China has quite a few institutional problems which are going to get in the way of growth in the future.

Yes, we won’t defuse the broken branch problem .. but look about 20-30 years further at what we’ll get from it.

Mew

p.s. my guess for the broken branches remains Africa. Far from mainland China, lots of potential spouses, lots of natural resources…

The whole world will pay the price, should China not find a peaceful solution…

Mew

(Anecdotal data among the several I have gotten to know quite well bumps the ratio up to at least 1000:1 when the “ewww” factor is written in.)

Then consider the number of Chinese baby girls adopted and raised in the U.S… and the potential impact on culture should the former decide to emigrate and pursue the latter…

Mew

This would be the dual-identification system that is endemic throughout the country. Urban vs. Country I D .
Country workers come in to cities and are denied benefits their ‘betters’ receive. This results in living less-well off, by orders of magnitude, and causes great disruption and angst in China.

During Tianimen Square country troops were used exclusively to quell the protestors. This inequity has existed for a while but information becomes easier to get as time advances.
To the Chinese Nomenklatura’s fright.

Chinese Gov’t is about to be turned around once again by
” The Princeling Class.” Similar to North Korea but many more participants.

The change is coming, and faster than you can anticipate. Bo Xilai was just the beginning.

This for me is really the big question facing China now, at the start of the twenty-first century, and perhaps the one that will decide whether the country goes on to greatness. Will it just follow the same cycle as every other dynasty in Chinese history, or will it, can it, break that cycle and take a different path?

It seems sometimes as though Chinese history has never had any narrative to it–just a succession of dynasties, all walled off from one another. Each dynasty came into power with new agenda, opposing the corruption of the previous one. It was welcomed; it undertook reforms. It expanded, it ruled, it reveled in its cultural golden age, and then is descended into the same corruption and incompetence as the previous dynasty. Sometimes it took a hundred years, sometimes two or three hundred. China’s history has only ever been about uniting and then collapsing, reuniting and then being invaded, overthrow, collapse, reuniting and collapsing again. Why should the future be any different?

In some ways, China is the same as it has always been. It is still the same kind of imperial, one-party government that the First Emperor from two thousand years ago would recognize. And that means that there are no effective checks and balances, and there is terrible corruption, as there always has been. Confucious was wrong on one point. Human beings are not able to police themselves.
:
But there are several very important ways in which today’s China is different from the past and which suggest that it may, just may, be able to avoid going the way of former dynasties and, perhaps for the first time, form an ongoing, progressive, linear narrative to Chinese history.

(China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power, Random House, 2007)

Gifford probes the question with wisdom and at length, and in the end dares not commit. But he does conclude on this subtly hopeful note:

And always lurking at the back of my mind is the fear that the weight of two thousand years of imperial history is stacked against the possibility of democratic reform. I am afraid that the methods of holding the state together are incompatible with allowing the state to change, that a united China, a united empire, will continue to be more important to the leaders than the possibility of a changed China. And I fear that the Chinese state, which has always been more important than the individual, may end up betraying the Chinese people all over again.

But in the end I cannot be completely pessimistic. … Chinese people, even more now than in the 1920s, are starting in a very small way to be in charge of their own destiny. They’re writing the words on the Chinese parchment, and their future will be less and less decided by fate or by the emperor or by the forces of nature. They are, as Lu Xun writes at the end of his story, making their own future, imperfectly, painfully, but hopefully along the road.

(Ibid.)

Thank you for insight, aesthete, which embodies Gifford’s exhortation to “get out of the ‘friend or foe?’ line of questioning ,,, it is a mixture of both, depending on which area you look at.” I doubt that many others here are likely to imbue their concept of “Chinese century” with the data–inconceivable in 1972–that the PRC is now home to the same order of magnitude of deeply committed Christians as the US. What next? will they be sending evangelical missionaries here as South Korea does? The timing couldn’t be better. Mi esposa just returned from a month visiting our eldest in a minority county village where, once a week for a half-hour in the evening, the govt-run PA plays hymns to call people to prayer meeting.

Come to think of it, the Reformation spurred a bit of linearity as well. To prayers for China.

Second, it is very easy to fall into the trap of viewing Chinese government and leadership as being historically more far-sighted than others — that is in large part because the source material that we have is almost 100% from the literate Confucian bureaucrats who believed in the Mandate of Heaven, and who wrote history in such a way as to a) instill Confucian values (including respect for authority), b) ingratiate themselves with the dynasts they served under, and to c) write a compelling narrative for a given set of rulers that communicated both points. One will notice that Chinese historical accounts tend to communicate history as long-form novellas of Great Deeds by Great Men; wise decisions that echo through generations — except at the end of the dynasty, where abruptly the ruler deviates from Confucian morality in a significant way and is thus replaced by new rulers, restarting the cycle. Foreign accounts of China, from Marco Polo onwards, noted either the garishness or backwardness of the country.

Third, China is not nearly as unified as it is often portrayed — either historically or in the present day. There has only been one peaceful transfer of power in the history of Communist China (2002), and indeed there are several factions within the Politburo, all with their own competing interests. Most of these factions fatten their purses with the trade that goes through their coastal cities. There was recently quite a scuffle related to leadership transfer, for example. This is to say nothing of regions which do not share the views of the Chinese government, or which otherwise cause trouble (the Mongolian and Turkic populations within China, for instance). A country tends to expand in terms of foreign policy for two reasons: either to “export its internal contradictions”, or because it has already accomplished most of its domestic goals. The former is a characteristic of weak states with low public support, high unrest, and low prestige on the world stage; indeed, Communist China was much more aggressive before it opened up its borders to international trade than after. The latter is a characteristic of strong, stable states strongly supported by its population — think the US during its “imperialist” phase in the late 19th century. China could go towards either of these extremes in the future, but if you’ll allow me a counterfactual, this is also true of a Maoist China — which did, after all, have nukes at the time that they opened up trade and reformed.

The Song Dynasty was conquered by the Mongols and never entered into power after that. The succeeding Mongolian dynasty disintegrated after 100 fruitless years. The Ming, despite having an enormous military and funding sweeping construction projects, brought economic growth to a near-standstill and never took advantage of opportunities afforded by contact with the West and Catholic Jesuit powers. The Qin (last dynasty of China) never modernized or industrialized, it had one of the most entrenched and conservative bureaucracies in the world by this point, and did not take advantage of most of the opportunities offered to it by relatively benign foreigners (like the US) or domestic trends. Most of its important cities were occupied by European powers on a lark. Nationalist China (the replacement for Imperial China) of course was toppled from power in short order and now governs only a small island on the coast of the mainland (Taiwan). Maoist China halved the GDP of the country and liquidated most of its intellectual capital, to say nothing of the other institutions in the country. Far from being far-sighted, China has been shooting itself in the face and reacting (mostly ineffectively) to various crises since at least the Yuan Dynasty. Even now, China’s attempts to annex a poor, agrarian region (Tibet) has gone poorly, and their domestic projects (Three Gorges Dam, housing bubble, overdevelopment, rural modernizations) have been failures outside of the extremely successful partial liberalizations of coastal urban zones.

The “far-sighted” argument can of course also be applied to N Korea, S Korea, Taiwan Japan — perhaps they are all biding their time until the US is weak, at which point they will strike. I don’t think this is the the case: rather, I think that these countries have certain political characteristics and national interests which inform policy, but that political leadership is no more or less far-sighted than our own. Opaque regimes are harder to read than democratic, transparent ones, but that is my reading based on some very short-sighted policy and decision making from China both in the past and in the present.