China: The Next Superpower: Dilemmas in Change and Continuity (review)

Could the People's Republic of China "awake" from its proverbial slumber and reign as a superpower? Australian author Geoffrey Murray attempts to answer this oft-asked question by engaging in a wide-reaching discussion of China's strengths and weaknesses. With a keen eye on China's historical continuity, he examines the mixed legacy of its reform efforts. To accomplish his purpose Murray presents a relatively familiar laundry list of issues commanding the attention of China's leaders, including rural and urban unemployment, the food supply, social upheavals, and China's key international relationships with the United States and Japan.

Just what is a "superpower"? In chapter 1 Murray attempts to get a handle on the meaning of this designation in China's case, mindful that Chinese leaders themselves try to resist its application to their country. The chapter turns out to be a huge overview, touching on everything from China's imperial greatness to the yin-yang and fang-shou cycles in both dynastic and communist China and Maoist theories on contradiction. Yet, he only examines two of China's claims to superpower status—military and economic—while implicitly highlighting China's historical and cultural longevity. Murray contends that in the past it was China's population and its control over a vast land area that accorded it superpower status, however hamstrung it was by its Confucian bureaucracy. Jumping from the Qing dynasty to the modern military within two pages, Murray argues that China is no toothless tiger (p. 8), giving special attention to the forays into space by China's military.

Murray organizes his study around China's status as an economic superpower, and devotes much of the first chapter to it. He emphasizes that one of the amazing things about China is not its success, but rather that the people remain so economically poor. Murray places the blame squarely on misguided decision making (pp. 20-21). Economic reform has produced many contradictions, which Murray sees as the first "problem area" threatening to derail China's superpower achievement. He begins with the most serious problem: people who were promised so much from the socialist utopia are now being offered up as "sacrificial lambs" to economic development (p. 47). Murray highlights the troubles that have arisen in the era of the smashed rice bowl, manifested especially in disputes, protests, and violence, and he offers detailed examples of sweatshop labor. Substantial statistical data are presented concerning China's unemployment bind, especially its source in the dismantling of state-owned enterprises. Implicitly, Murray highlights the irony of China's adoption of capitalist markets: the success of the reform of state-owned enterprises, intricately linked to marketization, presents the greatest challenge to what CCP elites narrowly refer to as political stability. Meager wages are hardly the most common or serious complaint among Chinese workers: physical punishment, harassment by bosses and guards, verbal assaults, and coercive rules, including detailed walking patterns and toilet restrictions, are among the host of issues identified by labor activists in China today (p. 44). Each of these problems is compounded by the absence of truly independent labor unions. In discussing the rise of bankruptcies and Jiang Zemin's tolerance of unemployment, Murray raises an interesting comparison with Japan: if Japan's economic success was based largely on job security and employee loyalty, it is hard to imagine how imposing "national job insecurity" could contribute to China's economic growth (pp. 36-37).

Throughout the book Murray reveals a society at odds with itself over the alleged fruits of economic development. First and foremost are the peasants, a group that has become increasingly differentiated in recent years. Murray highlights the rise, in both quantity and intensity, of peasant discontent, from the famous Renshou County clashes in 1993 to village and clan wars for land, interregional conflicts, and angry peasant letters to the official media. The thin veil of [End Page 213...