China?s Changing Shape

Gerald Segal

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 1994

Article preview: first 500 of 5,302 words total.

Summary:  Deng Xiaoping has embarked on a risky strategy that pushes economic decentralization at a time when international forces are pulling China?s regions apart. Provinces feud with each other over trade and with Beijing over taxes. East Asian neighbors, leery of a unified great power, exacerbate internal tensions by drawing China?s fringes into competing economic spheres. Beijing is increasingly helpless to assert its control, and real power on a range of issues has already devolved to the local level. As the last of the old guard acquiesces in the move from Mao to market economics, China may not only be changing face but also shape.

Gerald Segal is Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Editor of The Pacific Review. His latest book is The Fate of Hong Kong.

THE CHINESE IDENTITY CRISIS

At the very moment when China seems poised to regain its former power, doubts are growing about precisely what China is. China?s economy appears set to become the world?s largest, by some measures as early as 2002. Beijing has spurred this economic growth by abandoning Marxism and allowing China?s various regions remarkable independence. The risks of such a strategy raise enormous questions about China?s future. As the last of the communist old guard acquiesces in the move from Mao and Marx to market economics, China may be changing not only face but also shape.

This basic question over China?s future revolves around the degree to which Beijing?s authority will give way to the centrifugal pull of China?s increasingly dynamic periphery. The death of old ideologies has left Chinese nationalism as the obvious, if uncertain, organizing principle for Beijing?s domestic and foreign policies. Will China?s fate be dominated by its unsatisfied nationalism, or will it be moderated, even wrecked, by the fissiparous tendencies of Beijing?s continental empire?

The international context surrounding this internal challenge is critical. Never in China?s history has such a push for decentralization been accompanied by the pull of so many outside forces. In an age when empires disintegrate, sovereign powers form greater unions and the world economy grows more interdependent, can China be immune to revolutionary change? East Asia is rapidly evolving, and an era of increasing interdependence will tend to weave China?s competing regions into various patterns of global affairs. China?s neighbors may seek to exacerbate the regionalism begun by Beijing in order to restrain its impulse for domination. China?s regionalism at home thus connects with its increasing interdependence abroad.

The result is an identity crisis for China, at least a crisis in the Chinese sense of a simultaneous threat and opportunity. To better understand China?s future, Sinologists must abandon traditional methods and look beyond the politics of Beijing. China?s regions count for more, as do developments in neighboring East Asia and the world beyond. Factors well beyond Beijing?s control, burgeoning flows of commerce, decisions by regional and local players, and the power that accrues to new economic centers, will change the way China is perceived, how it is governed and how the outside world interacts with this rising power in the 21st century.

DENG?S GAMBLE

Deng Xiaoping has embarked on a risky strategy that ties the legitimacy of his regime to its ability to produce prosperity. So far it has worked. China has sustained nearly ten percent annual growth for the past 13 years, and the World Bank, not the most radical of institutions, now issues a range of evidence for why China looks set to become the world?s largest economy by 2010 or, if one includes "Greater China," by 2002.1 According to International Monetary Fund data, China is already the world?s second-largest economy, and the World Bank has dubbed the Chinese economic area a "growth pole" for the region. As China looks set to become the number one economic ...

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