The Chinese Empire Could Burst

The unavoidable comment in China is that political liberalization might threaten the unity of such a huge country. The empire could burst (‘éclater’, in a comparable manner as had been predicted by Carrère d’Encausse for the Soviet Union).

As a very old empire, China has indeed expanded and contracted over the territory with no a priori fixed boundaries. Still during the 20th century the boundaries of China have been redrawn a few times, in particular after the formation of a new republic of Mongolia in 1911, the separation of Taiwan after 1949, the annexation of Tibet in 1951, and the handover of Hong Kong and Macau in 1997 and 1999. In China the appearance of some high degree of ethnic homogeneity may be only the perception of the ignorant external observer, since relevant religious, race and language differences exist among its inhabitants. Although about half of the population officially reports no organized religious affiliation, apparently hundreds of millions practice folk religious traditions and have informal ties to local temples and house churches. While Han Chinese makes up the vast majority of the population, its distribution is highly uneven with large parts of western China having Han Chinese as a minority. The common written language acts as the standard used by an actual minority of the population over a continuum of spoken languages and dialects –apparently with differences as notable as those between, say, different Latin-derived languages in Europe, which may make people from different places unable to understand each other.

So far, villages are the only level of the institutional structure that has been open to people’s direct elections. Village committee elections were introduced to curtail growing unrest in rural China after the communist system of ‘production brigades’ was abolished. The new village committees, each formed by three to seven members, oversee most of the daily affairs of the village people. According to official estimates, about 600 million people may have participated in direct village elections at least once since 1999. These elections imply direct nomination of candidates, more candidates than seats to be filled, secret ballot, several ballot procedures of voting for individuals, and majority rule. It should be noted, however, that the average number of inhabitants in a village is below one thousand people, so making these elections a local affair with no visible impact on the general party’s and institutional structure. Certain analyses pretend that village elections may mark the beginning of a process of democratization from below. But in order to do so, the crucial step would be the implementation of elections at the township level and above, on which there have been only a few experiments and much resistance.

The strategic decision of democratizing a complex multilevel structure, either ‘from below’ or ‘from above’ may have important consequences on the outcome of the whole process. This issue has been widely neglected in the literature on democratization. But, as it was addressed some time ago by Juan Linz and Al Stepan, “the sequence of elections, per se, can help construct or dissolve identities… [because] elections, especially ‘founding elections’, help create agendas, actors, organizations, and most importantly, legitimacy and power”.

Specifically, if during a process of liberalization or democratization, the first elections are local or regional, as happened in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there are strong incentives for people participating to focus on local, regional and ethnic issues, organize local, regional and ethnic parties, and as a result weakening the legitimacy of the union. This effect can be stronger if the general design in the center does not include unambiguous democratization, but only some degree of liberalization, since this can give more open regional and local elections and the subsequent representative structures higher levels of legitimacy. In contrast, if all-union elections are held first, there are strong incentives to create all-union parties and an all-union agenda enabling the elected representatives to make binding decisions about the future of the union. Precisely because China is a so vast ‘empire’ with significant economic and territorial inequalities and high levels of ethnic pluralism, democratizing the ‘center’, that is, the all-China institutions, may be a priority to keep the union up.

REFERENCES

Diamond, Larry, and Ramon H. Myers. 2000. ‘Elections and Democracy in Greater China’, special issue of The China Quarterly; particularly the articles by Kevin J. O'Brien and Li Lianjiang, and by Robert A. Pastor and Quinshan Tan.

Linz, Juan J., and Alfred Stepan. 1992. ‘Political Identities and Electoral Sequences: Spain, the Soviet Union, and Yugoslavia’, Daedalus, 121, 2, 123-139

COMMENTS

Rein Taagepera said...

Rearranging the order of elections could not have preserved the Soviet Union any more than Spain. It lacked the essential cultural glue.

Portuguese still is the prestige language in Angola (not to mention French in Morocco), but Russian lacks any cultural prestige in Estonia.

This degree of imperial failure is quite remarkable.

How is it in Tibet or Siankiang? -- I have no idea.

Rein
Irvine, California, and Tartu, Estonia

Josep Colomer said…

The official version is that people from Sinkiang and from Shanghai, if they ever met, they would understand each other. But I read a few books on Chinese language (fascinating subject!) and I doubt so very much. At least Cantonese in Hong Kong is completely unintelligible for Mandarin-speakers and viceversa.

Rein Taagepera said…

It depends on whom one counts as "people". Native Uighurs, if they know only their own (Turkic) language,would not understand a word from a Shanghai person. But the central coast (Shanghai) version of Han is the likely lingua franca of Han colonists who have immigrated to Siankiang from all corners of China. Those Uighurs who have mastered some Chinese probably would also have been taught that version. It's a far cry from mutual non-understanding between Cantonese and Pekinguese, where the differences are age-old. So the east-west dimension rather than the north-south dimension would be chosen as an apparently neutral example by those who stress uniformity, but they do so at the cost of counting only Han speakers as "people". I wonder if those Han colonists in Siankiang order Uighur speakers to "speak a human language" when interacting with them, the way Russian colonists did in Soviet Estonia.

Salvador Giner said...

It will burst!

I predicted in 1982, that the Russian system would break down, and precisely how it would. (La Vanguardia, 4 December 1982).

Jan-Erik Lane said...

Like Max Weber, you underestimate the role of naked power.

Perhaps it could be of interest to other scholars to realise that Weber left out naked power when theorizing political regimes. The most employed macro model in political science is still Max Weber’s theory of legitimate authority or domination, which all undergraduate students all over the world are being told. Scoring high on conceptual parsimony and empirical richness, it merely uses a couple of ideal-types to cover the historical variation in rulerships, from Ancient times to the early 20^th century when presidential and parliamentary democracy was becoming the most relevant choice of a regime. Weber wrote down his theory twice, one shorter version and one longer version – both published in his posthumous Economy and Society (1978). The incredible coverage of empirical details does hide the implicit model, which is true of any text by Weber, attempting to reconcile the historical method with the new tools of sociology.

Now, Weber claims as his basic assumption that naked power cannot last. When a government uses merely the tools of repression, then it is bound to disintegrate and the rime will go down under. The cement between rulers and the ruled is the belief in legitimacy –a special value orientation that confers moral acceptance upon the government from the population. And we all know that Weber identified three types of legitimacy: legal-rational or modern, charismatic or revolutionary, and traditional or customary.

Yet, naked power is more than a mere category to collect a few border line cases or outliers. Naked power can accomplish tremendous results, as with 20^th century totalitarianism, not withstanding all the horrors involved in The Final Solution, the Gulag camps, the Cultural Revolution and bizarre North Korea. Naked power works to some extent in several Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, although carefully hidden behind Wahabism. Saddam Hussein, using somewhat unsuccessfully first Arab nationalism and later on Sunni tradition, could not be brought down except by military intervention. And Iran will not change, perhaps in hundred years, as Shi’ism together with naked power will prove irresistible. When naked power is employed, the outcome may be derisory, as in Latin America and Africa, when military regimes have proved incompetent. But that does not entail that all forms of naked power is inefficient. Far from it. Authoritarianism in China may prove long lasting, especially when combined with stunning economic advances. The present Chinese regime will not hesitate to use a clever employment of the tools of repression, when confronted by a crisis. Naked power is not ridiculous, but offers a basis of regime duration. And it can be brought to high levels of efficiency employing more and refined methods of intimidation and repression.

Naked power does not employ religion or ethnicity as the rationalisation of its domination. It just neutralises or eliminates whatever opposition comes its way.

Jan-Erik Lane

University of Geneva
University of South Pacific