt and deeply unpopular, and that the United States’ embrace of the Nationalist elites in Chinese cities was blinding it to the unhappiness of hundreds of millions of other people in China. Today, it appears that the United States may be making a comparable mistake in its dealings with Communist China and in the renewed embrace of the elites of Shanghai and Beijing.”

Mann makes a good point. Nobody wanted to hear about the calamity that was the KMT government in the 1930s and 1940s, just like we didn’t really want to hear about corruption in the South Vietnamese government in the 1960s or the wild mistrust and unpopularity of “Our Men in Baghdad” right now. Perhaps the CCP wasn’t quite the sainted salt-of-the-earth that Edgar Snow made them out to be, but did Chiang Kai-shek & Wife really deserve all the hagiographic homages of Henry Luce? (To be fair, Chiang only won “Man of the Year” once (1937), Deng Xiaoping won it twice, and the two “winners” immediately following Mr. & Mrs. Chiang were Adolph Hitler (1938) and Joseph Stalin (1939)). There are many in the China business community today who are simply not interested in rocking the boat if it’s good for profits. Incremental change is a good business environment, unrest in the streets is not.

But what of the new urban elites? Are they a force for change or is it a case of what my good friend The 88’s calls the “She Blinded me with Shanghai” syndrome?

Much of the “incremental change” theory assumes a growing sense of unrest on the part of the new urban elite towards the government–as incomes grow, as people accumulate wealth, they will start to demand political power comenusurate with their economic power so as to safeguard their property. But I wonder if today’s elites–like the elites of the 1930s and 1940s–might be more willing to throw their lot in with the ancien regime as a way to preserve stability against the Great Unwashed. At the end of the day, does the guy at Starbucks really have that much in common with the farmer in Gansu? Do they see themselves as stakeholders in the same society? I’m not so sure. The other day as I was jogging by a local Starbucks, some wingnut in a black BMW almost greased me as he was pulling out from the curb. He rolled down the window to apologize but stopped when he saw I was a foreigner. I called him a 买办资产阶级 (maiban zichan jieji “Comprador Bourgoisie”) and followed that with a 资本主义走狗 (ziben zhuyi zougou “Capitalist flunky/running dog.”) He should have studied his Marxist history more, because I’m not sure he got the reference. On a related note, I need to learn to swear more from taxi drivers, talking smack from old history journals just isn’t cutting it.

Obviously “urban elite” is far too broad a term for a specific argument to be made regarding potential for political change, but so long as the CCP continue to echo Ronald Reagan (”Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”), the urban elite should not be taken for granted as some kind of “Fifth Column” fueled by Big Macs, uniforms by Zara, and armed with cappucinos in travel mugs, ready to take on Hu & Co. in the near future.