Allies of the State: China's Private Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change

Allies of the State: China's Private Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change by Jie Chen and Bruce Dickson Harvard University Press, HK$486

Among Westerners who fancy their societies morally superior, two schools of conventional wisdom have grown up around China's spectacular changes. One holds that robust capitalism, which requires foreign trade with a once-pariah regime and thus a tactical retreat on human rights, will eventually bring redemptive freedoms.

'Trade freely with China, and time is on our side,' went George W. Bush's rationale. Journalist Nicholas Kristof posits that 'no middle class is content with more choices of coffees than of candidates on a ballot'. The histories of South Korea, Taiwan and Brazil may fit this optimistic thesis.

The sceptics, anchored by polemics such as James Mann's The China Fantasy, look at Singapore and Russia. They see cosy ties between business and government and a bought-off bourgeoisie whose memories of hunger and fear of both chaos and the government keep them in line. No liberalisation is on the horizon. Life is better than ever, so why rock the boat?

Despite the ironically Marxesque determinism of the trade-to-freedom optimists, China's capitalists are people, too. And what's been missing from this debate is a thorough, dispassionate assessment of their attitudes and priorities. True, the title Allies of the State leaves little suspense about the conclusion of this rigorously designed academic survey. But there are many worthy points - some surprising - along the way.

Sociologists Jie Chen and Bruce Dickson took a random sampling of more than 2,000 businesspeople in five coastal provinces and ran this raw data through a series of sophisticated statistical analyses. First, the cold water: China's capitalists are highly unlikely to lead the charge for democracy. The more successful and influential a businessman is, the more entwined he will be with a web of institutions supporting the status quo, from business associations to official bodies such as the national People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. The authors note that 'only 19 per cent of the capitalists in our survey were outside the reach of the state, in that they did not belong to any business association'.