January 22, 2013
China’s Information Challenge
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By IAN BREMMER
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EVEN on the best of days, China’s leaders are a risk-averse bunch. So when anti-censorship protests erupted in China on Jan. 7 and spread quickly through cyberspace, the state laid down the law: “The party has absolute control over the media, and this principle is unshakable,” declared an “urgent memo” from the Central Propaganda Department.
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To maintain monopoly control of political power in a country with a hard-charging economy, fast-growing middle class and the rising expectations they create, party officials will do all they can to monitor and manage the flow of information within the country and across its borders. This is especially important for a new generation of leaders now assuming their posts, officials who know that public expectations for good governance have never been higher. But with more than half a billion Chinese citizens now online, more than 300 million active on Weibo (China’s Twitter) and an increasingly ineffective “great firewall,” assertions of control over words and ideas reflect little more than wishful thinking.
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The party’s right to rule is predicated on the claim that stewardship of a three-decade-long economic expansion proves that government is run by competent, honest officials who understand the country’s needs. That’s why, in 2012, China’s leaders didn’t want citizens to read and discuss charges that a senior party official and his wife were deeply involved in corruption and murder, or that the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao held “billions in hidden riches,” according to The New York Times.
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There have been many other such embarrassments. In 2013, new leaders will try to reassert control at a time when an ever growing number of Chinese citizens are using modern communication tools to demand better governance and broader freedoms.
China’s battle with information is not about to give rise to a Tiananmen Square-scale public showdown. Nor is it likely to impact China’s near-term economic growth. Yet, the government’s bid to maintain control of information will have two important near-term consequences for China and the world. It will delay the reforms that China, soon to be the world’s largest economy, needs in order to reach the next stage of its development. And it will encourage China’s leaders to divert public anger toward outsiders, in part by taking more assertive — sometimes aggressive — actions in East and Southeast Asia.
In 2007, Wen Jiabao first warned that China’s development path was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable.” As the state embarks on year three of its five-year plan, efforts are ongoing to reduce a growing gap between rich and poor and to build China’s interior to give growth a better geographical balance. But the state’s most important medium-term goal is to reduce reliance on the export of manufactured products to Europe and America by empowering a much broader segment of China’s population to buy Chinese-made products. Getting from here to there will prove a dangerous process, because the restructuring and redistribution of wealth it demands will put tens of millions of workers (at least temporarily) out of work.
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China’s leaders need the country’s economy to generate enough jobs to satisfy the rising expectations of the swelling ranks of university graduates. These are the people most active online, those most likely to express opinions and engage in debate. If the party’s inability to control information leads to a go-slow approach on potentially painful reforms, a surge of public frustration might make matters worse — with substantial longer-term implications for the country’s political and economic future.
Fear of public anger might also lead China’s leaders toward a more belligerent foreign policy. Over the past year, we’ve seen rising tensions between China, Vietnam and the Philippines over territorial disputes in the energy-rich South China Sea. We’ve also seen an increasingly hostile confrontation with Japan over a string of contested islands in the East China Sea. Nationalist rhetoric is on the rise in all these countries.
Four months ago, Beijing allowed anti-Japanese protests inside China to burn hotter and longer than usual, and Japanese companies operating there sustained serious damage from boycotts and acts of public vandalism. Party leaders may well decide this year that if new channels of information cannot be shut down, the popular fury they sometimes transmit must be steered toward what the government calls “international hostile forces.” That’s bad news for Washington, since the U.S. foreign policy pivot toward Asia could leave U.S. diplomats to try to referee some of these disputes at a time when America needs better security and commercial relations with both China and its neighbors.
Whatever happens to its politics, the still-fragile global recovery needs the Chinese economy to continue to expand and mature. Companies around the world need access to China’s markets. The world’s most commercially dynamic region needs a stable China to sustain a peaceful status quo.
That’s why we should worry that China has become the emerging market least likely to develop along a predictable path. In 2013, it will become ever more obvious that the increasingly free flow of ideas and information inside China — and the anxiety it creates for its leaders — has become one of the world’s most important developing stories.
President Xi Jinping has championed what he calls the “Chinese dream.” He may soon discover that defining that dream for a fast-changing society is already beyond the party’s control.
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Ian Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and author of “Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World.”
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