6 thoughts on “The Chinese Regime”

  1. I’ve long thought that the aim of the West, if China became a problem (it has), should be to exploit the internal divisions and turn it in to numerous squabbling, warlord run fiefdoms. For the average Chinese resident it wouldn’t change things much.

  2. The relatively bloodless disintegration of the USSR has to rank as one of the miracles of history. To paraphrase Jimmy Doolittle, we could never be so luck again.

  3. Given that mass protests in other parts of China are now said to increasingly resemble those seen in Hong Kong anent slogans, iconography, etc., it is certainly possible we are seeing something analogous to the events of early 1989 in Soviet Eastern Europe.

    But we also saw this sort of thing in 1989 in China too. The Chinese regime of that time responded brutally and, in the end, effectively to the mass unrest. The current Chinese regime seems no more inclined than that of 1989 to stint on what it will see as necessary violence to stay in power.

    That said, though, a couple key differences between now and 1989 may incline matters in today’s China toward a different outcome. First, the Chinese economy, which was advancing smartly in 1989 after more than a decade of market-based economic reforms, is now – relatively speaking – in the doldrums and has been for a few years. It is losing, not gaining momentum. So 1989’s appeal by Chinese leadership not to upset the good-times applecart, which had considerable resonance in 1989, has none such today.

    Second, the China of 1989 was not stagnating demographically. Today, China’s population is aging faster than that of any other nation on Earth, including the now-shrinking populations of Europe, Russia and Japan. Four decades of the suicidal One Child Policy have yielded a demographic discontinuity in China of never-before-seen proportions. This demographic implosion/inversion is only in the early stages of its effects. Matters will only get worse over at least the next three decades and there is – quite literally – nothing the regime can do about it.

    Given that China is no more ruled today by a Chinese Gorbachev than it was in 1989 – in fact less so by all appearances – the likeliest result is bloodletting on a truly epic scale, though not necessarily at a level entirely novel in Chinese history given the precedents of the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. As the title of a Daniel Day-Lewis movie of a dozen years back put it, “There Will be Blood.”

    The one thing history seems pretty clear in teaching us about past such upheavals – if that’s, indeed, what we are witnessing here in early stages – is that they start unpredictably, but go to completion rather quickly once the ball gets rolling.

    The Eastern Europe of 1989 was a supersaturated solution just looking for a triggering event to crystallize it. Today’s China may be another such. In 1989, the “crystallization” took only months to go from the first rumblings to effective completion in Eastern Europe followed by an only modestly more leisurely crack-up of the remaining Soviet edifice.

    But that was a pre-Internet world. Things are likely to proceed rather more swiftly today if the tipping point is indeed upon us. If utter chaos is not rampant in China by Spring 2020 then we will know this was another false start as in 1989. If chaos is regnant in China by then, the U.S., and the rest of the world for that matter, will be unavoidable guests at a really epochal come-as-you-are party in terms of politics, economics and military balances.

    Even if 2020 doesn’t turn out to be the last year of the current dragon, however, that day seems certain to come not very much further into the coming demographic body blows now unavoidably descending on the Chinese state.

    Asia, in general, and China, in particular, has seen a lot of what was called in less politically correct times “Oriental Despotism.” But it has never seen any such regime with a mostly literate population that is increasingly urban, cosmopolitan and middle-class. Analogies to past Chinas of mainly illiterate, immobile, peasant subsistence agriculturalists are completely without application to current circumstances.

    If China doesn’t reap the whirlwind in 2020, it will certainly do so at some other not too temporally-distant point – most likely sometime in the coming decade. As with the erstwhile Soviet Union, the odds do not look especially favorable for the PRC living to celebrate its 75th anniversary as it has recently been celebrating its 70th.

    Interesting times approach.

  4. “This demographic implosion/inversion is only in the early stages of its effects. Matters will only get worse over at least the next three decades and there is – quite literally – nothing the regime can do about it.”

    Sure there is. Pass laws against immigration from Central and South America, but don’t enforce them, and allow anyone who gets through to stay and reap the benefits of a socialist paradise. Since it’s “impossible” to prevent “immigrants” from entering any country they wish to enter, China will soon be full of brand new citizens, who will add to the rich cultural diversity that is the backbone of our – and by extension, any other – nation.

    Boom! Population problem solved!

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