In the most sweeping reshuffle of his government since he took office last May, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fired his Cabinet and appointed a new prime minister earlier this month. The announcement comes at a tricky time, as the government is considering several reform measures that are seen as important to winning much-needed investor confidence. In an email interview with WPR, Steven Pifer, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, discusses the factors behind Zelensky’s move and why the new Cabinet will need to work hard to prove it can bring about real change in Ukraine.

World Politics Review: Why has Zelensky chosen to reshuffle his government at this time?

Steven Pifer: Some analysts suggest Zelensky made the personnel change due to concern over his declining popularity. Elected with 73 percent of the vote last April, his approval rating has fallen to just under 50 percent—still high by Ukrainian standards. Overall, the new Cabinet ministers lack the reformist credentials of their predecessors, and the new prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, is a relative unknown. The change has given rise to concern that the country’s oligarchs, who continue to exercise outsized political influence, are reasserting their position after Zelensky’s initial pledges to rein them in.

That, combined with the inexplicable timing of the reshuffle, has rattled Ukrainian reformers and Western investors. Zelensky took office last year amid high hopes that his presidency could make a dramatic breakthrough and put Ukraine on a path of economic growth and reduced corruption. When I visited Kyiv in late October, Ukrainians I spoke with were cautiously optimistic about what Zelensky and his government could achieve. The Cabinet reshuffle moves the needle sharply in the direction of caution. Indeed, some analysts fear the president is not committed to real change, and that he will simply muddle through as president without making the breakthrough that Ukraine needs. He will have to work hard now to quash those concerns and meet the expectations of Ukrainian voters.

Read the rest at World Politics Review

March 18 marks the sixth anniversary of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.  Attention now focuses on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Donbas, a conflict that has taken some 14,000 lives, but Moscow’s seizure of Crimea—the biggest land-grab in Europe since World War II—has arguably done as much or more damage to Europe’s post-Cold War security order.

Ukraine lacks the leverage to restore sovereignty over Crimea, at least for the foreseeable future.  But that does not mean the West should accept it.  Doing so might only encourage the Kremlin to believe that taking the territory of other countries is an action that it can get away with.

Crimea’s Illegal Annexation

Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution ended in late February 2014, when President Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv—later to turn up in Russia—and the Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) appointed an acting president and acting prime minister to take charge.  They made clear their intention to draw Ukraine closer to Europe by signing an association agreement with the European Union.

Almost immediately thereafter, armed men began occupying key facilities and checkpoints on the Crimean peninsula.  Clearly professional soldiers by the way they handled themselves and their weapons, they wore Russian combat fatigues but with no identifying insignia.  Ukrainians called them “little green men.”  President Vladimir Putin at first flatly denied these were Russian soldiers, only to later admit that they were and award commendations to their commanders.

The sizeable Ukrainian military presence in Crimea stayed in garrison.  If shooting began, Kyiv wanted the world to see the Russians fire first.  Ukraine’s Western partners urged Kyiv not to take precipitate action.  Since many enlisted personnel in the Ukrainian ranks came from Crimea, Ukrainian commanders probably had less than full confidence in the reliability of their troops.

Things moved quickly.  By early March, Russian troops had secured the entire peninsula.  On March 6, the Crimean Supreme Council voted to ask to accede to Russia.  The council scheduled a referendum for March 16, which offered two choices:  join Russia or return to Crimea’s 1992 constitution, which gave the peninsula significant autonomy.  Those who favored Crimea remaining part of Ukraine under the current constitution had no box to check.

The conduct of the referendum proved chaotic and took place absent any credible international observers.  Local authorities reported a turnout of 83 percent, with 96.7 percent voting to join Russia.  The numbers seemed implausible, given that ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars accounted for almost 40 percent of the peninsula’s population.  (Two months later, a leaked report from the Russian president’s Human Rights Council put turnout at only 30 percent, with about half of those voting to join Russia.)

On March 18, Crimean and Russian officials signed the Treaty of Accession of the Republic of Crimea to Russia.  Putin ratified the treaty three days later.

Russian Claims

Moscow maintains a historical claim to Crimea.  The Russians colonized Crimea during the reign of Catherine the Great, and they founded Sevastopol—the peninsula’s main port and largest city—to be the homeport for the Russian Black Sea Fleet.  Following the establishment of the Soviet Union, Crimea was a part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic until 1954, when it was transferred administratively to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

It is also true that Crimea in 2014 had an ethnic Russian majority of about 60 percent—the only part of Ukraine where ethnic Russians constituted the majority.  But it is equally true that, when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, the resulting independent states recognized one another in their then-existing borders.  Russia’s seizure of Crimea from Ukraine violated, among other agreements, the UN Charter, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances for Ukraine and the 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Ukraine and Russia.

Moscow expressed concern about the fate of ethnic Russians in Crimea, but no evidence showed any threat to them.  The Russian government justified the referendum and annexation as an act of self-determination, though it appears that well less than half of the Crimean population actually voted to join Russia.  In any case, the Kremlin applies the principle of self-determination selectively; Moscow responded to the desire of Chechens for independence from Russia after the Soviet collapse with two bloody conflicts.

It appears that domestic politics provided one motive behind Putin’s decision to seize Crimea.  He returned to the presidency in 2012 with an economic situation much weaker than during his first two terms as president (2000-2008).  Instead of being able to cite economic growth and rising living standards, he based much of his reelection appeal on Russian nationalism.  Seizing Crimea in a quick and relatively bloodless operation proved very popular with the Russian public.  Putin’s approval rating climbed accordingly.

Crimea Today and Looking Forward

Crimea has undergone significant changes over the past six years.  A large number of ethnic Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars—some put the total at 140,000—have left the peninsula since 2014.  Crimean Tatars complain of intimidation and oppression as one reason for moving.  During the same period, some 250,000 people have moved from Russia to Crimea (Crimean Tatar leaders claim the influx is much larger).  The inflow has included troops and sailors, as the Kremlin has bolstered the Russian military presence on the peninsula, deploying new submarines, surface combatants and combat aircraft among other things.

The economic picture is mixed.  Trying to create a success story, Moscow has poured in more than $10 billion in direct subsidies as well as funding major construction and infrastructure projects, such as the highway and railroad bridges that now cross the Kerch Strait to link Crimea directly to Russia.  On the other hand, small business has suffered, particularly with the decline in tourism, which once accounted for about one quarter of Crimea’s economy.  Crimea also remains subject to a variety of Western economic and other sanctions.  It is probably fair to say that the reality of the economic situation today falls short of what many in Crimea expected, or hoped for, with Russia’s annexation.

The ongoing Russian-Ukrainian conflict in Donbas has pushed Crimea to the back pages, with Kyiv understandably focusing on trying to end that fighting, which claims the lives of Ukrainian soldiers on almost a weekly basis.  Still, while Donbas has meant far more dead than Crimea, Crimea’s seizure arguably has done as much, if not more, damage to the European security order.  A key premise of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act and subsequent documents was that state borders should be inviolable and not changed by force; Russia’s actions in 2014 shredded that principle.  That has caused unease among Russia’s other neighbors.

The Ukrainian government maintains that it will get Crimea back.  Analytically, it is difficult to see how Kyiv can muster the political, diplomatic, economic and military leverage needed to do so.  Perhaps the one possibility would be if Ukraine were to achieve dramatic success in growing its economy, both in absolute terms and relative to the Russian economy, to the point where Crimeans calculated that their living standards would be better off as part of Ukraine.  Moscow would likely fiercely resist that—just ask the Chechens—and, in any case, Ukraine’s economy has a long way to go.

Even if Crimea’s return appears implausible in the near term, the United States and Europe should continue to support Kyiv’s position, maintain Crimea-related sanctions on Russia, and hold to the policy of non-recognition of Crimea’s annexation.  Moscow should pay some price for its use of military force to seize the peninsula.  That’s the right thing to do for Ukraine, for the European security order, and for dissuading the Kremlin from trying land grabs elsewhere.

The West also should remember the case of the Baltic states.  For five decades, the United States and other European countries refused to recognize their incorporation into the Soviet Union.  For most of that time, the Baltics regaining independence seemed implausible…until it happened.

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“Accommodate a despotic ruler if you have to,” says Stephen Krasner, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in his forthcoming book How to Make Love to a Despot: An Alternative Foreign Policy for the Twenty-first Century  (Liveright, 2020). Krasner suggests that by embracing rational choice institutionalism, the U.S. should be working with the elites the way they are, rather than expecting them to abide by our standards; aiming for not more and not less than “good enough governance.” We talked with Professor Krasner in more detail about his “third approach.”

Q: Your book How to Make Love to A Despot is coming out in April. The main takeaway is that the United States is permanently oscillating between two bad foreign policies and you are suggesting a third way. You say that the United States lives in a delusion that the rest of the world can and should be like us?

Krasner: I think the problem is that the United States has assumed that every other country could be a consolidated democracy. I think the clearest example of that is China. The assumption was that China would get richer, would have a large middle class, and it would become democratic. They'd be just like us. In the 20th century the United States, basically since it entered World War One, and then later through Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. wanted to turn the world into a set of consolidated democracies. That has worked sometimes but most of the time it hasn't worked. What I suggest in the book is what we should aim for is good enough governance that may turn into consolidated democracy at some point in the future, or it may not. It requires luck for that to happen, not just having the right conditions. But at least we wouldn't be inhibiting consolidated democracy from ultimately emerging.

Q: I can't resist but to ask about these examples you mentioned: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, these are all countries where the US has intervened with military force. So, when you say democracy promotion, what do you mean by it? Does this entitle military interventions too?

Krasner: I don't think it entitles a military intervention. Most of our military interventions have failed. I worked in the Bush administration, I think that President George W. Bush definitely believed that if you invaded Iraq and you demonstrated the benefits of democracy, that people would become democratic. And I think the fallacy here is that it was a kind of naturalness that if we intervene, we will be successful. I think the problem with active efforts at democracy promotion is that most of the time having a consolidated democracy means that you'll undermine the position of the traditional elite or the ruling elite. And they were not going to accept that. And they know more about the country than we do. So even things that are very well funded, have very well intentions, very well designed, often fail.

Q: So, do you honestly believe that the tendency of war in Iraq was democracy promotion?

Krasner: I do. I honestly believe that. I was in the administration at the time and I completely believe it. I think that Bush really believed that if we took the sewer cover off in Iraq, that that freedom would spring forth. In fact, that's not what sprang forth. I think that we did believe that it was relatively easy. When you're rationalizing why you're doing things in the rest of the world, why you're intervening in other parts of the world the standard American line would be that we're intervening to promote consolidated democracy, which actually turns out to be extremely difficult.

Q: From all the reasons that you just mentioned, you're suggesting the third course, with an awareness that we can't fix the world the way it is, but we can't ignore it either. So, in which way do you suggest that the United States should interact with the world? And how deep should it go and for how long?

Krasner: I think the problem is that we have entered a world in which in the near future it will be relatively easy to create malicious germs, nuclear weapons, etc. At this point, we kind of assumed that more information was better, and great information would rise to the top. That hasn't necessarily been the case. So, we can't detach ourselves from the rest of the world because even non-state actors with relatively limited capabilities, which is what Al-Qaeda was, are able to use weapons against the thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans. So, I don't think we can ignore the world. What we can do is to aim for good enough governance. The first thing is that you must be supported by national elites. Even if those national elites are autocratic. I think that way we could provide better security. We can provide some improvement in services, especially in health, which has been a big, big success story since 1945. We also must accept that the idea that we can eliminate corruption is entirely impossible. As you know, patronage is better than stealing a $100 million and moving it outside of the country. But that's the best that we can hope to do.

Q: So, the question is—how do you create this index of what is going to be tolerated and what is not going to be tolerated? What is good enough governance in practice?

Krasner: I don't have a clear answer to that. Good enough governance has to mean that we're trying to create a security environment in other countries, where governments are capable of policing their own territory, which might not always be possible. I don't think we can eliminate, but certainly, try to minimize threats that might arise elsewhere. The problem would be if the government is so repressive that it engenders a large-scale domestic reaction. Now, for the most part, you have to be really, really repressive and really stupid to have that happen, but it does happen sometimes, as it did in Sudan. Ideally, we should try and find government leaders who are inclusive enough that they'll be able to support and maintain the support of backers, necessary to keep them in power. And that's a part I'm uncertain about. I don't have a general rule for that. I think you'd just have to look at a particular situation.

Q: You must agree that there are many regions of the world where many countries are actually relying heavily on the help from the outside and count on active engagement with the U.S.?

Krasner: Yes. So, let me say something which I have to say I'm not certain about. I think acting because we assume that there are some things that are morally intolerable to people who lead the revolution is in general a mistake. Most of the time, if the government is able to keep a relatively stable situation and people are able to satisfy the material resources, I don't think they're likely to revolt. Now, if you look at the bigger revolts we've had, I mean, for instance, the revolt in Russia that led to the Soviet Union, the Romanovs were pretty inefficient and pretty ineffective. They were able to carry on a war for three years until the regime finally collapsed. But it took a lot of fairly bad policies to make that happen. So, what I'm arguing is that in general, I think that we assume that you can't have lasting peace unless you have a peace that's morally sustainable. I am, I should say assuming, because I haven't really done the empirical work in this, but assuming that people are willing to tolerate a lot of things that they consider immoral provided that the government provides them with some basic level of services including security.

Q: When you rely on local elites, as you say in your book, and they always serve their own interests, what would be the foreign policy mechanisms to limit how far that can go? Since the ramifications could be serious and lead the countries deeper into corruption and partocracy.

Krasner: I think that there is no formula for that. We've engaged, we've spent a lot of money directly on democracy promotion. Often the money is basically undermined. Azerbaijan, in the last election, had 50 election observers. 49 said the elections were okay. Only one, which was in the European Union, said the elections were corrupt. If you looked at CICIG in Guatemala, here was an organization that was set up by an agreement between the Guatemalan government and the secretary-general of the United Nations. What are the results? CICIG was disbanded within the last year and the effort to create something like CICIG in Honduras basically failed. In some cases, domestic leaders may misunderstand how threatening some of these organizations are and you have to assume that they know more about their country than we do. And they're not going to accept things which would result in their losing power, possibly being killed, possibly being exiled.

Q: In your book, you’re criticizing modernization theory saying that it just assumes that democracy and welfare can be attained relatively easily. You are also not so sure that putting an effort into building institutional capacity in those countries is enough. Still, in many cases, education on building institutional capacity dramatically helped in reforms.

Krasner: It may work, and it may not. I'm not saying I'm opposed to doing these things, but we shouldn't assume that they're going to easily lead to a consolidated democracy in the end. Hobbes, Samuel Huntington, they both say that you need institutional capacity, but the problem is what is going to prevent leaders who have lots of institutional capacity from acting in ways that serve their own interests, opposed to interests of a population? You're not going to be able to build institutions if they threaten the local political elite. If you look historically only for a relatively short period of time, generously the last couple of hundred years, have you had consolidated democracies in which the political elite could lose power as a result of decisions that were taken by the electorate and most of the world. It's pretty unusual. It’s happened in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. It hasn't happened in other parts of the world. We shouldn't assume then it's kind of the natural order of things. If you look at recent developments in the United States, it is important that rulers have a set of norms in which they value the foundational values of the country. But if you get a ruler who isn't very interested in those norms, you can have a lot of bad things happen.

Q: The theory that you suggest and call rational choice institutionalism relies on the elites and it stresses that elites will be willing to tie their own hands and adopt policies that benefit the population as a whole only under certain conditions. But when we take a step back and we do look at consolidated democracies, we see that many of the values in those societies are actually the foundation for the policies in those countries. And these values were nurtured over time.

Krasner: I agree with that. In consolidated democracies people have the elite, the political leaders adopted a set of values. It's true in most of the United States, it's true in the American military, it's true in parts of Western Europe in which people do actually cherish these values. But I think often they came later, and they weren't necessarily there in the beginning. I also think religion is one set of values that really matters to people. You have these Evangelical Christians in the United States who, you know, they see Trump, I think they see Trump as being a sinful individual, but they see him as the best bet to defend values that they endorse. Many people in the rest of the United States, they're looking around and seeing a world in which their material wellbeing has just deteriorated for 30 or 40 or 50 years, whether there’s Democrats or Republicans in office, they don't have any belief in anything anymore. Also, if you look at race relations in the United States, they are very troubled. They have been troubled for 300 years.

Q: So, does this mean that your overall understanding of the world today is that it's so bad that the United States should focus on self-preservation and just look at how to protect our safety?

Krasner: So, I think we should do two things. First of all, I think we should be concerned with how well our own society is functioning. In this sense, I think Donald Trump isn't so, isn't to the extent that he's tapping into that, is not wrong. I think there are always things that we can do internationally, but we shouldn't expect that if we do these things, we're going to have great outcomes. We may make things a little better. There are things that we can do at the international level, but not expect that everyone's going to be just like us.

Living and studying all over East Asia, some of Hannah Kim’s most favorite activities were to meet and talk to diverse people from different backgrounds. Those conversations sparked her interest in how public opinion and perceptions of democracy differ across societies — a question that turned into the focus of her doctoral dissertation, which she completed last year at the University of California, Irvine.

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We sat down with Hannah to talk about her current work and her plans for future projects.

Q: As you’ve been here at APARC researching your book, what kinds of relationships have you found between the middle classes of East Asia and their perceptions of a democratic society?

Middle-class groups in many East Asian countries are significantly different than those in other regions because they are newer and smaller. They also tend to be much more dependent on the state, and this state dependency has led to fundamentally different views of democracy than we see in other places.

Modernization theory — which is one of the most prominent theories in comparative politics — contends that higher levels of economic growth lead to a rise of a middle class. This middle class then becomes a driving force for democracy. In East Asian countries, however, state-led economic growth played a central role in the creation and development of middle-class groups, which fostered a dependent and mutually supportive relationship between middle-class groups and the state. This suggests that middle-class groups may prefer a stronger role of the state and be less likely to support liberal democracy relative to other groups.

Q: What research findings surprised you about the relationship between the middle class and democracy?

There have been a number of unexpected results. For one, middle-class East Asians are more likely to support good governance ahead of freedom and liberty, which is often reversed among middle-class groups in Western democracies. I’ve found that many East Asian middle-class citizens view democracy more illiberally and prefer a political system that has a mix of democratic and autocratic properties — a hybrid regime — rather than a liberal democracy.

For example, the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (2010-14) shows that 62% of Taiwanese respondents, 31% of Chinese respondents, 29% of Japanese respondents, and 49% of South Korean respondents stated that it is “Very good” or “Fairly good” to have a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections. This indicates a culture of implicit support for an authoritarian-like leader. Recent studies also show that there is a negative correlation between the middle class and support for democracy in China.

Q: You have also been doing work that looks at democratization and gender in East Asia. How do gender, gender roles, and traditional culture impact the progress and perception of democratization?

Even though there are three full-fledged democracies in East Asia – namely, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – their citizens’ views on gender equality remain far from liberal. A majority of respondents to surveys in those democracies support the ideas that men should have more employment and education opportunities than women, and that men make better political and business leaders than women. This may be in part due to the historically patriarchal culture that continues to legitimize these views. However, in my study, I suggest that culturally democratic citizens are more likely to break away from these traditional patriarchal norms and challenge gendered practices within these societies. Increasing democratic citizenship, therefore, may enhance support for gender equality and other liberal values.

Q: What pressing challenges do you see facing Asia’s democratic societies?

The last ten years have been described as a decade of decline for liberal democracies worldwide and public opinion data further shows that support for democracy is rapidly declining. East Asian democracies, many of which democratized during the so-called second and third waves of that trend in the late twentieth century, are no exception to this democratic recession. While there are many institutional limitations, the biggest challenge for East Asian democracies may come from authoritarian legacies that encourage middle-class citizens to support traditional values that often go against liberal democracy. While East Asian democracies may not necessarily evolve towards autocracy, it may be a while before the middle class and the general public in East Asian countries fully support liberal democratic values and help democracies overcome this democratic recession.

Q: What’s next on your research agenda?

After my fellowship with APARC concludes, I will be moving to Omaha, Nebraska, where I’ll be working as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska. I’m scheduled to teach Asian politics there this coming fall, which I am really looking forward to. My immediate research goal is to continue working on my book, but I would also like to start pursuing research on gender and political behavior in South Korea.

President Xi Jinping’s tenure has been marked by growing state influence over all spheres of governance in China, including a marked tightening of control over the economy.

Curtis Milhaupt, the William F. Baxter-Visa International Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, addressed the hardening of Party controls over Chinese corporate governance. His lecture to the China Program on February 6 was based on research conducted by Milhaupt in collaboration with Yu-Hsin Lin of City University of Hong Kong, and examined the expanding role of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within both state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately-owned enterprises (POEs). The influence of the CCP within these enterprises, Milhaupt says, is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Milhaupt posits that the level of control exercised by the CCP on SOEs is lower than one might generally expect. At the same time, the CCP exercises a surprisingly higher level of control over POEs than we would typically assume. To draw these conclusions, Milhaupt uses a set of ten model provisions deemed to be dangjian, or “party-building,” measures that were developed and released by the Central Committee of the CCP. From data compiled between 2015 and 2018 from the charters of publicly-listed companies, Milhaupt shows that 10% of SOEs chose not to adopt any of the provisions distributed by the Central Committee. Meanwhile, 6% of POEs had at least a low level of adoption, despite the fact that the provisions were not directed at them. The reason for such variation, according to Milhaupt, can be explained by the characteristics of the provisions, the SOEs, and the POEs.

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Which enterprises adopted which provisions was highly correlated to those enterprises’ characteristics. SOEs were far more likely to amend their charters if they had direct state shareholding, but less likely to amend if they had large non-state shareholders, were further down in the state-ownership chain, or were cross-listed on international stock exchanges. POEs followed a similar structure, with enterprises being more likely to adopt provisions the more politically connected they were or the more direct state shareholding they had.

It remains unclear how the government can actually enforce the dangjian policy, and how these policies will affect the enterprises that adopt it. Despite the official rhetoric behind the dangjian policy, with claims that greater loyalty to the Party will lead to more economic success, Milhaupt expresses doubts:

“What’s [the danajian policy] going to mean for firm performance? Certainly, from a . . . straightforward economics or corporate governance perspective, one would not be optimistic that infiltrating corporations with political influence is going to do good things for firm performance.”

Milhaupt also has concerns about how the strategy will impact international investment, noting the already high levels of suspicion surrounding Chinese motivations: “This [emphasis on loyalty to the Party] would certainly seem to add fuel to the fire, and heighten concerns or suspicions with respect to Chinese outbound economic activity.” As SOEs and POEs continue to navigate both domestic and international markets with their amended charters, the future feasibility of the CCP’s reassertions over the economy is far from certain.

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 rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released today.