Chinese civilization originated in the Neolithic Period, which began around 5000 B.C., but scholars know little about it until the Shang Dynasty, which dates from about 2000 B.C. By that time, the Chinese had already developed the technology and art of bronze casting to a high standard; and they had a sophisticated system of writing with ideographs, in which words are portrayed as picture like characters. From the fifth to the third centuries B.C., the level of literature and the arts was comparable to that of Greece in the Classical Period, which occurred at the same time. Science flourished, and the philosopher Confucius developed a highly sophisticated system of ethics for government and moral codes for society. Confucian values were dominant until the collapse of the Chinese imperial system in 1911, but even today they influence Chinese thought and behavior in China and Taiwan and in Chinese communities throughout the world.

The Chinese Empire

By 221 B.C., the many feudal states ruled by independent princes had been conquered by Qin (Ch'in) Shi Huang Di, the first ruler of a unified Chinese Empire. He established a system of governmental institutions and a concept of empire that continued in China until A.D. 1911. Although China was unified from the Qin Dynasty on, it was far less concrete than the term empire might indicate. China's borders really reached only as far as its cultural influence did. Thus China contracted and expanded according to whether or not other groups of people accepted the Chinese ruler and culture as their own.
Those peoples outside "China" who refused to acknowledge the Chinese ruler as the "Son of Heaven" or pay tribute to him were called "barbarians." In part, the Great Wall, which stretches more than 2,000 miles across north China and was built in stages between the third century B.C. and the seventeenth century A.D., was constructed in order to keep marauding "barbarians" out of China. Nevertheless, they frequently invaded China and occasionally even succeeded in subduing the Chinese-as in the Yuan (Mongol) Dynasty (1279-1368) and, later, the Qing (Ch'ing, or Manchu) Dynasty (1644-1911).
However, the customs and institutions of the invaders eventually yielded to the powerful cultural influence of the Chinese. Indeed, in the case of the Manchus, who seized control of the Chinese Empire in 1644 and ruled until 1911, their success in holding onto the throne for so long may be due in part to their willingness to assimilate Chinese ways and to rule through existing Chinese institutions, such as the Confucian-ordered bureaucracy. By the time of their overthrow, the Manchu rulers were hardly distinguishable from the pure (Han) Chinese in their customs, habits, and beliefs. When considering today's policies toward the numerous minorities who inhabit such a large expanse of the People's Republic of China, it should be remembered that the central Chinese government's ability to absorb minorities was the key to its success in maintaining a unified entity called China for more than 2,000 years.

The Imperial Bureaucracy

A distinguishing feature of the political system of imperial China was the civil-service examinations through which government officials were chosen. These examinations tested knowledge of the moral principles embodied in the classical Confucian texts. Although the exams were, in theory, open to all males in the Chinese Empire, the lengthy and rigorous preparation required meant that, in practice, the sons of the wealthy and powerful with access to a good education had an enormous advantage. Only a small percentage of those who began the process actually passed the examinations and received an appointment in the imperial bureaucracy. Those who were successful were sent as the emperor's agents to govern throughout the far-flung realm.

The Decline of the Manchus

The vitality of Chinese institutions and their ability to respond creatively to new problems came to an end during the Manchu Dynasty (1644-1911). This was due in part to internal rebellions, caused by a stagnant agriculture incapable of supporting the growing population and by increasing exploitation of the poor peasants who made up the vast majority of Chinese society. As the imperial bureaucracy and the emperor's court itself became increasingly corrupt and incompetent, they gradually lost the ability to govern the empire effectively. Furthermore, the social-class structure rewarded those who could pass the archaic, morality-based civil-service examination rather than scientists and others who could make contributions to China's material advancement.
China's decline in the nineteenth century was exacerbated by cultural "blinders" that prevented the Chinese from understanding the dynamism of the Industrial Revolution then taking place in the West. Gradually the barriers erected by the Manchu rulers to prevent Western culture and technology from polluting the ancient beauty of Chinese civilization were knocked down.

The Opium War

The British began importing opium into China in the nineteenth century. Eventually they used the Chinese attack on British ships carrying opium as an excuse for declaring war on the decaying and decrepit Chinese Empire. The Opium War (1839-1842) ended with defeat for the Chinese and the forcible entry of European merchants and missionaries into China.
Other wars brought further concessions-the most important of which was the Chinese granting of "treaty ports" to Europeans. These ports inevitably led to the spread of Western values that challenged the stagnant, and by then morally impotent, Chinese Empire. As the West and Japan nibbled away at China, the Manchu rulers made a last-ditch effort at reform, so as to strengthen and enrich China. But the combination of internal decay, provincialism, revolution, and foreign imperialism finally toppled the Manchu Dynasty. Thus ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China.

REPUBLICAN CHINA

The 1911 Revolution, which derived its greatest inspiration from Sun Yat-sen (even though he was on a political fund-raising trip in the United States when it happened), led to the establishment of the Republic of China (R.O.C.)-in name, if not in fact. China was briefly united under the control of the dominant warlord of the time, Yuan Shih-kai. But with his death in 1916, China was again torn apart by the resurgence of contending warlords, internal political decay, and further attempts at territorial expansion, especially by the militant Japanese, who were searching for an East Asian empire of their own. Attempts at reform failed because China was so divided and weak.
Chinese intellectuals searched for new ideas from abroad to strengthen their nation in the vibrant May Fourth period, spanning from roughly 1917 through the early 1 920s. In the process, influential foreigners such as English mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, American philosopher and educator John Dewey, and Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore came to lecture in China. Thousands of Chinese students traveled and studied abroad. Ideas such as liberal democracy, syndicalism, guild socialism, and communism were contemplated as possible solutions to China's many problems.

The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party

In 1921, a small Marxist study group founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Moscow-based Comintern (Communist International) advised this highly intellectual but politically impotent group to link up with the more promising and militarily powerful Kuomintang (KMT, or Nationalist Party, led first by Sun Yat-sen and, after his death in 1925, by Chiang Kai-shek), in order to reunify China under one central government. Without adequate support from the Soviets or from forces within China-because there were so few capitalists in China, there was no urban proletariat, and therefore the Marxist aim of "overthrowing the capitalist class" was irrelevant-the Chinese Communists agreed to form a united front with the KMT. They hoped that once they had built up their own organization while cooperating with the KMT, they could break away to establish themselves as an independent political party. Thus, it was with Communist support that Chiang Kai-shek successfully united China under his control during the Northern Expedition. Chiang Kai-shek understood the Communist Party's ambitions to gain political power, however, so in 1927, he brutally quashed the Communist Party.

The Long March

The Chinese Communist Party's ranks were decimated two more times by the KMT's superior police and military forces, largely because the CCP had obeyed Moscow's advice to organize an orthodox Marxist urban-based movement in the cities. The cities, however, were completely controlled by the KMT. It is a testimony to the strength of the appeal of Communist ideas in that era that the CCP managed to recover its strength each time. Indeed, the growing power of the CCP was such that Chiang considered it, even more than the invading Japanese, the main threat to his complete control of China. Eventually the Chinese Communist leaders agreed that an urban strategy was doomed, yet they lacked adequate military power to confront the KMT head-on. They retreated in what became known as the Long March (1934-1935), traveling 6,000 miles from the southeast, through the rugged interior, to the windswept plains of Yanan in northern China.
It was during this retreat, in which as many as 100,000 people perished, that Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) staged his contest for power within the CCP. With his victory, the Chinese Communist Party reoriented itself toward a rural strategy and attempted to capture the loyalty of the peasants, then comprising some 85 percent of China's total population. Mao saw the peasants as the major source of support for revolution. In most areas of China, the peasants were suffering from an oppressive and brutal system of landlord control; they were the discontented masses who had "nothing to lose but [their] chains." Appealing to the peasants' desire to own their own land as well as to their disillusionment with KMT rule, the CCP slowly started to gain control over the countryside.

"United" against the Japanese

In 1937, Japan invaded China and occupied China's coastal provinces and Manchuria in the northeast. Although the CCP and KMT were determined to destroy each other, Japan's threat to China caused the CCP and KMT to agree again to a unified front to halt the Japanese advance. Both the KMT and the CCP had ulterior motives, but, according to most accounts, the Communists contributed more to the national wartime efforts. The Communists organized guerrilla efforts to peck away at the fringes of Japanese-controlled areas while Chiang Kai-shek, head of the KMT, retreated to the wartime capital of Zhongjing (Chungking). His elite corps of troops and officers kept the best of the newly arriving American supplies for themselves, leaving the rank-and-file Chinese to fight bootless and with inferior equipment against the Japanese. The unstinting efforts of the self-sacrificing Chinese people and the American victory over Japan helped bring World War II to an end in 1945. Once again, Chiang Kai-shek was free to focus on defeating the Communists.

The Communists Oust the KMT

It seemed as if the Communists' Red Army had actually been strengthened through its hard fighting during World War II, leaving it a formidable force for the KMT to confront. Meanwhile, the relatively soft life of the KNIT military elite during the war did not leave them well prepared for the hardships of the civil war that they now faced. Moving quickly to annihilate the Communists, Chiang Kai-shek relied on his old strategy of trying to capture China's cities. By contrast, the Communists, who had gained control over the countryside by winning the support of the vast peasantry, surrounded China's cities. Like besieged fortresses, the cities eventually fell to Communist control. By October 1949, the Chinese Communist Party could claim control over all of China except for the island of Taiwan. It was to Taiwan that the KMT's political, economic, and military elite, with American support, had fled.
Scholars still dispute why the Red Army ultimately defeated the KMT Army, citing as probable reasons the CCP's appeal to the Chinese people, the Communists' more virtuous behavior in comparison to that of the KMT soldiers, the CCP's more successful appeal to the Chinese sense of nationalism, and Chiang's unwillingness to undertake reforms that would bring about economic development and control corruption. Even had the KMT made greater efforts to bring about reform, however, any wartime government confronted with the demoralization of a population ravaged by war, inflation, economic destruction, and the humiliation of a foreign occupation would have found it difficult to maintain the loyal support of its people. Even the Chinese middle class eventually deserted the KMT. Indeed, many of those industrial and commercial capitalists who had supported the KMT stayed behind in the cities in order to join in a patriotic effort with the CCP to rebuild China. Others, however, stayed behind only because they were unable to flee to Hong Kong or Taiwan.
In any event, one thing is clear: The Communists did not gain victory because of support from the Soviet Union; for the Soviets, who were anxious to be on the winning side in China, chose to give aid to the KMT until it was clear that the Communists would win. Furthermore, the Communists' victory was due not to superior weapons but, rather, to a superior strategy, support from the Chinese people, and (as Mao Zedong believed) a superior political "consciousness." It was because of the Communist victory over a technologically superior army that Mao thereafter believed in the superiority of "man over weapons" and that the support of the people was essential to an army's victory. The relationship of the soldiers to the people is, Mao said, like the relationship of fish to water-without the water, the fish will die.

THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

The Red Army's final victory came rapidly-far faster than anticipated. Suddenly China's large cities fell to the Communists, who now found themselves in charge of a nation of more than 600 million people. They had to make critical decisions about how to unify and rebuild the country. They were obligated, of course, to fulfill their promise to redistribute land to the poor and landless peasants in return for the peasants' support of the Communists. The CCP leaders were, however, largely recruited from among the peasantry; and while they knew how to make a revolution, they had little experience with governance. Rejected by the Western democratic-capitalist countries because of their embrace of communism and desperate for aid and advice, the Communists turned to the Soviet Union for direction and support.

The Soviet Model

In the early years of CCP rule, China's leaders "leaned to one side" and followed the Soviet model of development in education, the legal system, the economic system, and elsewhere. The Soviet economic model favored capital-intensive industrialization, which required a reliance on Soviet experts and well-educated Chinese, whom the Communists were not sure they could trust. Without Soviet support in the beginning, however, it is questionable whether the CCP would have been as successful as it was in developing China in the 1950s.

The Maoist Model

China soon grew exasperated with the limitations of Soviet aid-which did not come without price or obligation-and the inapplicability of the Soviet model to Chinese circumstances. Thus, China's preeminent Communist leader, Mao Zedong, proposed a model of development more appropriate to Chinese circumstances. What came to be known as the Maoist model took account of China's low level of development, poverty, and large population. Instead of expensive capital equipment, Mao hoped to utilize China's enormous manpower for development by organizing people into ever larger working units.
In 1958, in what became known as the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong launched his Chinese model of development. It was a bold scheme to sharply accelerate the pace of industrialization so that China could catch up with the industrialized states of the West. Land was merged into large communes, untested and controversial planting techniques were introduced, and peasant women were engaged fully in the fields in order to increase agricultural production. The communes became the basis for industrializing the countryside through a program of peasants building their own "backyard furnaces." The Maoist model assumed that those people possessing a proper revolutionary, or "red," consciousness would be able to produce more than those who were "expert" but lacked revolutionary consciousness-that is, a commitment to achieving communism.
The Maoist model was a rejection of the Soviet model of development, which Mao came to see as an effort to hold the Chinese back from more rapid industrialization. In particular, the Soviets' refusal to give the Chinese the most advanced industrial plant equipment and machinery, or to share nuclear technology with them, made Mao suspicious of their intentions.

Sino-Soviet Relations Sour

For their part, the Soviets believed that the Maoist model was doomed to failure. The Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced the Great Leap Forward as "irrational": but he was equally distressed at what seemed a risky scheme by Mao Zedong to bring the Soviets and Americans into direct conflict over the Nationalist-controlled Offshore Islands in the Taiwan Strait. Unwilling to risk war with the Americans, the thousands of Soviet experts residing in China in 1959 abruptly packed up their bags-as well as spare parts for machinery and blueprints for unfinished factories-and left the country.
The Soviets' action, combined with the disastrous decline in production resulting from the policies of the Great Leap Forward and several years of bad weather, set China's economic development back many years. Population figures now available indicate that somewhere between 20 million and 30 million people died in the years from 1959 to 1962, mostly from starvation and diseases caused by malnutrition. Within the CCP, Mao Zedong's ideas were paid mere lip service. The Chinese people were not told that Mao Zedong bore blame for their problems, but the Maoist model was abandoned for the time being. More pragmatic leaders took over the direction of the economy, but without further support from the Soviets. Not until 1962 did the Chinese start to recover their productivity gains of the 1950s.
By 1963, the Sino-Soviet split had become public, as the two Communist powers found themselves in profound disagreement over a wide range of issues: whether socialist countries could use capitalist methods, such as free markets, to advance economic development; appropriate policies toward the United States; and whether China or the Soviet Union could claim to follow Marxism-Leninism more faithfully, entitling it to lead the Communist world. The Sino-Soviet split was not healed until the late 1980s. But by then, neither country was interested in claiming Communist orthodoxy.

The Cultural Revolution

In 1966, whether Mao Zedong hoped to provoke an internal party struggle and regain control over policy, or (as he alleged) to re-educate China's exploitive, corrupt, and oppressive officials in order to restore a revolutionary spirit to the Chinese people and to prevent China from abandoning socialism, Mao launched what he termed the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." He called on China's youth to "challenge authority," particularly "those revisionists in authority who are taking the capitalist road." If China continued along its "revisionist" course, he said, the achievements of the Chinese revolution would be undone. China's youth were therefore urged to "make revolution."
Such vague objectives invited abuse, including personal feuds and retribution for alleged past wrongs. Determining just who was "Red" (Communist) and who was "reactionary" itself generated chaos, as people tried to protect themselves by attacking others-including friends and relatives.
During that period, people's cruelty was profound. People were psychologically, and sometimes physically, tortured until they "admitted" to their "rightist" or "reactionary" behavior. Murders, suicides, ruined careers, and broken families were the debris left behind by this effort to "re-educate" those who had strayed from the revolutionary path. It is estimated that approximately 10 percent of the population-that is, nearly 100 million people-became targets of the Cultural Revolution and that tens of thousands lost their lives during the decade of political chaos.
The Cultural Revolution attacked Chinese traditions and cultural practices as being feudal and outmoded. It also destroyed the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, through attacks on many of its most respected leaders. Policies changed frequently in those "10 bad years" from 1966 to 1976, as first one faction and then another gained the political upper hand. Few leaders escaped unscathed. Ultimately, the Chinese Communist Party and Marxist-Leninist ideology were themselves the victims of the Cultural Revolution. By the time the smoke cleared, the legitimacy of the CCP had been destroyed, and the people could no longer accept the idea that the party leaders were infallible. Both traditional Chinese morality and Marxist-Leninist values had suffered a near total breakdown.

Reforms and Liberalization

With the death of Mao Zedong and the subsequent arrest of the politically radical "Gang of Four" (which included Mao's wife) in 1976, the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Deng Xiaoping, a veteran leader of the CCP who had been purged twice during the "10 bad years," was "rehabilitated" in 1977.
By 1979, China once again set off down the road of construction and put an end to the radical Maoist policies of "continuous revolution" and the idea that it was more important to be "Red" than "expert." Saying that he did not care whether the cat was black or white, as long as it caught mice, Deng Xiaoping pursued more pragmatic, flexible policies in order to modernize China. He thus deserves credit for opening up China to the outside world and to reforms that led to the liberalization of both the economic and the political spheres. When he died in 1997, Deng left behind a country that, despite some setbacks and reversals, had already traveled a significant distance down the road to liberalization and modernization.
In spite of the fact that Deng Xiaoping followed policies that were more pragmatic than revolutionary, and more "expert" than "Red," and in spite of Mao Zedong's clear responsibility for precipitating policies that were devastating to the Chinese people, Mao has never been defrocked; for to do so would raise serious questions about the CCP's right to rule. China's leaders have admitted that, beginning with the "AntiRightest Campaign" of 1957 and the "Great Leap Forward" of 1958, Mao made "serious mistakes"; but the CCP insists that these errors must be seen within the context of his many accomplishments and his commitment, even if sometimes misdirected, to Marxism-Leninism.

The Challenge of Reform

The erosion of traditional Chinese values, then of Marxist-Leninist values and faith in the Chinese Communist Party's leadership, and finally of "Mao Thought" (the Chinese adaptation of Marxism-Leninism to Chinese conditions) left China without any strong belief system. Such Western values as materialism, capitalism, individualism, and freedom swarmed into this vacuum to undermine both Communist ideology and the traditional Chinese values that had provided the glue of society. Deng Xiaoping's prognosis had proven correct: The "screen door" through which Western science and technology (and foreign investments) could flow into China was unable to keep out the annoying "insects" of Western values. The screen door appeared to have holes that were too large to prevent this invastion.
The less "pragmatic," more ideologically oriented "conservative" or "hard-line" leadership (who in the new context of reforms could be viewed as hard-line ideologues of a Maoist vintage) challenged the introduction of economic reforms precisely because they threatened to undo China's earlier socialist achievements and erode Chinese culture. To combat the negative side effects from the introduction of free-market values and institutions, China's leadership therefore launched a number of "mass campaigns": the campaign in the 1980s against "spiritual pollution"; a repressive campaign following the crackdown against those challenging the leadership of the CCP in Tiananmen Square in 1989; ongoing campaigns against corruption; and campaigns to "strike hard" against crime and "get civilized" in the late 1990s.
Since 1979, in spite of setbacks and campaigns that have attempted to address some of the unintended consequences of reforms, China's leadership has been able to keep the country on the path of liberalization. As a result, the economy has been growing at double-digit rates for much of the last 2 decades. China has dramatically reformed the legal and political system as well, even though much work remains to be done. When Deng Xiaoping died in 1997, he was succeeded in a peaceful transition by Jiang Zemin, another committed reformer. Jiang is, however, just one leader-although a very effective one-within what is now a collective, well-institutionalized leadership. The problems that the leadership faces as a consequence of China's rapid modernization and liberalization since 1979 are formidable: massive, and growing, unemployment; increasing crime, corruption, and social dislocation; a lack of social cohesion; and challenges to the CCP's monopoly on power. These problems are discussed below.

THE PEOPLE OF CHINA

Population Control

By 1999, China's population was close to 1.3 billion. In the 1950s, Mao had encouraged population growth, as he considered a large population to be a major source of strength. No sustained attempts to limit Chinese population occurred until the mid- 1 970s. Even then, population-control programs were only marginally successful, because there were no penalties for those Chinese who ignored them.

In 1979, the government launched a serious birth-control campaign. rewarding families giving birth to only one child with work bonuses and priority in housing. The only child was later to receive preferential treatment in university admissions and job assignments (a policy later abandoned). Families that had more than one child, on the other hand, were to be penalized by a 10 percent decrease in their annual wages, and their children would not be eligible for free education and health-care benefits.
The one-child policy in China's major cities has been rigorously enforced, to the point where it is almost impossible for a woman to get away with a second pregnancy. Who is allowed to have a child, as well as when she may give birth, is rigidly controlled by the woman's work unit. Furthermore, with so many state-owned enterprises now paying close to half of their entire annual wages as "bonuses," authorities have come up with further sanctions to ensure compliance:
Workers are usually organized in groups of 10 to 30 individuals. If any woman in the group gives birth to more than one child, the entire group will lose its annual bonus. With such overwhelming penalties for the group as a whole, pressures not to give birth to a second child are enormous.
To ensure that any unauthorized pregnancy does not occur, women who have already given birth are required to stand in front of x-ray machines to verify that their IUDs (birth-control devices) are still in place. Abortions can and will be performed throughout the period of a woman's unsanctioned pregnancy. (The moral issues that surround abortions for some Christians concerning the rights of the unborn fetus are not concerns for the Chinese.)
The effectiveness of China's birth-control policy in the cities is not merely attributable to the surveillance by state-owned work units, neighborhood committees, and the "granny police" who watch over the families in their locale. Changed social attitudes also play a critical role, and urban Chinese now accept the absolute necessity of population control in their overcrowded cities.
The one-child policy in China's cities has led, however, to the problem of spoiled children. Known as "little emperors," these only children are the center of attention of six anxious adults (two sets of grandparents and the parents), who carefully scrutinize their every movement. It has led to the overuse of medical services by these parents and grandparents, who rush their only child/grandchild to the doctor at the first signs of a sniffle or sore throat. It has also led to overfed, even obese, children. Being overweight used to be considered a hedge against bad times, and the Chinese were initially pleased that their children were becoming heavier. A common greeting showing admiration had long been, "You have become fat!" But as contemporary urban Chinese adopt many of the values associated in the developed world with becoming wealthier, they are changing their perspectives and no longer are quite so enthusiastic about extra weight. Nevertheless, salad bars and diet programs do not loom on the immediate horizon, and the major purpose of people exercising still is to keep China a strong nation, not to look attractive.
The one-child policy has resulted in other, more serious concerns. One is the demographic issue of too few young people to support the large number of elderly people in future years. The other is the aborting of female fetuses. In spite of governmental efforts to stop it, this practice continues. And, although female infanticide is illegal, it sometimes happens, especially in rural areas. The decline in the ratio of women to men is in turn leading to another demographic crisis: an insufficient number of brides. Apart from societal unhappiness, this has led to a sharp increase in the kidnapping of young women and the practice of selling girls as brides in rural marketplaces as they have come of marriageable age in the 1990s.
In the vast rural areas of China, where some three quarters of the population still live, efforts to enforce the one-child policy have met with less success than in the cities, because the benefits and punishments are not as relevant for peasants. Since the communes have been disbanded and families have been given their own land to till, peasants want sons to do the heavy farm labor. As a result, the government's policy in the countryside has become more flexible. In some villages, if a woman gives birth to a girl and decides to have another child in hopes of having a boy, she may pay the government a substantial fee (usually an amount more than the entire annual income of the family) in order to do so.
It is estimated that at least several million peasants have taken steps to ensure that their female offspring are not counted toward their one-child (and now, in some places two-child) limit: A pregnant woman will simply move to another village to have her child. Since the local village leaders are not responsible for women's reproduction when they are not from their own village, women are not harassed into getting an abortion in other villages. If the child is a boy, she can simply return to her native village and register him; if a girl, she can return and not register her. Thus a whole generation of young girls is growing up in the countryside without ever having been registered. Since, except for schooling, peasants have few claims to state-supplied benefits anyway, they may consider this official nonexistence of their daughters a small price to pay for having as many children as necessary until giving birth to a boy. And if this practice is as common as some think, it may mean that China will not face quite such a large demographic crisis in the ratio between males and females as believed.
One important reason why males continue to be more valued in Chinese culture is because only sons are permitted to perform traditional Chinese family rituals and ancestor worship. This is unbearably painful-in fact, unacceptable- for families without sons, who feel that their entire ancestral history, often recorded for over several hundred years on village-temple tablets, is coming to an end. As a result, a few villages have changed the very foundations of ancestral worship: They permit daughters to continue the family lineage down the female line. The government itself is encouraging this practice, and it is also changing certain other family-related policies, such as who is responsible under the law for taking care of their parents. It used to be the son, meaning that parents of a daughter could not expect to be supported in their old age. Now both sons and daughters are deemed responsible. Furthermore, through instituting a new system of social security and pensions for the retired, the responsibility for caring for the elderly is gradually being absorbed by the state and employers.
China's strict population-control policies have been effective: Since 1977, the population has grown at an average annual rate of 1.1 percent, one of the lowest rates in the developing world. Unfortunately, even this low rate means an average annual increase of China's population of more than 12 million people. This is an ever-growing drain on limited resources and poses a challenge, and perhaps a threat, to future economic development.

Women

It is hardly surprising that overlaying (but never eradicating) China's traditional culture with a Communist ideology in which men and women are supposed to be equal has generated a bundle of contradictions. Under Chinese Communist Party rule, women have long had more rights and opportunities than women in almost any other developing country; in certain respects, they have even outpaced the rights of women in some of the developed countries. Although Chinese women have rarely broken through the "glass ceiling" to the highest levels of the CCP or management, and although they have often been given traditional "women's work," they have received pay fairly equal to that of men. This is in an economy where the gap between the highest and lowest paid, whether male or female, was small as well. Furthermore, an ideological morality that insists on respect for women as equals (with both men and women being addressed as "comrades" during the Maoist period), combined with a de-emphasis on the importance of sexuality, has resulted in at least a superficial respect for women that was rare before the Communist period.
The economic reforms that began in 1979 have, however, precipitated changes in the manner in which women are treated and how women act. While many women entrepreneurs and workers are benefiting as much as the men from economic reforms, there have also been certain throwbacks to earlier times that have undercut women's equality. Women are now treated much more as sex objects than they used to be; and, while some women revel in their new freedom to beautify themselves, some companies will hire only women who are attractive, and many enterprises are now using women as "window dressing." For example, women dressed in qipao-the traditional, slim-fitting Chinese dress slit high on the thigh-stand outside restaurants and other establishments to entice customers. At business meetings, many have become mere tea-pourers. In newspapers, many job ads for Chinese enterprises state in so many words that only young and good-looking women need apply.
The emphasis on profits and efficiency since the reforms have also made state-run enterprises reluctant to hire women because of the costs in maternity benefits (including 3 to 12 months of maternity leave at partial or even full pay) and because mothers are still more likely than fathers to be in charge of sick children and the household. Under the socialist system, where the purpose of an enterprise was not necessarily to make profits but to fulfill such socialist objectives as the equality of women and full employment, women fared better. Economic reforms have provided enterprise managers with the excuse they need not to hire women. Whatever the real reason, they can always claim that their refusal to hire more women or to promote them is justified: They are more costly, or less competent, or less reliable.

National Minorities

Ninety-four percent of the population are Han Chinese. Although only 6 percent are "national minorities," they occupy more than 60 percent of China's geographical expanse. These minorities inhabit almost all the border areas, including Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, the stability of which is important for China's national security. Furthermore, China's borders with many countries are poorly defined, and members of the same minority usually live on both sides of the borders.
To address this issue, China's central government has pursued policies designed to get the minorities on the Chinese side of the borders to identify with the Han Chinese majority. Rather than admitting to this objective of undermining distinctive national identities, the CCP leaders have phrased the policies in terms of getting rid of the minorities' "feudal" customs, such as religious practices, which are contrary to the "scientific" values of socialism. At times these policies have been brutal and have caused extreme bitterness among the minorities, particularly the Tibetans and the large number of minority peoples who practice Islam.
In the 1980s, the Deng Xiaoping leadership conceded that Beijing's harsh assimilation policies had been ill conceived, and it tried to gain the loyalty of the national minorities through more sensitive policies. By the end of the decade, however, the loosening of controls had led to further challenges to Beijing's control, so the central government tightened up security in Xinjiang (China's far northwestern province) and reimposed martial law in Tibet in an effort to quell protests and riots against Beijing's discriminatory policies. Martial law was lifted in 1990, but security has remained tight ever since.

Tibet

In recent years, there has been a surge of demonstrations for a more autonomous, and even independent, Tibet. The Dalai Lama is the most important spiritual leader of the Tibetans, but he lives in exile in India, where he fled after a Chinese crackdown on Tibetans in 1959. He has stepped up his efforts to reach some form of accommodation with Beijing. He insists that as long as he is in charge, Tibetans will use only nonviolent methods to gain greater autonomy for Tibet. The Dalai Lama also asserts that he wants greater autonomy for Tibet, but not independence; and that more control over their own affairs is necessary to protect Tibetan culture from extinction.
The threat to Tibetan culture at this point comes not from efforts by China's government to assimilate Tibetans into Han culture but, rather, from highly successful Chinese entrepreneurs who, under economic-liberalization policies, have taken over many of the commercial and entrepreneurial activities of Tibet. Ironically, the Tibetan feelings about the Chinese mirror the feelings of the Chinese toward the West:
They want their technology and commercial goods but not the values that come with the people bringing those goods and technology. And among Tibetans as among the Chinese, the young are more likely to want to join the world, to be modern and hip, and to leave behind traditional culture and values.
Not all Tibetans accept the path of nonviolence that the Dalai Lama insists upon. Many even challenge the Dalai Lama's leadership. In 1996, for the first time in decades, Beijing admitted that there were isolated bombing incidents and violent clashes between anti-Chinese Tibetans (reportedly armed) and Chinese authorities. The government in response sealed off most monastaries in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. Nevertheless, thus far, most actions have been confined to peaceful demonstrations against China's control over Tibet.
Much of the anger in Tibet against China's central government arose from Beijing's decision in 1995 not to accept the Tibetan Buddhists' choice of a young boy as the reincarnation of the former Panchen Lama, the second-most important spiritual leader of the Tibetans. Instead of accepting the Tibetans' recommendation, chosen according to traditional Tibetan Buddhist ritual to be their next Panchen Lama, Beijing substituted its own 6-year-old candidate. The Tibetans choice, meanwhile, is living in seclusion somewhere in Beijing, under the watchful eye of the Chinese. China's concern is that any new spiritual leader could become a focus for a new push for Tibetan independence, an eventuality it wishes to avoid.

Muslim Minorities

In the far northwest, the predominantly Muslim population of Xinjiang province continues to challenge the authority of China's central leadership. The loosening of policies aimed at assimilating the minority populations into the Han (Chinese) culture has given a rebirth to Islamic culture and practices, including prayer five times a day, architecture in the Islamic style, traditional Islamic medicine, and teaching Islam in the schools. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states, the ties between the Islamic states on China's borders (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan) are accelerating rapidly.

Beijing is certainly concerned that China's Islamic minorities may find that they have more in common with these neighboring Islamic nations than with the Chinese Han majority and may attempt to secede from China. Beijing's concern was heightened in late 1992, when Turkey held a summit conference at which it announced that the next century would be the "century of Islam." Subsequent signs of a growing worldwide Islamic movement have exacerbated Beijing's anxieties about controlling China's Islamic minority.

As in Tibet, there has been a growing number of demonstrations for greater autonomy, and even independence in Xinjiang. Several thousand people were arrested for separatist activities in the 1996-1997 "Strike Hard" campaign against crime. Officials in Xinjiang have also banned at least temporarily the construction of new mosques, tightened existing controls on religious practices, and intensified the search for weapons hidden in goods arriving in Xinjiang. In spite of these efforts, occasional bombs planted by Xinjiang separatists have exploded in recent years in Beijing and Xinjiang.

Inner Mongolia

Events in (Outer) Mongolia have also led China's central leadership to keep a watchful eye on Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region under Beijing's control. In 1989, Mongolia's government-theoretically independent but in fact under Moscow's tutelage-decided to permit multiparty rule at the expense of the Communist Party's complete control; and in democratic elections held in 1996, the Mongolian Communist Party was ousted from power.

Beijing has grown increasingly anxious that these democratic leanings might spread to their neighboring cousins in Inner Mongolia, with a resulting challenge to one-party CCP rule. As with the Islamic minorities, China's leadership is concerned that the Mongols in Inner Mongolia may try to secede from China and join with the independent state of Mongolia, because of their shared culture. So far, however, those Inner Mongolians who have traveled to Mongolia have been surprised by the relative lack of development there and have remained fairly quiet about seceding in order to become part of Mongolia.

Religion

Confucianism is the "religion" most closely associated with China. It is not, however, a religion in Western terms, as there is no place for gods, the afterlife, or most other beliefs associated with formal religions. But, like most religions, it does have a system of ethics for governing human relationships; and it adds to this what most religions do not have, namely, ethics and principles for good governance.
The Chinese Communists rejected Confucianism until the 1980s, but not because they saw it as an "opiate of the masses.' (That was Karl Marx's description of religion, which he viewed as a way of trapping people in a web of superstitions, robbing them of their money and causing them to passively endure their miserable lives on Earth.) Instead, they denounced Confucianism for providing the ethical rationale for a system of patriarchy that allowed officials to insist on obedience from subordinates. During the years in which "leftists" set the agenda, moreover, the CCP rejected Confucianism for its emphasis on education as a criterion for joining the ruling elite. Instead, the CCP favored ideological commitment as the primary criterion for ruling. The series of reforms that began in 1979, however, have generally supported an emphasis on an educated elite, and Confucian values of hard work and the importance of the family are frequently referred to.
Buddhism and Islam have remained important among some of the largest of the national minorities, notably the Tibetans (for Buddhism) and the Uygars and Mongols (for Islam). The CCP's efforts to eradicate these religious influences have been interpreted by the minorities as national oppression by the Han Chinese. As a result, the revival of Islam and Buddhism in the 1 980s was associated with efforts by the national minorities to assert their national identities and to gain greater autonomy in formulating their own policies.
For most Chinese, however, folk religions are far more important than any organized religion. The CCP's best efforts to eradicate folk religions and to impart in their place an educated "scientific'" viewpoint have failed. Animism-the belief that nonliving things have spirits that should be respected through worship-continues to be practiced by China's vast peasantry. Ancestor worship-based on the belief that the living can communicate with the dead and that the dead spirits to whom sacrifices are ritually made have the ability to bring a better (or worse) life to the living-absorbs much of the excess income of China's peasants. The costs of offerings, burning paper money, and using shamans and priests to perform rituals that will heal the sick, appease the ancestors, and exorcise ghosts (who are often those poorly treated ancestors, returned to haunt their descendants) at times of birth, marriage, and death can be financially burdensome. But peasants are once again spending money on traditional religious folk practices, thereby contributing to the reconstruction of practices prohibited in earlier decades of Communist rule.
Taoism, which requires its disciples to renounce the secular world, has had few adherents in China since the early twentieth century. But during the repression that followed the crackdown on Tiananmen Square's prodemocracy movement in 1989, many Chinese who felt unable to speak freely turned to mysticism and Taoism. Qigong, the ancient Taoist art of deep breathing, had by 1990 become a national pastime. Some 30 Taoist priests in China took on the role of national soothsayers, portending the future of everything from the weather to China's political leadership. What these priests said-or were believed to have said-quickly spread through a vast rumor network in the cities. Meanwhile, on Chinese Communist Party-controlled television, qigong experts swallow needles and thread, only to have the needles subsequently come out of their noses perfectly threaded. It is widely believed that, with a sufficient concentration of qi (vital energy or breath), a practitioner may literally knock a person to the ground.
The revival of Taoist mysticism and meditation, folk religion, and formal religions may reflect a need to find meaning from religion to fill the moral and ideological vacuum created by the near-collapse of Communist values.
In the 1980s, under the influence of the more moderate policies of the Deng Xiaoping reformist leadership, the CCP reconsidered its efforts to eliminate religion. The 1982 State Constitution permits religious freedom, whereas previously, only atheism was allowed. The state has actually encouraged the restoration of Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques, in part because of Beijing's awareness of the continuing tensions caused by its efforts to deny minorities their respective religious practices, and in part because of a desire to attract both tourists and money to the minority areas.
Christianity, which was introduced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by European missionaries, has several million known adherents; and its churches, which were often used as warehouses or public offices after the Communist victory in 1949, have been reopened for religious practice. Today, a steady stream of Christian proselytizers flow to China in search of new converts. Churches are now attended as much by the curious as by the devout. As with eating Western food in places such as McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken, attending Christian churches is a way that some Chinese feel they can participate in Western culture.
The government generally permits mainstream Christian churches to practice in China, but it continues to exercise one major control over Roman Catholics: Their loyalty must be declared to the state, not to the pope. The Vatican is not permitted to be involved in China's practice of Catholicism; and Beijing does not recognize the Vatican's appointment of bishops and cardinals for China as valid.
Since the mid- 1 1990s, the government has tried to clamp down on nonmainstream Christian churches and religious sects, arresting and even jailing some of their leaders. They have justified their actions on the grounds that, as in the West, some of them are involved in practices that endanger their adherents; some are actually involved in seditious activities against the state; and some are set up as fronts for illegal activities, including gambling, prostitution, and drugs. Some sort of religious practice often provides the foundation for illegal or "black" societies. Now that rural elections take place in villages all over China, religious sects and black societies often provide the basis of power for candidates for office. They are known to be involved in pressuring villagers to vote for their candidates in many villages.

Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought

In general, Marxists are atheists. They believe that religions hinder the development of "rational"' behavior and values that are so important to modernization. Yet societies seem to need some sort of spiritual, moral, and ethical guidance. For Communist party-led states, Marxism is believed adequate to fill the role of moral, if not spiritual, guidance. In China, however, Marxism-Leninism was reshaped by Mao Zedong Thought to account for Chinese conditions, and it was called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. The Chinese leadership believed that it provided the ethical values necessary to guide China toward communism; and it was considered an integrated, rational thought system.
Nevertheless, this core of China's Communist political ideology exhibited many of the trappings of religions. It included scriptures (the works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, as well as party doctrine); a spiritual head (Mao); and ritual observances (particularly during the Cultural Revolution, when Chinese were forced to participate in the political equivalent of Bible study each day). Largely thanks to the shaping of this ideology by Maoism, it included moral axioms that embodied traditional Chinese-and, some would say, Confucian-values that resemble teachings in other religions. Thus the moral of the story of "The Foolish Old Man Who Wanted to Remove a Mountain" is essentially identical to the Christian principle "If you have faith you can walk on water," based on a story in the New Testament. Like this moral, the essence of Mao Thought concerned the importance of a correct political (moral) consciousness.
In the 1980s, the more pragmatic leadership focused on liberalizing reforms; it encouraged the people to "seek truth from facts" rather than from Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. As a result, the role of this political ideology declined, in spite of efforts by more conservative elements in the political leadership to keep it as a guiding moral and political force. The required weekly "political study" sessions in moist urban work units abandoned any pretense of interest in politics. Instead, they focused on such issues as "how to do our work better" (i.e., how to become more efficient and make a profit) that were in line with the more pragmatic approach to the workplace. Nevertheless, campaigns like the "get civilized"" and anticorruption ones do have a strong moralistic tone to them.
Ideology has not, therefore, been entirely abandoned. In the context of modernizing the economy and raising the standard of living, the current leadership is still committed to building "socialism with Chinese characteristics.'" Marxist-Leninist ideology is still being reformulated in China; but it is increasingly evident that few true believers in communism remain. Rarely does a Chinese leader even mention Marxism-Leninism in a speech. Leaders instead focus on modernization and becoming more efficient; they are more likely to discuss interest rates and trade balances than ideology.
Fully aware that they need something to replace these guiding ideological principles, however, and fearing that pure materialism and consumerism have already taken their place, China's leaders seem to be relying on patriotism and nationalism as the key components of a new ideology whose primary purpose is very simple: economic modernization and support of the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. To oppose the CCP or its objective of modernization is unpatriotic. China's nationalism, on the other hand, is fired, as it almost always has been, by antiforeign sentiments. These sentiments derive from the belief that foreign countries are, either militarily, economically, or through insidious cultural invasion, attempting to hurt China or to intervene in China's sovereign affairs by telling China's rulers how to govern properly. This is most notably the case whenever the Western countries condemn China for its human-rights record. Undergirding China's nationalism is a fierce pride in China's history, civilization, and people. Insult, snub, slight, or challenge the Chinese, and the result is certain to be a country united behind its leadership against the offender.

Language

The Chinese had a written language by the time of the Shang Dynasty, which ruled in the second millennium B.C. It has evolved through 4,000 years into its present-day form, which is still ideographic. Each Chinese character, or ideograph, originally represented both a picture and/or a sound of a word. Before the May Fourth Movement of the 1920s, only a tiny elite of highly educated men could read these ideographs in the difficult grammar of the classical style, a style that in no way reflected the spoken language. All this changed with language reform in the 1920s: The classical style was abandoned, and the written language became almost identical in its structure to the spoken language.

Increasing Literacy

When the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, they decided to facilitate the process of becoming literate by allowing only a few thousand of the more than 50,000 Chinese characters in existence to be used in printing newspapers, official documents, and educational materials. However, since a word usually comprises a combination of two characters, these few thousand characters form the basis of a very rich vocabulary: Any single character may be used in numerous combinations in order to form many different words. The Chinese Communists have gone even further in facilitating literacy by simplifying thousands of characters, often reducing a character from more than 20 strokes to 10 or even fewer. In 1979, China adopted a new system, pinyin, for spelling Chinese words and names. This system, which uses the Latin alphabet of 26 letters, is still largely for foreign consumption and is not widely used within China. Because so many characters have the same Romanization (and pronunciation), and because of cultural resistance, ideographs have thus far remained the basis for Chinese writing. There are, as an example, at least 70 different Chinese ideographs that are pronounced zhu, but each means something different. Usually the context is adequate to indicate which word is being used, but Chinese often use their fingers to draw a particular character in the air so that those talking to them will know which of the homonyms is meant.

Spoken Chinese

Finally, to facilitate national unity, the government decided that all Chinese would speak the same dialect. Although the Chinese have shared the same written language over the last 2.000 years, regardless of which dialect of Chinese they spoke (the same written characters were simply pronounced in different ways, depending on the dialect), a sense of national unity was difficult when people needed interpreters to speak with someone even a few miles away. After the Communist victory in 1949, a majority of the delegates to the National People's Congress voted to adopt the northern dialect, Mandarin, as the national language and required all schools to teach in Mandarin (standard Chinese).
But the reality in the countryside was that it was difficult to find teachers capable of speaking Mandarin; and at home, whether in the countryside or the cities, the people continued to speak their local dialects. The liberalization policies of the 1980s and 1990s have had as their by-product a discernible trend back to speaking local dialects even in the workplace and on the streets. Whereas a decade ago a traveler could count on the national language being spoken in China's major cities, this is no longer the case. As a unified language is an important factor in maintaining national cohesion, the reemergence of local dialects at the expense of standard Chinese threatens China's fragile unity.
One force that is slowing this disintegration is television. for it is broadcast almost entirely in standard Chinese. As there is now a wide variety of interesting programming available on Chinese television, it may be that most Chinese will make an effort to acquire at least the ability to understand, if not speak, standard Chinese.

Education

The People's Republic of China can be proud of its success in educating its people. Before 1949, less than 20 percent of the population could read and write. Today, 9 years of schooling are compulsory, and close to 90 percent of those children living in rural areas attend at least primary school. Village schools often lack even such rudimentary equipment as chairs and desks, however. Rural education also suffers from a lack of qualified teachers, as any person educated enough to teach can probably get a better-paying job in the industrial or commercial sector. In the larger cities, 12 years of schooling is becoming the norm, with children attending either a vocational middle school or a college-preparatory school; but in the countryside, few children receive an education beyond the primary level. Not only are they needed to help in the fields, but even the very low school tuition is too expensive for many peasant families.

Overeducated Students

As in the West, in China there is concern that too many students are now preparing to go on to a university; but China's reason for concern is different. In the United States. for example, college graduates who lack vocational training often find themselves poorly prepared to get a good job. In China, only about 5 percent of the senior middle-school graduates will pass the university entrance examinations and be admitted; but far more people than that pursue a college-oriented curriculum. Thus, in China it is high school graduates who find themselves inappropriately educated for the workplace. As a result, the government is attempting to augment vocational training at the high school level. At the same time, China is increasing the number of slots available in colleges and universities. Private high schools and colleges are becoming increasingly popular as parents try to optimize the chances for their only child to succeed.
The freewheeling, small-enterprise capitalist economy that has thrived since the early 1980s has made many Chinese cynical about the value of a college education. Apart from those working for foreign-run joint ventures, those making the most money have generally not been those with a college education but, rather, those who are good at entrepreneurship. A college graduate, who is usually assigned to the low-paying state-run sector, still makes a mere $60 to $200 per month. An uneducated individual selling noodle soup out of the family home can often make at least that much in just a week. And workers in the state industrial sector have always earned far more money than have China's "intellectuals." At a time when moonlighting is permitted, ordinary workers often move on to a second job at the end of the day. Few such opportunities are available, however, to those with a "liberal arts"' college education.

Political Education

Until the reforms that began in 1979, the content of Chinese education was suffused with political values and objectives. A considerable amount of school time-as much as 100 percent during political campaigns-was devoted to political education. Often this amounted to nothing more than learning by rote the favorite axioms and policies of the leading faction in power. When that faction lost power, the students' political thought had to be reoriented in the direction of the new policies and values. History, philosophy, literature, and even foreign languages and science were laced with a political vocabulary.
The prevailing political line has affected the balance in the curriculum between political study and the learning of skills and scientific knowledge. Beginning in the 1960s, the political content of education increased dramatically until, during the Cultural Revolution, schools were shut down. When they reopened in the early 1970s, politics dominated the curriculum. When Deng Xiaoping and the "modernizers" consolidated their power in the late 1970s, this tendency was reversed. During the 1980s, in fact, schools jettisoned the study of political theory because both administrators and teachers wanted their students to do well on college-entrance examinations, which by then focused on academic subjects. As a result, students refused to clog their schedules with the study of political theory and the CCP's history. The study of Marxism and party history was revived in the wake of the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, with students entering many universities required to spend the first year in political study and indoctrination, sometimes under military supervision; but this practice was abandoned after 2 years. Today, political study is again confined to a narrow part of the curriculum, in the interest of giving students an education that will help advance China's modernization.

Study Abroad

Since 1979, when China began to promote an "open door" policy, more than 100,000 P.R.C. students have been sent for a university education to the United States, and tens of thousands more have gone to Europe and Japan; for although China does have universities, only a tiny percentage of all high school graduates will be able to attend them. Furthermore, until the late 1980s, Chinese universities were unable to offer graduate training. Unlike Americans, Chinese students take 2 to 3 months to study for the Graduate Record Exams (GREs), required for entrance to American graduate programs. Those taking the GREs are, moreover, already among the brightest students in China, as only some 1 to 2 percent of all Chinese high school graduates (compared to more than 40 percent of Americans) ever gain admission to China's undergraduate colleges and universities. Thus, Chinese generally outperform Americans in their GRE scores and are welcomed into American programs.
Those trained abroad are expected to return to China to establish graduate education in Chinese universities. But the fate of P.R.C. students educated abroad who return to China has not always been a happy one. The elite educated in Western universities who were in China in 1949, or who returned to China thereafter, were not permitted to hold leadership positions within their fields. Ultimately, they were the targets of class-struggle campaigns and purges in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, precisely because of their Western education. For the most part, those students who returned to China in the 1 1980s after studying abroad were given the same positions they occupied before they received advanced education abroad. This was largely because their less-well-educated seniors who had not been able to study abroad held a jealous regard for their own positions. These individuals still had the power to make arbitrary decisions about their subordinates, and they ignored the mandate from the central authorities to promote the returned students to positions appropriate to their advanced education.
Since 1992, however, when Deng Xiaoping announced a major shift in government economic and commercial policy to support just about anything that would help China become rich and powerful, much has changed. The result is that the government is offering students significant incentives to return to China. including excellent jobs. good salaries, and even the chance to start up new companies. Chinese students who have graduated from foreign universities are also recruited, for both their expertise and their understanding of the outside world, by the rapidly multiplying number of joint ventures in China, and by universities attempting to develop their own graduate programs.
The Chinese government also now realizes that those Chinese who do stay abroad and become citizens of other countries are forming critical links for China to the rest of the world. They have become the bridges over which contracts, loans, and trade flow to China. The fact that many remain abroad after their education is complete is now viewed as an asset in China. Finally, like immigrants elsewhere, Chinese who settle in the developed world tend to send remittances back to their families in China. These remittances amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign currency each year. They are valuable not just to the family recipients but also to the government's bank reserves.
Chinese studying abroad also learn much about liberal democratic societies. When they return to China-and to date, only a small percentage of students have-they bring with them the values at the heart of liberal democratic societies. The more conservative central CCP leadership faction placed the blame for massive street demonstrations for political reform in China in 1986 and 1989 on the liberalization policies that permitted an opening to the West, including the education of Chinese students abroad. For a few years after the crackdown on demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Chinese students found it very difficult to get permission to study abroad. As noted above, however, all this changed in 1992, with the result that more Chinese students than ever now study abroad.

THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM

A Command Economy

Until 1979, the Chinese had a centrally controlled command economy. That is, the central leadership determined the economic policies to be followed and allocated all of the country's resources-labor, capital, and raw materials. It also determined how much each enterprise, and even each individual, would be allocated for production and consumption. Once the Chinese Communist Party leadership determined the country's political goals and the correct ideology, the State Planning Commission and the State Economic Commission would then decide how to implement these objectives through specific policies for agriculture and industry and the allocation of resources. This is in striking contrast to a capitalist laissez-faire economy, in which government control over both consumers and producers is minimal and market forces of supply and demand play the primary role in determining what is produced and how goods are distributed.
The CCP leadership adopted the model of a centralized planned economy from the Soviet Union. Such a system was not only in accord with the Leninist model of centralized state governance; it also made sense for a government desperate to unify China after more than 100 years of internal division, instability, and economic collapse. Historically, China suffered from large regions evading the grasp of central control over such matters as currency and the payment of taxes. The inability of the Kuomintang government to gain control over the country's economy in the 1930s and early 1940s undercut its power and contributed to its failure to win control over China. Thus, the Chinese Communist Party's decision to centralize economic decision making after 11949 contributed to the state functioning as an integrated whole.
Over time, however, China's highly centralized economy became inefficient and inadequately flexible to address the complexity of the country's needs. Although China possesses a large and diverse economy, with a broad range of resources, topography, and climate, its economic planners made policy as if it were a uniform, homogeneous whole. Merely increasing production was itself considered a contribution to development, regardless of whether a market for the products existed or whether the products actually helped advance modernization.
State planning agencies, without the benefit of market research, determined whether or not a product should be manufactured, and in what quantity. For example, the central government might set a goal for a factory to manufacture 5 million springs per year-without knowing if there was even a market for them. The factory management did not care, as the state was responsible for marketing the products and paid the factory's bills. If the state had no buyer for the springs, they would pile up in warehouses; but rarely would production be cut back, much less a factory be closed, because this would create a problem for employing the workers cut from the payroll. Economic inefficiencies of this sort were often justified because socialist political objectives such as full employment were being met. Even today the state worries about shutting down a state-owned factory that is losing money, because it creates unemployment. In turn, unemployment leads to popular anger and provides a volatile, unstable environment, ripe for public political protest.
Quality control was similarly not as important an issue as it should have been for state-run industries in a centrally planned economy. Until market reforms occurred after 1979, the state itself allocated all finished products to other industries that needed them. If a state-controlled factory made defective parts, the industry using them had no recourse against the supplier, because each factory had a contract with the state, not with other factories. It was the state that would pay the costs to have additional parts made, so the enterprises did not need to worry about the exorbitant costs involved.
As a result, China's economic development under the centralized political leadership of the CCP occurred by fits and starts. Much waste resulted from planning that did not take into account market factors of supply and demand. Centrally set production quotas took the place of profit-and-loss issues in the allocation of resources. Although China's command economy was able to meet the country's most important industrial needs, problems like these took their toll over time. Enterprises had little incentive to raise productivity, quality, or efficiency when doing so did not affect their budgets, wages, or funds for expansion.

Disastrous Agricultural Programs

By the late 1950s, central planning was causing significant damage to the agricultural sector. Regardless of geography or climate, China's economic planners repeatedly ordered the peasants to restructure their economic production units according to one centralized plan. China's peasants, who had supported the CCP in its rise to power before 1949 in order to acquire their own land, had enthusiastically embraced the CCP's fulfillment of its pledge of "land to the tillers" after the Communists took over in 1949. But in 1953, the leadership, motivated by a belief that small-scale agricultural production could not meet the production goals of socialist development, ordered all but 15 percent of the arable land to be pooled into "lower-level agricultural producer cooperatives" of between 300 and 700 workers. The remaining 15 percent of land was to be set aside as private plots for the peasants, and they could market the produce from these plots in private markets throughout the countryside.
Then, in 1956, the peasants throughout the country were ordered into "higher-level agricultural producer cooperatives" of 10 times that size, and the size of the private plots allotted to them was reduced to 5 percent of the cooperatives' total land.
Many peasants felt cheated by these wholesale collectivization policies. When in 1958 the central leadership ordered them to move into communes 10 times larger still than the cooperatives they had just joined, they were irate. Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" policy of 1958 forced all peasants in China to become members of large communes: enormous economic and administrative units consisting of between 30,000 and 70,000 peasants. With communization, all of the peasants' private plots and private utensils, as well as their household chickens, pigs, and ducks, were to be turned over to the commune. Resisting this mandate, many peasants killed and ate their livestock. Since private enterprise was no longer permitted, home handicraft industries ground to a halt.
CCP chairman Mao Zedong's vision for catching up with the West was to industrialize the vast countryside. Peasants were therefore ordered to build "backyard furnaces" to smelt steel. Lacking iron ore, much less any knowledge of how to make steel, and under the guidance of party cadres who themselves were ignorant of steelmaking, the peasants tore out metal radiators, pipes, and fences. Together with pots and pans, they were dumped into their furnaces. Almost none of the final smelted product was usable. Finally, the central economic leadership ordered all peasants to eat in large, communal mess halls. This was reportedly the last straw for a people who valued family above all else. Being deprived of time alone with their families for meals, the peasants refused to cooperate further in agricultural collectivization.
When the catastrophic results of the Great Leap Forward policy poured in, the CCP retreated-but it was too late. Three subsequent years of bad weather, combined with the devastation wreaked by these policies and the Soviet withdrawal of all assistance, brought economic catastrophe. Demographic data indicate that in the "three bad years" from 1959 to 1962, some 20 million to 30 million Chinese died from starvation and malnutrition-related diseases.
By 1962, central planners had condoned peasants returning to production and accounting units the size of the higher- and lower-level cooperatives. Furthermore, peasants were again allowed to farm a small percentage of the total land as private plots, to raise domestic animals for their own use, and to engage in household handicrafts. Free markets, at which the peasantry could trade goods from private production, were reopened. The commune structure was retained throughout the countryside, however, and until the CCP leadership introduced the "contract responsibility system" in 1979, it provided the infrastructure of rural secondary school education, hospitals, and agricultural research.
Other centrally determined policies, seemingly oblivious to reality, have compounded the P.R.C.'s difficulties in agriculture. These include attempts to plant three crops per year in areas that for climatic reasons can support only two (as the Chinese put it, "Three times three is not as good as two times five"); and to plant twice as much grain as was normal in a field, with the result that all of it grew to less than full size or simply wilted for lack of adequate sunshine and nutrients. Such policies were carried out during both the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
A final example of centrally determined agricultural policy bringing catastrophe was the decision during the Cultural Revolution that "the whole country should grow grain." The purpose was to establish China's self-sufficiency in grain. Considering China's immense size and diverse climates, soil types, and topography, a policy ordering everyone to grow the same thing was doomed to failure. Peasants plowed under fields of cotton and cut down rubber plantations and fruit orchards, planting grain in their place. China's planners- largely CCP cadres, not economic experts- ignored overwhelming evidence that grain would not grow well in all areas and that China would have to import everything that it had replaced with grain, at far greater costs than it would have paid for importing just grain. Peasant protests were futile in the face of local-level Communist Party leaders who hoped to advance their careers by implementing central policy. The policy of self-sufficiency in grain was abandoned only with the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976.

Economic Reforms: Decentralization and Liberalization

In 1979, the Deng Xiaoping government began to implement a program of economic reform and liberalization in order to increase productivity and speed up modernization. In brief, although the program tried to maintain centralized state control of the direction of policy and the distribution and pricing of strategic and energy resources, it actually decentralized decision making, down to the level of local enterprises. Decentralization was meant to facilitate more rational decision making, based on local conditions, needs, and efficiency criteria. Although the state retained the right to set overall economic priorities, local factories and enterprises were now encouraged to respond to local market forces of supply and demand. Centrally determined quotas and pricing were gradually phased out, and enterprises now contracted directly with each other rather than the state. Thus, after 1979, the government gradually phased out its role as the go-between in commercial transactions and as the central planner and allocator of everything in the economy.
Today, most collective and individual enterprises, instead of fulfilling centrally determined production quotas, meet contractual obligations that they themselves set. After they have fulfilled their contracts and paid their taxes, enterprises are permitted to use any remaining profits to expand production facilities, improve equipment, and award bonuses. These are effectively private enterprises. Some 70 percent of China's gross national product (GNP) is now produced by these nonstate enterprises. They compete with state-run enterprises to supply goods and services; and if they are not profitable, they go bankrupt.
On the other hand, although the government has threatened to shut down state-run enterprises if they operate at a loss, fear of the political instability that might result from a high level of unemployment has left the government in a difficult position: It believes that it has to continue to subsidize the heavy losses in the state-controlled sector. This, in turn, consumes a significant portion of the state's budget and contributes to China's inflation.
The state has, however, reached a crisis point. Under a very carefully managed scheme, it has started to spin off some state-run industries to the collective and private sectors. Whoever buys these state industries usually must guarantee some sort of livelihood, even if not full employment, to the former employees of the state-run enterprises; but the owners have far more freedom to make a profit than did the state-run enterprises. Recently, in the face of competition from collective enterprises and under the threat of bankruptcy, some state-run enterprises have themselves become more efficient, to the point where they are no longer generating significant losses. The state is also slowly introducing state-run pension and unemployment funds to take care of those workers who lose their jobs when state-owned enterprises are shut down.
In agriculture, the collectivized economy is almost completely gone. Under the contract responsibility system, individual households to whom the formerly collective lands and production tools have been distributed are responsible for planning and carrying out production on their own land. The "10,000 yuan" household (about $2,000), a measure of extraordinary wealth in China, has now become a realizable goal for many peasants. Free markets are booming in China, and peasants who used to produce only what the centralized state bureaucracy ordered now produce whatever they can get the best price for in the market. Today, wealthy rural towns are springing up throughout the agriculturally rich and densely populated east coast as well as along China's major transportation lines.
Theoretically, the collectives still own the land that they have "leased" to the peasants, but in practice the land is treated as if it is owned by the peasants. Those who choose to leave their land may contract it out to others, so that some peasants have amassed large amounts of land once again suitable for large-scale farm machinery. To encourage development, the government has permitted land to be leased for as long as 30 years, and it allows leased rights to be inherited. Furthermore, peasants have built houses on what they consider their own land-itself a problem, because it is usually arable land. Nevertheless, the village councils also have some ability to reallocate land, so that soldiers and others who settle in the villages can receive adequate land to farm.
With the growth of free enterprise in the rural towns since 1979, some 60 million to 100 million peasants have left the land to work for far better pay in small-scale rural industry, or to search for jobs in China's large cities. Many roam the country searching for work. For some, especially those able to find employment in the construction industry, which is booming in many of China's cities, this new system has meant vast personal enrichment; but tens of millions of unemployed peasants clog city streets, parks, and railroad stations. By 1999, they had been joined by tens of millions of workers displaced by the more vigorous efforts of the government to shut down bankrupt enterprises. Together, they have contributed to a vast increase in criminality and social instability.

Problems Created by Economic Reforms

Economic Crime

In the last 20 years, problems have inevitably arisen from new economic policies that created a mixed socialist and capitalist economy. For example, with decentralization, industrial enterprises have tried to hide their profits but "socialize" their losses. That is, if they make a profit, they try to hide them to avoid paying taxes to the state; but if they are state-owned enterprises and losing money, they ask the state to subsidize them to keep them in business. In spite of the dramatic increase in the value of industrial output since 1979, therefore, the profits turned over to the state have actually declined.
Another problem resulting from China's mixed economy is that some localities and enterprises withhold materials normally allocated by the state, such as rolled steel, glass, cement, and timber. They either hoard them as a safeguard against future shortages or resell them at unauthorized higher prices. Not only do these enterprises make illegal profits for themselves; they also deprive the state of access to building materials for its key construction projects. This reflects the problem of China's mixed economy: With the state controlling the pricing and allocation of some resources and the free market determining the rest, there are many opportunities for corruption and abuse of the system.
The needs of the centralized state economy remain in tension with the interests of provinces, counties, towns, and individuals, most of which now operate under the dual rules of a part-market, part-command economy. Thus, even as enterprises are determining whether they will expand production facilities based on the demands of a market economy, the state continues to allocate resources centrally, based on a national plan. A clothing factory that expands its production, for instance, requires more energy (coal, oil, water) and more cotton. The state, already faced with inadequate energy resources to keep most industries operating at more than 70 percent capacity, continues to allocate the same amount to the now-expanded factory. Profitable enterprises want a greater share of centrally allocated scarce resources, but find they cannot acquire them without the help of "middlemen" and a significant amount of under-the-table dealing. Corruption has, therefore, become rampant at the nexus where the capitalist and socialist economies meet.
Widespread corruption in the economic sector has led the Chinese government to wage a series of campaigns against economic crimes such as embezzlement and graft. An increasing number of economic criminals are going to prison, and serious offenders are frequently executed. Until energy and transportation bottlenecks and the scarcity of key resources are dealt with, however, it will be extremely difficult to halt the bribery, smuggling, stealing, and extortion now pervasive in China. The relaxation of central controls, the mandate for the Chinese people to "get rich," and a mixed economy have exacerbated what was already a problem under the socialist system. In a system suffering from serious scarcities but controlled by bureaucrats, political power, not the market, determines who gets what-not only goods, but also opportunities, licenses, permits, and approvals.
Although the Chinese may now purchase in the market many essential products previously distributed solely through bureaucratically controlled channels, there are still many goods that they can acquire only through the "back door"- that is, through people they know and for whom they have done favors. Scarcity, combined with bureaucratic control, has led to "collective corruption": Individuals engage in corrupt practices, even cheat the state, in order to benefit the enterprise for which they work. Since today's non-state-owned "collectives" survive or perish on the basis of profits and losses, the motivation for corrupt activities is stronger than under the previous system.
Liberalization of the economy is, then, providing a massive number and variety of goods for the marketplace. The Chinese people may buy almost any basic consumer goods in stores or the open markets. But the nexus between continued state control and the free economy still fuels a rampant corruption that threatens the strength of China's economy.

Unequal Benefits

Not all Chinese have benefited equally from the last 20 years of economic reforms. Those who inhabit cities in the interior, and peasants living far from cities and transportation lines or tilling less arable land, have reaped far fewer benefits. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Chinese have seen some improvement in their lives. At the same time, short-term gains in income will be threatened in the long term by the deterioration of education and medical care in large parts of China's hinterland. This deterioration is due to the elimination of the commune as the underlying structure for education and health care. On the other hand, the wealthier peasants send their children into the larger towns and cities for schooling, and their family members can travel to the more comprehensive health clinics and hospitals farther away. In some areas, however, the wealthier peasants have actually built local schools and private hospitals. Furthermore, in a remarkable move away from dependency on the state for benefits, the Chinese now support Project Hope, an international charity whose purpose is to improve health care for China's poorest children.
In the cities, employees of state-run enterprises suffer from being on fixed state salaries that are barely adequate to buy goods whose prices are no longer state-controlled. By the mid-1990s, however, the state managed to bring inflation under greater control. China's annual inflation rate is now in the single digits, but many urban workers feel that they must have two jobs in order to make ends meet. In such an environment, there is also a greater temptation to engage in corruption in order to lead a better life. With the withering away of state control over the economy, but an inadequate system of regulations and laws to replace it, white-collar crime is surging in China.
The visible polarization of wealth, which had been virtually eradicated in the first 30 years of Communist rule, has returned to China with the return of the free market. The creation of a crassly ostentatious wealthy class and simply ostentatious middle class, in the context of high unemployment, poverty, and a mobile population, is breeding the very class conflict that the Chinese Communists fought a revolution to eliminate. When reforms began some 20 years ago, street crime was almost unheard of in China's cities. Now it is a serious problem, one that the government fears may lead to the overthrow of CCP rule if it is not brought under control.

Mortgaging the Future

One of the most damaging aspects of the capitalist "get-rich" atmosphere prevailing in China is the willingness to sacrifice the future for profits today. The environment is literally being destroyed by uncontrolled pollution, the rampant growth of new towns, cities, and highways, the building of houses on arable land, and the destruction of forests. Some middle schools have turned their basketball courts into parking lots in China's crowded cities, which are unable to provide parking facilities for the huge number of newly owned private cars. And they have used state funds allocated to the schools for education to build shops all along the outside walls of the schools. Teachers and administrators deal themselves the profits; but in the meantime, classroom materials and facilities are deteriorating.
Overall, however, the tensions among the central state, the provinces, the cities, the towns, and the enterprises that have been generated by decentralization of economic power have been beneficial to economic growth. Greater economic autonomy at each level has led to a concomitant growth in the political autonomy at that level. Thus, provinces-especially those that are producing significant revenues-can now challenge central economic policy, and even refuse to carry it out. For example, the wealthier eastern coastal provinces have successfully challenged the central government's right to collect more taxes on provincial revenues. Similarly, cities now have greater autonomy vis-à-vis the former all-encompassing power of the provinces over them. In short, this sort of economic power, won through the free market, has brought with it the political power necessary to challenge China's leaders. Indeed, some commentators wonder whether the unwillingness of the provinces to dutifully obey Beijing will lead to the breakup of China in the twenty-first century. In this sense also, the Chinese must be wondering whether they are mortgaging the future for profits now.

SOCIALIST LEGALITY

China's legal system must be viewed within the particular Chinese cultural context for law as well as the goals of law in a socialist system. Reforms in China's legal system since 1979 have, however, brought a remarkable transformation in Chinese attitudes toward the law; and China's laws and legal procedures look increasingly like those used in the West. This is particularly true for laws that relate to the economy, including contract, investment, property, and commercial laws. The Chinese have discovered that the legal system has developed into a powerful protector of their rights in economic transactions. Criminal law and procedure have also undergone a rapid transformation. In civil law (when it relates to disputes with neighbors and family members), however, the Chinese are still more likely to rely on mediation to settle their disputes.

Ethical Basis of Law

In imperial China, the Confucian system provided the basis for the social and political order. Confucianism posited that ethics were based on maintaining correct personal relationships among people, not based on laws. A legal system did exist, but the Chinese resorted to it in civil cases only in desperation, for the inability to resolve one's problems oneself, or through a mediator, usually resulted in considerable loss of "face," or dignity and pride. (In criminal cases, the state normally became involved in determining guilt and punishment.)
This perspective on law carried over into the period of Communist rule. Until legal reforms began in the 1980s, most Chinese preferred to call in CCP officials, local neighborhood or factory mediation committees, family members, and friends, not lawyers or judicial personnel, to settle disputes. Only when mediation failed did the Chinese resort to the courts. By contrast, the West lacks both this strong support for the institution of mediation and the concept of face. So Westerners have difficulty understanding why China has had so few lawyers and why the Chinese lack faith in the law.
Like Confucianism, Marxism-Leninism is an ideology that embodies a set of ethical standards for behavior. After 1949, it easily built on China's cultural predisposition toward ruling by ethics instead of law. Although Marxism-Leninism did not completely replace the Confucian ethical system, it did establish new standards of behavior based on socialist morality. These ethical standards emerge in the works of Marx and Lenin, in the writings of Mao Zedong, and in the CCP's policies.

Law and Politics

From 1949 until the legal reforms that began in 1979, Chinese universities trained very few lawyers. Legal training consisted of learning law and politics as an integrated whole; for according to Marxism, law is meant to reflect the values of the "ruling class" and to serve as an instrument of "class struggle." The Chinese Communist regime viewed law as a branch of the social sciences, not as a professional field of study. For this reason, China's citizens tended to view law as a mere propaganda tool, not as a means for protecting their rights. They have never really experienced a law-based society. Not only were China's laws and legal education highly politicized, but politics also pervaded the judicial system. With few lawyers available, few legally trained judges in the courts, and even fewer laws to refer to for standards of behavior, inevitably China's legal system has been subject to abuse. China has been ruled by people, not by law; by politics, not by legal standards; and by party policy, not by a constitution. Interference in the judicial process by party officials has been all too common.
After 1979, however, the government moved quickly to write new laws. Fewer than 300 lawyers, most of them trained before 1949 in Western legal institutions, undertook the immense task of writing a civil code, a criminal code, contract law, economic law, law governing foreign investment in China, tax law, and environmental and forestry laws. One strong motivation for the Chinese Communist leadership to formalize the legal system was its growing realization, after years of a disappointingly low level of foreign investment, that the international business community was reluctant to invest further in China without substantial legal guarantees.
Even China's own potential entrepreneurs wanted legal protection against the state before they would assume the risks of developing new businesses. Enterprises, for example, want a legal guarantee that, if the state should fail to supply resources contracted for, it can be sued for losses issuing from its nonfulfillment of contractual obligations. Since the objective of economic reform is to encourage investment, the leadership has necessarily had to supplement economic reforms with legal reforms. Formalization of the legal system has fostered a stronger basis for modernization. New laws have, moreover, helped limit abuse of the people's rights by the government and the CCP.

Consumer protection: Copyrights, Trademarks, and fake products.

In the area of intellectual property rights (IPR)-a source of much controversy between China and the West-the Chinese government is increasingly concerned, for its own domestic reasons, that copyrights and trademarks be respected. China is awash with false labels and fake products. From hair tonics and soaps to appliances and fruit juices, the Chinese people are being duped daily because of inadequate state controls over labeling, trademarks, and copyrights. Fakes have had serious consequences. Fertilizers have destroyed crops, and medicines have made people sick. Low-quality liquor, clothing, compact discs, and other consumer goods are often falsely marketed under famous labels-and in any event are the patented or copyrighted property of someone else. Scores of people have died in China after drinking "white liquor" made from ethylene. Beer bottles falsely labeled with the name of well-known breweries explode and harm people. And people buy expensive home remedies, such as ankle massagers, that do not function, or that even do harm.
In an effort to crack down on those producing goods under false labels, the government set up an "Anti-Fake Bureau." The government allows legitimate enterprises to use a special hologram on their products to indicate authenticity-but already the hologram is being sold on the black market to anyone who wishes to stick it on their own products.
Consumer protection has become an important issue, and many large companies and department stores urge consumers to report products that are defective or are suspected fakes. In most countries, consumer protection is still a "luxury" right, a right that is ignored until the country is much further along in development than is China. It is strikingly paradoxical that just when the government is trying to decentralize control over social and economic policy and to privatize state property, the Chinese people are actually demanding that their government play a larger role in protecting the people- from one another. The area of consumer protection is a good example of the continuance of the traditional Chinese view that the state should act as the "parents" of the people, who are the "children" and need to be taken care of.

Criminal Law

Procedures followed in Chinese criminal courts have differed significantly from those in, for example, the United States. Until 1996-when the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" was first introduced in China-it was presumed that people brought to trial in criminal cases were guilty. Not only was there a presumption of guilt, but the judicial process itself confirmed this guilt. That is, after the suspect was arrested by the police, the procuracy (the investigative branch of the judiciary system) would spend considerable time and effort finding out the facts and establishing whether the suspect was indeed guilty. This is important to understand when assessing the fact that 99 percent of all the accused who were brought to trial in China were judged guilty. Theoretically, had the facts not substantiated their guilt, the procuracy would have dismissed their cases before going to trial.
In short, those adjudged to be innocent were never brought to trial in the first place. For this reason, court appearances of the guilty functioned mainly to present the evidence upon which the guilty verdict was based-not to weigh the evidence to see if it indicated guilt-and to remind the public that criminals are punished. A trial was a "morality play" of sorts: the villain was punished, justice was done, the people's interests were protected. In addition, the trial process emphasized the importance of confessing one's crimes, for those who confessed and appeared repentant in court would usually be dealt more lenient sentences. Criminals were encouraged to turn themselves in, on the promise that their punishment would be less severe than if they were caught. Those accused of crimes were encouraged to confess rather than deny their guilt or appeal to the next level, all in hopes of gaining a more lenient sentence from the judge.
From the Western perspective, the real problem with this system was that once the procuracy established "the facts," they were not open to question by the lawyer or representative of the accused. (In China, a person may be represented by a family member, friend, or colleague, largely because there are simply not enough lawyers to fulfill the guarantee of a person's "right to a defense.") The lawyer for the accused was not allowed to introduce new evidence, make arguments to dismiss the case based on technicalities or improper procedures (such as wire tapping), or make insanity pleas for the client. Instead, the lawyer's role in a criminal case was simply to represent the person in court and to bargain with the court for a reduced sentence for the repentant client. The 1996 legal reforms are supposed to have improved the rights of the accused by giving them access to a lawyer within several days of being formally arrested. So far, however, it appears that many suspects (including some well-known democratic dissidents) have not been accorded this right.
Although the accused have the right to a defense, it has always been presumed that a lawyer will not defend someone who is guilty. The lawyer is, in fact, an employee of the state and is paid by the state. As such, a lawyer's obligation is first and foremost to protect the state's interests, not the individual's interests at the expense of the state. When lawyers have done otherwise, they have risked being condemned as "counterrevolutionaries" or traitors. Small wonder that after 1949, the study of law did not attract China's most talented students.

The Need for Lawyers

In the areas of civil and commercial law, however, the role of the lawyer has become increasingly important since the opening of China's closed door to the outside world. Now that the leadership views trade with other countries and foreign investment as crucial to China's development, its goal is to train at least one lawyer for every state, collective, or private organization and enterprise. Increasingly, the Chinese recognize that upholding the law is not merely a question of correctly understanding the party "line" and then following it in legal disputes but, rather, of interpreting the meaning of law according to the concrete circumstances of a case. Yet even in economic disputes, lawyers who have vigorously defended their clients' interests against the state's interests have occasionally been condemned for being "anti-socialist."
Since China has had so little experience in dealing with civil conflicts and economic disputes in the courts, and since Western investors insist that Chinese courts be prepared to address such issues, the leadership has been forced to train lawyers in Western law and to draft literally thousands of new laws. To protect themselves against what is difficult to understand in the abstract, however, the Chinese used to refuse to publish their newly written laws. Claiming a shortage of paper or the need to protect "state secrets," they withheld publication of many laws until their actual impact on China's state interests could be determined. This practice frustrated potential investors, who dared not risk capital investment in China until they knew exactly what the relevant laws were. As relations with foreign investors as well as the entrepreneurial activities of their own citizens have grown increasingly complex, however, the Chinese government now feels obligated to publish most of its laws as quickly as possible.

THE POLITICAL SYSTEM

The Party and the State

In China, the Chinese Communist Party is the fountainhead of power and policy. But not all Chinese people are party members. Although the CCP has some 50 million members, this represents less than 5 percent of the population.
Joining the CCP is a competitive, selective, rigorous process. Some have wanted to join out of a commitment to Communist ideals, others in hopes of climbing the ladder of opportunity, still others to gain access to limited goods and opportunities. By the late 1980s, however, so many students and educated individuals had grown cynical about the CCP that they refused to join. The motives of many of those who do join are considered suspect by ordinary people, as being a party member is likely to open more doors for advancement-and corruption-than are available to non-party members. Still, those who travel to China today are likely to find that many of the most talented people they meet are party members.
The CCP is the ultimate institutional authority and determines the "general line"-that is, the ideological justification of policy. All state policies must conform to the "general line." Although in theory the state is distinct from the party, in practice the two overlapped almost completely from the late 1950s to the early 1990s. By then, efforts by the reformers to get the party out of the day-to-day work of the government had started to take effect.
The state apparatus consists of a State Council, headed by the premier. Under the State Council are the ministries and agencies and "people's congresses" responsible for the formulation of policy. The CCP, however, exercises firm control over these state bodies through interlocking organizations. For example, CCP branches exist within all government organizations, and all key state personnel are also party members.
China's socialist system is subject to enormous abuses of power. The lines of authority within both the CCP and the state system are poorly defined, as are the rules for succession to the top leadership positions. This has allowed individuals like Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four to usurp power and rule arbitrarily. By the late 1980s, China's bureaucracy appeared to have become more corrupt than at any time since 1949. Anger at the massive scale of official corruption was, in fact, the major factor unifying ordinary citizens and workers with students during the antigovernment protests in the spring of 1989.
Campaigns to control official corruption continue. Individuals are encouraged to write letters to the editors of the country's daily newspapers to expose corruption or to suggest how corruption might be ferreted out. Some cases are investigated by journalists, thereby focusing public attention on official abuse. Television has a daily program running in prime time that records the successes of China's public-security system in cracking down on corruption and crime.
Reform of the political system has been another avenue that the government has pursued in its effort to curb corruption. The Chinese have tried to separate the party from the functions of the state bureaucracy and economic enterprises. For some leadership positions, there are now limits on tenure in office. There are also strict prohibitions on a leader developing a personality cult, such as that which reached fanatical proportions around CCP chairman Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. Reforms have also encouraged, if not demanded, that the Chinese state bureaucracy reward merit more than mere seniority, and expertise more than political activism. And, in 1996, the government's practice since 1949 of leading officials staying in one ministry during their entire career was replaced by new regulations requiring officials from divisional chiefs up to ministers and provincial governors to be rotated every 5 years. In addition, no high official may work in the same office as his or her spouse or direct blood relative. It is hoped that such regulations will curtail the building of power bases that foster corruption within ministries.
So far, most efforts to control official corruption have had little effect. Officials continue to use their power to achieve personal gain, trading official favors for others' services (such as better housing, jobs for their children, admission to the right schools, and access to goods in short supply). Getting things done in a system that requires layers of bureaucratic approval still depends heavily upon a complex set of personal connections and relationships, all reinforced through under-the-table gift giving. This stems in part from the still heavily centralized aspect of Chinese governance, and in part from the overstaffing of a bureaucracy that is plagued by red tape. Countless offices must sign off on requests for anything from buying a typewriter to getting a telephone. This gives enormous power to individual officials who are willing to take charge of processing an individual's or work unit's request for something, such as a license or a building permit. In today's more market-oriented China, for example, anyone with adequate funds may buy an air conditioner. But because all electrical service is controlled by the government, people who do purchase air conditioners must pay off an official to allow the electrical service to their living units to be upgraded so that they can actually use an air conditioner. Similarly, brothels can be run in the open, virtually without interference from the police, because they are bribed to look the other way.
An example of the difficulty in controlling corruption is this: To cut down on the abuse of official privilege, the government issued a new regulation stipulating that governmental officials doing business could order only four dishes and one soup. But as most Chinese like to eat well, especially at the government's expense, the restaurants accommodated them by simply giving them much larger plates on which they put many different dishes, and wrote it up as one dish! Another example concerns middlemen who are paid for arranging business transactions. They used to be considered corrupt. Now a government regulation says it is all right for a middleman to keep 5 percent of the total value of the transaction as a "fee' and it is no longer called corruption. The Chinese have also adopted the custom in other countries of permitting tour guides who take tourists to a shop to receive a percentage of the total sales, behavior that previously was considered corrupt.

ENVIRONMENT FOR DEMOCRACY

When assessing the Chinese political system's level of freedom, democracy, and individual rights, it is important to remember that the Chinese do not share the values and traditions of the West's Greco-Roman political heritage. For millennia, Chinese thought has run along different lines, with far less emphasis on such ideals as individual rights, privacy, and limits on state power. The Chinese political tradition is one of authoritarianism and moral indoctrination. For more than 2,000 years, China's rulers have shown greater concerns for establishing their authority and maintaining unity in the vast territory and populations they controlled than in Western concepts of democratic liberalism. Apart from China's intellectuals in the twentieth century, the vast majority of the Chinese people have appeared to be more afraid of chaos than rule by an authoritarian despot. As a result, even today the Chinese people seem more concerned that their rulers have enough power to control China than that the rights of the citizens vis-à-vis their rulers be protected.

Cultural and Historical Authoritarianism

The heavy weight of more than 2,000 years of Chinese history helped shape the development of today's political system. The Chinese inherited a patriarchal culture, in which the hierarchical values of superior-inferior and subordination, loyalty, and obedience prevailed over those of equality; a historical predisposition toward official secrecy; a fear of officials and official power; a traditional repugnance for courts, lawyers, and formal laws that resulted in a legal system inadequately developed to defend democratic rights; and a legacy of authoritarianism. These cultural factors provided the context for the introduction of Western democratic values and institutions into China from the nineteenth century onward. As a result, the Chinese people have not embraced Western democratic values with fervor.
China's limited experience with democracy in the twentieth century has been bitter. Virtually the entire period from the fall of China's imperial monarchy in 1911 to the Communist victory in 1949 (the period of the "Republic of China" on the mainland) was marred by warlordism, chaos, war, and a government masking brutality, greed, and incompetence under the label of "democracy." Although it is hardly fair to blame this period of societal collapse and externally imposed war on China's efforts to practice "democracy" under the "tutelage of the Kuomintang," the Chinese people's experience of democracy was nevertheless negative.
China's experience of democracy from 1912 until 1949, together with its political culture, helps explain the people's reluctance to pursue democracy aggressively. During that period, the existence of both democratic political institutions and a complete legal system (on paper) proved inadequate to guarantee the protection of individual rights. Under Communist rule after 1949, the period described as "democratic mass rule" (the "10 bad years" or "Cultural Revolution" from 1966 to 1976) was in fact a period of mass tyranny. For the Chinese, the experience of relinquishing power to "the masses" turned into the most horrific period of unleashed terrorism and cruelty that they had experienced since the Communist takeover.

Socialist Democracy

When the CCP came to power in 1949, it inherited a country that had been torn by civil war, internal rebellion, and foreign invasions for more than 100 years. The population was overwhelmingly illiterate and desperately poor, the economy in shambles. The most urgent need was for order. Despite some serious setbacks and mistakes, Mao Zedong and his colleagues made great strides in securing China's borders, establishing the institutions of government, and enhancing the material well-being of the Chinese people. But they also severely limited the development of "democracy" as the liberal democratic West would understand it, in the name of order and stability.
The Chinese people are accustomed to "eating bitterness," not to standing up to authority. The traditional Confucian emphasis on the group rather than the individual and an emphasis on respect for authority, although now being undercut by the effects of modernization and disenchantment with the CCP leadership, continue to this Day.
An atmosphere of greater freedom is pervasive in China as it nears the millennium, but all will admit that a gnawing fear persists as to what could happen. As one faculty member in a university remarked, although he doesn't think the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution could happen again, he still writes his diary in code. As he put it, when you feel you have been watched every day of your life for 43 years, it is difficult to rid yourself of deeply ingrained fears when no one is watching any longer. Furthermore, many would admit that, although those scholars and students studying abroad who protested the Chinese government's brutal suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations need not fear being jailed or persecuted if they return to China (unless, of course, like Shen Tong, an actual leader of those demonstrations, they are brazen enough to publicly advocate democratization on their return), they might well be punished in other ways-such as by the state offering them jobs inappropriate for the level of education they received abroad. Thus, the government continues to decide which rights individuals will receive-and when to withdraw them.
The Chinese people lack interest in political participation in part because it appears "ineffective in getting what they want for themselves. For that purpose, they have found that under-the-table gift giving to, and entertainment of local officials, together with developing a 'web of connections,' are far more effective. Chinese peasants and workers seem inclined to believe that policies change only when high-level officials mandate it, not in response to popular pressure." This helps explain the pervasive gift giving and outright bribery in China.
As the impersonal market forces of supply and demand undercut the power of officials to control the distribution of resources and opportunities in the society, these patterns are changing. Participation in the political process at the local level is already reaping significant results, with some officials eagerly seeking out advice for improving the economic conditions in their localities, and with incompetent officials unable to gain reelection. Nevertheless, many Chinese continue to believe that voicing their opinions in some situations is useless and can even be dangerous; and memories of forced participation in the many campaigns and movements in China since 1949 "continue to give political participation a negative connotation. The result is that an active political participant is often regarded with deep suspicion."
To the extent that the unwillingness of Chinese to challenge the political institutions and rulers of the CCP regime may be labeled as passive or submissive behavior, not to mention "collusion" with their oppressors, is it in any sense unique to China? One could argue that Central/Eastern Europeans also participated in their own political oppression simply by complying with the demands of the system. Vaclav Havel, president of Czechoslovakia and subsequently of the Czech Republic, once stated: "All of us have become accustomed to the totalitarian system, accepted it as an unalterable fact and therefore kept it running. . . . None of us is merely a victim of it, because all of us helped to create it together." Can we say that the Chinese, any more than the Czechs, passively accepted totalitarianism if they did not go into exile outside of their country or did not refuse to work? Is anyone who does not actively revolt against an oppressive system necessarily in collusion with it?
In short, those who do not challenge the system out of fear of the consequences cannot be said to be supportive of the system; but one cannot assume that the major reason why people are not challenging the Communist system is out of fear of punitive consequences.
Were the CCP to step back from its state policies of punishment for political crimes, then, there is nothing in an abstract Chinese culture that would necessarily cause Chinese to remain submissive to an authoritarian regime. Rather, it is the political system that has reinforced the authoritarian qualities of Chinese culture. Nor should a lack of rules and institutions be considered an insurmountable object, as "democratic" behavioral skills can be acquired through practice. In short, as the political system becomes more liberal, the political culture is likely to evolve-indeed, it is evolving-in a more liberal direction.

Limited Popular Demands for Greater Democracy

So far, China has experienced only limited popular demand for democracy. When the student-led demonstrations in Beijing began in 1989, the demands for democratic reforms were confined largely to the small realm of the elite-students and well-educated individuals as well as some members of the political and economic ruling elite. The workers and farmers of China remained more concerned about bread-and-butter issues-inflation, economic growth, and their own personal enrichment-not democratic ideals.
By the mid- 1990s, many Chinese had discovered that they could get exactly what they wanted through channels other than mass demonstrations, because of the development of numerous alternative groups, institutions, and processes. Many of these groups are not political in origin, but the process by which they are pressing for policy changes in the government is highly political. Literally hundreds of thousands of interest groups and associations have sprung up in the last decades. While many of these interest groups are organized and controlled by the state (such as the Women's Association and the Communist Party Youth League), others are not. It is perhaps ironic that the Chinese Communist Party's penchant for organizing people resulted in teaching them organizational skills that they now use in the non-government-directed sphere-and sometimes for the purpose of pressuring the government to change policy. They work through these organizations to advance and protect their members' interests within the framework of existing laws and regulations.
Even those Chinese not working through officially organized associations ban together to petition local officials in the style they learned through socialization by the CCP. For example, urban neighborhoods join forces to stop local noise pollution emanating from stereos blasting on the street where thousands of Chinese couples learn ballroom dancing, or from the cymbals, tambourines, gongs, and drums of old ladies doing "fan dancing" on the city streets. In turn, the fan dancers and the ballroom dancers petition the local officials to maintain their "right". to express themselves through dance in the streets, some of the few public spaces available to them in a crowded urban environment.
The tendency to organize around issues and interests in China today is more than a reflection of the decline of the role of Communist ideology in shaping policy. It also reflects the government's assertion of highly pragmatic concerns in policy making, and the desire of distinct constituencies to fall in line with, or take advantage of, this approach to issues and policy. Although China has never been homogeneous and uncomplicated, it is certainly a far more complicated economy, society, and polity today than it was before 1980. Today's China has far more diverse needs and interests to be represented than previously, and specialized associations and interest groups serve the need of articulating these interests.

Lack of an Alternative Leadership

One of the critical problems for democratization in China has been the people's inability to envision an alternative to CCP rule: It has been unthinkable. What form would it take? How would it get organized? Wouldn't the organizers be jailed? And if the CCP were overthrown, who would lead a new system? These questions are still far from being answered even today.
So far, no dissident leadership capable of offering an alternative to CCP leadership and laying claim to popular support has formed. Even the mass demonstrations in 1989 were not led by either a worker, or a peasant, or by an intellectual with whom the common people could identify:
In fact, during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, students were actually annoyed with the workers' participation in the demonstrations. They wanted to press their own political demands, not the workers' more concrete work-related issues. Some Chinese have commented that the students' real interest in demanding respect for their own goals from China's leadership was because they wanted to enhance their own power vis-à-vis the regime: The students' major demands were for a "dialogue" with the government as "equals," and for free speech-issues of primary interest to them, but of secondary interest to the workers of China.
Many Chinese believe that the leaders of the 1989 demonstrations would have differed little from the CCP elite had they suddenly been catapulted to power. The student movement itself admitted to being authoritarian, of kowtowing to its own leaders, and of expecting others to obey rather than to discuss decisions.
In any event, few of those who participated in the demonstrations in 1989 are interested in politics or political leadership today. Most have thrown themselves into business and making money.
Apart from students and intellectuals, the major proponents of democratic reform today hail from China's newly emerging business circles; but these two groups have not united to achieve reform, as they neither like nor trust each other. Intellectuals view venture capitalists "as uncultured, and business people as driven only by crass material interests." They in turn regard intellectuals and students as "well-meaning but out of touch with reality and always all too willing and eager to serve the state" when it suits their needs.
One thing seems clear: Those dissidents who left China and remain abroad have lost their political influence with the Chinese people. Apart from everything else, dissidents abroad still have no way to make themselves heard in China, where their articles cannot be published. Although e-mail and fax machines keep them in touch with other dissidents in China, their influence is largely limited to their ability to supply funds to the dissident movement in China. Doing so, however, often gets the recipients in China in considerable trouble, including lengthy prison sentences.

The Impact of Global Interdependency on Democratization

Since the late 1970s, the cultural context for democracy in China has shifted. Growing awareness of global interdependency, with the expansion of the global capitalist economy to include China, has brought with it a social and economic transformation of China. For the first time in Chinese history, a significant challenge to the "we-they" dichotomy-of China on the one hand, against the rest of the world on the other-is occurring. This in turn has led many Chinese to question the heretofore assumed superiority of Chinese civilization to all other civilizations.

Such an idea does not come easily for a people long accustomed to believing in their own superiority. Hence the fuss caused by "River Elegy," a television series first shown on Chinese national television in 1988. In this series, the producers argued that the Chinese people must embrace the idea of global interdependency-technological, economic, and cultural. To insist at this time in history on the superiority of Chinese civilization, with the isolation of China from the world of ideas that this implies, would only contribute to China's continued stagnation. The series suggested that the Chinese must see themselves as equal, not superior, to others; and as interdependent with, not as victims of, others. Such concepts of equality, and opening up China to ideas from outside of China, implicitly challenge the CCP's authoritarian rule and are still resisted by the more conservative reformers remaining in China's top leadership today.

The Press and Mass Media

When the student-led demonstrations for democracy began in the spring of 1989, China's press had witnessed remarkable growth in its diversity and liberalization of its content. With some 1,500 newspapers, 5,000 magazines, and 500 publishing houses, the Chinese were able to express a wider variety of viewpoints and ideas than at any time since the CCP came to power in 1949. The importation and domestic production of millions of television sets, radios, short-wave radios, cassette recorders, players, and VCRs also facilitated the growth of the mass media in China. They have been accompanied by a wide array of "un-Chinese" and "non-Communist" audio and video materials. The programs of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Voice of America, the diversification of domestic television and radio programs (a choice made by the Chinese government and facilitated by international satellite communications), and the importation and translation of foreign books and magazines-all contributed to a more pluralistic press in China. In fact, by 1989, the stream of publications had so overwhelmed the CCP Propaganda Department that it was simply no longer able to monitor their content.
During the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the Chinese press, under pressure from students and from the international press in Beijing (which, unlike the Chinese press, freely filmed and filed reports on the demonstrations), took a leap into complete press freedom. With cameramen and microphones in hand, reporters covered a student hunger strike that began on May 13 in its entirety. But with the imposition of martial law in Beijing on May 20, press freedom came to a crashing halt.
In the immediate aftermath of the crackdown on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the CCP imposed a ban on a variety of books, journals, and magazines. Vice Premier Wang Zhen ordered the "cleansing" of media organizations, with "bad elements" removed and not permitted to leave Beijing for reporting. All press and magazine articles written during the prodemocracy movement, all television and radio programs shown during that period, were analyzed to see if they conformed to the party line. Those individuals responsible for editing during that time were dismissed. And, as had been the practice in the past, press and magazine articles once again had to be on topics specified by the editors, who were under the control of the CCP. In short, press freedom in China suffered a significant setback because of the prodemocracy demonstrations in the spring of 1989.
In the new climate of experimentation launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1992, however, the diversity of television and radio programs soared. China's major cities now have multiple television and radio channels, carrying a broad range of programs from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and the West. These programs-whether soap operas about daily life for Chinese people living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, or art programs exposing the Chinese to the world of Western religious art through a visual art-history tour of the Vatican, or in news about protests and problems faced by other nations in the world-are both subtly and blatantly exposing the Chinese to values, ideas, and standards of living previously unknown to them. The Chinese are even learning about the American legal process through China's rebroadcasting of American television dramas that focus on police and the judicial system. Chinese are fascinated that American police, as soon as they arrest suspects, inform them that they have "the right to remain silent" and "the right to a lawyer." Such programs may do more to bring reform to the Criminal Procedure Code than all the efforts of the human-rights groups have achieved.
Today, ownership of television sets is widespread. China even has 50 million cable-television subscribers, with 5 million new subscribers being added each year. And virtually all families have radios. Round-the-clock, all-news radio stations broadcast the latest political, economic, and cultural news and conduct live radio and television interviews; and radio talk shows take phone calls from anonymous listeners about everything from sex to political corruption. There are even blatant critiques of corruption in the leadership, police brutality, and the failure of government policies on everything from trade policy to health care and unemployment. There is also far better coverage of social and economic news in all the media than previously, and there is serious investigative reporting on corruption and crime.
To paint the picture in quantitative terms, about 5,000 books were published annually around 1970. By 1990, the total was close to 90,000 annually; by 1995, it was about 104,000. In 1970, there were fewer than 50 newspapers. By 1990, the number had grown to 1,444, and by 1995, to 2,202-an overall increase of more than 4,000 percent in 25 years. Similarly, in 1970, virtually no journals were published.
By 1990, there were more than 6,000 registered journals and magazines; by 1995, there were 8,135-an official number that excludes the large number of nonregistered magazines and illegal publications. The number of radio stations increased from 635 in 1990 to 1,210 in 1995; the number of television stations, from 509 to 980. By 1995, there were also 1,200 cable-television stations and 54,084 ground satellite stations. Today, close to 90 percent of the population have access to television. In fact, print and electronic media are so prolific and diverse that much of it escapes any monitoring whatsoever, especially newspapers, magazines, and books.
The sheer quantity of output on television, radio, books, and the press allows the Chinese people to make choices among the types of news, programs, and perspectives that they find most appealing. The choice is not necessarily for the most informative or the highest quality, but for the most entertaining. As a result, the media have become market-driven, and consumers' preferences, not government regulations or ideological values, shape programming and publishing decisions. This market orientation is due to economic reforms: By the 1 990s, the government had cut subsidies to the media, thereby requiring that even the state-controlled media had to make money or be shut down; and this in turn meant that the news stories it presented had to be more newsworthy in order to sell advertising and subscriptions. Similarly, television programs, which now lack adequate state subsidies, must be appealing to viewers in order to attract advertising. In short: "Even though China's media can hardly be called free, the emergence of divergent voices means the center's ability to control people's minds has vanished."
The end of government subsidies to the media has spurred publication. Thinking that there is money to be made, township and village enterprises in the countryside, and even private entrepreneurs, have set up thousands of printing facilities over the last 10 to 15 years. Similarly, "China's 500 state presses and 6000 registered journals and magazines have.. . turned themselves into profit maximizers." All of the media now respond to consumers' tastes.
The printed press has regained substantial freedom since the crackdown on dissidents in 1989. "Week-end editions" print just about any story that will sell. Often about the seamier side of Chinese life, all are undercutting the puritannical aspect of CCP rule and expanding the range of topics available for discussion in the public domain. And China's official newspapers, which now must make money because the state no longer subsidizes them, cater to readers' interests so that they can solicit more advertising fees. So many publishing houses have sprung up that the CCP no longer has the resources to monitor the content of their publications. And even China's movies, plays, and fine arts have been able to provide commentary on heretofore prohibited topics.

The Student and Mass Movement of 1989

Symbolism is very important in Chinese culture; the death of a key leader is a particularly significant moment. In the case of the former head of the CCP, Hu Yaobang, his sudden death in April 1989 became symbolic of the death of liberalizing forces in China. The students used Hu's death as an excuse to place his values and policies in juxtaposition with those of the then increasingly conservative leadership. The deceased leader's career and its meaning were touted as symbols of liberalization, even though his life was hardly a monument to liberal thought. More conservative leaders in the CCP had removed him from his position as the CCP's general secretary in part because he had offended their cultural sensibilities. Apart from everything else, Hu's suggestions that the Chinese turn in their chopsticks for knives and forks and not eat food out of a common dish because it spread disease were culturally offensive to them.
The students' reassessment of Hu Yaobang's career in a way that rejected the party's evaluation was in itself a challenge to the authority of the CCP's right to rule China. A student hunger strike during the visit of then-Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev to China was, even in the eyes of ordinary Chinese people, an insult to the Chinese leadership. Many Chinese later contended that the students went too far-that by humiliating the leadership, they humiliated all Chinese.
Part of the difficulty in reaching an agreement between the students and China's leaders was that the students' demands changed over time. At first they merely wanted a reassessment of Hu Yaobang's career. But quickly the students added new demands: An end to official corruption, exposure of the financial and business dealings of the central leadership, a free press, dialogue between the government and the students (with the students to be treated as equals with top CCP leaders), retraction of an offensive People 's Daily editorial, the removal of the top CCP leadership, and still other actions that challenged continued CCP rule.
The students' hunger strike, which lasted for one week in May, was the final straw that brought down the wrath of the central leadership. Martial law was imposed in Beijing; and when the citizens of Beijing resisted its enforcement and blocked the army's efforts to reach Tiananmen Square to clear out the hunger-strikers, both students and CCP leaders dug in; but both were deeply fractured bodies. Indeed, divisions within the student-led movement caused it to lose its direction; and divisions within the central CCP leadership incapacitated the leadership. For 2 weeks, the central leadership wrangled over who was right and what to do. On June 4, the "hard-liners" won out, and they chose to use military power over a negotiated solution with the students.
Did the students make significant or well-thought-out statements about "democracy" or realistic demands on China's leaders? The short and preliminary answer is no; but then, is this really the appropriate question to be asking in the first place? One could argue that what the students said was less important than what they did: They mobilized the population of China's capital and other major cities to support a profound challenge to the legitimacy of the CCP's leadership. Even if workers believed that "You can't eat democracy," and even if they participated in the demonstrations for their own reasons (such as gripes about inflation and corruption), they did support the students' demand that the CCP carry out further political reforms. This was because the students successfully promoted the idea that if China had had a different sort of system-a democratic system rather than authoritarian rule-the leadership would have been more responsive to the workers' bread-and-butter issues and to corruption.

Repression within China Following the Crackdown

By August 1989, the CCP leadership had established quotas of "bad elements" for work units and identified 20 categories of people to be targeted for punishment. But people were more reluctant than in the past to follow orders to expose their friends, colleagues, and family members-not only because such verdicts had often been reversed at a later time, but also because few believed the CCP's version of what happened in Beijing on June 4. Although many people worried about informers, there seemed to be complicity from top to bottom, whether inside or outside the ranks of the CCP, in refusing to go along with efforts to ferret out demonstrators and sympathizers with the prodemocracy, antiparty movement. Party leaders below the central level appeared to believe that the central-government's leadership was doomed; for this reason, they dared not carry out its orders. Inevitably, there would be a reversal of verdicts, and they did not want to be caught in that reversal.
As party leaders in work units droned on in mandatory political study sessions about Deng Xiaoping's important writings, workers wondered how long it would be before the June 4 military crackdown was condemned as a "counterrevolutionary crime against the people." Individuals in work units had to fill out lengthy questionnaires. A standard one had 24 questions aimed at "identifying the enemy." Among them were such questions as, "What did you think when Hu Yaobang died?" "When Zhao Ziyang went to Tiananmen Square, what did you think? Where were you?" At one university, each questionnaire had to be verified by two people (other than one's own family), or else the individual involved would not be allowed to teach.
As part of the repression that followed the military crackdown in June 1989, the government carried out announced and unannounced arrests of hundreds of "liberal" intellectuals, students, workers, and others supporting the democracy movement. Some were summarily executed, although available information indicates that almost all of those executed were workers involved in the formation of labor unions. During the world's absorption with the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the Chinese government announced the trials and verdicts on some of China's most famous dissident leaders of the 1989 demonstrations.
All of the known 1989 student and intellectual dissidents leaders have been released since then, although several of the best known have been deported to the West as a condition of their release. The government has also occasionally re-arrested some dissidents for other activities. In 1998, for example, several of those who participated in the 1989 demonstrations made bold attempts to form a new party to challenge Chinese Communist Party rule. Although their efforts to register this new party were at first tolerated, they were later arrested, tried, and sentenced to prison.
As with the mass media, many repressive controls in Chinese society have slowly disappeared. Chinese people are free to criticize the government, though they cannot take political action that would threaten CCP rule. In any event, in spite of the government's best efforts, the Internet is virtually uncontrollable. China's students, intellectuals, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens know what is going on in the world and can spend their time chatting to dissidents abroad on e-mail if they so choose. As a result, although there are occasional arrests of dissidents who are blatantly challenging CCP rule, the leadership is more focused on harnessing the talents of its best and brightest for China's modernization than it is on controlling dissent.

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

From the 1 1830s onward, foreign imperialists nibbled away at China, subjecting it to one national humiliation after another. As early as the 1920s, both the KMT and the CCP were committed to unifying and strengthening China in order to rid it of foreigners and resist further foreign incursions. When the Communists achieved victory over the KMT in 1949, they vowed that foreigners would never again be permitted to tell China what to do. This historical background is essential to understanding China's foreign policy in the period of Chinese Communist rule.

From Isolation to Openness

The Communists had forced all but a handful of foreigners to leave China by the early 1950s. China charted an independent, and eventually an isolationist, foreign policy. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, and the return to power of more pragmatic "reformers" in 1978, China re-opened its door to the outside world. By the 1980s, it was hosting several million tourists annually, inviting foreign investors and foreign experts to help with China's modernization, and allowing Chinese to study and travel abroad. Nevertheless, inside China, contacts between Chinese and foreigners were still affected by the suspicion on the part of ordinary Chinese that ideological and cultural contamination comes from abroad and that association with foreigners might bring trouble.

Today, these attitudes have moderated considerably, to the point where some Chinese are more willing to make friends with foreigners, invite them to their homes, and even date and marry them; but this greater openness to things foreign sits uncomfortably together with a sort of neo-nationalism that has crept into the picture. The broad masses of Chinese people remain suspicious, even disdainful, of foreigners. Sensitivity to any suggestion of foreign control and a strong xenophobia (dislike and fear of foreigners) mean that the Chinese are likely to rail at any effort by other countries to tell them what to do. The Chinese continued to exhibit this sensitivity on a wide variety of issues, from human rights to China's policy toward Tibet and Taiwan; from intellectual property rights to working conditions in factories.
The Chinese people appear, moreover, to be just as nationalistic in their individual responses to foreign criticism of China as is the government. In addition to concurring with the government on its position on Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen, the U.S. threat of economic sanctions to challenge China's human-rights policies, and so on, the Chinese people exhibited extraordinary anger at losing the Olympics-site bid for the year 2000. They believe that China lost the bid only because of American manipulation of the decision to punish China for its human-rights abuses. The Chinese people were also enraged at the American broadcasters' suggestion on television during the 1996 Summer Olympics that China's swimmers had won medals only by using performance-enhancing drugs.
China's xenophobia continues to show up in its efforts to keep foreigners isolated in certain living compounds; to limit social contacts between foreigners and Chinese; to control the importation of foreign literature, films, and periodicals; and to keep foreign ideas-and diseases-out of China. In some respects, it has been a losing battle, with growing numbers of foreigners in China socializing with Chinese; television swamped with foreign programs; Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, and pizza parlors proliferating; "Avon calling" at several million homes; body building and disco becoming part of the culture; and AIDS cases rocketing skyward. In 1996, in an effort to protect China's culture, the government ordered television stations to broadcast only Chinese-made programs during prime time. The pride of the Chinese in their culture and country has been enhanced in recent years by their economic success and by China's outstanding performance in international events, such as the Olympics and Asian Games, music competitions, and film festivals.
By any measure, China is today a much more open country than at any time since 1949. This is in spite of the concern of the more conservative wing of the CCP about the impact of China's "open door" policy on the political system (the influx of ideas about democracy and individual rights), on economic development (a market economy, corruption, and foreign control and ownership), and on Chinese culture ("pollution" from foreign literature and pornography). Although a large number of foreign businesses left in the wake of the crushing of the student-led protests in June 1989, they were soon back. The favorable investment climate created by Deng's 1992 "experiment" (try-anything-that-works) speech accelerated the return of foreign capital. Since then, China has seemed less worried about the invasion of foreign values than anxious to attract foreign investments. The government's view now seems to be: If it takes night clubs, discos, exciting stories in the media, stock markets, rock concerts, the Internet, and consumerism to make the Chinese people content and the economy flourish under CCP rule, then so be it.

THE SINO-SOVIET RELATIONSHIP

While forcing most other foreigners to leave China in the 1950s, the Chinese Communist regime invited experts from the Soviet Union to China to give much-needed advice, technical assistance, and aid. This convinced the United States (already certain that Moscow controlled communism wherever it appeared) that the Chinese were Soviet puppets. Indeed, for most of the 1950s, the Chinese Communist regime had to accept Soviet tenets of domestic and foreign policy along with Soviet aid. But China's leaders soon grew concerned about the limits of Soviet aid and the relevance of Soviet policies to China's conditions-especially the costly industrialization favored by the Soviet Union. Ultimately, the Chinese questioned their Soviet "big brother" and turned, in the form of the Great Leap Forward policy, to a Chinese model of development. Khrushchev warned the Chinese of the dangers to China's economy in undertaking the Great Leap Forward; but Mao Zedong interpreted this as evidence that the Soviet Union wanted to hold back China's development.
The Soviets' refusal to use their military power in support of China's foreign-policy objectives further strained the Sino-Soviet relationship. First in the case of China's confrontation with the United States and the forces of the "Republic of China" over the Offshore Islands in the Taiwan Strait in 1958, and then in the Sino-Indian Border War of 1962, the Soviet Union backed down from its promise to support China.
The final blow to the by-then fragile relationship came with the Soviet Union's signing of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The Chinese denounced this as a Soviet plot to exclude China from the "nuclear club" of Great Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Subsequently, Beijing publicly broke Communist Party relations with Moscow.
The Sino-Soviet relationship, already in shambles, took on an added dimension of fear during the Vietnam War, when the Chinese grew concerned that the Soviets (and Americans) might use the war as an excuse to attack China. China's s distrust of Soviet intentions was heightened in 1968, when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in the name of the "greater interests of the socialist community," which, they contended, "override the interests of any single country within that community." Soviet skirmishes with Chinese soldiers on China's northern borders soon followed.
Ultimately, it was the Chinese leadership's concern about the Soviet threat to China's national security that, in 1971, caused it to reassess its relationship with the United States. The Sino-American ties that ensued made the Soviets anxious about their own security. The alleged threat of "Soviet hegemony's' to world peace became the main theme of almost every public Chinese foreign-policy statement.
The Sino-Soviet relationship did not really improve until close to the end of the cold war. The Soviets began making peaceful overtures in 19187: They reduced troops on China's borders, and they withdrew support for Vietnam's puppet government in neighboring Cambodia. Moscow's withdrawal from Vietnam provided Beijing with further evidence of the Soviets' desire for reconciliation. Beijing responded positively to the glasnost ("open door") policy of Soviet Communist Party general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Ideological conflict between the two Communist giants abated; for with the Chinese themselves abandoning much of Marxist dogma in their economic policies, they could hardly continue to denounce the Soviet Union's "revisionist" policies and make self-righteous claims to ideological orthodoxy. With both the Soviet Union and China abandoning their earlier battle over who should lead the Communist camp, they shifted away from ideological and security issues toward economic issues.

The End of the Cold War and the Chinese Military

With the collapse of Communist Party rule, first in the Central/Eastern European states in 1989, and subsequently in the Soviet Union, the dynamics of China's foreign policy changed dramatically. Apart from fear that its own reforms might lead to the collapse of CCP rule in China, the disintegration of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states removed China's ability to play off the two superpowers against each other: The formidable Soviet Union simply no longer existed. Yet its fragmented remains had to be treated seriously. The state of Russia still shares a common border of several thousand miles with China, and Kazakhstan shares a common border of nearly 1,000 miles.
The question of what type of war the Chinese military might have to fight has affected its military modernization. China's military leaders have been in conflict for decades over whether China would have to fight a high-tech war or a "people's war" in which China's huge army would draw in the enemy on the ground and destroy it. In 1979, the military modernizers won out and jettisoned the idea that a large army, motivated by ideological fervor but armed with hopelessly outdated equipment, could win a war against a highly modernized military such as that of Japan or even the Soviet Union. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) began by shedding a few million soldiers and putting its funds into better armaments. A significant catalyst to modernizing the military still further came with the Gulf War of 1991, during which CNN vividly conveyed the power of high technology weaponry to China's leaders.
China's military believed that it was allocated an inadequate budget for modernization, so it struck out on its own along the capitalist road to raise money. By the late 1 990s, the PLA had become one of the most powerful actors in the Chinese economy. It had purchased considerable property in Special Economic Zones near Hong Kong; taken over ownership of major tourist hotels and industrial enterprises; and invested in everything from golf courses, brothels, and publishing companies to CD factories and the computer industry as means for funding military modernization. In 1998, however, President Jiang Zemin demanded that the military relinquish its economic enterprises and return to its primary task of building a modern military and protecting China. The promised payoff is that China's government will allocate more funding to the PLA, making it unnecessary for it to rely on its own economic activities.
In recent years, China's military has purchased weaponry and military technology from Russia as Moscow has scaled back its own military, in what sometimes resembles a going-out-of-business sale; but in doing so, China's military may have simply bought into a higher level of obsolescence, since Russia's weaponry lags years behind the technology of the West. China possesses nuclear weapons and long-distance bombing capability, but its ability to fight a war beyond its own borders is quite limited. Today, however, China's military power at least counterbalances that of Asia's most feared potential enemy, Japan. Perhaps for this reason, China's neighbors (many of whom are themselves building considerable military power) seem willing to tolerate China's military modernization.
Furthermore, long before the cold war came to an end in the late 1980s, China's leadership was primarily concerned with economic development. Although ever-alert to threats to its national security (including sovereignty over Taiwan), there are no indications that China is preparing for a major war with any country. Instead, China is working to become an integral part of the international economic, commercial, and monetary systems. It is negotiating to join the World Trade Organization and has rapidly expanded trade with the international community and its potential enemies across the Russian and Kazakhstani borders. China has also won praise from the international community for not devaluing the Chinese yuan in response to the Asian financial and economic crisis that raged from 1997 to 1999. And, by late 1998, the Chinese had also agreed to negotiate again with the government in Taiwan as well as with the several governments involved in competing claims to the Spratley Islands. In short, Beijing seems far more interested in economic and diplomatic gains than in military gains; but the country's leadership would be acting irresponsibly if it did not continue to modernize China's s military capabilities.

THE SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONSHIP

China's relationship with the United States has historically been an emotionally turbulent one. It has never been characterized by indifference. During World War II, the United States gave significant help to the Chinese, who at that time were fighting under the leadership of the Nationalist Party (KMT) head, General Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese Communists were fighting together with the Nationalists in a "united front's' against the Japanese, so American aid was not seen as directed against communism.
After the defeat of Japan at the end of World War II, the Japanese military, which had occupied much of the north and east of China, was demobilized and sent back to Japan. Subsequently, civil war broke out between the Communists and Nationalists. The United States attempted to reconcile the two sides, but to no avail. As the Communists moved toward victory in 1949, the KMT leadership fled to Taiwan. Thereafter, the two rival governments each claimed to be the true rulers of China. The United States, already in the throes of the cold war because of the "iron curtain" falling over Central/Eastern Europe, viewed communism in China as a major threat to the world.

Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam

The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 helped the United States to rationalize its decision to support the Nationalists, who had already lost power on the mainland and fled to Taiwan. The Korean War began when the Communists in northern Korea attacked the non-Communist south. When United Nations troops (mostly Americans) led by American general Douglas MacArthur successfully pushed Communist troops back almost to the Chinese border and showed no signs of stopping their advance, the Chinese-who had been sending the Americans anxious messages about their concern for China's own security-entered the war. China's participation resulted in the UN troops being pushed back to what is today still the demarcation line between North and South Korea. Thereafter, China became a target of America's cold war isolation and containment policies.
With the People's Republic of China condemned as an international "aggressor's' for its action in Korea, the United States felt free to recognize the KMT government in Taiwan as the legitimate government of all of China. The United States supported the Nationalists' claim that the people on the Chinese mainland actually wanted the KMT to return to the mainland and defeat the Chinese Communists. As the years passed, however, it became clear that the Chinese Communists controlled the mainland and that the Chinese people were not about to rebel against Communist rule.
Sino-American relations steadily worsened as the United States continued to build up a formidable anti-Communist military bastion in the tiny Offshore Islands under KMT control, just off China's coast. Tensions were exacerbated when the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam steadily escalated in the 1960s and early 1970s. China, fearful that the United States was really using the war in Vietnam as the first step toward attacking China, concentrated on civil-defense measures: Chinese citizens used shovels and even spoons to dig air-raid shelters in major cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, with tunnels connecting them to the suburbs. Some industrial enterprises were moved out of China's major cities in order to make them less vulnerable in the event of a massive attack on concentrated urban areas. The Chinese received a steady barrage of what we would call propaganda about the United States "imperialist" as China's number-one enemy; but it is important to realize that the Chinese leadership actually believed what it told the people, especially in the context of the continuing escalation of the war in Vietnam toward the Chinese border, and the repeated "mistaken" overflights of southern China by American planes bombing Vietnam. Apart from everything else, it is unlikely that China's leaders would have made such an immense expenditure of manpower and resources on civil-defense measures had they not truly believed that the United States was preparing to attack China.

Diplomatic Relations

By the late 1960s, China was completely isolated from the world community, including the Communist bloc. In the throes of the Cultural Revolution, it had withdrawn its diplomatic staff from all but one of its embassies. It saw itself as surrounded on all sides by enemies-the Soviets to the north and west, the United States to the south in Vietnam as well as in South Korea and Japan, and the Nationalists to the east in Taiwan. Internally, China was in such turmoil from the Cultural Revolution that it appeared to be on the verge of complete collapse.
In this context, it was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Soviet military incursions on China's northern borders, combined perhaps with an assessment of which country could offer China the most profitable economic relationship, that led China to consider the United States as the lesser of two evil giants and to respond positively to American overtures. In 1972, U.S. president Richard Nixon visited China, the first official American contact with China since breaking diplomatic relations in 1950. With the signing of the Shanghai Communique, the initial steps in reversing more than 2 decades of hostile relations were taken.
A new era of Sino-American friendship had begun, but it fell short of full diplomatic relations until January 1, 1979. This long delay in bringing the two states into full diplomatic relations reflected not only each country's domestic political problems but also mutual disillusionment with the nature of the relationship. Although both sides had entered the relationship with the understanding of its strategic importance as a bulwark against the Soviet threat, the Americans had assumed that the 1972 opening of partial diplomatic relations would lead to a huge new economic market for American products; the Chinese assumed that the new ties would quickly bring the United States to end its diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Both were disappointed. Nevertheless, pressure from both sides eventually led to full diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China.

The Taiwan Issue in U.S.-China Relations

Because the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China both claimed to be the legitimate government of the Chinese people, the establishment of diplomatic relations with the former necessarily entailed breaking them with the latter. Nevertheless, the United States continued to maintain extensive informal economic and cultural ties with Taiwan. It also continued the sale of military equipment to Taiwan. Although these military sales are still a serious issue, Amen-can ties with Taiwan have diminished, while China's own ties with Taiwan have grown steadily closer since 1988. Taiwan's entrepreneurs (by way of Hong Kong front companies, as certain laws still prohibit their investment in China) have become one of the largest groups of investors in China's economy. Although Taiwan used to have one of the cheapest labor forces in the world, its workers now demand wages too high to remain competitive in international trade. Consequently, Taiwanese entrepreneurs have dismantled many of Taiwan's older industries and reassembled them on the mainland. With China's cheap labor, these same industries are now profitable, and both China and Taiwan's entrepreneurs are the beneficiaries.
Ties between Taiwan and the mainland have also been enhanced by the millions of tourists, most of them with relatives in China, who have traveled to the mainland since the late 1980s. They bring with them both presents and goodwill. Families that have not seen each other for 40 years have reestablished contact, and "the enemy" now seems less threatening. Furthermore, as China continues to liberalize its economic system and to raise the standard of living, the Chinese leadership hopes that reunification will become more attractive to Taiwan. This very positive context has been disturbed at various times: by the military crackdown on the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989; by Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui's visit to the United States in 1995; and by threats in 1996 of Taiwan declaring independence. The latter was serious, however, and China responded by "testing" missiles in the waters around Taiwan. High-level talks to discuss eventual reunification were broken off and did not resume until late 1998. Nevertheless, it is in the interests of both sides to maintain the status quo-a peaceful and profitable relationship in which Taiwan continues to act as an independent state but does not declare its independence.
In short, without firing a single shot, Taipei and Beijing are coming closer together. This does not mean that the two will soon be fully reunified in law; but whether or not this happens matters far less as their two economies become more and more intertwined. There remains, however, the black cloud of Beijing possibly using military force against Taiwan, as it threatened to do in 1996, if Taiwan makes efforts to become an independent state. Beijing refuses to pledge that it will never use military force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland, on the grounds that what it does with Taiwan is China's internal affair and, hence, no other country has a right to tell China what to do about Taiwan.

Human Rights in U.S.-China Relations

The election of Bill Clinton as president of the United States in 1992 caused considerable consternation to China's leadership and to its people. The Chinese people were confused and distraught at the prospect of the punitive economic measures that the new Clinton administration threatened to take in response to China's human-rights abuses. They saw their government as having taken economic measures to bring in foreign investment, integrate China into the international economy, and enhance development; and many saw their government's law-and-order campaigns, which sometimes involved jailing dissidents, as necessary to China's continued economic growth and political stability. China's phenomenal growth in the 1 980s and 1 990s had improved the daily lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese people. They were far more interested in the prospect of a higher standard of living than in the rights of dissidents. Even China's intellectuals no longer seemed interested in politics. They did not "love the party," but they accepted the status quo. They just wanted a promotion and to make money. As one university professor put it, it is easy to be idealistic in one's heart; but to be idealistic in action is a sign of a true idealist, and there haven't been many of those in China since 1989. Today in China, it is difficult to find any student who demonstrated in Tiananmen Square in 1989 still doing anything remotely political. Most have gone into business or government.
It is not just the number of democratic idealists that is limited; so are the number of idealists committed to communism. Few Chinese want to discuss Marxism or communism. Even government officials rarely mention communism. They prefer to talk about development. In doing so, they are appealing to the strong nationalism in China, which has seemingly almost replaced communism as the glue holding the country together.
The Chinese perspective is this: They only know what their government tells them; they assume it lies to them, but they nevertheless know no more than what they are told. Why should they risk their careers to fight for the rights of jailed dissidents when they really know very little about what they have done? They then argue that the American government has also brutalized its population, pointing to such matters as the Kent State killings by the National Guard during the Vietnam War, and the brutality of the Los Angeles police against Rodney King. They also mention the many deaths at the hands of the British in Northern Ireland. They have heard about the abominable behavior of several student leaders of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, both during the movement and after it. They wonder aloud if, upon examination, any of them were more virtuous than their own corrupt and brutal government leaders.
Some Chinese intellectuals argue that the recent difficulties in the United States and in other Western democracies indicate that their citizens frequently elect the wrong leaders, leaders who not only make bad policies but are increasingly being prosecuted in courts for corruption. This, they argue, indicates that democracy does not necessarily work any better than socialism. Many also support the view that the Chinese people are inadequately prepared for democracy because of a low level of education. The proceedings of the Kenneth Starr investigation, the House of Representatives' Judicial Committee, and the impeachment hearings in the House moved President Jiang Zemin to say that China would never have a democracy that looked like America's democracy.
China's intellectuals do not see the point in punishing hundreds of millions of Chinese for human-rights abuses committed not by the people, but by their leadership. Not infrequently, moreover, it is the Chinese people themselves who demand the harshest penalties for common criminals, if not political dissidents. For example, urban residents in Beijing have repeatedly demanded that the government remove the squatters and shantytowns that have sprung up, on the grounds that they are breeding grounds for criminality in the city. And many ordinary people now seem to believe the government's overall assessment of the events of the spring of 1989, which is that they posed a threat to the stability and order of China. To the Chinese people, no less than to their government, stability and order are critical to the continued economic development of China.
President Clinton quickly abandoned his 1992 campaign platform in favor of breaking the linkage between most-favored-nation trade status for China and its human-rights record. This was due in part to his conviction-a conviction President George Bush had had before him-that the United States dare not risk jeopardizing its relations with an increasingly powerful state containing one quarter of the world's population through measures that would simply give Japan and other countries a better trading position while undercutting the opportunity for Americans to do business with China.
Clinton's China policy was also shaped by a new strategy of "agreeing to disagree" on certain issues such as human rights while efforts continued to be made to bring the two sides closer together. This strategy came out of a belief that China and the United States had so many common interests that neither side could afford to endanger the relationship on the basis of a single issue.
Today, the United States follows a policy of "engagement" with China, a policy based on the belief that isolating China has proven counterproductive and that "engagement" allows the two countries to work together toward shared objectives. Among these are security arrangements in northeast Asia and fewer restraints on trade. The belief is that human-rights issues can be more fruitfully addressed in a relationship that is in its broader aspects more positive. In the context of the Asian financial and economic crisis that began in 1997, China's willingness to cooperate with the United States and the International Monetary Fund, and not to devalue its currency, has been critical to efforts to keep the economies of the Asian countries afloat. It is a good example of what a relationship that is positive can achieve.

THE FUTURE

In 2 decades, China has moved from being a relatively closed and isolated country to one that is fully engaged in the world. China's agenda for the future is daunting: It must avoid war; maintain internal political stability in the context of international pressures to democratize; continue to carry out major economic, legal, and political reforms without endangering CCP control; sustain economic growth while limiting environmental destruction; and limit population growth. Since 1980, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has, with the exception of limiting environmental damage, succeeded in all these efforts.
After the death of Deng Xiaoping in 1997, China also carried out a smooth leadership transition. Although President Jiang Zemin is not yet as powerful as Deng was, he does not need to be, in the new context of a collective leadership. The speculation about civil war or a military coup d'etat occurring after Deng's death has now abated, and the leadership's position seems secure for the moment. As long as economic growth continues, it is unlikely that the CCP leadership of China will be overthrown.
Nevertheless, massive unemployment, corruption, and common criminality continue to provide the fuel that could one day explode politically and bring down Chinese Communist Party rule. This would not, however, be in anyone's interests-neither that of the Chinese people, nor of any other country. An unstable and insecure China would be a more dangerous China, and it would be one in which the Chinese people would suffer immeasurably.
Finally, the integration of China into the international economic and political networks has made China's leaders at least slightly more sensitive to pressures from the international system on specific issues: human rights, environmental protection, intellectual property rights, prison labor, and legal codes. But it is still likely that China's leadership will insist on moving at its own pace, and in a way that takes into account China's culture, history, and institutions.
In the meantime, as is the case in so many other developing countries, China must worry about the increasing polarization of the population into the rich and the poor, high levels of inflation and unemployment, uncontrolled economic growth, environmental degradation, corruption, and the strident resistance by whole regions within China to follow economic and monetary policies formulated at the center. These would be formidable tasks for any country. How much more so for a leadership responsible for feeding, educating, and controlling the world's largest population.