China e o futuro das democracias de mercado - Rana Mitter (Oxford)

How the one-party state may shape our future

Tomorrow belongs to Beijing, but how can China win hearts around the world

Rana Mitter

Chatham House, Londres – 1.8.2019

China is seeking to define the future. At home, the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, intends to instil ‘socialist values’ that underpin an ever-expanding ‘China dream’. Overseas, its nexus of economic, political and military influence is framed by the idea of a ‘community of common destiny’. The past 40 years, since the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, have been marked by astonishing economic growth, a greater global role and strongly authoritarian politics at home.

This year, the CCP marks 70 years since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. Plans are already afoot for the centenary of the party’s founding in 2021. But how realistic is it to assume that China will maintain its momentum over the next three decades until the People’s Republic marks its centenary?

The answer is that this is possible, but only if China changes. In the next phase of its development, China will need to embrace economic and social openness in a way that it is still reluctant to do. This may happen in a counterintuitive way. A more open China would not necessarily abandon its one-party system, but it would need to allow significantly more freedom for discussion, economic activity and genuine two-way engagement with the wider world.

How likely is such a change? In the short term, perhaps not that likely. China’s political direction has been changing rapidly since the rise to power of Xi Jinping and it has become clear, as the 2010s have progressed, that Xi not only has no intention of liberalizing China’s politics but is actively steering the country in a different direction.This trend did not in fact begin in 2012 when Xi became secretary-general. Rather, it was the failure of the West to deal with the global financial crisis in 2008 that began the process of disillusionment with the Washington Consensus on democratic politics and neoliberal economics.

Xi’s rise, however, made it clearer that the Chinese state would be re-invented in the new leader’s image. We have seen a sharp move away from the trend of the early 2000s for state rather than party organizations to dominate Chinese government, with the direction of travel being reversed in the past few years as the party element of the party-state becomes ever more pronounced. For the next five to ten years, it seems unlikely that that trend will alter. China’s public sphere – its media, academia and legal system – has been placed firmly under the control of the party, with the constitution changed so Xi can take a third and possibly fourth term of office. But what will emerge after that period?

To answer this, we need to move beyond the sharp divide we make between authoritarianism and democracy. The likelihood that China will become an electoral democracy in the next few decades is low. But the probability that it will become a less restrictive although still authoritarian state is much higher.

China has never really had a full democracy, but during the years of communist rule the pendulum has swung between what the political scientist David Shambaugh has referred to as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ authoritarianism. Most of Mao’s rule was relatively hard, in its level of top-down control.

The 1980s was an unprecedently ‘soft’ period, although the 1989 Tiananmen Square killings brought this to an end. The run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics saw a remarkable opening up in areas such as investigative reporting, a trend that has come to an abrupt halt under Xi.

A demographic timebomb

Why, then, would things change? Consider one key date: 2029. This is the year when demographers calculate that China will begin to see the effects of its one-child policy come home to roost. Its population will start to fall by about five million people a year, and it will start to age.

This is a problem that has been faced by other countries such as Japan and South Korea, which have sought to resolve it either through technology or by allowing more immigration.

Experience has shown that older people don’t like being looked after by robots, so it is possible that China, like Japan, may allow immigration by larger numbers of young people, mostly women, from the Southeast Asian region. If that were to happen the influx of people would change Chinese society. Democracy may not follow, but a necessary engagement with other people and their cultures, points of view, and needs would provide more diversity within Chinese society, and allow new voices to thrive, particularly in the most vibrant part of China, its cities.

Another impetus for political change is the continuing issue of Taiwan. Beijing has always made it clear that it reserves the right to invade and occupy Taiwan, by military means if necessary. Yet this has always seemed a short-term way to ‘resolve’ the Taiwan question. True, mainland China may have the military capacity to capture the island. But what sort of unification would that offer the 23 million inhabitants of one of Asia’s most lively democracies, a place with free media, world-class education and a range of civil liberties that make it one of the most liberal societies in the region?

China has long sought to wield ‘soft power’, hoping to show that the Chinese path is an attractive, progressive, forwardlooking one to follow. A violent reunification would destroy any hope of burnishing that image.

Instead, a softening of attitudes that provide different levels of freedom would offer a skilful solution to a perennial problem. By liberalizing at home, making it clear that Hong Kong’s freedoms will be kept intact – and those that have been eroded will be restored – China would be in a far better position to make its case that reunification would be beneficial for all.

Right now, that story is hard to tell. Yet the depressing developments in Hungary, Turkey and Philippines in recent years show that democracy which exists only in a technical sense is no guarantee of liberal freedoms. This could mean that the space for China to reinvent itself as a state that allows genuine freedoms, even under a one-party state, is greater than it was at the height of global democratization in the 1990s.

The newly confrontational response of the United States may also give China a pressing reason to burnish its image in this area in the next decade. Under the Trump administration, it has become clear that containment of China is a top priority. However, the growing sense of confrontation with China is now cross-partisan. Democrats embrace the idea as much as Republicans.

In Asia, there is still unease about Trump’s commitment as an ally, but signs such as US arms sales to Taiwan suggest that creating an anti-Chinese alliance still beats Trumpian instincts to withdraw from the region. Meanwhile, China is trying to find the silver bullet that will win it genuine partners in the region and remove the US from it.

The answer may lie in China’s strategic framework, the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI. Despite the hype, rather than this being some masterplan organized from a headquarters in Beijing, much of the initiative has been pushed by internal economic factors, including the need to find somewhere to place misallocated capital, as well as providing opportunities for provincial corporations to compete with each other. There have also been setbacks, including the spat with Malaysia, which earlier this year threatened to pull out of the BRI highspeed rail contract it had signed until it was given a considerable discount.

China’s military presence is unwelcome

Yet the future of BRI as a project to spread Chinese influence may lie in a dilemma that will become clearer over the next decade. China can now offer significant funding for infrastructural projects, and has become the most significant trading partner for almost all other Asian states. There is simply no equivalent western source of funding for many of the proposed projects, particularly the more financially problematic ones. Despite this, the US remains the only reliable provider of security in the region.

Some countries, such as Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, are close to China and becoming closer. But few states yet relish the idea of a significant Chinese military presence in their territories, and it is hard to imagine that those countries that have a US presence would welcome swapping it for a closer alignment with China.

South Koreans will not exchange the US soldiers on their soil for People’s Liberation Army troops. China has its work cut out over the next decade to persuade people that its security presence should be welcomed. Yet without such a presence, large parts of the BRI, which goes into hostile territory in parts of South and Central Asia, will remain vulnerable.

Another factor, perhaps the single most important game-changer in China’s ability to spread its influence today, is technology.

Britain is currently consumed by arguments about whether Huawei should be allowed to install its 5G broadband network. The debate rather misses the point, however. China’s technological capabilities now make it a likely provider of technological infrastructure for large parts of the non-western world which need efficient, cheap capacity.

China can draw on experiments at home such as the social credit system, which is using a combination of big data, artificial intelligence and face recognition to create a system that allows close surveillance of the population.

There is potential now for China to create a cross-continental technological ecology, linked to the BRI, that could give it a major foothold in Southeast Asia, East Africa and Latin America.

What are the chances of China managing to turn the next three decades into a narrative as powerful as its story since 1978, which contains both a rise to economic superpower status and a continuing control over individual freedoms?

On its current path, China will run up against major obstacles. The drive towards globalizing China is becoming harder to reconcile with a domestic regime that is closing down the space for discussion. The technological revolution can help embed a Chinese economic presence, but it is unlikely on its own to create widespread admiration of Chinese values or what they bring to other societies.

The Chinese Communist Party has had some of its greatest successes in the past half-century when it proved open to major change: the shift from a command economy to market socialism, or the move from the totalitarianism that Mao espoused at the height of his regime to the relatively open periods of the 1980s and the early 2000s.

Could the development of a more liberal state, with one-party rule, but a genuinely free public sphere, be the next stage?

No other state in history has managed such a trick. But then no other state has posted ten per cent a year growth for the best part of a decade. In the end, it won’t be America’s decision as to whether China can dominate the next three decades. It will be China’s.

Rana Mitter is Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford and Director of the University China Centre

Why West often overlooks China’s WWII effort - Shanghai Daily

Entrevista com o historiador inglês Rana Mitter, especializado na história da China (tenho um livro dele, em italiano), sobre o papel tremendamente subestimado da China na II Guerra Mundial. Isto  ocorreu, em parte, por culpa dos ocidentais, que consideram importantes apenas as frentes de batalha no Ocidente e no Pacífico (EUA vs Japão), mas também por culpa de chineses, que mantiveram seus arquivos fechados desde os anos 1950, até pelo menos os anos 1980. O historiador inglês publicou um livro sobre o tema.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Why West often overlooks China’s WWII effort

By Ni Tao | 00:01 UTC+8 

Shanghai Daily, June 8, 2017 |  PRINT EDITION

Rana Mitter

EDITOR’S Note: There is a wealth of literature documenting WWII from a Western perspective but less is known in the West about China’s epic struggles against Japanese invasion. One of the few books that does justice to China’s war effort is the bestseller “Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945” published in 2013. Its author, Rana Mitter, Director of University China Center and Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford, spoke to Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao at this year’s Shanghai Forum about his research on China’s wartime history and how it taught him about the dangers of being doctrinaire while understanding the country’s political future.

SD: Early this year, the Chinese authorities updated the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression from eight years to 14 years. What is behind this change?

Mitter: I think a reason that there has been an official decision to change the length of the war from eight to 14 years is to change the historical understanding of the war itself.

If you look at the way in which Chinese scholars have been writing about the war in academic journals, they have been using the 14-year-long definition for quite a number of years.

The reason of course is because it dates the war from the invasion and occupation of Manchuria in 1931 as the starting point.

In a way, it also matches the definition of the war, which has been used in Japan, particularly by the Left, for many years. And I think that part of the reasoning has been to try and create an idea in the public mind of the different aspects of the build-up to the war.

Personally, I still think the eight-year definition is valuable, because it marks a particular time when the outbreak of the war, the Lugouqiao Incident of July 7, 1937, significantly changed the way in which the relationship between China and Japan operated.

After 1937, it would have been very dif­ficult to arrange any kind of compromise agreement between the two sides. People within the Nationalist government who had perhaps more sympathy toward Japan were no longer able to operate on the basis of getting closer to Japan.

SD: Why are China’s struggles during WWII largely forgotten in the West?

Mitter: I think there are two reasons: one to do with the West, one to do with China.

On the Western side, the major problem has been that the war in China was not taken very seriously.

Despite the fact that it caused millions of deaths and tens of millions of refugees, and despite (China’s) important role of holding down the Japanese army in China for many years, these achievements and suffering were regarded secondary to what was considered as the real war in Europe and then in the Pacific.

I would argue quite strongly that actually some of the decisions China made were really fundamental.

The best example of this was in 1938, a time when the Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek could have surrendered to the Japanese and in fact his former ally Wang Jingwei did form an alliance with the Japanese.

But by making the decision not to surrender to Japan, even when China was very weak and had little outside assistance, it actually set a very important turning point for the eventual victory in Asia many years later.

However, we also have to remember that it was very difficult, or actually impossible, for a long time for Western scholars to come to China and use archives for most of the period from the 1950s up until the 1980s and 1990s.

SD: How would you judge China’s contributions and sacrifices in WWII?

Mitter: I think that China’s contributions and sacrifices during WWII were immensely important and under-appreciated in the wider world.

The example I often give when asked where did China make a difference in World War II is to point to 1937.

You have to look at that year as it was seen then, not as what we know now.

Now we know that Japan and Germany were eventually defeated. The Americans would eventually come into the war.

But this was not at all clear in 1938. At that time China’s national government had retreated to Chongqing (the wartime capital); the Communists were restricted to some areas in northern and central China; a large part of China fell under Japanese occupation.

Many observers including some British diplomats thought that the most sensible thing to do would be for China’s government to compromise, surrender, or at least come to an agreement with the Japanese.

The decision both by the Kuomintang, and by the Chinese Communist Party, to continue resistance at a time when China had very little outside support or few alliances was not an obvious and easy one to make.

By deciding in 1938 that they would continue to fight against Japan, the Chinese managed to hold the situation for long enough for the situation to eventually change and for the eventual entry of the United States and Britain into the global war after 1941.

I f it weren’t for the Chinese contributions, it would have been much harder to achieve an allied victory in Asia.

But without the Allied contributions, China would not have been on the victorious side. So both sides needed each other.

SD: In researching the book, you rely on the diaries of personalities like Chiang Kai-shek. But could referencing these diaries come at the expense of more important archives?

Mitter: It is an important question to ask, because when writing history, we have to be aware of the danger of getting too trapped in personalities.

This is what the famous 19th century English historian Thomas Carlyle meant by the “Great Man” theory of history.

And we have to avoid that, partly because history is not just about men, and certainly not just about great men.

But the reason that I think these diaries are important is that they reveal not just the personality of the individuals, but also their particular mindset and viewpoints about much bigger questions, which is what was China going to achieve if it got through with the war with Japan.

For example, if you read Chiang’s diary, you’ll find he was constructing a different vision, not just of China, but also of Asia, one in which China would play a bigger role.

But understanding how he viewed China’s role in the post-war period tells you a lot about the relationship between America and China, as well as the emergence of new post-colonial and post-imperial nationalism in many Asian nations.

Moreover, one of the areas where I looked quite extensively was the way in which social change happened on the ground.

For instance, reforms in areas like health care, hygiene, and social welfare provision, refugee provision, in large parts of China during the war.

Most of that has nothing to do with specific individuals at all, but has to do with policies and social change in government as a whole.

And I think the important thing is to combine these materials with very personal views that you get from diaries.

SD: Have your perspectives changed over the course of researching China’s past?

Mitter: I think over maybe 16 or 20 years of writing about China, my views basically haven’t changed, but developed, and I hope deepened over that time.

Probably the single change is that it becomes much harder for me to argue that there is any fixed or definite political path for China during that time.

Sometimes if you look at the present day, you hear people from the West say China should be this way, while some say China definitely should be that way.

I think looking at 20th century Chinese history shows that actually there are a whole variety of different paths. And it’s not always possible to tell which one is the best at one time.

The one thing I learned from studying that period is that in the end it has to be up to the Chinese people to decide what their political path is going to be.

Leitura do dia: a China como aliada do Ocidente - Rana Mitter

Sou assinante de um "clube" de leituras diárias, ou melhor, de uma seleção de livros escolhidos pelo site delanceyplace.com.
O tema de hoje era a China, antes de se tornar comunista, como transcrito abaixo:

In today's selection -- from Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter.  Author: Rana Mitter  Title: Forgotten Ally Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt  Date: Copyright 2013 by Rana Mitter   Pages: 43-45    After the abdication of the last Chinese emperor in 1912, the country had fragmented into the chaos of regional warlords. In 1921, it was Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist party, based in Guangzhou and under the protection of a local warlord, who were most committed to trying to unify the country. But they lacked enough funding for an effort of that scale and unsuccessfully sought support from the European powers and Japan. They then turned to newly communist Russia. Why would Russia be interested in supporting a non-communist party in China? Because of its fear of Japan, which had unexpectedly won the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 -- the first Asian power to ever overcome a European one. Russia knew that a fragmented China would not be an effective buffer against Japan, and was therefore willing to support the Nationalist party as long as it desisted in its efforts to crush China's new and far-smaller Communist party. This created an opportunity that might not otherwise have existed for a young revolutionary named Mao Zedong: "By 1921, with the assistance of a sympathetic warlord, Chen Jiongming, Sun [Yat-sen] was based in Guangzhou (Canton), where he set up a revolutionary government. The Nationalists were in power, even if only in one region of China. ...  "Yet despite the talent that Sun and [the highly popular Wang Jingwei] brought to the Nationalist Party, their prospects seemed limited unless they could find some pow­erful supporter who would arm them. Sun Yat-sen had had no success in persuading the European powers to back him. He had more hopes of Japan, declaring in a speech at Kobe in 1924 that since Japan's victory over Russia in 1905, the peoples of Asia had cherished the hope 'of shaking off the yoke of European oppression.' However, Sun's idea of pan-Asianism, the philosophy of Asian unity, meant something rather different in gov­ernmental circles in Tokyo: not cooperation, but domination by [Japan itself]. "Then, in 1923, Sun made a decision that would help shape the path of Chinese history. For years, he had been seeking foreign support for his dream of launching a revolutionary army that would unify China, with him as its president. The Western powers had all turned him down flat. But there was another hand to play in the early 1920s. By 1921 the Bolshe­vik Revolution in Russia had been secured after a bloody and vicious civil war. Leon Trotsky, the fiery foreign minister of the new regime, was eager to find opportunities to use the Comintern, the agency responsible for spreading revolution abroad. In 1923 Sun held talks with Adolf Joffe, the representative of the Comintern, for a formal alliance between the Na­tionalists and the Soviets. In the Soviet view, China was too backward for a socialist revolution. Instead, a 'national bourgeois' party, the National­ists, should carry out the first revolution. Sun agreed, content to ally with Russia, believing that alone among Western nations she had shown 'be­nevolence and justice.' ... "The new alliance changed the fate of the Chinese Communist Party. During the first couple of years of the party's history, it was a tiny and marginal political grouping (as well as being officially illegal). It made grand claims about fomenting a revolution among urban workers, Bol­shevik-style, but in reality it had little prospect of doing so. Cooperation between Sun and the Soviets gave the CCP a crucial opportunity to ex­pand. On Soviet advice, many Communists also joined the Nationalists, forming the United Front, making the two parties hard to distinguish during this period. The alliance made sense ideologically for Sun as well. His political philosophy, which he termed the 'Three Peoples Principle's,' consisted of democracy, nationalism, and the idea of 'people's livelihood,' a vague social welfarism that was sometimes rendered as 'socialism' in English. He was not a Communist, but he and the Soviets had enough in common to make the alliance useful for both sides. Sun's prestige was also enough to calm the more conservative elements in the Nationalist Party who were wary of the Bolsheviks. "Revolutionary politics were forged on a small island in Guangzhou (Canton) Harbor. The nerve center was the Whampoa (Huangpu) mili­tary academy, where the Soviets tutored China's revolutionaries. For both the Nationalists and Communists, the experience of working with the So­viets between 1923 and 1927 on the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) was crucial. Wang Jingwei worked in the political education department of the academy, and alongside him was a rising star of the CCP, Zhou Enlai (later to become Chinas premier under Mao). On the military side, Chiang Kai-shek rose rapidly in the officer corps as his organizational skills became better known and better valued, along with his comrade from his Japan days, He Yingqin. Also at the Academy were Hu Zongnan and Xue Yue, both of whom would provide crucial military service to Chiang during the war years. "The alliance was of particular interest to the young Communist Mao Zedong, as it meant a much larger party base which he could use to plan radical revolution."   Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 by Rana Mitter by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt