This kind of silly and hypocritical talk about "100 years" reminds me of one academic conference I attended in China over a decade ago. All the participants were Chinese. There were no American or European scholars present. So no one was pulling any punches in their remarks.

At a discussion in front of all the attendees, an economist was asked when, given the "temporary" reinstitution of some capitalist practices, China would be able to attain the Communist utopia. He thought for a second, and said, "Oh, about 500 years." The entire room erupted in laughter. One wiseguy then loudly asked, "Is it really going to take that long?!!" At that point, the audience cracked up again.

In contemporary mainland China, "500 years" or "100 years" means the same thing: NEVER.

At some point soon China's rulers will realize that when they appoint a local disappointment, they get blamed for it. And democracy will begin at the lower levels.

ras, the logic of political power in China is not that the rulers at the top want to avoid being blamed for abuses by local officials. Rather, it is to make sure those local officials can control the people. If a non-Party maverick should somehow become an influential local figure, he is almost always coopted into the Communist Party.

In return, as long as dissent can be suppressed and as long as the political supremacy of the Party is maintained, the Party Center will overlook practically any acts of corruption by local officials, and allow them to rule as little emperors over their subjects. That's why the Party's "local despots" can call on the Chinese state's police structure to put down dissent even when it is their corruption that has stirred up popular anger and discontent.

It is only when a local official is incompetent at controlling the people that he becomes truly vulnerable. If he can't control the people, he will be replaced by someone who can. Democracy has nothing to do with this brutal logic.

People is China are sharp enough to realize that all that Marxist mumbo-jumbo doesn't fly. Furthermore, they just about invented money. I've never been to mainland China, but I have been to Taiwan, and seen a whole city of streets with little shops in the front of every house, not to mention truly vast marketplaces, and businesses of every description.

As China become sufficiently immersed in world communications to slough off the remnants of xenophobic Boxerism, their communism will follow that of the motherland of socialism into the great ashheap.

X:
I always appreciate your insightful comments on China. I wonder what your take is on this rather pessimistic view:
Thoughts on China's future
The short version is that state owned Chinese banks have a large number of non-performing loans which they are trying to paper over with special "asset management" companies set up by the government. When the Chinese financial system is opened to Western banks as part of complying with WTO requirements, the curency transfer from the Chinese to the Western banks will cause the collapse of the banking and financial system, leading to the collapse of the government. It is curious that a sell-off in Shanghai caused a 9 percent slide in Chinese stocks today, triggering a world-wide decline, but nowhere near as large anywhere else.

jd, thank you for your kind words and for referring me to James Waterton's piece.

Allow me to respond to your question with what I'm afraid are some pedantic points.

The implicit model outlined in Waterton is, at heart, an economic one.

As with all economic models, from Marx's theory of class struggle to the way modern consulting, financial, and marketing firms understand human behavior, it has certain appeals and strengths.

First, it talks about what appear to be measureable economic phenomena. Marx has his falling rate of profit in capitalist societies. Contemporary consultants talk about ROIs and the bottom line on a balance sheet. Waterton talks about the rate and scale of non-performing loans in Chinese banks.

Second, it postulates plausible causal relationships between those measureable phenomena and specific political outcomes. For Marx, once profits begin to fall, unemployment skyrockets to where workers will have nothing to lose but their chains and will in the end rise up in revolution. For someone who works at a firm such as Goldman Sachs, almost everything can be boiled down to the belief that the more money people make, the happier they'll be and the wealthier a society is, the more stable it will be. In most economic models of human behavior, economic crisis generates political instability. In Waterton's very impressive piece, it is basically this kind of economic logic that is at play: a banking collapse in China might lead to a general economic crisis, which in turn might lead to either a military coup or the collapse of the central government.

I believe that economic models can be very powerful. One of their greatest appeals is that they seem to make so much common sense. Moreover, sometimes, they do model what actually happens. There's only one problem: they completely fail to capture the complexity of human behavior and cannot explain why, under similar economic conditions, societies and human beings have made so many different and contradictory political choices.

In the early 1960s, despite a recent massive man-made economic crisis where tens of millions had starved to death, the Chinese people as a whole still supported Chairman Mao and the idea of building Communism. Today, although they live in an economy that is being heralded by many as a "miracle," the Chinese people no longer believe in the Party's infallibility and even less in Communism.

So if we want to talk about China's possible future, we can't just talk only about economics and only about economic phenomena. We must also talk about politics, which is not simply dictated by economics in the simple way assumed by most economic models. We must also talk about how long the police will continue to support the regime in a system where the ability to repress is now paramount because the regime's political doctrines are no longer considered legitimate. We must talk about the Chinese military and its internal political divisions. We must talk about the divide in China between those who are xenophobics and those who are cosmopolitans. We must talk about the rebirth of the criminal underworld and the implications for the massive growth of that underworld in a China where there will be many more males than females. We must talk about the powerful regional identities that have never gone away and that would be considered the potential foundation of new nations anywhere else. We must talk about the repeatedly demonstrated ability of the Party's leaders to make political decisions that will cause the greatest possible misery for the greatest possible number of Chinese.

Waterton is very insightful, but his analysis depends too much on one possible causal relationship. He would be even more insightful - and persuasive - if he and others who talk mostly about economics also incorporate the political, not as an effect but as a cause in its right. On the one hand, I think Waterton is right to be pessimistic about the regime's future, but I don't think the political collapse will necessarily happen in the way he postulates. One the other hand, I hope that there will be a collapse, so that China will finally have a chance to construct something other than yet another historical variation on despotism. In that sense, I'm optimistic.

X;
Thank you for your considered reply. Your are, of course, correct that there are many more factors involved. I was interested in Waterton's observation about the ATM machines - it reminded me of Robert Heinlein's observations of river traffic in Moscow in the 1950's disproving the economic figures put out by the Soviet government.

jd, there's an old story about how, during World War Two, the Allies were able to come up with more accurate numbers on German war production than the Germans themselves. The Allies did this by looking at the patterns of serial numbers on captured or destroyed equipment. Thus was born operations theory.

Who knows? Maybe the ATM machines fall into the same category!