In his famous essay On Liberty, the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill warned of the fate of states such as China or Russia, where the bureaucracy is all-powerful.
'No reform can be effected which is contrary to the interests of the bureaucracy,' Mill observed. To him, that was even the case when there was a revolution and a new dictator took the throne. 'He can send any one of them to Siberia, but he cannot govern without them or against their will.' It is beginning to look true for Premier Zhu Rongji, whose plan to cut the mainland's sprawling bureaucracy in half and transform the state-owned enterprises in just three years has been derailed.
His final card, accelerating China's entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) as a means to force change, has been played and failed. Mr Zhu tried to bypass the bureaucracy when he made a tempting offer in Washington during his April visit, and is now sidelined - so much so that United States Treasury Secretary Larry Summers left China empty-handed after meeting Mr Zhu in Lanzhou over the weekend.
Even the direct phone call President Bill Clinton made to President Jiang Zemin on October 16 made no difference. Mr Jiang is touring Europe but nothing new is emerging from his talks with European leaders. Nor are the talks between mainland and European Union negotiators in Geneva producing breakthroughs.
Hopes of movement in the next few weeks are still alive but by late November Beijing would be shut out of the next round of WTO negotiations. A result now appears to depend on capitulation by the US. Washington would have to agree to Chinese terms far less substantive than those offered by Mr Zhu in April.
Just how unsatisfying that may be has become obvious through a recent string of proclamations which have caught investors off-guard. Beijing has just shut foreigners out of the telecommunications industry by telling them to withdraw from the second telecom company Unicom, in which they had invested nearly US$1.4 billion (HK$10.8 billion).