A more confident Chinese people tests Communist Party rule
Minxin Pei says the once iron-clad rule of the Communist Party is today being tested by a more confident Chinese people, and the leaders preparing to take power have reason to worry
Sometimes the books that a country's top leaders read can reveal a lot about what they are thinking. So one of the books recently read by some of the incoming members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party may come as a surprise: Alexis de Tocqueville's .
These leaders - to whom the party is about to pass the baton at its 18th congress, scheduled for next Thursday - reportedly not only read Tocqueville's diagnosis of social conditions on the eve of the French Revolution, but also recommended it to their friends. If so, the obvious question is why China's future rulers are circulating a foreign classic on social revolution.
The answer is not hard to find. In all likelihood, these leaders sense, either instinctively or intellectually, an impending crisis that could imperil the party's survival in the same way that the French Revolution ended Bourbon rule.
Telltale signs of anxiety are already visible. Capital flight from China is now at a record high. Polls of China's US-dollar millionaires reveal that half of them want to emigrate. Amid intensifying calls for democracy, China's leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, reportedly met the son of the late Hu Yaobang, a political reformer and icon of Chinese liberals. While one should not read too much into such a visit, it is safe to say that China's next leader knows that the Celestial Kingdom is becoming unsettled.
The idea that some sort of political crisis could engulf China in the coming years may strike many - particularly Western business and political elites, who have taken the Communist Party's strength and durability for granted - as absurd. In their minds, the party's hold on power seems indestructible. But several emerging trends, unobserved or noted only in isolation, have greatly altered the balance of power between the party and Chinese society, with the former losing credibility and control and the latter gaining strength and confidence.
One such trend is the emergence of independent figures of public moral authority: successful businessmen, respected academics and journalists, famous writers and influential bloggers. To be sure, the party has followed a strategy of co-opting social elites since the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But people like Hu Shuli (who founded two influential business magazines), Pan Shiyi (an outspoken property developer), Yu Jianrong (a social scientist and public intellectual), Wu Jinglian (a leading economist), and the bloggers Han Han and Li Chengpeng achieved success on their own, and have maintained their independence.
Taking advantage of the internet and weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), they have become champions of social justice. Their moral courage and social stature have, in turn, helped them to build mass support (measured by the tens of millions of their weibo followers). Their voices often reframe the terms of social-policy debate and put the party on the defensive.
