Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (review)

Author Paul Monk derives his intriguing title from a passage by China's most famous writer, Lu Xun, who used "thunder" to mean explosive anger within a repressed society. Whereas Thunder from the Silent Zone does indeed contain much on the repression of human rights in the People's Republic of China (PRC), Monk intends the "silent zone" to also refer to the general understanding, or lack thereof, of the PRC's place in the world and what is possible both within China and in relations between China and the rest of the world.

Part of this second silent zone includes people outside the PRC who avoid saying things that might cause offense to it. This almost always means that they avoid any hint of disapproval of the actions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), with its appalling record on human rights and unreasonable insistence that Taiwan must agree that it is an inalienable part of the PRC's sovereign territory. The party claims not only a monopoly of power but also a monopoly on the correct interpretation of history. The suppression of the literary supplement Bingdian 冰點 (Freezing Point) that occurred after Monk's book was published is perfect illustration of his point. The offending paper's editors published a Chinese scholar's version of events that ran contrary to officially decreed myth on matters ranging from the murder of a nineteenth century French missionary to relationships with present-day Taiwan.

In truth, says Monk, the Chinese Communist Party's history is built on the corpses of tens of millions of Chinese people. Although market reforms have produced explosive economic growth, it is an illusion to believe that growth has occurred because of party rule-in fact, growth has occurred to the extent that the Chinese Communist Party has relaxed its ideological domination of the economic life of the country. To bring about a genuine democratic constitutionalism that would at long last give the Chinese people the freedom they have sought for the last century, the voices that the party seeks to suppress must be listened to, lest the dull background rumble of thunder turn into severe storms.

This is an iconoclastic book. A major target of Monk's iconoclasm is Samuel Huntington's portrayal of China as a civilization with the weight and mass to displace the West on the world scene. This is, Monk argues, absurd. The PRC's cumbersome imperial structure and enormous population are more likely to be hindrances than advantages in the twenty-first century. Moreover, the civilization that Huntington sees as rising to threaten the West in the modern era sank into torpor centuries ago: it is the vital energies of modern civilization, science, and open markets that power China's current resurgence.

A second target is the linear ascent model (LAM) that extrapolates the PRC's impressive economic growth rates far into the future, predicting that it will soon become the world's largest trading power. Monk points out that this would have China's economy growing 2.99 fold from .98. to 208., and asks at what point this becomes ridiculous.

Monk sees four alternative futures for China: mutation, maturation, metastasis, and militarization. The first, and obviously most preferable, entails a fundamental adaptation of the Chinese polity to accommodate to globalization, more democratic norms, and the rule of law. Maturation involves a flattening of the growth curve to a level that would nonetheless enable the PRC to cope with the demands of a population that is unlikely to stabilize short of 1.7 billion by mid-century. This appears to be where the PRC is heading under current president Hu Jintao: struggling to find a way up to the next level of transformation against the resistance of entrenched vested interests.

Metastasis is what may happen if the PRC's neo-authoritarians continue to prevail. Believing that the system is likely to disintegrate unless there is a strong party and...