China's New Deal

choi

Andrew Browne, All for One: China's New Deal; What appears to be the country's generous new bargain with its citizens is actually a move to strengthen the state and the party. Wall Street Journal, Nov 23, 2013.

(a) Excerpt in the windows of print:

Xi Jinping has emerged as a champion of state power, with himself at the top.

The unspoken compact between China's people and the state may be unraveling.

(b) the last three paragraphs:

“Still, for Mr Xi, the risks are high. He is fully aware that the last great Chinese dynasty, the Qing, began to crumble at the very moment it reached the apogee of its power in the final years of the 18th century, having conquered the vast regions of Xinjiang and Tibet and delivered living standards similar, in places, to those in Britain and the Netherlands.

“Mr Xi knows, too, that the problems that keep him up at night—corruption, demographic pressure, internal dissent, environmental exhaustion—are the same rot that undermined the Qing dynasty.

“The story is told—and widely believed—inside the party that Wang Qishan, the Politburo Standing Committee member whom Mr Xi has put in charge of the fight against corruption, has been urging those around him to read a work by the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution.’ In it, de Tocqueville argues that the French Revolution was sparked not by a popular clamor for change, but by the regime's own efforts to reform.


(c) My comment:
(i) The author is a WSJ columnist. The essay focuses on the just completed Third Plenum of Chinese Communist Party.
(ii) There is no need to read the rest.
(iii) It is the same unspoken compact we understand: "Today, however, there are signs that the unspoken compact between the Chinese individual and the state, which has held since the Tiananmen Square tragedy, is starting to unravel. Under its terms, the state promises  ever-rising living standards if the individual renounce politics. But now the economy is slowing, poisonous air chokes Chinese cities and food safety scandals cause public panic. These concerns, along with endemic official corruption