China's Trapped Transition_ The Limits of Developmental Autocracy - Minxin Pei [2]
One of the defining features of China’s economic reform is its integration with the world economy.10 Adopted by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping as the centerpiece of his reform strategy, the policy of opening the Chinese economy to international trade and investment has produced enormous benefits. During the past twenty-five years, China has become one of the leading trading nations in the world, as well as one of the most popular destinations for FDI. In 1978, China was a closed economy that, relative to the size of its economic system, conducted a small amount of foreign trade and had token FDI. After a quarter century of reform, Chinese foreign trade increased, unadjusted for inflation, forty-one-fold—from $20.6 billion in 1978 to $840 billion in 2003—making China the fourth largest trading nation in the world.11 In relative terms, China’s foreign trade grew almost six times faster than its economic output (as gross domestic product, or GDP, rose 700 percent in the same period). The stock FDI, slightly more than $1 billion in 1982, reached $446 billion in twenty years. In 1980, about half a million foreigners, excluding people from Hong Kong and Taiwan, visited China. In 2002, 13.5 million did.12
China’s integration into the international community has not been limited to trade and investment. Almost equally significant are the extensive educational, social, and cultural links with the West established during the reform period through the training of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students and visiting scholars in Western institutions of high learning, the appointment of tens of thousands of Western experts in Chinese universities, and through tourism and popular culture. Although it is difficult to quantify precisely the impact of such a multifaceted process of integration on Chinese society and politics, it is highly likely that the effects of this transformation have contributed to changes in values, tastes, and lifestyles that have occurred since the late 1970s.
China’s Lagging Political Development
Juxtaposed against such massive, and largely positive, economic and social changes, however, is China’s political system. Despite more than two decades of rapid socioeconomic changes, the core features of a Leninist party-state remain essentially unchanged.13 By most conventional standards, the pace of political change has significantly lagged behind that of economic progress. This gap appeared to be expanding toward the end of the 1990s, as the Chinese leadership continued its gradualist economic reform while taking no substantive steps toward political opening. To some extent, the discrepancy between economic progress and political change is captured, however crudely, by polling data in China and several widely followed international indicators of democracy and governance. For example, a survey of 2,723 people across China in 2002 showed that they believed their political rights and ability to influence government decisions, the likelihood of getting equal treatment from the government, and judicial independence had improved only marginally as compared with the prereform cra.14
In his speech at a small group meeting of the 16th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2002, Li Rui, an outspoken liberal party member and former secretary to Mao Zedong, offered an apt assessment of China’s political progress:
Since China began its transition to a market economy, our national strength has been rising steadily, and we have gained undisputed great progress. But these problems remain: excessively slow pace in the reform of the political system, the lagging development of democracy, the weakness of the rule of law, and the resultant pervasive corruption.15
Lagging political development will endanger the CCP’s own survival, Li warned:
Chinese and foreign histories prove that autocracy is the source of political turmoil.