Why David Shambaugh's 'Coming Chinese crackup' case is wrong
- By Stephen Harner
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E-mail Beijing Review, March 23, 2015
David Shambaugh, professor of international affairs and director of the China Policy Program at George Washington University, is one of a group of several dozen academics and think tank scholars, who, together with officials serving in the U.S. Department of Defense, CIA, State Department, and National Security Council, make U.S. policy toward Asia, and particularly toward China.
For this reason alone, we should be reading and interpreting with alarm Shambaugh's essay in the March 6 Wall Street Journal entitled The Coming Chinese Crackup.
In this essay, Shambaugh presents a veritable "end of days" thesis, presaging—if not predicting ("predicting the demise of authoritarian regimes is risky business")—a collapse of political authority and administrative control in China and hinting at subsequent domestic and international turmoil.
"The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe," he declares, "and it has progressed further than many think…Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d'état."
What has Shambaugh announcing doom? It is Xi Jinping's seemingly ever deepening and broadening anticorruption campaign in which, avers Shambaugh, "he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state, military and commercial constituencies."
Let me say here. Anyone who visits for long intervals or lives in China, and, especially, who reads Chinese publications and listens to Chinese broadcasts—as I do, did for 20 years, and do daily—knows that a sense of dramatic, almost revolutionary, change now permeates the air.
There can be no doubt that Xi's anticorruption campaign is shaking the very foundations of many institutions, breaking many "rice bowls," and not just threatening but actually attacking deeply vested interests in all the institutions mentioned by Shambaugh.
I nevertheless absolutely reject his conclusion which I find astonishingly ill-informed. The pervasive sense of dramatic change is, I have found, combined in almost all Chinese minds with satisfaction and confidence that the change is urgently needed–indeed long overdue—and in the right direction.
For this reason alone, the most likely outcome of which is a much stronger, more legitimate, and more effective CPC and government at all levels.
Shambaugh presents five "telling indications of the regime's vulnerability and the party's systematic weaknesses." They are all easy to dismiss.
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