China's tight control over its economy is one reason why it is facing an economic slowdown of global implications, Stanford scholars say.

China's stock market fall is now in its third week, and share prices have lost a third of their value since mid-June, though the market is still higher than a year ago. China has the world's second-largest economy, with deep financial links to the United States.

Nicholas Hope, director of the China Program at the Stanford Center for International Development, which is part of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said the simple answer behind the slowdown is that "nothing grows at 10 percent forever."

However, the dropoff is sharper than the government of China expected or desires, he noted.

Hope said the deceleration is due to the effects of slow growth globally on international trade, slower progress than hoped in rebalancing the Chinese economy toward spending more on consumption and less on investment, and the inefficiency of much of Chinese investment. Another big problem is the debt load of local and regional governments.

Hope does not think the steep fall of China's stock market is comparable to the American crash of 1929 – "so long as the Shanghai market index remains comfortably above where it was a year ago."

Yet the "frighteningly sharp correction" over the past few weeks highlights the fragility of the Chinese financial system, he said. It also serves as a cautionary tale for the many small investors who speculated on high returns with borrowed money.

"Borrowed funds have financed many risky economic investments in infrastructure by subnational [regional and local] governments as well as stock purchases by unwise investors," he said. "The result threatens to be an unwanted increase in non-performing loans in the banking system as borrowers are unable to repay."

Hope believes China can overcome its problems if it adopts economic reforms aimed at fostering more private enterprise and less state control over the market. Back in 1993, China's Communist Party announced those reforms and updated them in 2013, so they are technically on the books.

"Paradoxically, current weaknesses could be a longer-term source of strength, as the shares of income and consumption in Chinese GDP rise, investment is increasingly more efficiently allocated by a transformed financial system and all factors of production – land, capital and labor – are put to more productive uses," he said.

To counteract the market drop, the government ordered state-owned companies to buy shares, hiked the amount of equities insurance companies can hold and offered more credit to finance trading. Hope said this may cause a problem.

"It is introducing considerable moral hazard by attempting to bail out small investors because of the concern over the potential for social unrest if too many of those investors lose all of their savings," he said.

Charlotte Lee, associate director of the China Program at Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, says it is too early to tell if the market fall will diminish the credibility of the government and Communist Party in the eyes of the people. China's President, Xi Jinping, does want to maintain his popularity.

"The government's management of the economy is, however, one of the pillars of its credibility," Lee said.

She described this as a "small dent" in that credibility, as the government has many other ways it aids the Chinese people.

Opening up the economy

Stanford Professor Darrell Duffie says that it will be hard for China to maintain its past high growth rates.

"China's growth rate is still very high, but it is less high than it was because most of the giant pool of cheap and underutilized labor that China had 20 years ago has by now been put to work relatively productively," said Duffie, the Dean Witter Distinguished Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business.

"Additional sources of productivity gains are harder to find," he added.

Duffie is concerned about excessive leverage in China's equity markets.

"Chinese investors have borrowed a lot of money to invest in equities. This margin financing was used too aggressively. China's corporations and local governments are heavily indebted, and that will be a drag on future growth," he said.

He suggests that China would do well to continue on its current course of opening up its economy to cross-border capital flows and reducing its economy's reliance on state-owned enterprises.

If China's economy slows down, the country will decrease its demand for American goods and services, he added. American businesses that plan to operate in China should learn as much as possible about how China's economy and government works.

And Duffie advised, "Whenever possible work with trusted partners in China."

Asian power games?

With China ramping up its military in recent years, what are the risks to U.S. national security if China's economy plunges?

Amy Zegart, co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, said it is possible that a slowing economy might make China behave differently in terms of its hard and soft power.

"For all the worry about a rising China, a fragile China is bad for the United States. The Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy rests on a promise of economic prosperity. The more China's growth falters, the more party leaders will be driven to stoke the fires of nationalism to secure domestic support," said Zegart, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

She added, "We've seen this movie before. It stars Vladimir Putin behaving recklessly abroad to win political support at home as his economy stalls."

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

The United Nations has thus far fulfilled its charter to prevent a third world war, but with 60 million refugees, continued bloodshed with unresolved civil conflicts and terrorism spreading like cancer, the world's leading peacekeeping organization must spearhead global action, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Friday at Stanford on the 70th anniversary of the international organization.

Ban, the U.N.'s eighth secretary-general, did not rest on any laurels during his speech at a public event sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). "I humbly accept criticism that the U.N. is not doing enough," he said. 

However, the situation could have been worse if not for the United Nations, he continued. "Without peacekeepers, or without the U.N.'s continued humanitarian assistance and advocacy of human rights, I'm afraid to tell you that this world would have been poorer, more dangerous and even bloodier without the United Nations."

Ban's visit to Stanford – his second to the university in less than three years – was part of a trip to the Bay Area to commemorate the signing of the U.N. charter. In 1945, representatives from 50 nations gathered in San Francisco to create the United Nations – an international organization aimed at saving future generations from the "scourge of war."

Today, the United Nations has grown to 193 member nations. Its challenges – from climate change and poverty to civil wars and terrorism – have never been greater, Ban said.

"This is a critical year; 2015 is a year of global action," he said. "The U.N. cannot do it alone. We need strong solidarity among government, business communities and civil societies, from each and every citizen."

The fact that so many young people around the globe are drawn to violent narratives is worrisome, Ban said. "Violent terrorism is spreading like cancer around the world."

The rise in terrorist activities stems from "a failure of leadership," he said. That's why the United Nations needs to develop a comprehensive plan of action to address extremism, he maintained.

The U.N.'s 70th anniversary coincidentally fell on a momentous day of tragedy and celebration around the world. Dozens were killed when terrorists launched horrific attacks across three continents – in France, Tunisia and Kuwait – fueling anger, sadness and fear of more violence.

But in the United States, celebrations rang out in response to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalizes same-sex marriages nationwide.

Ban, who has long advocated for equality and last year pushed the United Nations to recognize same-sex marriages of its staff, drew a round of applause when he heralded the court ruling as "a great step forward for human rights."

The June 26 event was co-sponsored by Shorenstein APARC and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, with promotional co-sponsors Asia Society, Asia Foundation and the World Affairs Council of Northern California. 

May Wong is a freelance writer for the Stanford News Service.

Coverage and related multimedia links:

Remarks at Stanford University by Ban Ki-moon (U.N. News Centre, 6/26/15)

Photos of Ban Ki-moon at Stanford University (U.N. Photo, 6/26/15)

At Stanford University, Ban says U.N. ready to build a better future for all (U.N. News Centre, 6/27/2015)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomes growing engagement of India, China (NDTV, 6/27/2015)

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks at Stanford, celebrates U.N.'s 70th anniversary (Stanford Daily, 6/29/15)

Hoover archival photographs featured at lecture delivered by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (Hoover Institution, 6/29/2015)

The damage that Mao Zedong wrought in China made it much easier for that country to move away from a Soviet-style economic model and toward a new market-oriented one, a Stanford scholar says.

In fact, China has been in full retreat for four decades from Mao's disastrous rule, according to a new book by Stanford sociology Professor Andrew Walder, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and director emeritus of the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia Pacific Research Center.

"Mao ruined much of what he had built and created no viable alternative," he wrote. "At the time of his death, he left China backward and deeply divided."

Led by Mao, China's Communist Party seized power in 1949 after a long period of guerrilla insurgency followed by full-scale war. Mao launched a bloody Chinese revolution that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese over the next few decades. 

In an interview, Walder said that Mao pushed campaign after campaign against the Chinese Communist party and bureaucracy after 1966 – "The bureaucracy was basically flat on its back at the time of his death."

By contrast, Walder noted, the Soviet bureaucracy was powerful and well-entrenched, and had enormous vested interests that thwarted genuine reforms.

"In post-Mao China, the economy was so backward and the bureaucratic interests so weak that market reform was bundled together with a program of national revival – restructuring the economy along market lines while rebuilding the party and bureaucracy," he said.

Therefore, the politics of reform were much easier for a Chinese leader like Deng Xiaoping than for a Soviet leader like Mikhail Gorbachev, who had to contend with an entrenched bureaucracy still proud of the fact that the USSR was (until the late 1980s) the second largest economy in the world and an undeniable superpower, according to Walder.

He noted that Mao's initiatives repeatedly led to unintended and unanticipated outcomes.

"What is so remarkable is that after 1956 this was a recurring pattern. His initiatives repeatedly ran into trouble, forcing him to backtrack and change direction constantly – although he always insisted that things had unfolded in ways that were according to his plans," Walder said.

Class struggle, imaginary enemies

Mao's China, he added, was defined by a harsh Communist Party rule and a socialist economy modeled after the Soviet Union. Mao himself intervened at almost every level, despite a large national bureaucracy that oversaw this authoritarian system.

"The doctrines and political organization that produced Mao's greatest achievements – victory in the civil war, the creation of China's first unified modern state, a historic transformation of urban and rural life – also generated his worst failures: the industrial depression and rural famine of the Great Leap Forward and the violent destruction and stagnation of the Cultural Revolution," Walder wrote.

He said that Mao misunderstood China's real problems in advocating a top-down "class struggle" against capitalism and imaginary enemies.

"At the time of his death (in 1976), he left China backward and deeply divided," Walder wrote.

The result was a gradual transition to the market-oriented system of today, he added. Almost immediately following Mao's death, his most fervent followers and supporters in the party were arrested and detained – all of which opened the door to reform and opportunity.

China has overcome widespread poverty to become the second largest economy in the world within the span of just a couple of decades. Still, according to Walder, China's rulers seek to cling to a sanitized version of Mao as a way to buttress their legitimacy.

"The damage of his misrule, and the incompetence on his part that it reflects, are not part of the official story anymore, and certainly this is not what is taught to school children or in party manuals in the present day," he said.

World War II and Stalinism

On two other key issues, Walder said his book challenges the conventional wisdom about China and Mao.

First, he says that Mao's forces did very little of the fighting against the Japanese in WWII.

Walder said that the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949 over the Chinese nationalist forces has usually been traced to the strategy of guerrilla warfare in rural regions championed early on by Mao.

"But that was simply a strategy of survival during the Japanese invasion – and Mao's forces did very little of the fighting against the Japanese, in stark contrast to the popular myth of rural resistance." (Only 10 percent of China's military casualties were Red Army, he said.)

What Mao's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) excelled at was mass mobilization for all-out warfare during the Chinese civil war of 1945-49, Walder said.

"And this – pushing your organization and the population for all-out mobilization for war – is the real source of the CCP's success over the Chinese nationalists. This was more like the Soviet Union's war against German armies during World War II than a 'people's war' led by a party that was close to the rural people and built support by catering to their needs," he said.

Second, Walder describes Mao's thinking as frozen in Stalinist doctrine, despite the conventional view of him as an original thinker.

"In fact, Mao's core ideas were absorbed from late-1930s Soviet pamphlets put out under Stalin, and his thinking was very much frozen in that earlier era," Walder said. "The core idea that he absorbed from these pamphlets in creating 'Mao Thought' was that socialism had to be built in an all-out mobilization, like warfare, by extracting huge sacrifices from the population."

The most pernicious idea that Mao absorbed from these old Soviet pamphlets, Walder said, was that class struggle actually intensifies after the means of production are put under public ownership and former exploiting classes are liquidated.

"The sad corollary to this idea is that the Great Leader is the fount of correct ideas, and those who doubt or oppose him represent class enemies who actually oppose socialism," said Walder.

Based on this logic, Walder pointed out, the class struggle had to be waged against "incorrect ideas" as judged by the Great Leader.

"Mao's personality cult was an imitation of Stalin's own," he said.

And so, the Chinese leader held on to old Stalinist ideas long after they were rejected by the Soviet Union as crude distortions of Marxism.

"Mao was actually insisting on keeping to the old and tattered Stalinist playbook," Walder said.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Fei Yan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, has been awarded a prize from the China and Inner Asia Council (CIAC) for his paper on political rivalries during China’s Cultural Revolution. The award aims to recognize emerging scholarship and foster intellectual exchange among experts working on China and Inner Asia topics, according to the award website.

Yan was presented the award at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference on March 27. CIAC released the following statement:

“In his paper, Fei Yan offers a new interpretation of the factional rivalries that wracked China's provinces during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. His focus is on the dispute between the so-called ‘radical’ Red Flag faction and the so-called ‘conservative’ East Wind faction that came to a head in Guangzhou in 1967. Making use of previously unavailable archival sources, he offers a meticulous and detailed description of the extent to which this split was based less on deep ideological differences and more on intense power rivalries and disagreements over tactics.”

Yan specializes in Chinese politics and political culture, and comparative social policy within transitional economies and authoritarian settings. He will join the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua University as an assistant professor this fall.