Last fall, I described what I saw as an “accumulating risk of crisis” in China. Recent developments in two parts of the country only reinforce my sense that the Communist Party of China (CPC) is entering a period during which it will find it increasingly hard to sustain its monopoly on state authority.
The first part of the country drawing fresh attention is Hong Kong, where pro-democracy activists have mobilized a new nonviolent challenge to the Party’s authority in spite of the center’s pointed efforts to discourage them. Organizing under the Occupy Central label, these activists recently held an unofficial referendum that drew nearly 800,000 voters who overwhelmingly endorsed proposals that would allow the public to nominate candidates for elections in 2017—an idea that Beijing has repeatedly and unequivocally rejected. Today, on 1 July, tens of thousands of people marched into the city’s center to press those same demands.
1 July 2014 rally in Hong Kong (AP via BBC News)
The 1 July rally looks set to be one of the island’s largest protests in years, and it comes only weeks after Beijing issued a white paper affirming its “comprehensive jurisdiction” over Hong Kong. Although the official line since the 1997 handover has been “one country, two systems,” the expectation has generally been that national leaders would only tolerate differences that didn’t directly challenge their authority, and the new white paper made that implicit policy a bit clearer. Apparently, though, many Hong Kong residents aren’t willing to leave that assertion unchallenged, and the resulting conflict is almost certain to persist into and beyond those 2017 elections, assuming Beijing doesn’t concede the point before then.
The second restive area is Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, where Uyghurs have agitated for greater autonomy or outright independence since the area’s incorporation into China in 1949. Over the past year or so, the pace of this conflict has intensified again.
The Chinese government describes this conflict as a fight against terrorism, and some of the recent attacks—see here and here, for example—have targeted and killed large numbers of civilians. As Assaf Moghadam argues in a recent blog post, however, the line between terrorism and insurgency is almost always blurry in practice. Terrorism and insurgency—and, for that matter, campaigns of nonviolent resistance—are all tactical variations on the theme of rebellion. In Xinjiang, we see evidence of a wider insurgency in recent attacks on police stations and security checkpoints, symbols of the “occupying power” and certainly not civilian targets. Some Uyghurs have also engaged in nonviolent protests, although when they have, the police have responded harshly.
In any case, the tactical variation and increased pace and intensity of the clashes leads me to believe that this conflict should now be described as a separatist rebellion, and that this rebellion now poses a significant challenge to the Communist Party. Uyghurs certainly aren’t going to storm the capital, and they are highly unlikely to win sovereignty or independence for Xinjiang as long as the CPC still rules. Nevertheless, the expanding rebellion is taxing the center, and it threatens to make Party leaders look less competent than they would like.
Neither of these conflicts is new, and the Party has weathered flare-ups in both regions before. What is new is their concurrence with each other and with a number of other serious political and economic challenges. As the conflicts in Xinjiang and Hong Kong intensify, China’s real-estate market finally appears to be cooling, with potentially significant effects on the country’s economy, and pollution remains a national crisis that continues to stir sporadic unrest among otherwise “ordinary” citizens. And, of course, Party leaders are simultaneously pursuing an anti-corruption campaign that is hitting higher and higher targets. This campaign is ostensibly intended to bolster the economy and to address popular frustration over abuses of power, but like any purge, it also risks generating fresh enemies.
For reasons Barbara Geddes helps to illuminate (here), consolidated single-party authoritarian regimes like China’s tend to be quite resilient. They persist because they usually do a good job suppressing domestic opponents and co-opting would-be rivals within the ruling party. Single-party regimes are better than others at co-opting internal rivals because, under all but exceptional circumstances, regime survival reliably generates better payoffs for all factions than the alternatives.
Eventually, though, even single-party regimes break down, and when they do, it’s usually in the face of an economic crisis that simultaneously stirs popular frustration and weakens incentives for elites to remain loyal (on this point, see Haggard and Kaufman, too). Exactly how these regimes come undone is a matter of local circumstance and historical accident, but generally speaking, the likelihood increases as popular agitation swells and the array of potential elite defectors widens.
China’s slowing growth rate and snowballing financial troubles indicate that the risk of an economic crisis is still increasing. At the same time, the crises in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and the many cities and towns where citizens are repeatedly protesting against pollution and corruption suggest that insiders who choose to defect would have plenty of potential allies to choose from. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe that the CPC regime is on the brink of collapse, but I would be surprised to see it survive in its current form—with no legal opposition and direct elections in rural villages only—to and through the Party’s next National Congress, due in in 2017.
Dart-Throwing Chimp 
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