If anyone has advice to offer on how to handle large images (such as the graph in the previous post) so that they don’t screw up my formatting and push my right-hand control bar all the way to the bottom of the page, I’d be much obliged. I’ve had this problem before and just shrank the image to fit within the column width of the text, but in cases such as today’s graph that would render the data unreadable except for any readers with 20/10 vision.

Via Art Hutchinson, a great article from Policy Review examining China’s Stubborn Anti-Democracy.

Art makes an important distinction between resilience and robustness. Resilience is “characteristic of a system that’s able to bounce back seamlessly (or nearly so) from a wide array of unanticipated shocks and challenges,” while robustness connotes a more general strength and durability. The CCP’s ability to maintain power in the face of China’s liberalizing economy indicates its robustness - a point many democracy-necessarily-will-follow-economic-liberalization narratives often overlook - but does not necessarily make it resilient. Ying Ma’s article describes how the CCP’s anti-democracy efforts focus upon preventing viable and coordinated challenges to its rule. Instead of attempting to eliminate dissent, the CCP works to keep it “spontaneous, leaderless and unorganized.” When any dissent - be it related to religion, labor issues, or human rights - becomes organized, then one sees the CCP spring into action (as it did in response to Fulong Gong). This strategy has been successful in maintaing the regime’s strength, making it durable, but does not address the systemic dynamics that create the dissent. I think that Art makes a critically important point that the CCP’s inability to deal with these systemic dynamics will prevent it from become truly resilient, ultimately leading to the end of authoritarian rule in China.

One indicator of the mangnitude of the dissent the CCP faces is the explosive growth of protests. Ying Ma offers the following official statistics from the Ministry of Public Security (given their official nature, on immediately wondering if they represent an under-estimate):

The Ministry of Public Security reported 10,000 protests throughout the country in 1994; 58,000 protests in 2003; 74,000 in 2004; and 87,000 in 2005.

Given that cash payoffs in particular and economic growth in general represent primary CCP strategies for fracturing this dissent, continued economic growth is a matter of regime survival. Continued economic growth will require allowing the Chinese population greater coordination, which will contradict the CCP’s attempts to prevent political coordination among dissenters.