Minxin Pei, Ph.D., is a professor of Government and the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is a former senior associate with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pei was listed as one of the top 100 public intellectuals in a poll by Prospect magazine in 2008. His area of expertise is comparative politics and U.S.-Asia relations.
The Politic: For our readers that are unfamiliar with your stance on China, could you briefly explain why you do not think China will rise in the way some international relations theorists have predicted?
MP: It is always very dangerous to rely on a country’s growth to predict its future. To prove this, we can take a look at two recent examples in the last century. Japan’s economy was growing rapidly in the late 1980s and was widely predicted to overtake the U.S. Instead, we saw two decades of stagnation. Same goes for the Soviet Union in the 1960s: rapid growth followed by stagnation. Second, demographic shifts and economic transitions must not be ignored. If you look at China’s population, you see a big demographic divide. The aging population in China means that there will be less cheap labor in the future. An aging country generally doesn’t grow rapidly. Also, China is going through transitions, quickly becoming the world’s largest exporter, but the amount of exports will ultimately be limited by technology and the size of the middle class.
The Politic: At the beginning of this year, Ma Jing-jeou was re-elected as President of Taiwan. Some scholars have said that Ma’s efforts to improve cross-strait ties with China may present an obstacle for U.S. strategic interests in the region, one of the reasons being greater difficulty for the US to sell arms to Taiwan. What do you think the US’s role should be in dealing with Beijing-Taiwan cross-strait relations for the next 4 years?
MP: The U.S. should do for the next four years what it has done for the past four years, which is basically nothing. It is in the U.S.’s interest to allow China and Taiwan to further open up economic engagement with each other. The U.S. will not promote vertical dialogue anyway. If anything, the U.S. may decrease military deployment in the area.
The Politic: You have mentioned how censorship has become harder as the online population grows and technology advances. With micro-blogging tools like Wei-bo proving increasingly popular, is the value of censorship to the Chinese government shifting? What do you think will happen to the Chinese government’s censorship?
MP: The Chinese government can do anything that is possible with regards to censorship. There has been some success for the Chinese government in censoring information, but it has not been 100% successful. Looking into the future, I foresee some censorship continuing, but certainly not blanket censorship over all things. As to the value of censorship itself, the value is still clearly present, but in face of technological advances, the value is ultimately quite limited.
The Politic: Ever since the Arab Spring, there has been speculation about China’s Jasmine Revolution and prodemocracy uprisings. A recent FP cover story said 2012 will be a particularly bad year to be a Chinese dissident. Can you comment on the likelihood of a similar uprising in China? Do you see it happening in 2012 or the near future?
MP: The thing about revolutions is that they are unpredictable. It would be foolish of me to say that there is a high or low likelihood of revolution. Revolutions are usually spurred by a unique combination of societal factors, which are hard to speculate on. These factors are also very uncertain. Factors that we believe will spur revolutions often end up having no effect at all. At least while the Communist Party is still in power for the next 10 to 15 years, it seems unlikely.
The Politic: Some in the U.S. and E.U. worry that the Yuan will pick up the pace of internationalization and soon become a global currency possibly displacing the dollar. Are there grounds to that concern?
MP: If it does happen, it will be good for the rest of the world. There are multiple benefits of the Yuan internationalizing: first it provides the market with more options. It would also most likely mean that the Chinese market will open up even further in a friendly way, allowing in investment and welcoming business. It is, however, not going to happen for some time and I don’t foresee drastic internationalization of the Yuan happening in the next 10 to 15 years.