By Kevin Dunleavy
When he wrote his 2008 book, “China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation,” George Washington University Professor and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow David Shambaugh said the Chinese government recognized 25 factors present in the Soviet Union before the collapse of its government.
“At that time about half those factors were present in China,” Dr. Shambaugh said last Thursday at the Elliott School of International Affairs. “I would argue that since I published that book, that has grown to about 75 percent.”
Speaking before a standing-room-only crowd inside Lindner Family Commons, Dr. Shambaugh outlined 10 reform challenges China currently faces and drew strong parallels between the world power and the fall of the Soviet Union. The director of GW’s China Policy Program, who has made a career studying contemporary China and spent eight years living in the country, compared the recent anti-corruption reform efforts of Chinese President Xi Jinping to those of Mikhail Gorbachev 30 years ago.
“Once Gorbachev came along with his reforms, the system couldn’t take it. It was shock therapy on a system that couldn’t adapt,” Dr. Shambaugh said. “Xi Jinping’s reforms are shock therapy that I’m not sure the system can take.”
Of the reform challenges Dr. Shambaugh mapped out, the one that he most emphasized was the need for innovation. He characterized China’s economy as one of assembly and processing, but with little creativity.
“It’s certainly going to be crucial if China is to avoid becoming stuck forever in the middle-income trap that it already is in,” he said. “As we know from the examples of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and other industrialized economies, the only way out of the trap is to innovate your way out.”
As he ran through his bullet points, Dr. Shambaugh was professorial and informative, amplifying the opinions he recently expressed in an opinion piece he wrote for the Wall Street Journal.
There is a difference, he said, between China and the Chinese Communist Party.
“[They] are two different things. China was there for 3,000 years before the Chinese Communist Party was ever there,” Dr. Shambaugh said. “I’m not predicting China’s collapse. I’m predicting the protracted decline of the Chinese Communist Party.”