The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (46 page)

As I traveled from one authoritarian country to the next, the only place everyone talked to me about was China. Its passage from a struggling economic backwater to the top echelon of nations is an object of fascination, envy, and awe. In Venezuela, Chavistas spoke of the Chinese Communist Party in hushed tones, with something approaching reverence. A few blocks from the Kremlin, members of Putin’s ruling party brought up China’s success almost defensively, arguing why it was an unfair yardstick to measure them against. In Cairo, officials with close ties to Gamal Mubarak—who they thought would soon sit on his father’s throne—explained that Egypt needed to follow China’s example of pursuing economic reform first, then political reform. Human rights activists everywhere considered themselves fortunate that they were not up against a regime as sophisticated and brutal as the one in Beijing. But whatever one’s perspective or disposition, China was on everyone’s lips. It is the topic that always came up.

For authoritarian regimes, China is a tantalizing example. In 1989, no one could have expected that the Chinese Communist Party would be vastly stronger twenty years later. It had been pushed to the brink by revolt, faced divisions within its ranks, and lost most of its natural allies with the collapse of the Soviet Empire, then rebounded to enjoy what has been its most powerful chapter yet. The party defied the experts who said that economic liberalization would lead inexorably to political freedom, in part because no one anticipated its unique blend of state capitalism, political repression, and open markets. Far from falling victim to a dictatorship’s most common ailments, it is succeeding beyond expectation. It is an intoxicating brew for one-party states concerned with their own preservation. The People’s Republic offers a non-Western, undemocratic beacon for authoritarians everywhere to follow. To them, China looks like the future.

But for all their success, the task before China’s leaders is becoming infinitely more difficult with time. The trouble for the party is that
it may be entering a period when technocratic fixes are not equal to the problems it faces. Take, for example, an incident from November 13, 2005. On that day, an explosion at a chemical plant in the northeast province of Jilin dumped a hundred tons of benzene into the Songhua River. The river is one of the main sources of drinking water for millions of Chinese, including the residents of Harbin, a city of ten million people in the neighboring province Heilongjiang. At first, the authorities in Jilin stonewalled. They announced that the accident posed no risk of air pollution and denied that any toxins had been released into the river. For days, as the fifty-mile slick of poison made its way down the Songhua, the officials kept their secret. Nearly a week after the explosion, Jilin’s authorities informed their counterparts in Heilongjiang of the danger headed their way. It is unclear when China’s central government leaders first learned of the environmental disaster. But even with news of the spill, the officials in Harbin did not level with residents about the risks. Instead, they announced that the water supply to the city was being temporarily shut off for maintenance. Such a bizarre and unprecedented announcement set off a wave of panic, as many residents suspected that an earthquake or other disaster was imminent. Only then, on November 21, did Chinese authorities tell their citizens that their water had “perhaps” been poisoned. Environmental crews scrambled to catch up to a spill that was already a week old. China then offered an apology to the Russian government; the toxic belt of water would soon be arriving in Siberian cities downstream.

The disaster and the subsequent cover-up reveal the limits to the party’s political dexterity. For all the effort to alter the regime’s Leninist machinery, to make it more responsive and attuned to the needs of the people, the party has not reinvented its fundamental Leninist character. It remains, at heart, a top-down system of government that gives officials very little incentive to send bad news up the chain of command. Local officials who govern at the will of the central authorities and lack any independent source of legitimacy have every reason to conceal, hide, and bury their mistakes. Of course, China’s leaders know those lies could be costly. But the natural solutions—more openness, greater accountability, deeper democratic reform—would risk the party’s own grip on power. For all the sophistication, expertise, and
training of its officials, this weakness is hardwired into the regime. The party has had the wisdom to engage in reform, but because of the contradictions over which it presides, it must also undermine those very reforms before they advance too far. This tension was captured in something Lai Hairong, the official at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, said to me. “
In China, it is not about yes or no. It’s about where the balance should be,” he said. “It’s about the extent. It’s wrong to say that China is a democratic regime or a dictatorship. It’s the extent of authoritarianism or the extent of democracy.”

The ability to find the proper “extent” grows more difficult as the ground shifts under the party’s feet. Middle-class Chinese citizens—the very people who are supposed to be co-opted, conservative, and content—are increasingly demanding a greater say in the decisions that affect their daily lives. People’s awareness of their rights and willingness to step forward are rising. In late 2011,
an unprecedented number of Chinese citizens launched independent campaigns to run for seats in local people’s congresses, often building support for their candidacies through a Chinese version of Twitter. In August 2011, roughly twelve thousand Chinese in the prosperous coastal city of Dalian filled the public square to protest a chemical factory that they believed was vulnerable to typhoons and natural disasters. It once would have been easier for authorities to stop such a demonstration, but the call to protest moved too quickly across Chinese social media. Beijing’s tools for keeping its society atomized are slowly eroding. One of the biggest outbreaks of ethnic unrest occurred in Xinjiang in 2009. It is believed that nearly two hundred people died in the clashes between Uighurs and Han Chinese. Rioting began in Urumqi after rumors that Muslims from Xinjiang working thousands of miles away in Guangdong Province had been murdered; the rumors had spread on the Internet. Today,
a misstep by a local official in one part of the country is a potential fuse for unrest or instability in another. As much as the party learned from the events of Tiananmen Square, those lessons become less relevant the further it moves from 1989.

Mao famously remarked, “A single spark can light a prairie fire.” Today, the sparks the party must douse come from every direction. An environmental disaster, a train crash, a public health scare, a lie that is told for too long—any of these can start a chain reaction that may
be too difficult to contain. When a regime’s legitimacy is derived from its performance, any crisis—and how the party responds to it—can raise existential questions about the regime’s right to rule. In such a moment, the party’s expertise, even if well applied, may be meaningless. It will no longer be a matter of making adjustments or turning the knob in one direction or another. People will not be looking for the right answer; they will question whether the regime has the legitimacy to try again.

And, as the Arab Spring reminded everyone, it is not enough for China’s leaders to worry solely about turmoil within their borders. The fortunes of authoritarian regimes everywhere are a cause for concern, lest their own citizens draw inspiration from the battle. Surely, someone in the party saw the signs in Tahrir Square that read, “Down with Mubarak!”—in Chinese. Shortly after Mubarak resigned, one Chinese posted, “
Even though the people we are watching are Egyptian, even though the voices we are hearing are those of Egyptians, our ears are ringing with the echoes of history. This is the sound of the German people tearing down the Berlin Wall, of the Indonesian students taking to the streets, of Gandhi leading the people down the road of justice.”

I asked one party member if there was any one thing that the party saw in Tunis, Cairo, or Benghazi that might strike a chord or be a cause for alarm? Yes, he replied. The party had survived its Tiananmen moment, but few think it can survive another. What Chinese leader would have the authority to fire on the people today? “
If they let that many people go to a public square again,” he said, “they will have already lost.”

I
n July 2011, Srdja Popovic and I sat down in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., to talk about the revolutions and uprisings that were crisscrossing the globe. The year had been like no other, as people living in a string of repressive countries rose up to challenge tyrants and the regimes they led. “
It’s been a bad year for bad guys,” Srdja said, smiling. Six months before no one would have predicted that “Ben Ali and Mubarak would be out, Gaddafi and Saleh would be on their knees, and Assad would be seriously challenged. If you would have seen that in your crystal ball and then told people on TV, men in white coats would have come to take you away.”

But it was no hallucination. A few weeks later Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who had been forced to flee Tripoli, was hunted down in the streets of his native home of Sirte. Rebels found the former dictator cowering in a drainage pipe. Gaddafi was the third Arab strongman to fall in nine months. Although the Arab world had been at the center of the revolutionary storm, the tumult was not limited to the Middle East or North Africa. By the year’s end, authoritarian leaders in a long list of countries—places as far-flung as Belarus, China, Malaysia, Russia, even the Kingdom of Swaziland—faced a more assertive public clamoring for a say in their futures. The phenomenon was so great
Time
magazine declared “the protester” to be the 2011 Person of the Year.

And what had these millions of people making demands revealed about the dictators? That strongmen are less interested in sophisticated
strategies when they feel cornered. For example, in early December 2011, Russia’s ruling party suspected it might not perform well in the upcoming parliamentary elections. Polling ahead of the vote had shown its candidates faring badly. So, in Chechnya, perhaps the most repressive corner of the country,
Putin’s United Russia brazenly claimed to have won 99 percent of the vote—much like the Soviet Union of old. Putin’s first response to protests denouncing the stolen election was to blame the United States for trying to destabilize the country—the same desperate conspiratorial claim that had been made by Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi.

The sophisticated artifice of the modern authoritarian had been intended to prevent the people from ever coming out to rally in the square. Fundamentally, the dictator on his learning curve seeks ways of renewing dictatorship, to keep it resilient, agile, and in some way effective. A basic goal is to keep the people apathetic and uninvolved. But when the system fails, when the people do assemble, dictators typically jettison these political maneuvers for a starker set of choices. They show themselves for what they truly are. In March 2011, a month after Mubarak was ousted, one Egyptian ruling party official privately expressed his regrets to a friend of mine. Looking at how other Arab regimes were responding to their own uprisings by resorting to force, the Egyptian official said, “
We were stupid. Yemen was smarter than us. They are managing it. Bahrain was smarter than us. They are managing it. Libya was smarter than us. Leaving aside the morality, they are
managing
it.”

“Managing it” was, of course, a euphemism for violence. Indeed, early on,
Gaddafi invoked China’s 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square to stress the violent ends he was willing to pursue to remain in power. Violence did not save Gaddafi, however, and any regimes that massacred their citizens risked losing whatever thin claims to legitimacy they still had. They may persevere for the moment, much like how Iran’s hard-liners clung on after the 2009 Green Revolution, but they cannot expect their rule to be easier with a simmering population more alienated, angry, and embittered than before.

Syria’s Bashar Assad was another who had opted for a bloodbath. As the uprising widened, elements of the military defected and joined the rebellion. Cities were torn apart and left in pitched battles as the country descended into civil war. The savagery of Assad’s regime drew denunciations from around the world, but the body count continued to grow. By early 2013 more than 60,000 Syrians had perished. Increasingly isolated and with no legitimacy left, the Syrian government appeared less tenable by the day. In the face of a twenty-first-century revolution, Assad had opted for a slow-burning twentieth-century crackdown.

Of course, authoritarian regimes did not face a narrow choice between caving in to demands for democracy and simple repression. After stumbling, some quickly regained their footing and looked to pursue a familiar middle path. In Saudi Arabia,
this meant massive handouts: in March 2011, King Abdullah unveiled sixty thousand new public-sector jobs, raises for state employees, and greater stipends for the unemployed. Altogether the measures amounted to more than $93 billion in public spending. But the Saudi kingdom is clearly a unique case. No other regime can compete with its oil-rich coffers. Others must rely more on their wits than their wallets to restore stability.