James Mann sees three potential futures for China the same way:
It is possible to envision three scenarios for China. One can be called the Soothing Scenario: that China's authoritarian political system is bound to open up, or even that it is already evolving toward political liberalization.
Another scenario holds that China is so fundamentally unstable that it is headed for some sort of political cataclysm or economic nosedive, or both. Call this the Upheaval Scenario.
And then there is what I call the Third Scenario: that China's one-party political system will not change in any fundamental way. This view holds that China will remain an authoritarian regime over the long term.
Mann thinks the third scenario is most likely. In the near term, over the next generation, I imagine Mann is right. The Chinese have learned from the Soviets and will not make the mistake of linking economic reforms with even limited political reforms as the Soviets tried. And Tiananmen Square in 1989 showed that the Chinese were willing to slaughter Chinese citizens to make their point that the Chinese people are "free" only to get rich and make China more powerful. So the third scenario is certainly the one the Chinese rulers are aiming to achieve.
But is it their choice alone?
I mean, based on the experience of the Soviet Union tryng to open up the economy and ending up collapsing their political system, I'm sure the Chinese rulers want that third course. I mean, of course they want this course.
But even though the Chinese seem to have succeeded so far in expanding their economy while keeping the political field narrow where the Soviets failed, must this continue just because the Chinese rulers rather obviously want to keep ruling a more powerful China?
I've long said that I don't know whether a successful China that can match our defense spending is more of a threat to our security than a failing China that splits apart into warlord kingdoms.
And I don't know if China will become our friend or enemy. A democracy or still a dictatorship.
I still don't know. And arguing that China's communist rulers want a successful economy with Communist Party control really doesn't tell me anything I don't already know.
UPDATE: One reason I don't find a crack-up in China eventually as unrealistic. Half of the Chinese people can't understand each other:
Of the half-million people asked, 53 percent said they can communicate effectively in spoken Mandarin, Xinhua reported. In cities, the rate was 66 percent, while in rural areas, it was 45 percent.
All Chinese dialects share the same written language, which has been in use for 3,000 years, but the pronunciation of the identical characters differs from area to area, especially between northern and southern China.
One day, much as we speak of "Europe" as a geographic description rather than a political description (and hopefully the EU will fail t make "Europe" mean a political description), "China" could be a geographic desrciption of a number of independent state in East Asia.
One promising sign for China is that younger people are more likely to speak the common tongue, so the potential fissures based on language might be shrinking.
I don't know whether that is ultimately good or bad. But I think it is possible. The number of countries in the UN continues to grow--not shrink. So until we get some mergers (raise your hand if you think France and Britain really want to give up their permanent UN Security Council seats to the "EU" representative) that show this trend reversing, I see no reason to rule out a break up of China.
