First, China’s cultural values formed during the warring states period and that China was twice unified and given stable government only by the most ruthless application of totalitarian rule.  First by the Emperor Shih Huang-ti who followed the tenets of Han Fei-tzu ‘s Legalist-Realist school and secondly by the equally indomitable Mao Zedong, with his own particular version of Marxism-Leninism.  In between the two despots dynasties rose and fell and generally tried to tie together a continental-sized nation with a natural centrifugal tendency to split into unrelated regional economies and eventually warlordism, civil war and dynastic collapse. In short, China’s rulers do not take the unity of their country for granted the way the French or the British or postbellum Americans do.  Chinese leaders are crazed about Taiwan because in their minds if Taiwan is ever recognized by the world as an independent state than so can Tibet…and Xinjiang..and perhaps the rich coastal provinces might feel better off without their inland cousins.  An authoritarian ledership of already shaky political legitimacy may choose the economically suicidal course if they believe that Taiwan’s independence will bring their regime down regardless.

Secondly, in assessing China’s might keep in mind the reality of per capita facts. As Brad DeLong conveniently noted the other day hundreds of millions of Chinese remain extremely poor, living on less than a dollar a day.  Hundreds of millions more are better off than a generation ago but they still hover not terribly far above subsistence. These people are not, as most suppose, a danger to the regime. Peasants have starved for a millenia without ill political effect and these people are, fortunately, at least eating. What they represent instead is an enormous claim on the economic surplus that China is currently generating – a claim on roads, schools, hospitals, infrastructure, basic comforts  – before providing ” rich ” urban Chinese with internet cafes, dance clubs, imported cars or  more missile frigates for the Chinese Navy.  These people need exceptionally robust economic growth for decades to see real improvement in living standards.

Thirdly, the inner circle of China’s leadership have undergone an important transformation during the end of Deng Xiaoping’s tenure as paramount leader.  Unlike in the USSR where the Red Army was strictly subordinate to the CPSU, Mao’s guerilla war left far greater cohesion between the PLA and the CCP. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping were bona fide military leaders. Zhu De and Lin Biao were also political leaders.  PLA generals routinely sat in the Central Committee and higher party cadres did military work. Today, China’s generals and politicians are distinct leadership classes with factional interests. The generals have become much more the military professionals and no one mistakes Jiang Zemin for a field marshal. To  a certain extent, the politicians are appeasing the military elite while the latter are developing a far more narrow outlook.

Lastly, globalization brings with it to all societies a danger of raising up a countervailing power. For example, in one sense al Qaida’s radicalism is merely the culmination of an ideological debate that has been going on within Islam since the Turks retreated from the gates of Vienna in 1689. But in a general sense bin Laden’s violent answers only have traction among Muslims because globalization has created enough new ” connections ” to create economic and social upheaval in very traditional, formerly disconnected, Arab and Central Asian nations.

China’s previous experience with opening up to the outside world is not a heartwarming tale. The Ming and Q’ing dynasties, like the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan, had ” disconnected ” from the world even as the European nations began explosive advances in science, wealth and technology. The world intruded anyway. Japan opted to reconnect via the Meiji Restoration and catch up to the West.  China resisted and suffered not only external humiliation at the hands of the West, Russia and Japan but also two internal rebellions – the Taiping Rebellion and the Boxers. The former revolt, fired by half-understood western religious ideas, was warfare of a magnitude not exceeded in scale until the western front in 1914.

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