Doomsday strategy no. 593 – The WTO column

One of the most favorite hobbies of Western China-watchers is predicting its demise. When I came to China in the 1990s the stories of disaster surrounding the deathbed of former leader Deng Xiaoping kept the foreign community in China very busy. The climate was rife with all kind or scenarios on how China would fare after this official death and all looked gloomy.
Since then the flow of doomsday stories was only matched by the flow of foreign investments into China. SARS was the latest big acute threat that triggered of a new flow of scenarios. I must admit that at some scary moments it was pretty hard not to think that things would be over very soon. The only reason I did not join the chorus and predicted in those months also the end of China, was the fact that I had seen that all doomsday strategies of the past decade had only one thing in common: they did not work out.
Gordon Chang did five years ago a nice effort by predicting that China would fall apart five years after its entry into the WTO. He brought together a wide variation of really big challenges China is facing, and decided that each of them could bring down China, let alone the fatal combination of all of them. It still has to happen.
So, when Nicolas Kristof, columnist at the New York Times, recently predicted that the internet would challenge the ruling party and bring it down, I had to laugh. Yet again another tea leaf reader telling us that the end is near.

The really nice thing of doomsday scenarios is that they make life relatively simple. All symptoms point in one direction and because the end will be fatal, thinking about nitty-gritty boring things like solutions is not longer needed. Assuming that reality might just be a little bit more complicated does not fit the agenda of the Kristof’s of this world. Wishful thinking has been the driving force behind those media dispatches and that makes them as powerful as wrong.
While the internet is offering the 100 million well-to-do Chinese a powerful new tool to explore, discuss and disseminate new thoughts and information, I do not buy it that it really undermines the status quo in China. On the contrary, in stead of undermining the system, parts of the internet are actually strengthening the power of the central and provincial authorities. For the first time in the history of China, Beijing can have a bit of a clue what is happening elsewhere in their country. In the past, when really strong rumors would reach Beijing before they were silenced by local government officials, Beijing would send out inspection teams. Now the internet offers powerful new information sources.
And reversed, the internet is increasingly used as a tool to send the official messages out. While much of the rest of the world, companies and governments, is still trying to figure out how to use the internet, China is already pretty far is organizing the way the country is e-governed. Nice new feature was recently the story that some local government has installed official ‘commentators’ who could explain in weblogs and bulletin boards the official government strategy and give backgrounds.
It that going to save the current regime? I’m not sure, but I do think there is very little solid evidence for the opposite. China is becoming a crucial part of the globalizing world and that in itself is a good guarantee for all to large disasters as they developed in the past. All those killing fields of the past developed when China was an isolated, poor country. From that perspective, despite all the major challenges, the future can only be rosy.

Fons Tuinstra

On China's future