Jeffrey Wasserstrom: China and the Latest Challenge of Prediction
[Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine.]
Could China experience a Jasmine Revolution of the sort that has brought change to Egypt and Tunisia — or does its booming economy make this very unlikely? Why have the Chinese authorities been so spooked by Internet calls in dozens of cities for “strolls” of protest — even though few people have turned out for them? What has made Beijing, which has tolerated some demonstrations in recent years, show zero tolerance toward the current “shadow revolution” that so far has not generated a single mass gathering?
I was asked questions like these a lot during a recent nine-day trip that took me to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to speak at a couple of campuses, participate in a pair of literary festivals and give talks at two press clubs. This was hardly surprising. After all, one of my main research areas is the history of protest in China, and before heading across the Pacific, I’d published a commentary at Miller-McCune.com on China-Egypt comparisons and contrasts, as well as a comment on the same topic at the “Room for Debate” blog of The New York Times....
...I’ve spent a lot of time since 1989 thinking, teaching and writing about that year’s Tiananmen demonstrations and the subsequent June 4 massacre that brought them to such a tragic end. And looking back to that era, while talk of the Arab Spring was in the air, left me with an unshakable feeling that forward-looking speculation was bound to be of particularly limited value this time because of one important thing we don’t know and another important thing we can’t know.
The important thing we don’t know is how unified the Chinese leadership group is at a crucial point in time. We know that Hu Jintao is preparing to step down and hand off the top role in the government to someone else, and such succession moments are always tricky in one-party states. The conventional wisdom holds that his successor will be Xi Jinping and that this succession will go smoothly, but we’ve overestimated the unity of China’s top echelon before. And given how secretive the party is, we are still reduced to best guesses about how smooth or rocky relations are between different factions within the government....
Read entire article at Miller McCune
Could China experience a Jasmine Revolution of the sort that has brought change to Egypt and Tunisia — or does its booming economy make this very unlikely? Why have the Chinese authorities been so spooked by Internet calls in dozens of cities for “strolls” of protest — even though few people have turned out for them? What has made Beijing, which has tolerated some demonstrations in recent years, show zero tolerance toward the current “shadow revolution” that so far has not generated a single mass gathering?
I was asked questions like these a lot during a recent nine-day trip that took me to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong to speak at a couple of campuses, participate in a pair of literary festivals and give talks at two press clubs. This was hardly surprising. After all, one of my main research areas is the history of protest in China, and before heading across the Pacific, I’d published a commentary at Miller-McCune.com on China-Egypt comparisons and contrasts, as well as a comment on the same topic at the “Room for Debate” blog of The New York Times....
...I’ve spent a lot of time since 1989 thinking, teaching and writing about that year’s Tiananmen demonstrations and the subsequent June 4 massacre that brought them to such a tragic end. And looking back to that era, while talk of the Arab Spring was in the air, left me with an unshakable feeling that forward-looking speculation was bound to be of particularly limited value this time because of one important thing we don’t know and another important thing we can’t know.
The important thing we don’t know is how unified the Chinese leadership group is at a crucial point in time. We know that Hu Jintao is preparing to step down and hand off the top role in the government to someone else, and such succession moments are always tricky in one-party states. The conventional wisdom holds that his successor will be Xi Jinping and that this succession will go smoothly, but we’ve overestimated the unity of China’s top echelon before. And given how secretive the party is, we are still reduced to best guesses about how smooth or rocky relations are between different factions within the government....