The Chinese Communist Regime is on the Brink of ‘Disintegration,’ Says Leading China Expert

Epoch Times ^ | 12/6/2019 | Frank Fang

[The_Media_never_lie]

Every one knows the Communist system doesn’t work, except Thomas Friedman.

[ifinnegan]

Waldron has always seemed the sharpest Sinologist I’ve read.

[ifinnegan]

“Xi Jinping is essentially part of the Deng period, which began after Deng’s successful coup against Mao’s hand-picked successor, Hua Guofeng.”

I think Xi is the first post-Deng leader in that Deng did not annoint him as he did Jiang and Hu.

This is why it is unstable or potentially so.

Ultimately the PRC is a banana republic and whoever the military backs is the civilian leader.

[ifinnegan]

“One of the most notoriously wrong “expert” is Gordon Chang who actually lived in Shanghai and Hong Kong.”

Chang is king of the wishful thinkers.

Arthur Waldron is not Gordon Chang.

[ifinnegan]

“IMHO, this qualifies as “Fake News”...”

It’s clearly an opinion, not news.

[granada]

“......but regime changes are fairly common. ”
........

Lol. Time period of 100+ years, the Great British empire has shrunk to a little Britain.

Your wishful thinking is even more mysterious than indian rain dance!

[BeauBo]

“It was a combination of Reagan and Chernobyl that sunk the old USSR.”

Some have argued that it was the collapse in oil prices, that drained the hard currency finances, which had kept their sham economy operating. The Soviet Union got the great bulk of its foreign (that is to say, real) currency from one source - oil/gas exports.

China gets its necessary foreign exchange, from exporting manufactured goods.

Perhaps if the foreign exchange needed for essential imports into China of oil, food and raw materials would suddenly dry up from the loss of their export of manufactured goods; then their sham economy might experience a harsh re-valuation as well. Maybe a debt crisis, banking crisis, stock and real estate market crashes and a currency collapse - which could wipe out a huge chunk of the net worth for their population.

[BeauBo]

“the regime can defend itself from internal threats by launching nukes”

Will they nuke their own cities, like a rebellious Hong Kong? No.

Would mobs raging against a domestic economic crisis believe, or even care about, Government rhetoric about foreign war? Not if economic conditions get bad enough.

Would the regime survive a nuclear exchange? Doubtful.

[granada]

“He recalled a conversation with an unidentified person, who is a close advisor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“He said to me, Arthur, what the hell are we going to do? .....”

>

Seems like a charlatan & a liar.

[drop 50 and fire for effect]

Under Communist Party rule, mainland China is, at best, an opaque society. We do not know, nor can we know if the regime’s control is solid, or is it a solid looking, but brittle shell.

At the beginning of 1989, the USSR looked to us to be a solid superpower, with some problems, but the Communist government was able to manage them.

In retrospect, the USSR was riven with ethnic, regional, political, and economic cleavages. Party leaders in the hinterlands chaffed at central control, ethnic hatreds and old resentments simmered. The Party was losing its ability to retain control, but no one, inside or outside the Party realized just how bad the situation was getting.

Castro in Cuba, had fewer problems and enough distance and isolation to head off the revolutions that toppled the eastern European Communists.

In China, to me, General Secretary Xi’s personality cult building and the Party’s focus on nationalism and external expansion could well be designed to distract people from internal problems the Party is struggling to deal with. But we can only speculate, as hard accurate information is difficult to find.

[Zhang Fei]

[The PLA itself is not a monolith, correct?]

---

No Chinese army is a monolith. Military commanders and influential courtiers have repeatedly taken or attempted to take the crown for themselves, either for the empire as a whole or for the parts that they governed when opportunity arose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Tuo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sima_Yi

There’s a tendency to see the Chinese as a bunch of robots who just take orders. In reality, the show of obsequiousness is just that, a show. It’s not for nothing that Sun Yat-sen, the man to whom the collapse of the last de jure Chinese dynasty is credited, said that the Chinese were like a sheet of loose sand. By that, he meant that they looked to the interests of self, blood kin and clan first and foremost, whereas the state was an abstraction.

---

https://jme.bmj.com/content/31/3/159
[Two stories from Confucian Classics reveal that legal justice or retributive justice had no absolute power in Confucius’ and Mencius’ ethical theories that social justice might sometimes have to be compromised with or even be overruled by filial piety and family values. Firstly, it is recorded in the Confucian Analects: The Duke of She told Confucius, “In my country there is an upright man named Kung. When his father stole a sheep, he bore witness against him”. Confucius said, “The upright men in my community are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this.”10 Secondly, it is described in Mencius: Tao Ying asked, saying, “Shun being sovereign, and Kao-yao chief minister of justice, if Ku-sau [Shun’s father] had murdered a man, what would have been done in the case?” Mencius said, “Kao-yao would simply have apprehended him”. “But would not Shun have forbidden such a thing?” “Indeed, how could Shun have forbidden it? Kao-yao had received the law from a proper source.” “In that case what would Shun have done?” “Shun would have regarded abandoning the kingdom as throwing away a worn-out sandal. He would privately have taken his father on his back, and retired into concealment, living somewhere along the seacoast. There he would have been all his life, cheerful and happy, forgetting the kingdom.”18]

---

It’s precisely because of this disrespect for authority at a fundamental level - the notion that legitimacy is merely a matter of prevailing in a power struggle, that makes Chinese rulers very cautious about their subordinates. The absolute power held by Chinese rulers equally makes their subordinates unsentimental about removing or killing their superiors. Which came first - the chicken or the egg? Whatever the answer to this question, the reality is that all Chinese rulers view their courtiers with a wary eye, and vice versa.

Within the party itself, Lin Biao, Mao’s right hand man for a time, was alleged to have mounted an abortive coup against him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_571 Similarly, Bo Xilai, the Party aristocrat who was arrested for alleged corruption years ago, was said to have been in the initial stages of mounting a coup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Xilai The most well-known coup is, of course, the one that succeeded, which removed Hua Guofeng from power in favor of Deng Xiaoping. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hua_Guofeng#Ousting_and_death

The divisions are, IMO, not so much a matter of ideology as a matter of individual ambition. But ideology will be seized upon as a rallying point, if only to give their supporters something other than “more of the same” on which to hang their hats.

[SauronOfMordor]

Bookmark

Seems plausible. China has been dependent on a massive export market, which is not as available as it was.

[SeekAndFind]

I haten to remind you that Waldron himself RECOMMENDED Chang’s book when it was published.

[ifinnegan]

“I haten to remind you that Waldron himself RECOMMENDED Chang’s book when it was published.”

Most books on China were saying how China was changing and it’s leaders were reformers, moving toward more freedom and openness.

Chang was a lot more right than most of the dross coming out about China from the academic swamp.

[mrsmith]

Limited, sure - but it can apply. Ask Gaddhadi. Foreign influence is often a factor in regime change.

Also consider the huge spy apparatus China has. Quite extraordinary!

It’s important to study history because people don’t change.
However the circumstances they act in can.

Feudal systems with modern defenses are not changed as easily as before.

[mrsmith]

Great read that!

[ROCKLOBSTER]

The Chinese communist regime is heading towards disintegration and the West needs to be prepared to manage the fallout,

So what happens now?

Democratic erections?

[Paul R.]

Thanks for the detailed reply. Interesting stuff!

One of my own recollections (from reading some time back) was that at Tiananmen Square, the local PLA Corps(?) was NOT inclined to attack the protesters and may have even to some degree tried to shield them, but was pushed out of the way by more powerful units brought in from outside to crush the protests. Is that correct?

[Zhang Fei]

[One of my own recollections (from reading some time back) was that at Tiananmen Square, the local PLA Corps(?) was NOT inclined to attack the protesters and may have even to some degree tried to shield them, but was pushed out of the way by more powerful units brought in from outside to crush the protests. Is that correct?]

---

Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of events on the ground. Hopefully, someone who was high level enough to know the gist of what was happening will have written memoirs to be released to the world when the Party has been pushed out of power. But unless some political or military leader seized the moment and moved to take on the ancien regime, it’s unlikely that mere discontent would have done much for the students. I have read that some of the commanders of the units that are rumored to have balked at mowing down the students were later demoted.

If Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang had moved decisively to corral support from key military figures, it’s possible Deng and his supporters could have been removed from power. The problem for Hu and Zhao is that they would need to have cultivated those ties long before the Tiananmen Square incident. And it’s possible that Deng picked* them both for their positions precisely because of their lack of relationships with high-ranking military leaders. All successful dictators are very conscious of these relationships and the possibilities for mutiny.

However, in the overall scheme of Chinese history, the massacre at Tiananmen was a blip. Compared to 100m (1/4 of the population at the time) dead in multiple revolts aimed at toppling the Qing dynasty during the 19th century, a few thousand students is small beer.

Note that the material I mentioned in my response, re pre-modern palace intrigues, is not obscure. It’s constantly on television in China. Two of China’s 4 great classics, The Water Margin and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, are about peasant revolts. Not Disneyfied accounts, but gory narratives involving people who wouldn’t be considered paragons of virtue in the modern era. The foreword to one English translation has the following (translated) epigram: “The young should not read Water Margin, and the old should not read Three Kingdoms.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms#Cultural_impact

You won’t have time for this, but a Chinese TV series (about a fictional kingdom) recommended by a Freeper captures the flavor of Chinese intrigues:

https://www.viki.com/videos/1152611v-nirvana-in-fire-english-dubbed-version-episode-1?locale=en

I found it entertaining despite being very confused during the first few episodes.

* Oddly-enough, Jiang Zemin promoted Xi Jinping in the late 90’s, because he thought Xi lacked ambition. As soon as Xi became head honcho though, he started purging all of Jiang’s other proteges. So much for Jiang’s judgment. The fact is that the one skill all Chinese schemers must master is the appearance of obsequiousness and lack of ambition.