Mainland sees risks, costs of military option: scholar

Whereas previously Beijing emphasized the importance of military strength in asserting its position with regard to Taiwan, now the mainland is more inclined to foster a more accommodating foreign policy, according to Harry Harding, dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.

“(Mainland China has) begun to see the negative risks and costs of the military instrument, particularly in the Taiwan Strait,” stated Harding, speaking on Friday during a forum on “China’s Political Future.”

Harding noted that this new toned-down and less confrontational stance is most clearly demonstrated by the mainland’s cooperation with the U.S. in the war against terrorism, acquiescing to Washington’s policies toward Iraq and in working with the U.S. to bring about a nuclear weapons-free North Korea.

While Harding described the recent 16th Chinese Communist Party Congress as “entirely uninformative” and even “disappointing,” and despite the absence of concrete progress toward real democracy in the mainland, he expressed “grudging admiration” at the resilience of the Chinese Communist authorities over the last decade.

After the bloody suppression of student protests in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 many Western observers predicted the imminent implosion of the mainland Chinese government, yet this scenario did not play out. Two fundamental courses of action that have enabled the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to remain in power, according to Harding, have been the introduction of greater freedoms inside the mainland and the opening of the country’s economy to foreign direct investment (FDI). Still, the durability of this strategy will be tested as the mainland struggles to absorb a labor force in transition and as it seeks to ensure stable and sustainable fiscal and monetary policies, according to Harding.

The mainland authorities were also awarded high marks for their resilience by Andrew Nathan of Columbia University in New York and co-editor of the “Tiananmen Papers.” Rising living standards in the mainland and the development of “input institutions,” that allow mainlanders to air their grievances with government policy to some extent, are two key factors that have enabled the mainland regime to command a high level of legitimacy among the populace, according to Nathan.

The situation in the mainland may, however, not be as rosy as it at first appears, according to Mingxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mainlanders only passively accept their government, according to Pei. There may be little active resistance to the regime, but there is also little active support, he continued. So far the government in Beijing has been “lucky and skillful” and has not had to face a real economic test in over 30 years, noted Pei.

Given wider freedoms, increased institutionalization and greater stability in the mainland, Bruce Gilley, a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, co-author with Nathan of “China’s New Rulers,” and formerly with the Far Eastern Economic Review, even went as far as to predict the emergence of a democratic mainland in the next ten to twenty years.

However, Bruce Dickson of George Washington University, giving the example of Singapore, explained that democracy in the mainland is not inevitable. Unlike in Taiwan, noted Dickson, where the once authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) survived the transition to democracy, democratization in the mainland is likely to result in the demise of the CCP in its present form.

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