only two options

Daniel Drezner has a question for readers:

Question to readers: is 2009 the year that China's government collapses? Or is it just another year in which there will be a crackdown of a mass uprising? Because those may be the only two options.

…and is gently schooled by his commenters. I don’t know why he thinks that these may be the only two options. There’s nothing in the rest of his post to indicate why that should be the case. My preferred option is that the government won’t collapse or crackdown on a mass uprising, by which I think he means something of the Tiananmen variety.

Not that there won’t be discontent of the MGI kind I’ve been tracking here for a while. The government has reanimated the rural industrialization programme first pioneered in the eighties and early nineties over the past few years; which is why there are so many riot-friendly underemployed folks dotted around in county and prefecture level cities all over interior China. Now they’re joined by people being repatriated to the interior after factory closures on the coast. So my guess is: probably fewer MGIs as a whole, but larger riots in small* towns across the interior provinces. And that will lead…probably nowhere, at least for now.

Having said that, Victor Shih notes that party cadres are now to be assessed by their ability to cope with incidents of various sorts (riots, earthquakes), whereas previously they were punished for allowing them to happen or taking actions that caused them. It sounds like we have a little retrenchment here.

*by Chinese standards.

Comments

[ajay]

From the comments:

"Even before that, and bizarrely enough, former PM Zhu Rongji strongly endorsed the movie Titanic on the grounds that it illustrated the danger posed by democratizing decisionmaking."

...what? I am hampered by not having seen the movie, but do you know anything about this?

[jamie k]

I don't recall Zhu Rongji saying anything but Jiang Zemin definitely endorsed the film on class struggle grounds. So perhaps the implication was that capitalist democracy leads to a lot of poor people being stuck in the bowels of a ship with Leonardo DiCaprio.

The reason Jiang said anything at all was that Titanic was one of the first major Hollywood blockbusters shown in China.

Still, nothing new. One of the Gang of Four's last campaigns was against the pernicious effect of the TV adaptation of the Water Margin on the grounds that it endorsed capitulationism.

That's the same adaptation we saw over here, btw.

[Fellow Traveller]

They punished officials for allowing earthquakes to happen? I suppose it lines up with the general level of state craziness given that unauthorized re-incarnation became illegal as well.

[jamie k]

Well, OK: add bad crisis management to that as well.