Is instability a bad thing and stability, good?

[Botnst]

Like your underwear: Depends.

Bot

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Twilight of the Autocrats

Will the financial crisis bring down Russia and China?

JOSHUA KURLANTZICK | March 16, 2009


Gansu is one of interior China's most forlorn provinces, one that has gone largely unnoticed by the outside world. When I worked in rural Gansu two years ago, I met few people who had ever left their hometown. In one tiny village, ethnic minority Muslims were eking out a living as farmers in the dusty, arid climate and sleeping in simple stone huts that looked like they'd been built centuries earlier. Most villagers had never met a foreigner before.
Then last fall, Gansu suddenly hit the news. Some 2,000 people rioted in one district, torching cars, smashing up the local Communist Party offices, and attacking policemen with iron rods, chains, and axes in protest of a local government decision that might have forced some of them to resettle.

Gansu isn't the only Chinese province that has erupted in social unrest lately. Taxi drivers have gone on strike in several Chinese cities, people who lost money in illegal fundraising have protested in Beijing, and demonstrators have gathered across the country to demand unpaid back wages. Protest has even spread to the Pearl River Delta, the manufacturing center that abuts Hong Kong, traditionally one of the most prosperous parts of the country. In some years, the Delta's factories have produced 5 percent of all manufactured goods made in the world. But orders for the Delta's products have dried up, and angry factory workers, many owed back pay, have taken to looting warehouses. As these protests turn violent, they could provoke a violent response; Chinese factory owners are increasingly hiring thugs to hit back at demonstrators.

The protests hint at something even bigger than China: The economic downturn has created a profound threat to the autocratic regimes of the world, from China and Russia to Venezuela and the Persian Gulf states. Already, the Russian police have been placed on alert to crack down on demonstrators. Several of Russia's prominent human-rights activists have been killed in recent weeks. Protests, once rare, have spread from eastern Russia to the heart of the Kremlin itself.

Modern autocracies are very different from those of the past. Rather than ruling by strict ideology, ruthless internal police, and tight control of information, authoritarian regimes like Beijing and Moscow have remained in power primarily by making an implicit bargain with their most critical middle-class citizens -- you might not have freedom, but you will have money. As long as the broad middle class, which is where the most dangerous dissent would take hold, is gaining ground economically, the regime is safe.

So while in the West, leaders worry that the global economy faces a second Great Depression, such an economic crisis poses a major threat to some of the world's most resilient autocracies. A strong economy was their only backstop. Now, starved of the growth that keeps them in power and unable to repress their people as old-fashioned dictators did, these autocracies may have nothing left to fall back on.

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Over the past decade, authoritarian capitalist countries built impressive economic resumés. China has grown by over 10 percent in most years, and some of its biggest cities, like Shanghai, now boast per-capita incomes of more than $7,000 per year, the same level as a middle-income nation. Russia, all but bankrupt in the late 1990s, has delivered strong enough growth that it now boasts the third-largest capital reserves in the world and has built its gas companies into such powerhouses that they now dominate the markets of Europe. The authoritarian capitalists proved so successful, in fact, that some in the West began wondering whether their model of development had surpassed liberal democratic capitalism. Israeli political theorist Azar Gat argued in Foreign Affairs last year that the most significant challenge to liberal democracy today "emanates from the rise of non-democratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes."

Constant growth kept the populations quiet. In Russia, Vladimir Putin promised to save the country from the ruin of the 1990s, a time when Russians enjoyed a more open society but incomes and wages fell sharply. True democracy, he implicitly suggested, might result in disorder in such a large and unwieldy nation. And in return for higher growth rates and greater disposable income, Russians allowed Putin to slowly strangle their freedoms. "Putin does provide stability of sorts, which the middle classes cherish," says Dmitri Trenin of the Carnegie Endowment's Moscow Center. "Even those [Russians] who oppose authoritarianism in principle fear that the likely alternatives are worse -- outright chaos, populist nationalism, much harsher authoritarianism than Putin's."

In China, the regime made a similar bargain, if not with the masses, at least with its urban middle classes. The regime's investment and largesse was slanted toward the big cities. As Deng Xiaoping vowed when he opened China's economy, "Some will get rich first" -- and those nouveau riche would appreciate who paid for their cars, homes, and glittery new mobile phones. In recent years, according to China expert Jonathan Unger, the government has made a deliberate policy of favoring this population.

more at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=twilight_of_the_autocrats

[pj67coll]

In the thread I posted here...

http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/showthread.php?t=248619

the participants consider precisely the scenario outlined in this article. Schwartz is optimistic and Ferguson not so. Ferguson makes the interesting point that quite apart from a mass outpouring of democratic protest against the regime in China there seems to be a spontaneous outpouring of old fashioned late 19th early 20th century nationalism amoungst the populace. This appeares facilitated by the rise of mass communicaition ie the internet and cell phone cameras etc. This appears to be spontaneous rather than government sponsored. That means that the automatic assumption by western elites (and with which this article wraps up) that these problems in the autocracies will result in more freedom might be completely wrong and that instead they could in fact bring an increase in problems that are not new to history.

- Peter.