Excerpts from “The Party's Over: China's Endgame” by Gordon G. Chang:
Deng’s policies sparked the creation and development of private enterprises, in many ways the most important engine of China’s growth during the last three decades. In 1978, the state produced virtually all the nation’s gross domestic product. Today, that figure has dropped to a third.
Predictions that Beijing’s [$586-billion stimulus] plan might trigger the biggest wave of corruption in Chinese history now seem correct.
Yet Wen, in office since 2003, has not made much of an effort to do so. His stimulus plan targets the creation of infrastructure and aims almost entirely to boost industrial capacity even further, which would only aggravate the unbalance of the Chinese economy…
China’s system is now weeding out the Mao Zedongs and even the Deng Xiaopings in order to prevent the rise of charismatic leaders, particularly someone like a Chinese Gorbachev..
Senior Beijing officials now face the dilemma of all reform-minded authoritarians: the economic progress that legitimates their leadership endangers their continued control….
Middle-class Chinese, the beneficiaries of decades of reform, now behave like activist peasants and workers whenever they think their rights are threatened. Yet Hu Jintao is repressing, not protecting, those rights. The humorless general secretary is now presiding over a seven-year crackdown on almost all elements of society, even the writers of karaoke songs, and the regime now attempts to control political speech more tightly than it did two decades ago. That is a sign of trouble to come. The party can censor and imprison, but it does so at the risk of creating even more enemies, both internal and external, and further delegitimizing itself…
Unfortunately for the Communist Party, this new restiveness comes as technology and instant communications are changing society. News travels fast in the modern Chinese state. During the first six months of last year, China’s citizens sent 382 billion text messages. No other country has more cell phone subscribers (there are 703 million of them) or Internet users (384 million, at last count). Cyber China, the most vibrant part of the most exciting nation on the planet, reflects the growing inquisitiveness of Chinese citizens about their society. Political dissent is sizzling on the Web—and readily available, at least most of the time. It is on the Internet that officials criticize their own government for corruption and businessmen post tracts on democracy.