The politics of repression in China

This article was published in The Economist 18 February 2010

What are they afraid of? The economy is booming and politics stable. Yet China’s leaders seem edgy.

“The forces pulling China toward integration and openness are more powerful today than ever before,” said President Bill Clinton in 1999. China then, though battered by the Asian financial crisis, was busy dismantling state-owned enterprises and pushing for admission to the World Trade Organisation. Today, however, those forces look much weaker.

A spate of recent events, from the heavy jail sentences passed on human-rights activists to an undiplomatic obduracy at the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen last December, invite questions about the thinking of China’s leaders. Has their view of the outside world and dissent at home changed? Or were the forces detected by Mr Clinton and so many others after all not pulling so hard in the direction they were expecting?

The early years of what China calls its “reform and opening” after 1978 were marked by cycles of liberalisation and repression. The turning-points were usually marked by political crisis: dissent on the streets, leadership struggles, or both. Now, however, the only big protest movements are repressed ones among ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s big cities are hardly roiled by political turmoil.