NEXT YEAR IN CHINA: TEN STORIES TO WATCH
The New Yorker, 18 December 2013
By EVAN OSNOS
For the past three years, I lived in the middle of Beijing’s fortune-telling district. Business is booming for the soothsayers beside the Lama Temple, as Chinese customers, facing a time of extraordinary uncertainty, seek otherworldly counsel. (In the spring, one of the purveyors, Mr. Guo, analyzed my birth date, time, and other mystical factors, and then looked up approvingly. “Good news,” he announced. “In the near future, you will begin to make considerable income on the side!”)
With a nod to Mr. Guo—and to Jeffrey Toobin’s annual exercise in legal prognostication—here are ten predictions for the stories that will define the coming year in China:
1. Unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang
The growing unrest on China’s western frontier is the biggest story that nobody really knows. The effort to disrupt and deny the authority of Beijing over a vast region of China—an area far larger than Europe—has enormous potential to alter the country’s political and economic future, but it is poorly understood inside and outside of China. Authorities bar foreign correspondents from reaching large parts of the areas that are home to Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs. The news flashes leave no doubt of deepening unrest—sixteen people, including two policemen, were killed in Xinjiang on Sunday, in a clash that we are unlikely to learn much more about. The sheer absence of information can be cause for more unrest. False rumors of a gang rape contributed to deadly unrest in Xinjiang in 2009, and the lack of knowledge is likely to produce problems again. “Atrocity stories repeat themselves, but then, so do atrocities. As with so much else in Xinjiang, it remains indistinct,” wrote James Palmer, in one of the year’s best stories from China.
2. Visa Wars
The effort to restrict critical coverage of China burst into the open in 2013, when the government considered expelling two dozen reporters from the Times and Bloomberg. The response from the U.S. was, I suspect, louder than Chinese officials expected. I may be wrong, but I predict that they will stop short of the full-scale eviction: they will approve some of those visas and leave others in purgatory in order to avoid retribution against Chinese visa-seekers in America. But this issue is not going away. In a response to Thomas Friedman’s call for approving the visas, the Global Times, a Party-run newspaper, declared that “information security is among China’s core security concerns. China is willing to communicate with the world, but it won’t yield its own agenda-setting rights to the Western media.”
3. Crowded Waters
Ask U.S. policymakers these days what they worry about most in Asia, and you are likely to hear about “miscalculation”: the threat that some combination of ships—American, Japanese, and Chinese—is likely to produce a dangerous confrontation in the increasingly crowded waters of the East China Sea. (A preview: on December 5th, a Chinese amphibious vessel came within five hundred yards of an American cruiser, the Cowpens, that was conducting surveillance of a Chinese aircraft carrier.) When you put the same question to Chinese officials, you are told that the risk of miscalculation is low. That’s either a bluff or an honest assessment; in either case, expect larger clashes to come.
4. Jazz Hands, Gentlemen
Whatever it takes: the success of a “Gangnam Style”-type viral video by Chinese traffic cops will inspire a wave of similar efforts to use song and dance to draw closer to the masses. Somewhere, a platoon is learning the kick line.
5. Two Is Not Enough
The news that China is relaxing its one-child policy for the first time in a generation, which will allow some couples to have a second child, was welcomed by urban families. It’s a good example of the ways that the government is responding to advice from economists, who have predicted for years that the curbs on family size will leave China with too few workers and too many retirees in need of support. But less than two months after the new policy was announced, both families with rising expectations and researchers are already criticizing the “two-child policy” for not going far enough. Only about twenty million people qualify for the policy revision, and local governments will move slowly enough that the scholar Zuo Xuejin warns, “It won’t have a great impact.”
6. Made in China
One of my favorite themes in the Chinese media is the zeal to uncover yet another thing that was actually pioneered in China. A few years ago, it was golf. This year, it was the house cat. Next year: Fire. Or snow.
7. Betting on Contradiction
Before President Xi Jinping took office, analysts wondered if he would tack toward reform or conservatism: Would he seek to open up the economic and political realms, or refurbish Party control over them? More than a year on, it’s clear that he has embraced contradiction; he is trying to narrow the space for political entrepreneurship while expanding possibilities for economic entrepreneurship. (“Even amid a wave of bearish sentiment in recent years,” Evan A. Feigenbaum and Damien Ma wrote this month, “it would be worthwhile to again bet long on reforms over the next decade.”) Historically, the Communist Party has worried that internal contradictions are a recipe for collapse. But conditions have forced the Party to revise its view; today it is betting that contradictions are the key to survival.
8. Tigers, Not Flies
The Party’s effort to protect itself by rooting out corruption has edged higher into the ranks than critics expected. The latest, and most senior, name in the crosshairs is Zhou Yongkang, the fearsome former security chief with a face like an Easter Island statue. But don’t expect this to produce the public satisfaction that the Party needs. By going after high-profile “tigers,” as the saying goes, the Party hopes to demonstrate its determination and deter lower-level offenders. But what really inflames the public are the routine abuses by the “flies”—the bribes demanded by low-level officials for medical care and promotions and access to schooling. And unless the Party undertakes deeper reforms to bring accountability, those abuses are likely to continue.
9. The Perils of Patriotism
Since taking office, President Xi Jinping has been a boon for Chinese nationalists. The People’s Liberation Army backed the production of a video called “Silent Contest” which lays out Chinese fears of an American effort to bring about “peaceful evolution” in China. For Chinese leaders, nationalism is always a volatile tool: it can easily spin out of control. But as Xi encourages his people to imagine a larger and more ambitious “Chinese dream,” he will have to allow them to express their zeal—even if it forces him to bear the risk that it will turn critical of the Party, too.
10. The Year of Water
For those who have lived with China’s air pollution, it has been a source of some perverse satisfaction to watch, this year, as the world fully acknowledged the impact of China’s epic smog. It’s not a life-style issue; it is a political and economic issue that illuminates the way in which the government is racing to meet the expectations of its people. Dirty air gets attention because it makes for good photos, and it affects big cities, but in the years ahead, water is likely to be the bigger risk. Early in 2013, an outbreak of pollution forced authorities to cut off water to a city of nine million people. Expect a sudden awareness of the water shortage now that Beijing has dropped below the United Nations “absolute water scarcity threshold” and is facing a “more severe water scarcity than some countries in the arid Middle East.”
Above: Chinese President Xi Jinping, in Beijing, in September. Photograph by Feng Li/Getty.