The new, old China

By Deauwand Myers

Since her administration began, President Park's been playing a smart game of placating China by not officially endorsing America's deployment of THAAD missile batteries on the peninsula. Rightly, she did this in the hopes of convincing China's President Xi to take a harder line against its client state, North Korea.

This was an admirable, but unattainable diplomatic goal. China will try its best to keep the Kim regime alive, even tolerating the crime and dysfunction on its border with North Korea, so long as the DPRK's government doesn't disintegrate.

China has long thought that a collapse of North Korea would mean bad things, perhaps some or all of these: unsecured, rudimentary, but highly effective nuclear bombs, starving North Koreans flowing into China, and a consolidation of the peninsula into one, democratic Korea.

In truth, these may all come true whether or not China, North Korea's sole trading partner, cuts off all economic activity, albeit at a slower pace.

What President Park, Prime Minister Abe, President Obama, and the international community at large fail to enunciate (but may very well know) is North Korea will never give up its only card to survival: nuclear weapons, and that China is struggling to acclimate to its rise as a global power.

The new China, with the greatest increase of wealth and expansion of the middle classes in all of human history, a burgeoning, more sophisticated, and diversified economy less reliant on low-tech, cheap manufacturing, and a better funded, increasingly lethal military, is not much different than the old China, particularly when it comes to the government.

President Xi, or Emperor Xi, if you like, has increasingly taken steps to consolidate power in a manner not seen in generations. This is one of the many problems with autocratic regimes versus liberal democracies: an autocracy cannot check the power of its head.

For decades, China's government worked undemocratically, but functioned as an oligarchy. Yes, there was a president, but major decisions were made with consensus amongst the very elite (usually the five or more people on the Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, or PSC). Members of the Committee and the echelon right below it (the Central Committee), functioned in discrete sectors of the government and were in charge of various portfolios, from the economy to the military. The President was not directly in charge of all these cabinet positions, nor did he exert influence on them without input from other Committee members.

President Xi has decided to place himself as the head of all levers of government and all sectors of its functioning. This is a stark departure from Xi's predecessors, who embraced shared democracy and group consensus within the party's elite.

Further, unlike his recent predecessors, President Xi is building a cult of personality, and is using the vast power, reach, and ubiquity of the government to silence critics and possible political rivals under the guise of stamping out rampant corruption.

Government and military graft is a huge problem in China, and Xi is right to point it out as one of the biggest threats to the Communist Party's legitimacy. But as I've written before, corruption cannot be effectively reduced in a sustainable fashion without an independent judiciary. When the government has control of the justice system, laws and their enforcement aren't predicated on evidence or objectivity, but the political wishes of the state.

In this way, Xi takes his cues not from the best practices of modern governments, but from ancient Chinese history: legalism (using laws to consolidate state power), and proscriptions (the killing off of political rivals).

President Xi, like Russia's Putin (but less lethal than Putin), disappears people hindering his power as total and absolute.

This new China has a long memory like the old one. China remembers its subjugation from Western powers like Britain, and Asian neighbors like Japan. It gave much of Asia writing and cultural cues; it gave the world gunpowder, paper, printing (along with Korea, which most probably invented a viable form of printing before China), and the compass.

Intellectual theft, and lying about it, presents China with a cheap and effective way of advancing its science, military, and technology sectors, which is why its cyber warfare is quite robust. Billions of dollars in research and technical knowhow from both the government and the private sector of advanced nations like America underpin China's pursuit of becoming a true superpower.

The new China has something to prove. It has an ego to uplift. Yet, fundamentally, the new China will suffer the fate of the old one as long as its government hyper-regulates industry and censors thought, political and otherwise.

The magic sauce that has made America and other democracies wealthy and stable isn't big and powerful militaries, great technology, or omnipotent governments. It's freedom.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.com.