This is the second part of a series leading up to the publication of Fateful Decisions. You can read the first installment here.

In the last forty years, China has reemerged as a tremendous geopolitical, economic, and technological power on the world stage. But the easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and influence are over, argue Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar and China Program Director Jean Oi in a new article published by The Washington Quarterly.

In this piece, drawing on the findings and insights of contributors to their forthcoming edited volume Fateful Decisions: Choices That Will Shape China’s Future (Stanford University Press, available May 2020), Fingar and Oi outline the daunting array of difficult challenges China now faces and explain why its future depends on the policy choices its leaders make in what will be seen as a watershed moment.

An excerpt from their article is available below. For the full version, visit The Washington Quarterly and download the PDF.
 

From, “China’s Challenges: Now it Gets Much Harder”

Some years ago, one of us had a running partner who wanted a bigger challenge than the dozens of marathons he had completed. When asked to describe his first 50-mile race, he replied, “The first 30 miles weren’t bad, but after that it got really hard.” China is approaching the metaphorical 30-mile mark in its developmental marathon. The challenges it encountered and managed effectively during the past 40 years were not easy, but they pale in comparison to those looming on the horizon. The way ahead will be more difficult, less predictable, and highly contingent on the content and efficacy of complex policy choices. The easy phases of China’s quest for wealth and power are over.

We begin with this cautionary note because so much of the new narrative about China’s rise posits capabilities and evolutionary trajectories that we find implausible. That China has done well in the past does not assure that it will do equally well (or better) in the future. That the Leninist party-state system adopted in the 1950s has proven sufficiently agile to manage the easier phases of modernization does not assure that it will be equally adept at meeting the more difficult challenges of a country being transformed by past successes and demographic change. The number, magnitude, and complexity of these challenges do not foreordain that China will stagnate, fail, or fall apart, but they do raise serious questions about the putative inevitability of China’s continued rise and displacement of the United States. China’s future is neither inevitable nor immutable; its further evolution will be shaped by internal economic and social developments, the international system, and above all, the policy choices of party leaders facing a daunting array of difficult challenges.

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We refer to China’s current approach as “back to the future” because it seeks to resuscitate institutions, methods, and rationales adopted in the 1950s and shelved during the period of reform and rapid modernization. We do not know why party leaders decided that it is in their — and thus China’s — interest to curtail or reverse policies that facilitated sustained growth and rapid improvement of living standards and China’s international image, but speculate that they hope doing so will buy time before incurring the risks (and for the elite, the costs) of fundamental reform.

Beijing has announced a number of very ambitious goals such as moving into the ranks of highly-developed countries by the centenary of the PRC in 2049, achieving global preeminence in key technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence, providing urban social benefits to most citizens, and building a number of green megacities. The likelihood of achieving all of the proclaimed goals is nil, but China will make substantial progress on some of them. It is impossible to predict which will succeed, which will fail, and which will flounder, but we can anticipate a mix of all three outcomes. Whatever the precise mix, it is likely to produce a China that is less prosperous and less powerful than predicted by the predominant narrative about where China is headed. Whether China’s leaders will risk tackling the difficult reforms that remain or continue to embrace key and thus far counterproductive structures and methods from the past remains to be seen.  Whether the party-state system is able to maintain acceptable levels of growth and public satisfaction under the new conditions is also uncertain. The only certainty is that China can no longer ride the wave that helped along its economic growth and resultant capabilities for at least ten reasons.

Read the full text of this article via The Washington Quarterly.

The Great Wall of China is one of Asia’s most photographed and visited landmarks. Built over thousands of years and winding through a total of 13,170 miles, this wide-reaching network of defenses was constructed as a barrier against China’s northern neighbors. But within the digital landscape of China is a much less conspicuous yet far more pervasive set of fortifications: the Great Firewall. China’s state-operated internet is carefully controlled, heavily censored, and designed to keep its own citizens away from information that might damage the power and perception of the Communist Party.

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In Robert’s assessment, the Great Firewall is an example of censorship via what she terms “friction.” Rather than centering on fear, this type of censorship acts as a tax on information, creating small inconveniences that are easy to explain away and requiring those seeking information to spend more time and money if they want access to it. Censorship thus “works through distraction and diversion. It nudges — but does not force — most users away from unsavory material.”

This framing of censorship, Robert says, helps explain why, even though China’s Great Firewall is porous and can be circumvented, the number of people who “jump the wall” using a virtual private network (VPN) remains relatively low. People are not necessarily afraid of legal or political consequences of using a VPN, but rather the process of doing so is deemed too bothersome or offers too little value for the effort in most people’s day-to-day lives.

This friction-driven censorship is, therefore, effective on two levels: it keeps the majority of citizens away from sensitive material by making it too labor-intensive for them to access, and it naturally filters for outlier individuals the government has an interest in monitoring. According to Robert’s data, VPN users are overwhelmingly 35-year-old and younger, tend to be college degree holders, have fluency in English, have traveled or studied outside of China, and are interested in international politics — precisely the kinds of cohorts the Communist Party would benefit from managing more closely.

However, these digital demographics shift dramatically to include much broader groups of people during crises and following abrupt interruptions to citizen’s daily lives. Through analysis of Chinese social media data, online experiments, and nationally representative surveys, Roberts shows how the number of VPN  downloads spiked during the devastating Tianjin chemical explosion in 2015 as people scrambled to find information on the disaster. VPN downloads also increased after the shutdown of Instagram on September 29, 2014, following protests in Hong Kong. The Chinese government barred access to the platform to contain posts about the protests, but Roberts says that it was the sudden loss of access to the social media platform’s draw of entertainment that pulled many more “everyday” citizens over the firewall than would be typical. Once over, these new users quickly moved from accessing pictures of pop stars to exploring banned websites and censored information in more political spaces.

This is one of the important takeaways Roberts sees in her work. “This porous nature of censorship . . . means that there’s an Achilles heel of friction, which is that during crises, or sudden, more visible [moments of] censorship, people are willing to seek out that type of information and that can undermine some of these other strategies.”

With the Great Firewall only a few decades old, the full effects of its friction-based barricades remain to be seen, but Roberts is certain that in the coming years, the control of access to and accuracy of online information will have important effects not only on modern China but the future digital world as a whole.

You can learn more about Margaret Robert’s work in her book, Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall.

Deputy Director of APARC and Director of the Asia Health Policy Program Karen Eggleston recently spoke to Bloomberg Markets about the new cases and the further spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States.

"There has been widespread international collaboration on the scientific side to try and get ready for a vaccine and for therapies, but that takes time. In the meantime, you have to rely on tried and true public health measures."

Eggleston stressed the importance of people remaining calm and avoiding both complacency and panic in response to the growing public health crisis. Instead, being proactive, science-based, and utilizing clear, organized communications channels are the keys to protecting individuals and communities and in making timely, informed, effective decisions about future steps as the outbreak continues. Typical practices for flu season such as frequent handwashing, staying away from public spaces when ill, and following recommended self-quarantine guidelines are all measures people can take to support their well-being and the health of those around them.

"It's important to remember that both the transmissibility and the fatality rate [of COVID-19] can be changed by the way we respond. The way we trace the contacts and isolate can reduce the transmissibility. And the resilience of our public health system and investment in prevention and supporting our healthcare workers — and having the right equipment in place for the severe cases — can affect the fatality rate and protect people."

Watch the full interview below to hear more recommendations on how to prepare.

When economists, policymakers, and media commentators discuss growth or compare living standards across countries, they typically turn to a single measure: Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In layman’s terms, GDP is the monetary value of all goods and services made or exchanged in a country during a specific period of time. The calculation of a nation’s GDP is complex and takes in a multitude of country-specific caveats, but the final figure per capita is supposedly a proxy for a nation’s economic health.

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Using GDP as a measure of welfare, however, has multiple problems. Just ask Dr. Amit Kapoor, an expert in economic development and business strategy, who rebuts the focus often placed on the importance of GDP. As the chair of the Shared Value Institute of India, president and CEO of the India Council on Competitiveness, and as an affiliate faulty member with the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness of the Harvard Business School, Kapoor has spent a great deal of time and effort working with the governments of India and other countries on measuring social progress and developing living standards, performance, and progress indices. In a recent lecture as part of APARC’s South Asia Colloquia, Kapoor made his case for looking past GDP when considering the overall well-being of nations.

GDP, says Kapoor, originated in the 1940s as a wartime estimate to provide a window into a region’s economic situation and is based on the paradigm that economic objectives equal social objectives. Yet economic development doesn’t always lead to advancements in social progress and human prosperity. To gain a complete understanding of a nation’s growth, he argued, it is important directly to measure social progress, which includes indicators of human well-being such as access to education, equal opportunity, health services, sanitation and clean water, social inclusion, and even tolerance.

 Our world as we know it is facing multiple threats, Kapoor reminds us, from environmental extinction to the rise of populism and to the crisis of capitalism. We can only address these issues “by creating alternate measures of how we assess human well-being.”

Kapoor points to the apparent growing gap between economic gains and social parity as evidence that GDP-centricity gives a very pixelated, partial picture of national development. In the past 80 years, economies as a whole have gained exponentially, as indeed reflected in GDP measurements, but progress on issues such as basic human needs, personal well-being, and opportunities for individual fulfillment have seemed to lag.

Kapoor’s issue with GDP is that it fails to account for these other kinds of social, environmental, and cultural factors. To this end, he advocates considering other means of measuring success and development, such as the Human Development Index, or his research to gauge and codify “ease of living” measurements in his home country of India.

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That research, says Kapoor, shows there exists a non-linear relationship between ease of living and per capita GDP. Therefore, the impact of economic development on a population’s ease of living will depend on where the region is placed. Moreover, if one is at a lower level of economic development, then investing in economic well-being will translate into social well-being, but after the cutoff is reached, higher economic development will lead to a fall in the ease of living.    

“In an economy with well-being at its heart, economic growth will simply be another tool to guide it in the direction that the society chooses. In such an economy, the percentage points of GDP, which are rarely connected with the lives of average citizens, will cease to take the center stage. The focus would instead shift towards more desirable and actual determinants of welfare.”

You can read more of Amit Kapoor’s perspectives and learn more about his work to redefine development in India in his Harvard Business Review article, “GDP Is Not a Measure of Human Well-Being.”

In a recent interview with People's Daily Online, APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar reflects on some of the milestones in the developing and diversifying relationship between the United States and China over the past forty years. The interview is part of a series of short documentaries produced by People's Daily Online West USA to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979. The series was premiered at the San Francisco Public Library on January 18, 2020.

"So much of my career has been devoted to this relationship, [to] making this relationship work," says Fingar. He recounts how his own interest in China was sparked as a student in an anthropology class, where he began trying to understand why China and the United States "did things differently."

That initial question led him to a lifetime of building connections between the two countries, both in academia and government. Fingar was instrumental in launching Stanford's U.S.-China Relations Program in 1975, which promoted the exchange of learning, technology, and training between U.S. academics and students and their Chinese counterparts.

The focus on promoting U.S.-China engagement continues to inform Fingar’s perspectives today. "I'm concerned about the relationship [between the U.S. and China], but I'm not worried about it. I'm confident that both sides understand the stakes, [and] both sides understand the pressures to make this work".

Watch the interview below: