It has never been easy for Westerners
to understand China. Not during the ages of rule by emperors and warlords,
when the land was more or less closed to foreigners; not during the tumultuous
century now ending, when it went from being governed by the corrupt and
moribund Qing dynasty to the troubled Nationalist government of Chiang
Kai-shek to the often-brutally suppressive Communist Party of Mao Zedong
and his successors.
But China continues to fascinate, even as it confounds.
It is, after all, the world's most populous nation, a sleeping economic
giant that is finally waking up and smelling the tea, a military power
that cannot be ignored. It is also -- nominally -- the last great communist
power on the planet, albeit one that is quietly transforming its state-run
economy to one embracing free-market principles. The Communist Party's
high-wire balancing act between (from our view) empowering change and
repressive continuity, or (from its view) order and chaos -- which came
to a head 10 years ago at Tiananmen Square -- continues to be the stuff
of drama.
To get some insight into China today, Gazette Senior
Editor Samuel Hughes spoke with Dr. Avery Goldstein, C'75, GEd'76,
associate professor of political science and that department's resident
China hand, not to mention director of its Christopher H. Browne Center
for International Politics and director of the Asia Program for the Philadelphia-based
Foreign Policy Research Institute. Goldstein, who claims that he was "not
a very serious political-science student" during his undergraduate
days at Penn, nonetheless got bitten by the China bug during an independent-study
course with Dr. Jack Nagel, then an assistant professor in the department.
That bug led him (after a brief interlude teaching in the Philadelphia
public-school system) to the University of California-Berkeley, where
he earned his master's degree and Ph.D. and garnered a prize as the "outstanding
graduate student in political science." He returned to Penn as an
assistant professor in 1985.
The first interview took place in Goldstein's Stiteler
Hall office this past November (just as, quite coincidentally, Penn President
Judith Rodin, CW'66, was in China on University business); the
second, by phone, in January. The talks covered a wide range of issues:
from President Jiang Zemin and the current Communist Party leadership,
to the economy and such social issues as pollution and the effect of the
Internet, to affairs of state. The last category includes the recent return
of Hong Kong, held by Great Britain as a colony since 1897; the occupation
of Tibet and the persecution of Buddhist monks by the Chinese People's
Liberation Army; and the long-simmering tensions over Taiwan, whose democratic
Nationalist government has, with American support, remained independent
from the mainland. That dispute almost boiled over in 1995 and 1996, when
Beijing conducted military exercises in the Taiwan Straits and the United
States sent in the Seventh Fleet as a warning.
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Since it has been two years since the death of Deng Xiaoping,
the last of the old Communist Revolutionary leaders of China, we began
by looking at some significant developments -- and non-developments --
since Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, took the reins. For Goldstein, the
biggest non-development was that, contrary to expectations, there has
been no obvious power struggle among the leadership. (Given the amount
of blood shed during earlier power struggles, that has to be considered
good news for the Chinese people.) Under Jiang, Goldstein pointed out,
China has continued to move toward a free-market economy, gradually divesting
itself of its inefficient state-run enterprises along the way. And by
naming Zhu Rongji as premier last year, "they appointed someone who
has a reputation for getting things done."
Unfortunately, Goldstein added, "just as those
efforts got underway, the Asian financial crisis began to kick in, and
any hopes that they could make such economic reforms work without creating
significant unemployment were dashed." On top of that, China had
to cope with the catastrophic summer floods. As a result, he said, there
has been a slowdown in economic reforms, and while the official numbers
published by the government -- including a 7.8-percent growth in the gross
domestic product -- indicate that the Chinese economy did quite well compared
with other Asian economies, "people seem to have less confidence
in the numbers for this year than the numbers they have gotten in the
past."
The other big change, he said, has been the "more
active international strategy of the leadership, and particularly the
attempt to strengthen relations with the United States." In fact,
he added, the current leadership has restored U.S.-China relations to
their best point since prior to Tiananmen Square. Whether that will survive
the recent report by a House subcommittee chaired by California Representative
Christopher Cox -- that some "militarily useful" technology
has been transferred to China over the past 20 years -- remains to be
seen.
What follows is an edited version of those two interviews.
Continued...
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Gazette Last modified 2/16/99