#20 The Future of the Chinese Polity

From WMUR found in Washington D.C. the future of

another in a series of discussions of alternative futures. Your moderator is

Joe coach of the world future society.

Mr. Coates Good evening this is Joe codes for the world Futures Society

presenting another in a series of discussions of alternative futures the subject for this evening's

discussion is the future of the Chinese polity. Arnold

Toynbee not so long ago said that our image of communist

China haunts and provokes fear and hostility. What we see is the figure of an

angry giant rearing up and glaring down at us with threatening gestures. This

is how China looks even to Americans who would like to believe that Communist China is

nonexistent to discuss the reality and the future of that image we have

with us this evening.

Doc Barnett and Angus Fraser. Doc Barnett was born in

China one thousand twenty one educated at Yale Franklin and Marshall and in the

Marine Corps. After a stint as a correspondent for The Chicago Daily News

he moved on eventually headed the State Department for an area studies

at the Foreign Service Institute. From 1981 to 69 he was a professor of

Government at Columbia University and headed their contemporary China Studies

Program. Currently he's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He's

edited several books published numerous articles on China and Asia.

Our other discussion this evening is Colonel Angus Fraser U.S. Marine Corps

retired after 25 years of service in the Marine Corps in mainland China

Taiwan and Korea. He has worked as a research analysis analyst at

the international studies division at the Institute for Defense Analysis. Colonel Frazer

specializes in Chinese political military affairs before structure and the role of

the Army and the Chinese policy. Well Dr. Barnett What do you see as

the future of the Chinese polity.

You know I quote from 20 that you gave I think I think caught the flavor

of the image that does exist in the minds of many westerners. One

might immediately point out that a comparable image exists in the

Chinese that the Chinese have felt themselves of him then

threatened. By Western outside powers

I was there to be one of the one of the big problems in the period ahead is whether there can

be some kind of mutual accommodation between China and the West whether the West

will have different images of China learn to get along with China and whether the Chinese will

have different images of the West. My view is that China

is currently going through an extremely important process of

change after this great outburst of revolutionary

energy of the past 10 to 20 years. I would

say that it's reached a transition period. It's waiting in a sense

Molly the great revolutionary leader to go and in the process is undergoing great

change the culture revolution has been the most recent sort of evidence of it. And will

undergo a great change in the future and I presume that's what we will discuss tonight the kind of

change that we here had but Colonel Fraser you agree that the death of me will

be the initiation of a transition.

It seems almost platitudinous to say so but I think he is one of the charismatic

first generation leaders of our time and most

certainly life will never be the same in China after his passing.

People talk about a disruptive power struggle. I think the Chinese

are far too wise for this even during the trying days of the Cultural Revolution.

One could think that none of the antagonists would go

too far in fear of opening China to outside

action are disrupting the total fabric of the country to the point where it would

fall apart. I think that after Mao We will see a

loose alliance of perhaps competing leaders who operate

by debate and consensus and who will in a little increments

never openly violating our arguing with the thought of mobs that don't move

China into a somewhat more realistic position with respect to the rest of the world.

Well it sounds like he's going to become an Oriental pope. But before we go into the

discussion of the factors driving for the future it might be useful to clarify.

How the Chinese government is now organized so that Mao can enjoy such

a critical and essential position not to burn it.

That's not an easy question to answer. Well and I said what if they were having a

very easy or relatively easy up until late 1965

and the Cultural Revolution started. Up until that time our general picture of

China was of a fairly centralized regime was

seemingly all low in retrospect now we have evidence that this was not entirely correct seemingly a

fairly unified leadership pursuing the stated policies of collectivization

socialisation industrialization and so on and the Cultural Revolution though has

been really remarkable phenomenon. In essence this is a great

oversimplification but. Ma instead of becoming more conservative

as he aged as many men do seem to become more utopian

more concerned about somehow making a final try to preserve

his utopian revolutionary values he saw these being undermined by

the growth of a great bureaucratic state. He saw them undermined by the growth of

technocrats in the society. He saw them undermined by leaders who

were more prepared than he to sort of compromise with the realities of the society and what he

did he with military support or at least the support of part of the military in

effect turned on the party set. Lose the youth of

the country and tore down a large part of the organizational structure

that he built. Now China is in the process now of trying to

rebuild it so it's a country in which the distribution of power and authority

is really quite uncertain because it's still being reconstructed it's still in a

transitional state. I think you can say is that in the vacuum it was

created by this tearing down of the old structure what was left as

authority or two things it seems to me. Mao himself. But his

authority will not be transferable to anybody else. And the military

stepped into the vacuum and now is in effect running the country. But this

too I think is a transitional thing the military is going to be very important for quite a long period of

time but the military can't directly rule China and what's going on though is a

slow process of reconstructing the bureaucracy the party bureaucracy the government

bureaucracy. So it is but there's a very slow process and it is a changing

period and one in which as Angus said you already

have much greater competition of forces and leadership I would say even

now is a much more complex leadership than it was before. And when Mao

goes it's going to be even more so. It is going to have to be some kind of a collectivist

or a coalitional type of leadership dealing with a rather diffuse society.

What are the principal components for as you can tell us.

Who are the principal actors or the principal group interests making up this

complex governing body.

Well the conventional wisdom would describe three groups and his

associates and the group around them. Now

not clearly identified as members of that group perhaps competing in

their fervor and competition for Molly's favor. Are the Cultural Revolution

people like Mao's wife junking and a number of others.

Finally then there is said to be thought to be a cluster of more practical

minded or better oriented in the

government governing sense clustered around Geo and why the old

bureaucrats some of the army leaders and the people who

in the 20 year history of the Chinese People's Republic have been the ones who got things done.

What's the role in this. Have you not given the appropriate

emphasis of the technocrats the bureaucrats. Is there a new class coming up

the sort that we had in Yugoslavia and in Russia.

I think it was Mao's perception of just this phenomenon that that had a lot to do with launching the

Cultural Revolution. And I would like to backtrack to something Doc said just a moment

ago. The function of the youth in this whole operation has been very

interesting knowledge complained of visitors in the past that the youth of China were soft. They lacked

any revolutionary experience of any revolutionary zeal and I think one of the

cleverest uses of resources we've seen is the way Mao used the youth against the

bureaucrats while at the same time giving you their revolutionary experience which in

his mind they so badly needed. Now of course the payoff is some 20 to 30 million

of them are now rusticating learning how to be farmers and promising to dedicate the rest of their

life to agriculture.

Let me pick up on what Angus has just been talking about. I group very much agree with that.

The evidence we now have suggests that there was a very strong tendency in the society

towards the development of to use shorthand technocrats people who are

specialized people who are concerned with various sort of narrow

elements of the tasks of the regime and that in the early 60s and the sort of

critical period following the failures economically of the Great Leap leadership of this

kind came to the fore and it was my perception as I said that this is the case

and he tried to combat it. Now at the height of the Cultural Revolution these people were

totally submerged and a very high proportion incidentally of the

leadership of this country was purged during the culture.

What does that mean specifically to be submerged and purged.

Well to be submerged means that the whole weight of the propaganda

apparatus which got control of rather early in the Cultural Revolution was

focused on trying to promote the values of of

self sacrificing generalize and you don't mean these people who are put out of

employment.

Yes I do.

That you do second part of your question and nobody really knows precisely how many

people in the party as a whole were purged or the Russians of claim that over half of the entire

Communist Party were Perris and I whether that's true or not I don't know. But if you look at the

leadership well over half of the top leadership was pre purged as

not incidentally in the Chinese context mean taken out and shot in the Russian sense

purged means deprived of their jobs and sent down the

work except for really indoctrinations. And so most of these people are probably somewhere tucked

away in China but they're not in the jobs they had before. Now they

were therefore subjected to this kind of attack during the Cultural Revolution.

But I would say that in the sort of complicated balance of forces post Cultural

Revolution which we now see it appears to me if you look at

the actions of the regime that you have ups and downs backing and filling and

you'll get Maoist impulses come out low as my self in the group around them.

Call for things like the promotion of barefoot doctors. At this

this idea is just one I picked out of the hat this is to develop a lot of sore semi-trained

people go out in the countryside and provide medical service. Certain rationality that incidentally but

it fits in the mouse sort of approach to things. On the other hand you have it seems to me

pressures in the other direction carabaos are pressures to sort of get things

disciplined under control rebuild the party get things sort of back on organizational basis

pressing for mass mobilization methods other people pressing for more rational systematic

routine EIS organizational methods. This is going back and forth it isn't you know it's unsettled

at the moment.

But with the demise of how do you both agree that they'll be the move toward order regularity and

control.

I think specific problems will be attacked with a little more vision and

imagination a little more thought to their real consequences. But don't you

know the Scripture has been written and it's a question of exegesis now and

I think that the successors will rationalize whatever they do in accordance with

the thought of matzah don't no matter how wildly it actually departs from thought.

Well I'm sure that will in the discussion work back to this point. But

since the future grows out of the present and the present out of the past and since China has

that you are long past. Why don't we take a running start on the future

and see if we can identify some of the basic historical factors that are going to

determine the Chinese future. For example is there a traditional

manifest destiny or expansionism in China which will be realized. Is there a

traditional political structure. Well warlord ism for example which will be

realized in a new embodiment in the future.

Dr. Burnet Well let me go back that far and say that I

think that there are certain very powerful forces that have been growing and operating in

China they've been growing for the last hundred years I would say. They've been

determining the course of events in China the motivation of Chinese in that

basic sense for a good many decades. One is about a vacation

from modernization. The introduction of western science and technology for the development of

industry for the improvement of Agriculture for raising of staff of livings and the

growth of the economic base of this country and the power of this country. And now

there's been a very strong nationalist drive. And this is grown in the

20th century. It is primary in all Chinese groups.

Nationalist communist or anyone else and these are constants.

So I think I think it's absolutely

questionable in my mind that post Mao you will have

these continuing strong drives to build China into a national

power to modernize it and to get economic

growth underway in a significant fashion. The question is

what are post ma leaders going to do in terms of the strategy of trying to achieve these

goals. I feel very strongly that there will be a

swing away although I think Angus is right it will probably be justified by

selective quotation from AO. There will be a swing away from his sort of

visionary approach Mao has believed or

seem to believe that you could push this country forward towards these

national economic modernization goals by demanding sort of

ultimate idealism self-sacrifice on the part of people minimizing sort of rewards and

incentives and things of this guy. By mobilizing people by the

kinds of methods he used during the Revolutionary War and avoiding

bureaucratic routine Nies rationalized ways of going about it now. I don't

think any other leader can even push hard in these directions after Mao goes I

think. China sort of shot its bolt so to speak in this direction with the Cultural

Revolution. And I think of it and the tendency is going to be to pursue these

goals of modernization of national power but by what I personally at least

would call more rational more realistic types of methods.

I agree with that completely. I would like to go back again to

something a word you used a couple of times. You speak of warlordism. I think one

of the phenomena we're looking at today and which has tremendous importance for the

near future say the next five to 10 years anyway is just exactly what the military

people are doing. The Army had to be

introduced into the cultural revolution in a fashion that was rather unfamiliar to the

Chinese they had to be inserted. To restore order

when things were getting out of hand then over time as the bureaucracy was

turned out as Doc has pointed out. We saw the

army in various manifestations moving into control of

leavers a power simply to keep the country going. No we're looking at a

scene where the revolutionary committees which are really running affairs the

pot party committees are being reconstituted very slowly and none have been reconstituted at the

province or regional level.

The army people are running things not as warlords no one is going to

succeed in fighting the image of say the warlords of the 1920s

is completely inaccurate. But what we do see. A group of very powerful

regional and provincial leaders who have the ability now to

withhold our condition the sort of support that they give to the center and who

in return for their support extract certain concessions and certain freedoms in their

own area. Now this brings us up to the really serious question

is China governable you're talking about a country of 700 million

people with. Land

area just not too much larger than that of the United States three point seventy five

million square miles. Communications are still rudimentary. Local

interests and group interests tend to preoccupy most of the people away

from the center of government. And I think what we're looking at first is a

problem of restoring some sort of cohesive

programming and control of programs and plans from the center.

I agree with this and let me elaborate just a bit on this warlord thing one

thing that's important to point out to realize is that the

regional provincial military leaders at the present time are very different from the

warlords because their goals are not primarily local power.

They're exercising local power because they have to in some respects and because they do

have local interests. But I think they're motivated by a very strong nationalism by a very

important identifiable national goals in a way that the old warlords were not.

This basic problem that anchors have been talking about of the distribution of power and

how what is governable from the center in a country like this. I would say that when the

communist first really set up their regime in the mid 50s when they had consolidated and

set up a formal structure they tried an impossible degree of

central control. They tried for a brief period of time to run everything from the

Senate. Now there are a lot of things impelling Chinese and particularly Chinese

communist don't want to do this. There's a long tradition of trying to have central control in China

and the communist desire to plan the society and plan the economy also argued

in favor of central control. But by the late 70s in other words after a very

brief period of time they found they just could not control everything from the center and they began to

decentralized. I am can vets that one thing if one looks.

Future compares it with the past that you are for the long run.

You will have vacillation fluctuations in central centralization vs.

decentralization. But I think for the long haul there is going to be more power down

at the regional provincial and local levels than there has been in the past because this

country is so huge it simply cannot be run in detail from the setting.

I think we're seeing the beginnings of some very very pragmatic activity for

example small industries supplying to power equipment

for agriculture are quite deliberately being moved away from large

clusters and from the big industrial centers in each province now supposed to be working

on its own complex for the production of agricultural equipment. This is simply

one recognition of the fact that too many things cannot be

gathered and controlled from the center. And this may be an indication of where we are

moving in the future and of the growing influence of the group. We talk about as the possible

successors of Mao.

This is going to be a tough and continuing problem because they're built in a way almost

unsolvable dilemmas here. Post my leadership is going to water every

new industrialization it is going to want to have planning it's going to want to. A

quote communist unquote economy of some sort. It is going to want to

mobilize or so I says to the extent it can. And yet it's got to

somehow work out a system where there's a lot of original initiative a lot of original

control a lot of original planning is a very difficult thing to do. I know it's happened in

varying degrees in other communist societies and economies but this is going to be a

problem that they're going to wrestle with for a long time.

Do you see this drive toward economic development to any substantial

degree flowing out of military concerns or fears of foreign

intervention.

Or will the economic development be largely directed at

internal development.

This too I would say is going to be a source of continuing debate there's no doubt that defense

has been a primary motivation from the start and yet it's not the sole motivation by any sense and

what is this in some sense a misperception on the Chinese

part in much the same way that we have traditionally mis perceived the Chinese

I think in the sense of military preparedness Joe the people who

over the years have have held someone popular rather professional military

views must be feeling some gratification because the Russian

menace. As viewed by by the Chinese is

very very real and they are acutely aware of their physical inferiority and

what this means is it probably a greater share of the

available resources for a period of time will go into better

preparing to deal with with a massive order.

Is there a competing interest group in the population perhaps. We entertain the view that

the Chinese used to see the Boid masses of people with the pimple

of control at the top.

We really haven't talked about the groups within the Chinese population. Is there a

consumer interest is there a peasant interest.

Is there a small shopkeeper interest which in some sense exerts a

potentially powerful influential group in the future influential

tendency in the future.

I would say if you start looking at interest groups and China does have something that in the

broadest sense one can call interest group if you start with the bureaucracy itself which is a huge

apparatus in China. And it's clear that over the years you have developed

very real sort of interest groups and getting back to what we're talking about allocation of

resources for defense industries let's say versus other economic purposes that quite clearly clashes

between people of variety of economic ministries are not defense related and

those who have a lot of resources for defense and this is going to continue. If you're talking about interest

groups elsewhere in the society you have to be a little bit more cautious because

in our sense there are two interest groups that has not been possible in the past for people to

organize and push for their own interests. Nevertheless in an

interesting way I am inclined to think that one thing that's happened in the Cultural Revolution is that

this centralized mass organization structure that the regime had

for labor labor unions for workers present associations and things of this kind the

country youth organization this broke down and these organizations not really

been reconstructed. And in the confusion almost chaos at times of

the Cultural Revolution you did have groups springing up and competing

with each other all over the country. Now one question mark I would have. Is whether

these will take on or may take on overtime some of the characteristics are sort of locally

rooted interest groups I don't think this is certain but it's possible.

What would you say.

I would agree with that. The groups that sprang up during the Cultural Revolution

tended to base their association on ideological

considerations and there were many many rather rather severe fights

between two groups each of which contended that it was the custom of the thought of Mao and

the other just didn't know how to handle this sort of thing. But as don't points up

now that they have gotten together and all that they see the advantages of working

together they will be able to focus their interests on other matters. But what

sort of interest groups they will constitute is pretty hard to predict at this point.

And to that lady I don't think certainly I would and I doubt Fagus would either like to leave the impression

China is on the verge of being a highly pluralistic society in a political

sense. It's a terribly complicated society that has always been highly

organized. Many local organizations on the other hand the relationship of the state

to social organization has always been one which the state has had predominate. Now I don't think that's going

to suddenly change. I think this is an old pattern is likely to persist.

Well could we look at what is perhaps. Chestnut in all

discussions of the future you may have some particular importance in Chile and the

interplay of population and food. What pattern do you see for the

future and what influence especially influence you see.

Dr. Burnat I shouldn't preface every comment I make by that's a

tough question. Well yeah. The facts as

little we know them are roughly as follows that the population is somewhere let's say between seven and a

hundred million estimate some go as high as close to 800 million in

this country at last report and their figures on this sort of saying have a birth rate over 2

percent. This is it poses a very fundamental

problem. I would say that over a period of

time. It was rational or relatively rational policy China can keep ahead of its

population and general economic growth and agriculture to China has yet

for example to really take advantage of these new so-called miracle rice

and wheat grain SEPIC they began.

They've just been announcing that they have their own sort of strains

equivalent to the new Mexican wheat in the Philippine rice and these have been produced with the aid of the

thought of don't like it was.

Now when I look up there's a there's that little Whitney you follow everything

everything with the thought of most of that.

But in the long run I think as I started to say I think for a short run they can keep ahead the long

run the future of this country depends very much on a basic sense of whether they can bring down their

net population growth are you talking now in terms of when you say the long running talking 25

years 50 years.

You know I would say 25 I'd say they have about 20 years in which to do something

significant about this problem.

They're trying to they have adopted population control policies but

it's not easy primarily raw agrarian population to carry

out these could could we perhaps over me either of you a brief word on the future role of

women in China. Well briefly

I think women in China have been going throughout the last 50 years but

particularly says a Kavis period a basic change in their old society they're merging into

for example productive roles and other roles and to an extent they have not before and

I think this is one thing that certainly going to continue over the next several decades.

Colonel for it you can are I concur completely there are much more active in there they're

participating in the sorts of things that they've they've never been involved in before and there's

some rather formidable looking lady militia.

Is this likely to lead to a turn down in population just because they'll have some distractions

outside the home.

I think the turndown population has already taken place because of distractions outside home

activities and methods of living that very effectively

encourage later marriages in smaller families.

Well thank you Dr. Barnett. Thank you Colonel Fraser for this excellent discussion of the factors

driving toward the future Chinese polity. This has been another in a series of discussions presented

by the world future society. The objectives of the society are to encourage the serious

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