How Can Liberal Democracies Promote Democracy In China?
Excerpt from interview published in China Journal of Democracy Edition 1 of 2024
Yu Haofeng, Associate Editor, China Journal of Democracy,
Interviews
Roger Garside, former British Diplomat and Author
An Extract
Yu: You have described the many problems and weaknesses of the communist regime, so now let's turn to the main question of this interview: How can liberal democracies promote democracy in China?
Roger Garside: Any answer to that question must take account of the history of our attempts to achieve this goal since the death of Mao in 1976.
In the time we have, I must put it briefly and simplistically, and leave aside the wider global context.
Fundamentally, the ultimate aim of liberal democracies for the relationship between them and China and the Chinese Communist Party’s aim for that relationship were and are incompatible: we want a democratic China, with whom we can have a trusting, mutually beneficial relationship, while the CCP wants a totalitarian dictatorship which will reshape the world order.
For a long time, many in the liberal democracies believed that engagement with China would achieve their objective gradually and peacefully. This was a delusion based on a failure to appreciate the true character and true goal of the CCP.
Engagement has had a major impact on China, the full consequences of which have not yet played out, but it has not achieved a democratic China by gradual peaceful means. The Party put an end to it precisely because it could see that if engagement and the transition to a market economy continued, the totalitarian dictatorship would be undermined. It followed the teaching of Karl Marx that the political superstructure depends on the economic substructure. As a totalitarian party, it gave priority to its political monopoly over true economic health. Even if we wanted to resume engagement as we practiced it for thirty years we could not, because it is no longer on offer from the Chinese side.
That is where we are now, but history has not ended, and we cannot yet say what the ultimate impact of our past engagement on China will be.
We should have realised from the outset that we could not achieve a democratic China through gradual, piecemeal reform. Totalitarian regimes cannot be reformed, as Gorbachev learned when his reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. They can only be ended through revolutionary change.
Now let us let look at the history in a little more detail.
For three decades following the death of Mao, “engagement” as the liberal democracies thought of their strategy, and “Reform and Opening” as the Chinese named theirs, suited both sides well.
The liberal democracies profited greatly from their massive flow of goods and investment into China and the opportunities for cultural and social influence, to which gave rise.
Reform and Opening suited the Chinese Communist Party because, the Party recognised that to continue to rule China it must make tactical concessions: it must somewhat relax its control; allow increase of economic, social and religious freedom; build a system of laws and legal institutions in order increasingly to rule by law (as distinct establishing the rule of law), and tolerate some measure of dissent and some freedom of expression and non-political assembly; and allow some opening to foreign trade and investment, including entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
For many years, US trade with China was in principle related to improvements in its treatment of certain human rights and Congress could withhold Most Favoured Nation Treatment, but it never did. The Clinton presidency from 1992 started with an executive order that linked renewal of China's MFN status with seven human rights conditions, but every year Congress overrode this policy. This was partly because of pressure from business interests, but also because the magnitude of the impact of the growing relationship with China on its social and economic life led many to believe that engagement was actually changing China politically, or would do so. They mistook the Party’s tactical concessions for systemic change. The Party was careful not to disabuse them. It followed the line which Deng Xiaoping would encapsulate in his 24-character strategy in 1990, now referred to in English-language commentary as “Hide and Bide”, i.e. encourage belief in political change and keep a low profile to avoid antagonising the US and its allies.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Chinese who favoured democracy and the rule of law exploited the limited freedoms that had been granted to push for more, using law as a defence against the abuse of human rights and beginning to develop civil society. Chinese intellectuals embraced liberal ideas. More and more classic liberal texts were translated into Chinese, including Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Popper, Milton Friedman, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand. Demand for translations of the works of Friedrich von Hayek became voracious. As Liu Junning, a leading Chinese liberal and a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote in 2000, “Chinese liberalism today gives special attention to property rights, economic freedom, constitutionalism, the rule of law and limited government, individualism, toleration, pluralism, and the open society.” Liu observed that: “Today, almost all of those who shape public opinion and most of the "celebrities" in virtually all fields in China are liberals. Among Chinese intellectuals, pride in being a leftist has been replaced by pride in being a liberal.”
But the contradictions inherent in a Chinese strategy of economic and social reform unaccompanied by political reform were bound to make themselves felt sooner or later. In 2004, Zhao Ziyang, under house arrest, reportedly told a friend who visited him: “What China has now is the worst form of capitalism. Western capitalism in its early phase was also bad, but it could become gradually more progressive. But the worst form of capitalism in China today is incapable of becoming more progressive (my emphasis).”
So it was that the totalitarian character of China’s political system manifested itself as the first decade of the 21st century progressed. Not only did the Party leadership ended the transition to the market in 2008, it began to toughen its social and geo-political strategies. When Xi came to power in 2012, he quickly reinforced controls and diminished areas of freedom previously permitted; he pursued a strategy of restoring the reach of the Party in all areas of life, explicit hostility towards “universal values”, including liberal democracy, and confrontation with liberal democracies. Hide and Bide was dead and gone.
But I believe the Party left the ending of the transition to the market, and the reimposition of controls too late. The 500 million-strong property-owning class. brought into existence by Reform and Opening cannot be wished away. They now account for more than one-third of the nation; they have tasted freedom; the most successful among them have built world-class companies, which they have listed on the New York Stock Exchange; they have sent their sons and daughters to Ivy League universities; many of them have learnt about political systems institutions, and human rights enjoyed in other countries, and understand that law can be used to protect property. They are not immune to the aspirations that have led the bourgeoise elsewhere to press for political power throughout history. They resent that Reform and Opening which generated the wealth and allowed an increase in freedom, has been replaced by Regression and Closing, and that this has come at a high price in terms of relations with the world’s most powerful nations.
The most intelligent members of this class must regard Xi Jinping’s rule as a demonstration of impotence in the face of economic and social reality. Those among them who believed in the possibility of a gradual transformation from totalitarianism to democracy have become disillusioned; already in 2000, Liu Junning wrote: “1989 Tiananmen Square Incident shocked and awakened those intellectuals [who had hoped to make one-party rule more “democratic”]. They gave up hope of “transforming the untransformable;'.” They share Zhao Ziyang’s judgment that China under one-party rule is “incapable of becoming more progressive”. More recently, in 2013, Tiancheng Wang, CEO of the National Committee of the Democratic Party of China, and now Editor-in-Chief of this journal, wrote: “A revolutionary culture has recently begun to reemerge. The gradualist school, though still potent, is losing followers. This change of sentiment and opinion has grown out of frustration at the absence of long hoped for top-down political reform, as well as feelings of dismay roused by the declining economy.”
While senior Party officials, of course, do not want to end up dying of a heart attack in a swimming pool, like former Premier Li Keqiang, there will come a time, as economic crisis deepens and social unrest mounts, when they will judge that their best hope of protecting their own power and wealth - and saving the nation - will be to lead the revolution rather than engage in a futile attempt to suppress it.
Who will lead this revolution? The book I published three years ago, China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom, explained why the totalitarian regime will soon end, and - in semi-fiction - showed how it might end. The three people I named as leading the revolution have all been driven from power and one ended up dead in a swimming pool. So, who will lead the revolution? There is no identifiable leader-in-waiting.
But, who knew, in 1796 before Napoleon Bonaparte a military campaign against Austria that three years later he would launch a coup and become First Consul of the French Republic?
Who knew in 1916 that Vladimir Lenin, a sickly, depressed and pessimistic exile, would lead the Russian revolution in 1917?
Who knew, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to power, that Gorbachev would launch reforms that would lead to the collapse of the Communist Party and the Soviet Union, and that Yeltsin would lead a transition to an elective democracy and a market economy? Even they did not know it.
Revolutionary situations give birth to revolutionary leaders. A revolutionary situation is now building in China which will give birth to new leaders, as in Russia in 1917 and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
When that happens, the strategy of engagement once pursued by the liberal democracies will be vindicated…
…
The future will create opportunities for the US and its allies to use their powerful weapons which I identified above to strike against Xi Jinping and his totalitarian dictatorship and help those Chinese who want democratic change to achieve it. It is essential that we be prepared mentally and institutionally for that hour.
Yu: Where do you see the most likely avenues for opportunities to help Chinese achieve political change to arise in the future?
Roger Garside: The most likely route lies through the crisis in local government funding. As I have said, for now, local governments are keeping themselves afloat by using Ponzi schemes. When those schemes run out of road, as soon they must (the average maturity of local government financing vehicle debt is about 3 years), they will dismiss employees, close down services and terminate infrastructure projects; they will default on their obligations to bondholders; depositors in smaller banks will lose their deposits; investors in wealth management products related to local government financing will lose their capital; businesses dependent on local government financing will collapse, and unemployment will escalate massively. Some of this is already happening in the worst-affected cities and provinces, such as Tianjin and Guizhou.
What will the political consequences of this be? There will be outrage and unrest on a massive scale. I have already described the disillusion and disaffection of the property-owning class. The security forces and military are not immune from that. People in all ranks of both the security forces and the military will have suffered heavy financial loss; their morale and discipline will have been undermined. Young people in the countryside will see that migration to cities, which has provided the escape route from rural poverty for hundreds of millions, has been largely closed off. Liberal intellectuals will see that their hour has come. Members of the political and economic elite who have long been disillusioned but have bided their time, will judge that the best hope of saving what remains of their wealth and power, and the nation, is to lead a political revolution.
China would face the same choice that Britain faced in 1831, when the Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new proletariat that demanded political representation: a choice between political reform and revolt. Thomas Macaulay urged Parliament to approve political reform legislation, warning that "the danger is terrible and the time is short." If Parliament rejected the legislation, it would result in huge property losses and a breakdown of social order. Twelve months later, the legislation was passed, opening the way for the political, economic and social modernisation of Britain.
