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Anthony Saich on the Future of China

Over the past 20 years, reform in China has affected every facet of life. Increasingly, China is attracting international attention due to its large population and rapid economic development. Anthony Saich's research focuses on the interplay between state and society in Asia - particularly China - and the respective roles they play in determining policymaking and framing socioeconomic development. He is the Daewoo Professor of International Affairs and Faculty Chair of Asia Programs and the China Public Policy Program.

Q: Please give us some historical perspective. Why does the Chinese Communist Party continue to grow while the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed?

Saich: Well, I think that the starting points were very different. When Mr. Gorbachev came into power in Russia, I think he recognized that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had already tried on many occasions to push through economic reform and those attempts had been essentially unsuccessful. And whether he liked it or not I think he felt the only way out was to start with fundamental political reform and once he began to do that it was a slippery slope down into eventual disintegration of the former Soviet Union.

The situation is very different in China. China was still an overwhelmingly agricultural country; it wasn't as heavily state-controlled as the former Soviet Union. I think when they saw what had happened in Soviet Russia, Deng Xiaoping, who then still had the controlling influence over China, really came to the conclusion that 'unless we push ahead with this economy, unless we introduce fundamental economic reforms, we're going down the tube.' And they were able to do that in a much easier way than Soviet Russia. It wasn't controlled by industrial state-owned enterprises. They could start in the countryside where most people lived.

And so they've had a progressive kick into their economy from the agricultural areas which carried through into urban areas. And then of course you had the big boom of the 1990s, and I think that allowed people, if not to have an absolute faith in the Chinese Communist Party, to think it was better than what else was around. So they were able to survive the tumultuous upheavals in the rest of the socialist world by essentially adopting capitalist economic policies and now, you know, if you want to go to a party, it's the only party in town, so it serves a whole range of purposes - from true believers to true achievers to those who essentially see it as a good country club to make good connections for their future careers.

Q: In contemporary Chinese politics, governance has often taken a back seat to ideology, connections, factionalism and class background. Do you see this changing?

Saich: I think it is changing. I think if you talk with both academics and government officials in China, many of them are now coming to the conclusion that the severe problems for China moving forward are related to questions of governance: the levels of corruption in China, questions of transparency of budgets, questions of the qualifications of local officials, and issues to do with accountability. So I think governance is becoming a very serious issue in China, whether it's corporate governance, whether it's managing villages, whether it's dealing with a multitude of urban development problems. So I think we're not leaving behind the days of factions, but people are beginning to think very seriously about the government structures in China - how they need to adapt to managing a modern market economy and a much more diversified, pluralistic society, and how they can improve the quality of their officials, which of course has had a spin-off benefit for the Kennedy School with a number of them coming here for training programs that we've been setting up on questions to do with public administration and public management.

Q: You have stated that the 'real politics in China is now local politics.' What is happening in China at the local, grassroots level?

Saich: What I meant by the statement that 'real politics in China is now local politics' is that de facto power has really devolved down to local governments - the village level and county level administrations. And to a large extent they do get guidelines from the center but they're left to their own devices in terms of how they interpret those and how they implement them. So what you're really seeing is an extraordinary mosaic of local governments often adopting quite different approaches to development. You can go from one county to the next county and see quite a difference in terms of investment in physical infrastructure, in terms of the kinds of foreign direct investment they've encouraged to come there. So it's a tremendously varied environment, and what works in Beijing doesn't necessarily work in Tibet. For many years China has had this phrase of 'cutting with one knife' meaning that policy is decided in Beijing and everyone has to apply that policy in the same way. There's still a little bit of that in certain areas, but there's a lot more flexibility, a lot more diversity, and a lot more local initiative than ever before and I think than many of us actually realize looking at China from the outside.

Q: Is public discourse in China moving beyond the party-state, and if so, is an alternative vision emerging that can usher in either a civil society or a democratic political order?

Saich: Public discourse has certainly moved beyond just thinking about the party-state. There are a lot of discussions about the role of non-governmental organizations, government-society partnerships. But it's still a very muted discourse; it's not a free and open discourse, and there are clearly limits to the permissible. One makes a distinction between the discourse where you're sitting around in a room talking to people, which can be very open, very critical, very direct in terms of the issues it raises - that doesn't necessarily find its way into print. In fact, I would say it often doesn't find its way into print. So there's a verbal public discourse that's very roller-coaster, very open, and very critical, but a discourse in terms of what we'd see in the media is still very muted. One problem moving forward is there is no real coherent framework to these public discourses. The Communist Party has still been very successful in terms of controlling the parameters of the debate. In that sense it means no, there is no real civil society out there and at the moment it's also quite hard to see how it could pull in any meaningful sense given the controls the traditional party-state still exerts over the system. Were the system to collapse tomorrow - not that I think it will - I think the biggest fear is that perhaps the uncivil society might rise up because a kind of a new collective ethos about what it means to be Chinese or what the nature of the Chinese state should be certainly has not yet formed.

Q: What do you see as being the greatest challenges facing China in the next decade?

Saich: I would focus on a set of concerns related to the transition in governance and also to the creation of a moral vision for China's future society. I think that's where the biggest challenges lie. At a certain point China's going to have to transform its authoritarian political system into something that's more open, more receptive to different ideas. How it does that is going to determine its success in all the other areas. But I think very closely related to that is that there is no real notion of what the future looks like for China. It's on this helter-skelter road of economic development with no clear end in sight in terms of, 'What do we want our society to be in the future? What do we want our state to be in the future? What do we want our politics to be in the future?'

I think that comes about primarily because it is very difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to offer a clear blueprint for the future. It still has to talk about Marxism-Leninism, but nobody really believes in that any longer. It still has to talk about a socialist market economy, a socialist future, and yet it's hard to see often what is socialist in much of the current policies with the huge increase in inequalities - the differentials between urban and rural China. I think any future they project either would portray a severely limited role for the Chinese Communist Party or - the worst conclusion for them - perhaps no role for the Communist Party in the future.

So you have a society which is operating very much on free market principles, often combined with a morality of 'looking after number one,' a socialist rhetoric that overhangs from the government that doesn't appear to bear much resemblance to the way life is lived on the street, and nothing that really has the bind or the social glue or a moral fabric to pull this together. So you often hear complaints in China about the corruption, about the selfishness of people and the lack of a kind of social conscience, the lack of a development of a caring society beyond the family.

Please contact 617-495-1115 to arrange an interview with Anthony Saich.