My Take | China according to the collapsists, declinists and triumphalists
- Will China drop dead or take over the world? I would bet on neither, not in our lifetime anyway
Some people are determined to be party-poopers. Just as the Chinese Communist Party is set to celebrate the centennial of its founding next month, Minxin Pei predictably comes up with another opinion piece predicting its demise, any time now.
“If the CPC is not on the right track with its neo-Maoist revival,” he wrote, “its upcoming milestone may be its last.
“The fact that no other [dictatorial] party in modern times has survived for a century should give China’s leaders cause for worry, not celebration… One obvious reason for the relatively short lifespan of communist or authoritarian parties is that party-dominated modern dictatorships, unlike democracies, emerged only in the 20th century.”
Sometimes I feel for the likes of Pei and Gordon G Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, first published in 2001, who has since repeated his prophecy many times. Let’s call them collapsists.
And Pei is repeating himself. Here’s a piece he wrote in September 2019: “While there is technically no time limit on dictatorship, the party is approaching the longevity frontier for one-party regimes.” He then cited Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Taiwan’s Kuomintang, as he does in his latest piece.
The totalitarian party state, it’s true, may be a distinctive 20th century phenomenon, so is democracy if we equate the term with “universal suffrage”. Of course, democracy in a loose sense dates back a long time; tyranny and empire even longer. Is the contemporary Chinese “communist” state really communist and totalitarian any more? A brief trip to China should give you a quick and easy answer, say, after the global pandemic.
