Peter Hartcher writes: While Australia’s government argues over whether to join a China-sponsored infrastructure fund, a larger debate has started on a much grander question – can China’s ruling regime survive?
China under the Communist Party has been described as history’s most successful dictatorship. China is not just a rising power: it has risen. China today is the second biggest economy and military spender on the planet. The Communist Party regime is now in its 66th year. Some indications are telling.
1. China’s economic elites have one foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system really begins to crumble. A survey of 393 millionaires and billionaires by Shanghai’s Hurun Research Institute; 64 per cent said that they were emigrating, or planning to do so.
2. Xi’s harsh political repression: Would a secure and confident government institute such a severe crackdown?
3. The hollowness of official belief in Xi’s doctrines. Officials are only going through the motions,.
4. Corruption runs deep and will outlive Xi’s anti-corruption purge, which will succeed only in enraging powerful interests.
5. he economy is stuck in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit,” he says. Xi’s attempt to break the traps, his economic reform plan, is encountering stiff internal resistance.
No party can rule forever, anywhere. The big questions are exactly when and exactly how the regime will collapse.
The Soviet collapse was, at core, a crisis of confidence. The Communist party was not challenged by another party, by a coup or by an uprising. The party yielded much of its power because its leadership had lost the self-belief and the will to go on.
China’s Xi Jinping may have many deficits, but a deficit of confidence is not one of them.
There is a major economic crunch beginning, certainly. But the Communist regime has prevailed through much worse. There is no sign that the instruments of coercion are wilting.
