On April 3, 2011, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was detained by police just prior to boarding a flight to Hong Kong. He has been held incommunicado since. [Ed. note: He was released on June 22, after this article went to press.] Ai-known internationally as much for his far-ranging artistic projects as his criticisms of the Chinese government-is but one of many, perhaps thousands, of "troublemakers" rounded up by the Chinese government in recent months. Ai may be the most recognizable name globally, but other detainees have included rights activists, lawyers, bloggers, journalists, and academics. Some have been formally charged with "creating a disturbance" or "inciting subversion"; others have been disappeared through extra-judicial procedures.
The exact motivations behind the government's expanding crackdown are uncertain, but it is safe to assume that images of Egypt and Tunisia loom large. Indeed, back in February and March, China too appeared caught in the undertow, with hints of a homegrown "Jasmine Revolution." But the Jasmine Revolution drew small crowds and little energy. The dominant story soon became one of unyielding political repression and conspicuous public silence.
In the West this situation has inspired renewed focus on repression in China, with extensive coverage in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London, Le Monde, and elsewhere. At one level is concern for the detainees themselves, individuals who appear to have done nothing wrong but have been swallowed up by a criminal justice system affording them neither due process nor mercy. At a deeper level are geopolitical or even existential worries about what the Chinese government's behavior signifies for a nation that is now a leading global power. Seemingly out of nowhere, China has emerged as the world's fastest-growing major economy, the largest overseas holder of U.S. government debt, the largest exporter, and the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. And along with jaw-dropping technological advancement in the domestic economy, China has invested in military modernization. Yet even as China becomes a nation of global caliber, it appears governed by individuals determined to play by their own rules and to respect no limits to their exercise of power.
But why should the recent detentions arouse particular anxiety? After all, it is hardly news that China is governed by an authoritarian system. Extrajudicial detentions and reflexive repression of dissent-whether real or imagined-have always been the method of authoritarian regimes. We see it today in Syria, Libya, Russia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. And we saw it just a few decades ago in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and even Mexico.
The variety of nations (and political outcomes) on this list suggests that abuse of dissenters-conspicuous in spite of overseas condemnation-is characteristic of not just sclerotic, immovable regimes, but also of authoritarian systems undergoing profound processes of change and liberalization. It would be wrong to read the current crackdown as a sign of stasis or regression. Though there has been no "Chinese Spring," in fundamental institutional, organizational, and behavioral terms, it would be hard to describe what has transpired in China over the past twenty years as anything but a revolution.
Lessons From South Korea and Taiwan
Those who doubt that profound change and harsh repression can coexist in China should look to the history of South Korea and Taiwan. In January 1987, just seven years after a democratic uprising was crushed in the South Korean city of Gwangju and a few months before the military-backed regime would yield to popular demands for open elections, student protestors were being summarily rounded up by the police. At least one of the students died during interrogation. That same year Taiwan's Kuomintang government announced the end of 38 years of martial law, a key step toward the establishment of democracy there. But in the months before the announcement, dissenters were still being shipped off, often by secretive military tribunals, to the notorious gulag on Green Island. Crackdowns on opponents, extrajudicial detentions, and violence are often the last-ditch efforts of authoritarian regimes.
Perhaps because of their willingness to use force even in their final days, these regimes can appear impervious to change and determined to remain in power. Given the empirical evidence available in the mid-1980s, one could reasonably have described Taiwan's single-party state as "flexibly" authoritarian: grudgingly willing to mollify the populace with marginal institutional changes, but prepared to employ the gun to defend its grip on power. No one could have been sure whether the Taiwanese government-or South Korean, for that matter-would hold onto power indefinitely, succumb to violent overthrow precisely because of its resistance to change, or yield peacefully and voluntarily to popular desires for liberalization. The same can be said of China today.
The cases of Taiwan and South Korea also suggest that we should be cautious about the frequent observation that politics in China has lagged economics. Both Taiwan and South Korea, right up until the end of the democratization process, were successful and creative on the economic front but politically retrograde. At minimum the lesson here is that the absence of overt regime change doesn't tell us much.
That leads to a final point about the Taiwanese and South Korean experiences, one equally applicable to the contemporary Chinese scene. Even as authoritarian regimes and their supporting institutions remain in place, subtle political shifts may be under way. Such shifts can include recomposition of the ruling establishment (i.e., the ruling party stays in place, but it ends up populated by new kinds of members), societal pluralization, depoliticization of daily life, and evolving efforts at regime legitimization-efforts that often lead to major changes in political discourse and participation. Ruling elites may push such changes with the most conservative intentions. The goal may be nothing more than regime survival. However, as the cases of Taiwan and South Korea show, such processes can take on a life of their own with members of the state and ruling establishment swept up in the wave of new attitudes, aspirations, and values. And that wave may crest suddenly or over the course of years.
The Economy Reaches Out
There are undoubtedly numerous differences between the China of today and the South Korea and Taiwan of yesterday. But in terms of sociopolitical change, China is increasingly looking like its previously authoritarian East Asian neighbors.
Since the early 1980s China has experienced no political revolution, no definitive ideological break from the past, and nothing even resembling a nationwide political movement. Since Deng Xiaoping's death in 1997, the country's leaders have been conspicuous for their lack of charisma and vision. The sprawling Communist Party-state-inheritor of a 1400-year-old tradition of technocratic and highly interventionist bureaucratic rule-grinds on. On the surface, nothing has changed.
But under the surface, virtually everything has. The transformations are particularly striking in the urban industrial economy. At one time China exported almost no manufactured goods; now Chinese industry is deeply immersed in global supply chains. At the dawn of reform in 1978, virtually all Chinese industry was owned by the state. By 2008, in an industrial economy that had grown more than 25-fold, private firms were the dominant players, with foreign firms not far behind. That which was once allocated hierarchically by the state-basic commodities, industrial inputs, manufactured goods, labor (both high-skilled and low), housing, and health care-is now purchased in commercial markets. All manner of new rules have been developed to manage these markets: enterprise law, contract law, labor law, environmental regulations, and so on. And new actors populate core industrial and bureaucratic structures: private entrepreneurs, elite returnees from overseas, domestically trained technocrats, multinational commercial and financial elites, legal professionals, media professionals, and even self-described policy activists and social entrepreneurs. Once-taboo business entities are now vital to the national economy. In 2001, private entrepreneurs-capitalist roaders par excellence-were officially welcomed into the Chinese Communist Party.
