{"id":11508,"date":"2007-03-04T14:51:11","date_gmt":"2007-03-04T21:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2007\/03\/04\/the-underestimated-party-state-arthur-kroeber\/"},"modified":"2009-01-30T12:06:29","modified_gmt":"2009-01-30T19:06:29","slug":"the-underestimated-party-state-arthur-kroeber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2007\/03\/the-underestimated-party-state-arthur-kroeber\/","title":{"rendered":"The Underestimated Party-State &#8211; Arthur Kroeber"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nArthur Kroeber, the managing editor of China Economic Quarterly published following essay on the Financial Times:<br \/>\n\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nPeople in the rich world perturbed by China&#8217;s rise spend a great deal of time these days consoling themselves with a political fantasy.<\/p>\n<p>China&#8217;s economy may be growing fast, the argument goes, but unless that growth is matched by political reform &#8211;  specifically, the adoption of Western-style democracy &#8211;  then economic progress will grind to a halt.<\/p>\n<p>This argument has plenty of what the music business calls crossover appeal. The yellow-peril school of Chinaphobes like it because it enables them to forecast the imminent collapse of a sclerotic state unable to manage the dynamic forces it has unleashed. Idealists, of either the liberal or the neo-conservative persuasion, find it validates their view that evolution towards an Anglo-American style capitalist democracy is the inexorable course that all nations must follow, failing which they must stagnate or collapse.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nFew seem willing to accept the possibility that the Chinese party-state will manage to keep rapid economic growth going for a long time, while reforming the political system only slowly and on terms dictated mainly by Chinese culture and bureaucratic history &#8211;  not on Western, and particularly not on Anglo-American lines. Yet for anyone who cares to analyse China on the basis of empirical evidence, rather than appeals to bogus axioms of political development, this seems <a href=\"\/2007\/02\/cdt_bookshelf_interview_with_james_mann.php\">the most likely outcome for China in the next two decades<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The China-must-reform-as-we-say-it-must fantasy has been most clearly articulated by two recent books. China&#8217;s Trapped Transition, by <a href=\"\/2006\/02\/the_dark_side_of_chinas_rise_minxin_pei.php\">Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment<\/a>, claims that corruption has so overwhelmed the Chinese state that it is rapidly losing the capacity to deal with all sorts of social problems. <a href=\"\/2007\/01\/new_china_new_crisis_will_hutton_1.php\">The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century, by Will Hutton<\/a> (<\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ft.com\/cms\/s\/e6435b24-b0f5-11db-b901-0000779e2340.html\">reviewed by Martin Wolf<\/a><span style=\"color:#000000;\"> in the FT on February 2), asserts that &#8220;the Chinese economy and the Chinese Communist Party are in an unstable halfway house&#8221; between socialism and capitalism, and that the party must surrender its monopoly on power &#8211;  soon &#8211;  or risk economic collapse.<\/p>\n<p>Both books, not to mention legion other critics, are right to point out that China faces a staggering array of problems: corruption, income inequality, water shortages, environmental degradation, the potential for epidemic disease and so on.<\/p>\n<p>But where these books and the legion other critics go spectacularly wrong is in their assessment of the Chinese party-state as &#8220;sclerotic,&#8221; &#8220;rigid,&#8221; &#8220;unresponsive&#8221; and so on. The Chinese party-state has many exceedingly repulsive aspects, and certainly uses ruthless repression as one of the tools of governance. But if for no other reason than an interest in self-preservation, it is responsive to all manner of ills. Critics&#8217; underestimation of the party-state&#8217;s ability to identify and address problems is a severe failure that leads them into erroneous diagnosis. <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/www.howardwfrench.com\/archives\/2007\/03\/05\/the_underestimated_partystate\/\">[Full Text]<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arthur Kroeber, the managing editor of China Economic Quarterly published following essay on the Financial Times: People in the rich world perturbed by China&#8217;s rise spend a great deal of time these days consoling themselves with a political fantasy. China&#8217;s economy may be growing fast, the argument goes, but unless that growth is matched by [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[99,2,100,5,4202],"tags":[4530],"class_list":["post-11508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cdt-highlights","category-economy","category-politics","category-society","category-translation","tag-development-model","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.1 (Yoast SEO v24.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>The Underestimated Party-State - Arthur Kroeber<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2007\/03\/the-underestimated-party-state-arthur-kroeber\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Underestimated Party-State - Arthur Kroeber\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Arthur Kroeber, the managing editor of China Economic Quarterly published following essay on the Financial Times: People in the rich world perturbed by China&#8217;s rise spend a great deal of time these days consoling themselves with a political fantasy. 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