After Deng the Deluge

If this reasoning is correct, the assumptions about China that Lieberthal articulates and governments around the globe share are at best valid only for the short term and are likely to mislead if pushed further. China future will be very different from China past and even present, and particularly from the China whose workings are most familiar and which Lieberthal describes exhaustively: the People's Republic. Substantial--and not evolutionary or gradual--changes are not only possible but likely. These will influence China's relations with the rest of the world far more than any initiatives or agreements decided on today. The present is transitional, and the United States should start positioning itself now for change (and perhaps influencing it).

The twentieth century provides a sense of the wide range of alternatives. One set of possibilities for China may broadly be termed constitutional. In its last years the Qing Dynasty was becoming a constitutional monarchy with a parliament and cabinet. The Republic of China that followed was authoritarian but also saw a remarkable series of parliamentary and constitutional initiatives. Eleven constitutions or draft constitutions were proposed or adopted between 1911 and 1949. The current democratic government in Taiwan operates under the all?Chinese constitution of 1946, with amendments. Difficult as it has been to implement, the idea of constitutionalism continues to have legitimacy in Chinese minds, so that even the People's Republic has felt the need for a basic document, successively adopting five constitutions, the most recent in 1982.

At present, of course, the constitution is a sham. A small group of powerful men, as Lieberthal explains in his illuminating chapters on "inside" and "outside" views of government, handles the real business of ruling China. But Zhou Enlai 20 years ago drew up plans for some reconstitutionalization of rule after Mao's long extralegal reign (though Zhou died before Mao, so they came to nothing). Similar calls come today from the National People's Congress, China's quasi parliament, as Deng's long and equally extralegal rule draws to a close. In fact, generational change may force the government to pay more attention to the rules it has set for itself. With the last of the Long March elders departing from the scene, the strongman solution becomes impractical because no one fully qualifies for the role.

This is not to say that no one will try to become strongman--which brings up a second set of possibilities for the decades ahead. Chinese history this century reveals a pattern of attempts to recentralize authority in the vast and diverse land. Such was the fundamental policy of Yuan Shikai, the first post?dynastic military dictator, who seized power from parliament and ruled from 1912 to 1916, as well as of Chiang Kai?shek and the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party. After 1949 the People's Republic could proudly claim to have achieved this goal. Until the late 1970s the center, or zhongyang, counted for nearly everything (though Lieberthal's discussion shows that the reverse is true almost everywhere in China now). Someone in the center in the years to come could decide that enough is enough, the fractious country must be pulled back together, by force if necessary.

But as Hu Shih, perhaps twentieth?century China's greatest scholar, argued in an important essay, it is precisely when such attempts are made that China's unity has been most imperiled. China is a great civilization, and the most enduring of human historical units. But its inherent unity depends on a good deal of flexibility and local autonomy; apply too much centralizing pressure and the strain will cause China to begin to split. Thus in the 1920s more than a decade of regionally based warlordism and warfare followed Yuan's centralized rule.

Lieberthal mentions the precedent but does not make clear the logic driving it: a once?coherent ruling elite proves unable to reconstitute itself under a new leader after the strongman's death, and its members begin quarreling among themselves, first employing political and parliamentary maneuvers but then cautiously reaching for military means as a way to decision. Nor does he note that this is almost identical to the intraparty politics of the People's Republic as his book describes it--the same personal disagreements, the same attempts to resolve them through alliances and bureaucratic intrigue, and the ultimate appeal to force, most recently in the capital bodyguard division's extralegal ousting of Mao's widow and other followers in October 1976. The key difference is that in the People's Republic such intraparty disputes have never led to full?blown civil conflict--though the Cultural Revolution came close, and 1976 could have been more violent had military dispositions been different.

KEEPING THE LID ON

Lieberthal has considerable confidence in the ruling elite's ability to prevent its bitter rivalries from escalating into countrywide conflict. But in the administration of China, disagreements are ubiquitous within the center, between the center and the increasingly wealthy regions, within regions and units, and between rulers and the ruled. Any of these could supply the spark. Suppose, a few years down the line, an increasingly assertive National People's Congress passes laws that conflict with regulations promulgated by the party administration, or the governor of a wealthy southern province refuses to leave his post when Beijing tells him to. Each side might use its connections in the security apparatus and the military and among the regional authorities to get its way. Resolution might come, but it might not. Unanticipated escalation could even lead to civil war.