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One Country Two Systems:

Is It Working?

Address by

Dr. Richard Baum

Director, UCLA Center for Chinese Studies

Dr. Orville Schell

Dean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley

Xiao Qiang

Director, Berkeley-China Internet Project

June 2, 2004

Dr. Richard Baum

It was exactly 15 years ago, June 3, 1989. The day broke in Beijing and few people understood or could appreciate what was about to happen there.  It was a 24-hour period that changed not only China but much of the rest of the world as well.  It was a tragic event, the crackdown at Tiananmen.  Its repercussions are still being felt, primarily within China, but again also around the world.

We thought that in looking back at that event and its implications, its ramifications, that we would start by asking the question that very conveniently, for me at least, was raised in this morning's New York Times in an opinion piece written by Nick Kristoff who was representing the Times in Beijing in 1989. Kristoff makes a rather interesting observation that, although the Chinese government clearly triumphed over student demonstrators and activists in 1989, in the long run the government lost. His argument is this:  “the Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night.  Political pluralism has clearly not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has.  The struggle for China's soul is over for China today is […] modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989.  The reformers lost their jobs but they captured China's future.”

In retrospect, the Communist hardliners will write about one thing – they knew that after the Chinese started watching Eddie Murphy wearing tight pink dresses and struggling over what to order at Starbucks the revolution was finished.  No middle class is content with more choices of coffee than of candidates on a ballot. 

This is a very optimistic assessment of what has happened in China in the last 15 years. It's certainly open to dispute, and what we want to do here tonight is raise some of the questions that are suggested by Nick Kristoff's arguments in this morning's New York Times.  We will also open it up to discuss not just China but also recent events, trends and prospects in Hong Kong and Taiwan.  Because of time constraints, however, I am going to turn the podium over to Orville Schell immediately so that he can talk a bit about the Chinese path to democratization – if there is such a path where does it come from, what are its roots and where does it lead?  After Orville has made his opening remarks because he has to get an airplane so quickly we will open the floor for at least a few questions directly to him before he has to depart and then we will carry on and have the remainder of the program. 

So, without any further hesitation let me introduce an old and dear friend and a really perspicacious China watcher, one of the very best, Orville Schell.

Orville Schell

Thank you, Rick.  It's a great pleasure to be here. Everybody, yourselves included no doubt, are wondering "Where is China headed and will it get there?"  That's a very interesting question not simply a facetious question, because the question of where it's going to get is somewhat murky.  If you had visited China in the mid-‘70s, when Chairman Mao was still alive and the Cultural Revolution was still going, you would have a baseline against which to measure where it is today. Even if you had no such baseline, if you go to China today you cannot help but be impressed.  There is indeed an extraordinary amount of progress, there's an extraordinary amount of energy and an extraordinary amount of pride in what China has managed to do.  There have been a few major bumps in the road, June 4, 1989 was certainly a bad one.  The Chinese Communist Party didn't survive.  Since then it has managed to save at least half of the reform program that it began in the 1980s and the two halves are, of course, economics and politics.

After 1989 and before Deng Xiao Ping died, when he was still paramount leader, he kick- started China back into this fevered pace that we now witness when we go there.  Growth rates that had reached as high as 14 percent are up around 89 percent now.  Indeed, China confronts the paradoxical situation of having growth that may be too fast.  The economy is overheating and how do you slow it down?  Of course, that has other consequences.

This is all to say that in a certain manner China has been a stunning success.  If one inhabits the world of business, one cannot but take one’s hat off. Indeed we've been through several layers of miracles in Asia.  Remember the Japanese miracle?  Remember when the rising sun seemed like it would never set in Japan and many of you were running out to buy management books about how they did it?  Go get the Gospel.  Then Japan faded, and then do you remember the Five Dragons?  Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand.  People thought this was the Promised Land and there was another whole slate of books that came out.  Now we have the China miracle.  It is only a cautionary reminder for me to tell you that what goes up often comes down and one would be advised to take a Hindu notion of life in general: namely, we're all on this wheel of life, nothing is eternal.  It may be that China is something of a bubble; it may be that it forges ahead, we don’t really know the answer to that, but we do know that in economics it has excelled.  The area in which China has been much more torpid is, of course, in the area of political reform: that process which it has undertaken in certain cautious ways in the 1980s and was interrupted by the student demonstrations and the Beijing massacre in 1989 which was making China more open, more democratic and less of a kind of Marxist-Leninist state which we were familiar with during the Mao years.

So one has to ask:  How long can it be that half of this country, the economic part, goes at breakneck speed while the other half goes sort of creeping much more slowly along?  Is that discontinuity a fundamentally unstable one?  And we also have to wonder that if there isn't an electable process of openness in the marketplace that leads to openness in other aspects of life, how is China going to bring about this transformation on the other side of the ledger – that part which is much more retarded than the economic route?

I started off by saying that everybody wants to know where China's going but the truth is nobody knows where it is going. No one knows what the model is towards which it seeks to evolve, and one of the reasons for this is that within the framework of politics in China today there can be no debate of consequence over such issues as the critical political issues which really lie at the heart of almost any nation.  No nation lives by economics alone, just as no nation lives by politics alone.  The Chinese found out that latter presumption was false when their revolution failed.  It was an almost purely political revolution.

Now, they've lurched to the other extreme. I want to highlight that China is a land of extremes.  It is a land that lurches from one totalistic conception to another, and in a certain sense it has gone from the extremism of politics to the extremism of an unbridled marketplace.  So how can it get itself back in balance, particularly when it can't talk to itself?  Well, as the dean of a journalism school, far be it for me to extol our own television, possibly even our own media, as being exemplary.  But there are certain things that we can do in this country.  We can talk to each other more or less. Sometimes we miss a beat, for instance on the Iraq war.  We didn't, I think, rise to the occasion of doing due diligence on weapons of mass destruction as early as we might have.  But by and large we do have an open and free press.  China does not.  The absence of this means it is very difficult for China to have a discussion with itself about where it wants to go, what it wants to look like when it presumptively gets there, and what political model do they aspire to emulate and to affect in their country.  Remember, China is in a massive state of transition from the Marxist-Leninist society with a very extreme Maoist revolution to what? Not known.  And how might China find out the answer to this question?  Well, given the present state of affairs, the closedness of the media, the controls that are on the political life of the country, it's not going to be an easy question to raise, much less to answer. 

But I think there is a place that China could turn to begin to get back in touch with this sort of absent political side of itself, which I think we all would agree cannot be ignored forever.  I mean, countries may not like governments, and republics in particular don't like governments, but we're very loathe to live without them and we all know the reasons why: garbage collection, the police, the schools, the highways, protection against unsafe food, regulation of financial markets -- one could go on.  China does not particularly want to turn towards America.  It's not a great time for America to be proselytizing for anything, certainly not rights, certainly not certain aspects of democracy given what's been going on of late in the Middle East.  In any event, there's a great sensitivity towards that because the West has for many decades been viewed by China as something of an overweening force or a censuring force, sometimes predatory.  The Communist Party calls it imperialism.  So we aren't a particularly good candidate for China to turn to, nor are we particularly good as evangelists in China at this moment for how they might better go about the process of governing themselves. 

There is one very indelibly Chinese source to which they can turn. Alas, because Communist parties are never particularly good about treating history respectfully, they tend to airbrush, wipe out, censor, reinterpret, rewrite.  They have been unable to find the enormous benefit that exists within their own history that might help guide them through the process of understanding politically what China could become. This was a discussion that took place back in the second part of the early five decades of the last century, after the last dynasty fell in 1911.  It is one of the most exciting debates that I think the world has ever had on how you reinvent a country.  This is China's problem.  How do you reinvent yourself?  You're not going to be Maoist anymore.  Yes, his portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square, but that's not the model.  What is the model?  Well, you have to go through this process of self-reflection, discussion of national dialogue and finally, as our country went through with the Founding Fathers, you reinvent who it is you want to be that will lay down some founding documents.  You have to actually have a conception of what it is you want to evolve into. 

This debate  grew out of a movement called the May 4 Movement, which erupted at the end of the First World War when all of Germany's concessions in China were given to Japan.  People fled into the streets much as they did in April, May and June 1989.  And out of that grew a debate of such towering intelligence, and in many cases eloquence, about what China's relationship should be with the West.  What part of the West should it adopt?  Should it be a constitutional monarchy, should it be a republic? 

A series of Chinese intellectuals, many of whom were educated in the West and Japan, laid down a corpus of work, of thought and discussion, which is lying almost undisturbed in the archives and libraries of China through these five decades of revolution. Waiting, something like the classics in the monasteries during the Middle Ages, to be unearthed, retranslated and reinseminated back into cultural and political life as they were during the Renaissance in Europe.  These are written in beautiful Chinese and since they were a part of the first movement in China of a vernacular language, it means they were in the language that people spoke.  This Chinese language was written in a classical form which nobody could understand because it wasn't the way you spoke, so an ordinary person would read it and would have no idea what it meant.  And if you pick these books up and you read them today it almost makes you weep.  I could name names, Hoshur, Yang Chi Chao, even Sun Yet Tsen, who was dismissed for many years in this country as sort of a lightweight. He had a very clear, highly evolved schedule of how China got from being basically a one-party authoritarian state under an emperor to a republic all laid out. So many stages, so many principles, a free people’s principles -- and it’s basically forgotten.

  So, I would say this process of reinvention is absolutely inescapable in my view, because every country needs to know who it is, what it stands for, and where it's going.  China could do worse than turn back to its own heritage, people in its own history who went through this territory themselves; though alas it came to naught.  The Japanese invaded and it put an end to this discussion and it also made it inevitable that the Chinese Communist Party would come to power, and that was the final and total end of this discussion because Leninists don't particularly want to have a discussion on political futures because they know what the future is and it's Leninist. 

Now China is waking up again and it seems to me that if it fails in this task it risks a monumental danger the next time the business cycle I spoke of comes around, as it always will. It needs some other source of legitimacy, value and institutions to sustain this country. It will need to have had this discussion and build those political institutions that are not the old Stalinist ones laid down in the '50s that it still rests upon.  It can ignore this for a while, and it has, but it can't ignore it forever. I think it would behoove it to turn not to the West, not to the Marxism-Leninism of Russia and Europe, that's a Western import, but towards itself.  Back to what it's own people did when they did the first process of due diligence, what China should become as it molded out of its own imperial era. 

Xiao Qiang

Thank you, Rick. It's a real honor to be here and to share some thoughts about China with you.  Today, because it’s the 15^th anniversary I can deliver a personal [address] because it was 15 years ago, I was a student here studying physics, already in my third year in Ph.D. studies. I went back to China when I saw what happened.  I spent two months there and then became a human rights activist for the next 14 years and last year I started teaching in Berkeley. And because of that I'm living in exile, so what you're going to hear it's not some journalist or journalist professor from journalism school who is unattached with an unbiased view.  I'm speaking as an activist Chinese exile. 

Talking about the Tiananmen legacy, I can think of many things, but from a personal view I'll tell you the first thing I can think of is fear. I got on an airplane to go back to China, I went back to Beijing, I walked on the streets in the city where I grew up, just a few weeks after the massacre.  We already saw on TV, we all remember that, the attacks, the soldiers.  Why that many tanks?  Why that many troops?  For what?  Do you remember the soldiers all wearing helmets and white gloves, weapons, marching on the streets?  I was there watching them and asking myself that question: why white gloves in the middle of June, which was quite hot?  I can answer. They were creating the fear.  They drove the message home.  They have to use tanks, they must use heavy weapons, they used every single symbolic message and real bullets to tell the Chinese, "Don't ever, ever rebel again. We crush. This is power.”

That was 15 years ago, and that's still there.  Did that fear really permanently crush the spirit of the Chinese for democracy and established stability?  I think fear goes both ways.  It goes into the government permanently.  They can't deal with it after 15 years.  They live in permanent insecurity.  The government has lost its legitimacy.  Yes, they created economic market reforms.  I'll touch upon that again, but the enormous, very successfully economic growth is part of a response to this legitimacy crisis.  The People's Republic, the People's Congress.  It all came to the true colors of bullets and tanks at that one event.  And that was it.  There's a generation of Chinese that do not trust government at all, not any more.  So they created the fear, they created the legitimacy crisis and they certainly also destroyed the public morality. Which is the people who participated, had hope in China, thought they would have a certain unity with the government, after the Cultural Revolution, all the disasters China's opening up, that we're all together on this.  No. After that people make money for themselves.  Now government is giving them a chance to make money. Great, but  I’m doing it for myself. The government, lost the long-term thinking.  Who's responsible for the state?  Nobody.  Look at the environmental degradation.  Look at the older policies. Do the Chinese leaders know the long-term future?  I don't think they even think more than ten years ahead. But can China afford a nation with 1.3 billion people?  Nobody thinks for the long-term.  Nobody sees the ownership, because of that trust that was destroyed at Tiananmen and it's hard to heal because government is still denying it. 

I'll talk about the economic success.  We certainly all see it.  I don't need to elaborate on it.  That's partially a consequence of the legitimacy crisis. The government decided to continue to push this new deal with the Chinese people -- while you keep us in power we will allow you to make money and you'll remember to be rich is to be glorious. In a way it worked a miracle in China. 

And there's another policy that goes: "Don't debate.  Don't discuss."  In particular, it means don't discuss politics, don't discuss June 4. In a way you can see the political side of it which is, let's just move forward, let's just move up and we'll open up the economy, partially because there's a legitimacy, and partially because China has to go forward.  Don't discuss.  If you open the discussion whether it's socialism or capitalism or whether it's the Communist Party or dictatorship, it never ends and it cannot afford the instability.  So, there's no discussion.

It's still going on today. You see the value of it but also you want to question: Is this policy sustainable, can China not discuss it's own pain, it's own wound, it's government’s crimes?  Can there be no discussion on the direction China is going, what it means to be Chinese? Because if you open that discussion you'll touch upon all these issues that deepen the wound of June 4, 1989.  Undo the legitimacy of the Communist Party and everything else. 

But this is the Internet age now.  Because of the economic growth, because China is now by fact is part of a global economy.  That's enormous progress.  At the same time, how long can you not allow those implicit issues now becoming explicit?  It's becoming more and more explicit, but the government is not responding that way, government is still trying to use the old control methods, and I'm not sure that can last very long.

Now I’m running this China Internet project at UC Berkeley and am watching the development of Chinese cyber-space closely.  Five years ago there were few Chinese Internet users. Today it's more than 19 million.  There are how many members of the Chinese Communist Party?  There are about 70 million.  And from 1970s society where  people were tied into working units and peasants could no travel very far from their villages there are now 2.8 million cell phones.  Internet, TV, it's a highly connected mobile society now, inland it’s still very backward -- but in general it's a different society. In this highly connected society, can you really tell people “don't discuss.”  Can you really control the country that way?  I do not think so.  I do think there is a huge challenge for China, for the people, for the government.  How do you face the elected officials, how do you face 1989? 15 years didn't go away, because if it's gone away people could discuss it in an explicit kind of way. That is why this issue has the power to transform Chinese society. No matter how far you go you run into deeper political structure issues, if you address it, you have to come back to June 4, 1989, 15 years ago. China cannot really go beyond that until you discuss it, until you tell the truth, until you say you're going to make peace with history.  How China's going to do it, I don't really know, but I do know that in this highly connected age the central power has much less control. There are much faster changes happening in those network societies where new social norms emerge, new information becomes a fashion. A revolution may emerge using those technologies and communication tools.  If they are still centered in fear and insecurity, if there's still no trust, no unity between the society and the government.  If they still cannot create some kind of real identity for the society, those fears will come out and become something hard to control. 

So, I would conclude by saying there is us a lot of uncertainty for China, for the Chinese people, that we don't know what will come in the next 20 years.  We don't know we'll make that much money, we do everything we can now, but what next?  That uncertainty, deep down, is related to June 4, 1989 – fifteen years ago.

Thank you.

Richard Baum

I'd like to return to the subject that was raised in Nick Kristoff's editorial this morning because, if I may paraphrase Kristoff and also include an entire school of political theory called "modernization theory," Kristoff is assuming that affluence, information, and social mobility will breed political pluralism.  That's the hypothesis in a nutshell.  It's called "peaceful evolution."  It's one of the things that the Chinese leadership was afraid of in 1989.  Now, how can we test this hypothesis?  Does in fact affluence, material proliferation of economic opportunity, geographic mobility, social mobility, information revolution -- how can we test the hypothesis that these create more pressure, more opening for political pluralism and political competition? 

Well, we have a case study not far away from China at all.  Just across the Taiwan Straits.  Taiwan is a very good example of a country that evolved very quickly from a rigid authoritarian political system to a very open pluralistic democratic system. The conditions that made that possible Taiwan do not yet pertain to China, but it is inching forward. Again, those conditions would be affluence, information and social mobility. 

Taiwan has developed as a result of the economic miracle of the '60s and '70s.  Taiwan had evolved into an emerging middle class society.  By the time the democratic reforms began in earnest in the mid to late-1980s, Taiwan had already experienced two decades of rapid economic growth of not dissimilar type to what China itself is undergoing now. An emerging middle class formed in Taiwan, a middle class that was both self-confident and mainly Taiwanese in national original – that is, they were not transplanted mainlanders. And they wanted participation in the system that had been relatively closed to them previously but because of their economic middle class status they had a stake in the system. Having a stake in the system breeds not revolution but allegiance to the system.  And so they could open up the Taiwanese political system to a whole range of people who had been excluded from such participation and the system didn't collapse or implode. 

That's the lesson of Taiwanese democratization, that if you include the middle classes, the emerging middle classes who have a vested interest in the economic and. indirectly at least, the political system, then you can have a pluralistic political competitive system without risking the overthrow of the entire regime.

Just by way of postscript, I was in Taiwan two months ago for the election of March 20 and if the proof of the pudding of democratic stability is in the eating then I would say that Taiwan survived rather well a very severe test of its democratic institutions when the president was shot the night before the election and that shooting in all probability changed the outcome of the election.  It probably did.  We'll never know for sure but it certainly seems that was the case.

Many commentators said, "Oh, I doubt this demonstrates the Taiwanese are this far away from chaos and instability," but the truth is the system held even though the opposition party didn't gracefully accept defeat.  It was worse than the Florida situation.  Four years ago in Florida, at least the loser after a while, after the court intervened, accepted begrudgingly, in the name of political expediency and political continuity the results of the election. In Taiwan the losers still haven't accepted it, but the system has survived. It has not become paralyzed, it has not come crashing down, there has even been a presidential inauguration.  I think this, to my mind, shows an enormous success in a democratic transition which is only 15 years old, after all.  And it hasn't been very long since the Koumintang looked very much like the Chinese Communist Party as a one-party authoritarian regime. 

So, is there hope for China in this model of peaceful evolution that occurred in Taiwan?  I would say yes, there is.  Should we expect China to emerge and look more and more like Taiwan?  Well, let's look at some of the figures. You've already heard some of the figures on the communication revolution – 280 million cell phones, 90 million Internet users.  There are some other indicators that are of interest.  There are 42 million satellite dishes in China, which means that information from all over the world can get to many, many people. Even in the most remote parts of the country you see satellite dishes, even though technically they're illegal, people have them and use them.  There are 12 million automobiles in China, ten million of which are private.  That may not sound like much, there may be that many in Southern California, but ten years ago there were almost none and certainly no private automobiles ten years ago.  Auto sales are up 83 percent year on year the first three months of this year.  There is simply an enormous demand for these instruments of mobility.  They're also instruments of deteriorating environmental quality, but at least in terms of middle class mobility this is a very good indicator.  There are now 1,100 McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets in China and, this is some of that good-news-bad-news category, there are 117,000 lawyers in China.  I don't know how to count that:  Is it a blessing or a curse?  But it certainly indicates that contracts and civil law and various legal ramifications of the modernization and economic development process is very much central to the whole development operation and project in China. 

China has a middle class now estimated at between 10 – 15 percent of the urban society.  Most people in China now own their own homes interestingly enough – 59 percent of families own their own homes.  It's not to say they own homes that are similar to those on the west side of L.A.  They're very small and crowded for the most part, but they do own them.  So, there is a middle class that's emerging.  It's more evident on the coast than it is in the interior, more evident in the cities than in the countryside. 

The progress of this remarkable revolution has been very uneven and so there are great differences – vast differences – in income, in purchasing power, in education, in job mobility.  And these are worrisome because the political system as we heard already tonight is rather brittle, partly because of the aftermath and backlash from Tiananmen 15 years ago. The government is very nervous about possible sources of political instability, and that brittleness doesn't serve the government very well when it comes to solving the real problems of an economy that's booming, but unevenly so and is creating unemployment in the process.  A lot of people are out of work, a lot of people are moving around the country in search of work, there's a lot of corruption, there's an HIV-AIDS epidemic that’s virtually bursting at the seams and the political apparatus is struggling to deal with it partially because of its own brittleness.  It would be a daunting task for any kind of government to deal with the kind of changes that have been unleashed in China in the last 20 years.  But when the government is brittle and sort of nervous and insecure  it becomes even more difficult to adapt and adjust and accommodate demands for equity, demands for justice, demands for fair play.  So the Chinese government has some serious problems. 

What about other models for democratic transition or for political pluralism? What about the Hong Kong model, since our topic tonight is Greater China and that includes Hong Kong?  As many of you know, there have been some signs of distress coming from Hong Kong lately.  I was living in Hong Kong in 1997.  I lived through the handover there.  You may recall 6,000 journalists showed up on the eve of the handover on July 1 expecting the PLA to come marching in with jack boots to arrest demonstrators and lay down the law.  Well, of course, that didn't happen.  The transfer of power in Hong Kong was quite peaceful and quite orderly and basically most people spent the three-day holiday that was declared for the occasion shopping in malls rather than demonstrating or being arrested or having trouble of various kinds.  And from 1997 until very recently, things were rather stable and ok in Hong Kong.  There was some censorship in the press, there were some reports about intimidation, but by and large Hong Kong remained free and pluralistic and very much open. 

That has been called a little bit into question of late. Last year the Hong Kong government tried to introduce legislation which -- in fact in was mandated to do so by the Basic Law, which is Hong Kong's constitution -- to introduce legislation on treason, sedition and cessation, that is, a security law, a basic security law, on how to handle challenges to the security of the state. Once the government introduced what turned out to be a rather hardnosed piece of legislation, people in Hong Kong, close to a million of them, demonstrated their disapproval by demonstrating in the streets about a year ago and the backlash and fallout from that event has still not completely settled down.

The democrats in Hong Kong, pro-democratic parties, have been demanding or asking for fuller democratic elections of their legislature and of their chief executive.  As it stands now the legislature is only half democratically elected and the chief executive is appointed by a committee and picked by Beijing.  So there really is not an elected government, strictly speaking, in Hong Kong. In the last year various groups and interests in Hong Kong have been agitating for a faster timetable towards the transition to full democracy to elect a chief executive and a fully elected legislature. The Chinese government which, after all is the landlord, may have given Hong Kong autonomy for 50 years and the Basic Law, which is written to guarantee it, but it is the landlord, and if the tenant starts banging around the furniture in the house the landlord at least has a legal right to come in and say, "Cut it out." 

Of late, the Chinese government has, for the first time, begun to intervene in Hong Kong by making its opinions known about democratic transition. There will be no directly elected chief executive in 2007 or ‘08, there will be no fully democratically elected legislative council in 2007 or ’08.  Those were the earliest years that it was possible to do so, and the Chinese government has now said it won't happen and there's been a reaction in Hong Kong, a public reaction. This week we will see just how upset and angry the citizenry is. On June 4 there's always an anniversary and candle-lit vigil in Hong Kong and, in past years, they have been attended by anywhere from 10,000 to 80,000 people.  So this is sort of a barometer of public mood in Hong Kong.  We'll have to wait and see just how upset people in Hong Kong are. 

Hong Kong, therefore, is a bit troubled, like Taiwan.  Taiwan is troubled, but on the other hand the process of democratization, which is what these troubles are about, is never an easy, smooth, or calm process.  The very essence of a democratic system is that it must be able to tolerate dissent, must be able to tolerate tension, disagreement, even unrest. The stronger the democratic system, the more it can tolerate. 

Now, whether the Chinese have done themselves a service or disservice by postponing or at least putting the brakes on political reform, we don't know yet.  It can be argued both ways.  That the crackdown after Tiananmen and the deliberate decision to go full speed ahead with economic reform, market reform give people the opportunity to make money, distract them from their political problems and unresolved political issues, that has certainly contributed to the growth and lack of development of China -- putting the foot on the accelerator of market reform and joint ventures and foreign investment and all these things. But the simultaneous decision to put the brakes on the political reform process? -- it's true they were able to hold Humpty Dumpty together that way.  It's true that China has remained in one piece while the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and most other at least industrial Communist countries go by the wayside.  The only remaining Communist countries outside of China are very backwards, very orthodox and very undeveloped economically. 

So, China is an anomaly, it's a Leninist state that actually survived the turmoil of 1989 to 1991, but did they buy time at the cost of ultimate system failure?  We don't know yet because things are still brittle in China, and, as the economy and society become more complex, the problems become more difficult, and there need to be political mechanisms that can reflect accurately people's experiences, people's expectations, people's fears, people's anger.  There have to be public opinion institutions, have to be mass media institutions that do more than just transmit the party's policies downward: They have to transmit the popular pulse upward. There has been very little autonomous institution and public opinion in China of what we would call input into the political process or feedback. This is what China vitally needs and this is what has been stunted in the aftermath of Tiananmen.  So, it's sort of a classic good-news-bad-news situation.  Yes, China has remained relatively stable politically, yes there have been great economic problems, but the bills have not come due yet.  The piper hasn't been paid. China still has a very fragile political system and is going to have to relax and let the system evolve if it is going to, I think, survive and flourish in the way Taiwan has done in the last 15 years.  It remains to be seen whether this generation of leadership has the will, the courage and the determination to do so.

Views expressed are not necessarily those of the World Affairs Council, which pays neither honoraria or expenses to its speakers.