China in the 21st Century: Problems and Prospects
August 22, 2021
Photo Credit: Engin Akyurt via Unsplash
by Mark Seliber
Many BOLLI study groups and lecture series cover timely subjects, but the material Scott McKnight and one hundred plus participants discussed on five recent Wednesday mornings concerning China’s role in the world felt like it had been ripped from a daily news feed.
Scott, who recently earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto, is a post-doctoral fellow at the University’s Munk School of Global Affairs. He was a very enthusiastic and informative instructor, sharing his knowledge and insights on this massive and mysterious country. Sessions were interspersed with polls to learn more about the participants (for example, who has travelled to China or who would like to) and quizzes that guided our thinking about many important issues.
At the beginning of the first session, Scott introduced the following three key questions we would consider throughout the series:
- How did China, a country beset by war, unrest and extreme poverty from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, become an increasingly wealthy and globally-relevant country over the past four decades?
- How has China’s single-party (the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP) state, which came to power in 1949 to form the People’s Republic of China (PRC), been able to adapt and thrive where many other single-party states have stagnated or collapsed outright (see: the Soviet Union)?
- What do China’s rise and its economic, political and environment position mean for the rest of the world and for the United States in particular?
At the first meeting, we learned some amazing statistics highlighting China’s meteoric growth and transformation from 1978 to the present. During that time, population increased by 55%, from 931 million to 1.44 billion, while the percentage of the population living in cities more than tripled, from 20% to 63%. The number of cars jumped from 1.7 million to 300 million. Scott offered these explanations for China’s growth: an efficient command economy, where the government is both the regulator and banker; extensive investment in infrastructure with little regard for environmental impact; encouragement of foreign investment, but with conditions attached; cheap, semi-skilled labor producing manufactured goods for export; and the political stability of authoritarianism.
The second session covered the Chinese Communist Party, which has 90 million members, comprising only 6% of the total population of the nation. The CCP only recently started to encourage students, professionals and business leaders to join in order to provide more diversity and expertise, but still does not allow major dissent from the official party line. Xi Jinping has been General Secretary of the CCP since 2012 and is on path to remain in charge for life. Scott argued that the four chief priorities of the CCP are: to rule indefinitely, raise the country’s economic standard of living, protect national interests and territory, and increase China’s influence in Asia and the rest of the world.
The third class focused on trade and technology, with Scott dividing up the narrative into three main eras. During the reign of Mao Zedong (1949-1976), China was focused mostly inward, on ideology and political campaigns. But the country still made some key initial steps towards improving agriculture, developing industrialization and energy production, bringing inflation under control, improving health and education and becoming economically self-reliant. After Mao’s death, a transformation was led by Deng Xiaoping (chairman from 1978 to 1989), who oversaw decollectivization of farms and creation of special economic zones in the big cities along the Pacific coast and strongly encouraged export of consumer goods to the West. In more recent times, Xi and his predecessors have emphasized privatization of thousands of state-owned enterprises, and overseen China’s transition from a manufacturing economy to a global high-tech powerhouse.
The fourth meeting covered the transformation of China’s economy in more detail, in particular how it relates to energy production and usage. Though there was a large migration from farms and small towns to big cities, feeding the nation’s huge population remains a priority requiring massive amounts of power and water. Urban residents and industries are also major users of resources and generators of greenhouse gases. Currently, 58% of China’s energy comes from coal, 20% from oil, 8% from gas, and only 14% from renewable sources – hydroelectric, solar, wind and nuclear. But China has begun to switch to less energy-intensive infrastructure and production.
In our final session, we focused on three controversial geographical areas over which the party and the nation claim sovereignty.
Xinjiang is a huge province in the northwestern corner of the country, comprising one-sixth of China’s total land mass and a significant source of key natural resources, especially coal, oil and gas. It is also home of the Uyghurs, a Turkic people who are Muslims. The Chinese government, fearing the Uyghurs’ desire for separation, the threat of terrorism, and religious differences, has placed over a million Uyghurs in detention facilities (euphemistically called “employment and education centers”), sterilized women, set up obtrusive surveillance, and encouraged the migration of Han Chinese (the overwhelming majority of China’s residents) into the province. International calls for ethical treatment of the Uyghurs have been ignored by the PRC.
Hong Kong was a British colony for a century and became a world financial powerhouse. Britain transferred Hong Kong to China in 1993 under a plan that would preserve its autonomy for 50 years under a system of one country (China) with two systems. But as we all know, while wanting to preserve Hong Kong’s financial leadership, China has been cracking down dramatically in the last few years, in an effort to control Hong Kong’s residents and not allow separation, independence or autonomy.
Taiwan, the refuge of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Chinese nationalists who fled Mao’s 1949 revolution, has become an advanced democracy and a world leader in semiconductors and other high-tech products. However, at China’s insistence, Taiwan is not recognized as an independent country by the rest of the world and remains an ongoing potential target of Chinese invasion.
Answers to the three key questions Scott posed in the first session materialized during our five weeks together. But perhaps the biggest lesson for our group of very engaged participants was that the answers may be very different next year — or even next week!