The end of Inevitability

The Islamic Republic has been on the forefront of news cycles for over a week. People of all walks of life are glued at television sets watching what in all fronts looks like a counter revolution. But lost in the middle of the biggest story of 2009, it the end of the age of ‘Inevitability of Change’ over the People’s Republic of China.
Many China observers have long been predicted that the Republic’s encounter with free flow market forces or liberal social institutions and instruments from the Western world would spur inevitable democratic change. These pundits have been right that China would become more pluralistic and multifaceted. But they have been delusional in thinking that its leadership would simply roll over and relinquish power when presented with challenges to their iron first-type of rule. On ever aspect raging from international trade to the World Wide Web, from village elections to the rule of law, Chinese rulers have consistently proved the flaws of inevitability of change.
The fundamental underwriting of US policy towards China (the promotion of democratic ideas inside the country) is full economic engagement. Since the American Congress granted the coveted Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR) status to the communist republic back in 2000, an underlying assumption of economic engagement with China is that the free market forces unleashed by international trade and investment will spur economic and political reform in Chinese society.
Washington view is based in no small part by the successful democratic transformation undertaken by other authoritarian regimes such as those in Chile, South Korea and Taiwan after they embarked on economic liberalization. Indeed, two plus decades of direct US-Chinese trade have drastically alter the face of China’s society, resulting in an un-precedent expansion of economic, social and personal freedoms for its citizens.
The links between economic liberalization and political reform, nevertheless, have turned out to be more complicated and precarious in the case of China. More than eight years since the passing of PNTR, major improvements in Chinese society have not translated into political liberalization. The Communist leaders have shown o meaningful interest in reforming the country’s political structure and have continued to rely in the old fashioned ways of repression and brutality to maintain its hold on power.
Since 2000, the United States Department of State’s Annual Country Report on Human Right Practices has continued to state that the Chinese government human record is ‘poor’. Similarly, Freedom House, a non-profit human right organization has continuing rate China ‘unfree’ on its Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties.
This lack of political progress was not what the Clinton and Bush Administration promised the American people. When lobbying for the extension of PNTR to China, former President Bill Clinton predicted in the summer of 2000 that, “we will be unleashing the forces no totalitarian operation rooted in the last century’s industrial society can control”. Five years later, President George W. Bush reiterated Clinton’s prediction, “I believe a whiff of freedom in the marketplace will cause there to be more demand for democracy”. Unfortunately for the 2 billion that lives inside continental China, the opposite is true. The communist regime continues to gobble up western technology, know-how and capital without relinquishing its authoritarian hold on power.