What kinds of conclusions do these books point toward, beyond providing ample evidence that China is far more diverse than the country we often see portrayed in our newspapers and on television? First of all, that it makes little sense to treat the PRC as an "evil empire" or "awakening giant." While the significance of state repression and the economic boom cannot be doubted, we need to pay attention to such things as the resurgence of intense attachment to localities (the nation, but also much smaller communities), the dramatic increase in forms of mobility (the ability of people to swtich from job to job and city to city) and the divergent lifestyles of people belonging to different groups (defined by generation and ethnicity as well as region, class and religion).

The books are also a reminder that we need to free ourselves from the sense, so palpable when the Berlin wall fell, that China's Communist Party is living on borrowed time. It will, of course, eventually lose power. No regime lasts forever. But fifteen years have passed since the Soviet Union collapsed, and the PRC is still run by a Communist Party (albeit one that accepts capitalists into its ranks). If the Party's days have been "numbered" since 1989, the integer is not a small one. Hence one starting point for critical analysis should be asking how exactly the Party has retained control, even during an era when there is considerable popular discontent. Mao once famously said that a "single spark" was enough to "start a prairie fire," but the PRC of today shows that there can be literally tens of thousands of "sparks" a year (there were 87,000 separate incidents of unrest in 2005 alone, according to the CCP's own statistics) without igniting a national conflagration.

To be sure, the CCP's resilience lies partly in its use of force to crush militant protests and to stifle any organization that threatens (or is imagined to threaten) its authority, and its efforts to control the communications media. But force alone cannot explain the party's hold on power. The Communist Party has skillfully appealed to popular nationalism and, perhaps most important, it has presided over remarkably high growth rates, which have led many Chinese to feel that in material terms their lives have improved. The diversity of experience in the PRC, made possible by the reforms, has paradoxically helped the one-party state to stay afloat. China is now a place where people living in different regions, doing different kinds of jobs and belonging to different generations can easily seem to be living in different worlds. And far from dividing the country into "winners" and "losers," recent changes have led many people to feel that they are both winning and losing, but in radically dissimilar ways.

Imagine a scholar who is happy that she has an easier time now accessing translations of works in her specialty by Western scholars and traveling abroad to conferences, but who is furious that the state intends to demolish her beloved old house in the heart of Beijing and relocate her to the suburbs. Is she a "winner" or a "loser"? Or imagine a factory worker in his 50s who is angered after being laid off from a state-run company, where he had a job that was supposed to be his for life, yet who is relieved that his children are not criticized periodically, as he once was, because one of their forbears fought in Chiang Kai-shek's army in the 1930s? Is he a "winner" or a "loser"? Our imagined scholar and imagined worker have both "won" and "lost," but in such different ways that a protest by one would not automatically generate strong sympathy in the other. And neither would be likely to look favorably on protests by Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang who complain of oppression by Han Chinese colonizers. Americans often assume that rapid development, of the kind that South Korea and Taiwan experienced in the 1980s and that the PRC is experiencing now, will automatically work as a democratizing force, with a newly created middle class demanding an increase in political choices commensurate with their increased economic ones. Ironically, though, while there are certainly middle-class Chinese who would like, and in some cases are agitating for, greater political freedom, the principal outcome of rapid development has been a tendency toward social fragmentation that has undermined the prospects of mass resistance to the state. One reason that protests spread easily in 1989, both in China and elsewhere, was that many people felt that the only meaningful divide in state socialist systems was between a small elite group, who enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, and everyone else. This is not true in the PRC today. And this makes it hard to imagine scenarios that would lead to a repeat of 1989.

Hard--but not impossible. For while the PRC's boom has lasted longer than the experts predicted, it cannot go on forever. And at some point growing disgust with official corruption could lead people in widely varied social sectors to conclude that the regime's purported commitment to the nation's welfare is the most jiade thing about it. Then, to play on the title of a classic work of reportage from another era (the 1940s), when corruption was a "scourge of the time" and an authoritarian regime (that of Chiang Kai-shek) struggled to hold on to power, a new kind of thunder might come out of China.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.