CHINESE

AUTHORITATAINSIM
GOOD/BAD WAKE

Notes
YAY DEBATE!!!
General Thesis Chinese Authoritarianism is currently
stable and needs to continue being stable to solve [insert
impact]. The plan either tries to transition China into a
democracy by collapsing the CCP or some other way, which
means the impacts do not get resolved. That is bad.
Important to note that not all the cards say, Chinese
authoritarianism, but that is okay. Authoritarianism by its
most basic definition a type of government with a strong
centralized power that has restrictions on freedoms. This
means that cards that reference the Chinese Communist
Party or President Xi Jinping or Chinese centralized
government all apply.
Weaknesses None. Just joking. (1) But seriously, an issue
with this problem is that there is more evidence about
Chinese Authoritarianism Good than evidence about
Chinese Authoritarianism Bad; its slightly unbalanced. If
you were planning on using this file, I would suggest
finding more cards for reasons why it is bad so you have
answers to an impact turn you are running. (2) Also the
evidence on Democratic Peace theory is generic and not
specific to China. You should do updates of those. (3) I
would highly recommend updating the impact cards to
Chinese Economic Collapse, specifically the Marcus card
That author is literally just Marcus and does not really
have any qualifications, but Marcus does not pretty decent
warrants.
The 1NC for this impact turn should be:
Card #1 Chinese Authoritarianism is key to solve [insert
impact]
Card #2 Impact Card
(The CCP resilient cards are just impact defense if you are
straight turning, you cannot read those CCP resilient cards)

The think the best evidence is in the economy scenario

and the environment scenario for both sides of the issue
the main argument for Chinese Authoritarianism Good is

that because government is so centralized, it can

intervene in important issues without an opposition like a
democracy (think about Congress and how we cant
effectively implement innovative policies to reduce
emissions for warming because there are some believe
government regulation is good and there are others who
are climate-deniers. China avoids all of this because they
are not only climate-deniers, but also they dont have any
obstacles for an effective policy).
I also think that the evidence about the protest good can
be really helpful because it can serve an internal link turn
FYI (1) the cards on Chinese Authoritarianism Bad under
Human Rights, Organ Trafficking, and Structural Violence,
I think, can be used for Shunning. (2) These impacts can
also be used for Chinese Politics DA too
If you are still reading here is a BIG SHOUT-OUT to Kate
Shapiro for helping me a LOT with research ideas on this
file and Calum Matheson who first talked about Chinese
Authoritarianism and ANOTHER SHOUT-OUT to all my lab
leaders Forget what Charles Barkley said, you all are my
role models. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Sincerely Yours,
Sage Young Damien High School
If you have any questions here is my gmail:
@[email protected]

Chinese Authoritarianism
Good

CCP Resilient

CCP Resilient
CCP is resilient
Xing and Christensen, 2010
Li, Associate Professor, Department of History, International and Social Studies, Aalborg University,
Denmark, and Peter, Post-Doc, Institute of Business Communication and Information Science, University
of Southern Denmark, Denmark, Why is the Chinese Communist Party Able to Sustain its Hegemony in
Eras of Great Transformation, Xing, Li, ed. The International Political Economy of New Regionalisms
Series : The Rise of China and the Capitalist World Order. Farnham, GB: Routledge, 2016. ProQuest
ebrary, Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL

Conclusion The CCps transformation and adaptation in the past three

decades of economic reform has proved its capacity and resiliency in
struggling to maintain the continuing domination of its ruling power. The
CCp has been able to manage the changes brought about by the economic
liberalization process as a proactive player throughout an initiator, a
planner, an organizer, an implementer. The resilient nature of the CCp
implies that as long as the party is transforming and adapting itself in
accordance with Chinas socio-economic changes, the basic structure of its
dominion over the state and society will not be fundamentally altered
(Zheng, 2009). Thus, it can be well concluded that the CCps capacity in
maintaining social and political stability in the midst of recurrent crises is
one of the strongest enduring features of contemporary Chinese political
culture in order to sustain its power and legitimacy without upsetting the
market mechanism, the CCp has been adapting itself in a continuous process
of passive revolution aiming to generate new sources of hegemony around
a reconstituted historical bloc. Today, general consensus on the role of
the CCp as the key stabilizer is shared not only by the CCp itself but
also by the society at large. The adaptive behavior of the CCp can be
analyzed as systemic behavior, i.e. the party as an institution with its own
life trying to adapt to a changing environment by changing its own
constitution and behavior and underpinning its survival using economic
reforms in creating economic efficiency and authoritarian rule to maintain
social stability. This chapter attempts to show that analyzing the systemic
behavior of the CCp as one of the key factors behind the rise of China is
extremely important. But at the same time this analysis does not exclusively
give a complete picture of the political and economic development in China,
if the historical and social contradictions shaping the crises as well as the
adaptive responses from the CCp to the emerging social contradictions are
left out of the analysis. during the reform period, the social basis of the CCp
has changed, and so has the pattern of social interests. economic growth
and social stability are intimately connected with the changing pattern of
power relations in society, which is reflected in the pattern of relations of
interests articulated and promoted in the actual behavior of the CCp.
analysis of social contradictions must, therefore, complement the systemic
analysis of the CCp as an institution. historically China has been able to
display a capacity for absorbing foreign ideas and influences and sinicizing
and transforming them into parts of native value systems, such as the
sinicization of Buddhism and Marxism-leninism. Currently the CCp is
attempting to sinicize capitalism and create a market economy with

Chinese characteristics. To which extent is the CCp willing to further

modify the political system to make the economic system viable? To find the
right answer is very difficult. But an open-ended answer is that if the CCP is
able to create market capitalism with Chinese characteristics, it will be able
to establish a political economy with very evident Chinese characters as
well.

Predictions Wrong
Predications of CCP collapse are wrong same logic can
be applied to most democratic countries
Tao, 2015
(Xie, professor of political science at the School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign
Studies University. He holds a PhD in political science from Northwestern University (2007). His current
research focuses on Chinese foreign policy and U.S.-China relations. He is the author of U.S.-China
Relations: China Policy on Capitol Hill (Routledge 2009) and Living with the Dragon: How the American
Public Views the Rise of China (with Benjamin I. Page, Columbia University Press, 2010). He has also
published several articles in the Journal of Contemporary China, including What Affects Chinas National
Image? A Cross-national Study of Public Opinion (September 2013). He is a frequent guest at CCTV
News, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and China Radio International, Why Do People Keep Predicting China's

http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/why-dopeople-keep-predicting-chinas-collapse/, Accessed: July 8, 2016, YDEL)

The temptation to make predictions about China is probably irresistible , because
Collapse?, The Diplomat, March 20, 2015,

it is arguably the most important contemporary case in international relations. Thus, a few Western observers have risked their professional reputations by acting as
prophets. Perhaps the most (in)famous is Gordon Chang, who published The Coming Collapse of China in 2001. The end of the modern Chinese state is near, he
asserted. The Peoples Republic has five years, perhaps ten, before it falls, China didnt collapse, as we all know. So, yes, my prediction was wrong, he admitted
in an article (The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition). But he remained convinced about the imminence of a Chinese apocalypse and offered a new timeline:
Instead of 2011, the mighty Communist Party of China will fall in 2012. Bet on it. Gordon Chang may be dismissed as an opportunist who tries to make a fortune
political and/or economic out of sensational rhetoric about China. But not so with David Shambaugh, a well-respected China scholar at George Washington University
who heretofore has been rather cautious in his assessment of China. In a March 6 Wall Street Journal article, he portrayed the Chinese party-state as struggling for its
last breath. The endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun, I believe, and it has progressed further than many think, he wrote. We cannot predict when
Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. Shambaughs article was nothing less than a supersize

the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinpings

leadership seems to be revitalizing itself through a series of important
measures. And these measures particularly the anti-corruption campaign
and the drive for the rule of law appear to have significantly bolstered
popular support for the new leadership. Shambaugh actually published a book in 2008 that offers a rather favorable
bombshell in the China field, especially in light of the fact that

assessment of the party-states abilities to adapt to new challenges in the first decade of the 21st century. It is unclear what caused Shambaughs sudden about-face.
Some speculate that he was merely trying to get a foreign policy position in the post-Barack Obama administration. Others contend that he is the Chinese version of a
mugged liberal converted to a conservative, that Shambaugh is deeply upset by Chinese leaders intransigence on fundamental reforms. Whatever the motives

there is no denying that China is facing myriad daunting

challenges. China is sick but so is every other country in the world,
behind Shambaughs nirvana,

though each country is sick with different symptoms, for different

reasons, and of different degrees . Take the United State as an example.
The worlds oldest democracy may also strike one as terminally ill: appalling
inequality, dilapidated infrastructure, declining public education,
astronomical deficits, rising political apathy, and a government that can
hardly get anything done. In his bestseller Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama described the American
body politic as being repatrimonialized, ruled by courts and political parties,
and gridlocked by too many veto points. Across the Atlantic, many European
democracies are facing similar problems, particularly financial insolvency. Yet
nobody has declared the coming collapse of American democracy or European democracy. Why? Because many Western analysts (dating back at least to Seymour
Martin Lipset) subscribe to the view that as long as political institutions are viewed as legitimate, a crisis in effectiveness (e.g., economic performance) does not pose
fatal threat to a regime. Thus even in the darkest days of the Great Depression, according to this view, Americas democratic institutions remained unchallenged. By
contrast, if a regime is already deficient in political legitimacy, a crisis of effectiveness (such as an economic slowdown, rising inequality, or rampant corruption) would
only exacerbate the legitimacy crisis. China is widely believed to be a prominent case that fits into this line argument. China might be facing a performance crisis,

If the Chinese party-state

could survive the riotous years of the Cultural Revolution and the existential
crisis of 1989, why couldnt it manage to survival another crisis? In fact, a more important
question for Western observers is why the Chinese Communist Party has managed to stay in
power for so long and to produce an indisputably impressive record of
economic development. In 2003, Andrew Nathan from Columbia University put forward a theory of authoritarian resilience to explain
but whether it is also facing a legitimacy crisis is debatable. Beauty is in the eyes of beholder; so is legitimacy.

why the Chinese Communist Party didnt follow in the steps of the former Soviet Union. In a January 2015 article, he argued that instead of showing signs of an

Beijing is actually on a path of authoritarian resurgence, supporting

similar regimes and seeking to roll back democratic changes both at home
and abroad. One of his central messages is that authoritarian resurgence
embattled regime,

reflects democratic decline. Because the appeal of authoritarianism grows

when the prestige of democracy declines, he wrote, the most important
answer to Chinas challenge is for the democracies to do a better job of
managing themselves than they are doing today. All societies,
authoritarian and democratic, are subject to decay over time , wrote Francis Fukuyama. The
real issue is their ability to adapt and eventually fix themselves. The Chinese party-state is certainly
undergoing policy decay just like most Western democracies but it is
too early to call the Chinese patient terminally ill.

AT: Shambaugh
Indicts their scholarship Shambaugh is wrong
Dingding, 2015
(Chen, an assistant professor of Government and Public Administration at
the University of Macau and Non-Resident Fellow at the Global Public Policy
Institute (GPPi) Berlin, Germany. His research interests include: Chinese
foreign policy, Asian security, Chinese politics, and human rights, Sorry,
America: China Is NOT Going to Collapse, March 10, 2015, The National
Interest, http://nationalinterest.org/feature/sorry-america-china-not-goingcollapse-12389?page=3, Accessed: July 8, 2016, YDEL)
In a recent piece published in the Wall Street Journal, The Coming Chinese Crackup, China scholar and

David Shambaugh boldly predicts that the

Communist Party of China (CCP)s endgame has begun . Although, in the past, such
George Washington University professor

brave predictions of the CCPs collapse have been proven wrong, the fact that such a prediction has come
from Shambaugh, a leading China expert, makes it all the more interesting. In a report from Chinas
Foreign Affairs University, Shambaugh was named the second most influential China expert in the United

Professor
Shambaugh listed five indicators that point to Chinas coming collapse .
States. As such, Chinese scholars and officials will take his opinions seriously.

However, a closer analysis of these five points reveals that

Shambaughs conclusion is based on incorrect facts and flawed
interpretations of Chinas recent socioeconomic and political
developments.First, he asserts that wealthy Chinese are fleeing
China . Actually, this is only half true. While a large number of wealthy Chinese have
migrated to countries like Canada, most of them still do business in China,
meaning that they are still have a positive outlook on Chinas future. In any
case, a good number of these wealthy people move their assets out of China to
avoid corruption charges, which has nothing to do with Chinas future
development. Moreover, in recent years an increasing number of overseas
students have chosen to come back to China because they have confidence
in Chinas future. The second indicator is increasing political
repression and CCP insecurity . Actually, not much has changed in this area, compared to
the Hu Jintao presidency. The party insecurity thesis is an old argument and one
can say that the CCP has always been insecure, especially since 1989. So
what is so special about the present that signals the Partys endgame?
Indeed, one can argue that the Partys endgame is soon , no matter what it does. If
the Party opens up, then civil society will rise up and overthrow the regime; if the Party continues to be
repressive, it will breed insecurity, which will cause its collapse.

Third, Shambaugh

argues that Chinese officials come across as wooden and bored . But
many Chinese officials were always like that, so there is nothing new in this
observation. It is definitely not something that can support Shambaughs
China collapsing argument. Fourth, Shambaugh points out there is
massive corruption in China . Shambaugh is right about the seriousness of the corruption
issue in China. But he neglects to mention that the anti-corruption campaign has
been very successful so far, and the main reason for this is because it has

the public's support. Corrupt officials know this too, which is why they are unable to fight back.
Shambaughs final argument is that the Chinese economy is slowing .
Arguably, this fifth factor is the only new point in Shambaughs argument, as the previous four factors
have been features of Chinas political culture for quite some time. As such, this argument deserves

Shambaugh seems to believe that a slowing economy will

lead to widespread grievances, which in turn will lead to civil unrest. This will
serious consideration.

lead to the collapse of the regime. Arguably, this is what fueled the Arab Spring and may be applied to

there are several problems with this argument. First,

Chinas economic slowdown is not an economic meltdown . It is true that compared
to Chinas past sensational growth rate, a six to seven percent growth rate is a slowdown. But which
other major economy can grow at this rate? Chinas economic growth must
be viewed in a relative sense. Second, would a slowdown, or even a massive
financial meltdown lead to widespread disruption in Chinese society? The
China today. However,

answer actually depends on how the effects of the slowdown are distributed throughout society. As
Confucius pointed out long ago, Chinese people tend to get riled up more about inequality than

Most ordinary Chinese hate a high level of

inequality, especially if such inequality is a result of corruption rather than
legitimate hard work. While a severe crisis would lead to a massive loss of
jobs and lower incomes, if the U.S. economy survived the 2008 global financial crisis, there is
no reason to believe the Chinese economy cannot overcome a similar one.
Third, even if a severe economic crisis hits China and causes greater social
grievances, why does this mean that social unrest will automatically lead to
an uprising against the regime? In other words,, this claim is premised on the belief that the
Chinese governments legitimacy relies solely on economic performance. Unfortunately this
assumption, though widely held among scholars, is no longer true. Economic growth is
certainly important for most Chinese people, but education, the
environment, corruption, and legal justice matter just as much as growth. As
long as the Chinese government seriously tackles problems in those areas, support for the
scarcity(), which is just as true today.

CCP will remain high. This explains why the Xi administration has initiated bold reforms in
all these areas. Finally, even if there is political unrest will it necessarily topple
the regime? This depends on the balance of power between the government and the dissenters.
Where is the political opposition in China today? Does the political opposition enjoy the widespread
support of ordinary Chinese people? Is there any leader who might want to play the role of Gorbachev?

None of these factors exist in China. In sum, in order to make the argument that an
economic slowdown would lead to regime change, one would have to make the argument that all of the
above factors would come into play. Yet, Shambaughs argument does not demonstrate this. Indeed, a

slowing economy is actually bringing several benefits to China . A

slower but stable growth rate would mean less pollution, fewer landgrabbing incidents, less corruption, less energy consumption, and lower
socioeconomic expectations, all of which lead to reduced social tensions in
China, decreasing the possibility of a regime collapse . Implicit in Shambaugh's

argument is the claim that China and the CCP will collapse unless they adopt Western-style liberal
democracy. But he never attempts to answer a simple question: is Western-style liberal democracy what
most ordinary Chinese people want? As Orville Schell and John Delury point out, wealth and power are
the two things that most Chinese people have pursued throughout the last century. Today, with Chinas
rising power and influence, international respect can be added to this duo. Do the Chinese also desire
liberty, democracy, human rights, and so on? Of course they do. My own research, which will be
presented in a forthcoming article based on survey data, shows that even among the most liberal
Chinese, the desire for liberty and democracy quickly weakens as long as the Chinese government does a
good job of tackling corruption, environmental pollution, and inequality. Democracy is seen as a means,
rather than as an end. Research done by late professor Shi Tianjian also shows that

Chinese

culture still favors authoritarianism even as people also desire

democracy.

Through this context, we can understand that Xi Jinping has become so popular among

the Chinese masses because of his bold reform measures, which range from soccer-reform to overhauling
state-owned enterprises. Even in the area of political reform, Xi is proceeding steadily as consultative
democratic mechanisms will soon be implemented at various governmental levels. Thus, it is no
exaggeration to say that Xi has been the most creative leader in the last three decades. If anything,

the

level of support for the CCP is higher now than it was in the last decade .
Ignoring this reality seriously misreads Chinese politics today. Then, why do so many Western analysts
not see this reality? What do Shambaughs article and similar writings reflect about the mentality of some
Western thinkers and analysts? Perhaps implicit in such arguments is the collective worry or fear that
China will continue to become stronger, more prosperous, and more assertive in international affairs. The
West has not prepared for a possibility where it is no longer the dominant force in the world. After the
Cold War, many Western democracies have adopted the triumphal End of History thesis. However, now
that a strong and authoritarian China has emerged, one not compliant with the standard liberal
democracy model advocated by the West, it is seen as a threat. The China threat narrative is
understandable, as people tend to fear something they do not understand or that looks different. And
China today is a great other, but because it is strong, it is more threatening than a weak other. A
strong China causes cognitive dissonance among many Western analysts because according to their
theories, an authoritarian China should be weak. This explains the selective reading by Western scholars
of Chinas political reality. Therefore,

Shambaughs argument is seriously flawed

due to its problematic logic . However, this does not mean that there is no merit at all in
his piece.

Cyber Security

Social Media Stability

Authoritarian Regime uses social media to prevent
domestic instability
Gunitsky, 2015
(Seva, PhD. Political Scientist at the University of Toronto, (2015).
Corrupting the Cyber-Commons: Social Media as a Tool of Autocratic
Stability. Perspectives on Politics, 13, pp 42-54.
doi:10.1017/S1537592714003120, Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL)
Bolstering Regime Legitimacy In closed and hybrid regimes, manipulated elections create
opportunities for ostentatious propaganda campaigns that function along two parallel dimensions: the
marshaling of domestic groups that traditionally serve as the governments support base, and the

Similarly, bolstering
regime legitimacy through social media functions through the two related
mechanisms of counter-mobilization of supporters and discourse framing of
the larger national discourse. First, in the face of potential online opposition,
regimes can use the extensive reach of social networks to counter-mobilize
their own base of support. Just as opposition leaders can use social media to lower barriers to
collective action and mobilize protestors, regimes can also employ online technology to
organize and rally their own domestic allies. These include not only groups that
ritualistic affirmation of the regime aimed at all citizens more generally.16

directly benefit from government patronage (such as military or business elites), but also regular
citizens motivated by patriotism, ideology, or a general sense that the regime has earned their trust.
Few regimes exist without some measure of public support or legitimacy, and this is especially true in
mixed or hybrid regimes, which rely in part on the passive acquiescence or the active support of

Domestic support for the government in Russia or

China, for instance, is not merely an illusory artifact of oppression, but reflects
real popularity derived from economic performance, nationalism, or antiWestern ideology. Leaders in such regimes can thus draw upon social
networks to maintain a connection with these supporters. If the authorities do not
various groups to remain in power.

like what is happening on the internet there is only one way of resisting, Putin said in 2011,
suggesting that the internet should be used as a resource to collect a larger amount of supporters.

Second, beyond using social media to forge links with their supporters,
incumbent rulers can employ it to disseminate propaganda in a more
efficient way, and to shape online discourse in a more precise and adaptive
manner. Propaganda via message framing goes beyond brute-force censoring to choreograph and
channel the bounds of acceptable deliberation. Yongnian Zheng has argued, for example, that
17

certain types of activism in China can actually reinforce regime

legitimacy through careful management of online discourse. Online
protest calling for the introduction of multi-party politics or independence
for irredentist groups is quickly censored. At the same time, grievances calling
for reforms or demands to address corruptionprotest within the bounds of
the established political frameworkcan be used by party moderates as
ideological ammunition against communist hard-liners.18 Similarly, King, Pan, and
Roberts have recently argued that Chinese authorities do not simply censor all antiregime posts on social media, even those that express vitriolic antigovernment sentiment. Instead, they focus on those posts that demonstrate
potential for collective action, spur social mobilization, or fundamentally
challenge the regimes legitimacy.19 At the same time, anti-regime posts that
expose local corruption or ineffective policies serve as a basis for
publicizing government responsiveness to local demands.2

No social instability in China regime uses cyber ops to

prevent chaos
Tsai, 2016
(Wen-Hsuan, Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, How
Networked Authoritarianism was Operationalized in China: methods and
procedures of public opinion control, Journal of Contemporary China, April
13, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2016.1160506, Accessed: June
25, 2016, YDEL)
Seen from a comparative perspective, scholars are divided into two groups as to whether or not network
technology helps to promote democratization. One group holds the networked democracy view; the
other holds the networked authoritarian view. The former believe that network technology may help
promote the development of a democratic movement, as in the example of the Arab Spring of 2011. In
the countries in the Middle East which witnessed collective citizen protests, citizens had contacted each
other via the Internet and other electronic media to form a consensus of opinion and collective
resistance,61 which seems to indicate that the Internet may play the role of a helping hand in achieving

However, those holding the networked authoritarian view believe

that network technology may actually strengthen the governance of
authoritarian regimes. As pointed out by several scholars, many authoritarian states have
noticed the threat to their regimes posed by network technology, and those states have tried to
control or even incorporate network technology for their own u se.62 This fact
partially confirms the pessimistic view of some scholars, i.e. that network technology
democracy.

cannot promote the democratic transition of authoritarian regimes.

On the contrary, this technology may actually strengthen the
regimes ability to govern .63 The case of contemporary China seems to
be an embodiment of the Networked Authoritarian Theory, as the
authoritarian regime seems to have constantly adapted to new developments
through a process of continuous learning and evolution. The CCP regime
began the battle for the Chinese Internet as soon as the Internet was introduced into
China.64 Shan Xuegang , Deputy Secretary General of the People Nets Public Opinion Monitoring
Office, believes that the

government must understand the Internet before

controlling it.65 In recent years, the CCP has invested heavily in terms of both
equipment and capital to study modes of Internet control. One of their most
important policies is to apply the governments historical experience of social control to the field of
network technology. This strategy seems to echo Evgeny Morozovs comment, which was that

authoritarian governments control the Internet through a combination of

technological and socio-political means.66 Relying on the discussion within this article,
we have pieced together the means adopted by the CCP when dealing with network Hot Incidents, as
provided in Table 1.

As soon as a network Hot Incident emerges, the CCP will

employ some methods and techniques of network control, including
reporting the network public opinion and differentiating the antigovernment forces on the network, which will then be adapted to gradually
dilute the influence of the Hot Incident on the public and sustain both the
stability of society and the survival of the regime. Ultimately, during the fallback
period of a network public opinion event, the propaganda department must
employ the network and other channels to advertise the sincerity and
effectiveness of the government in solving problems, thus repairing public
trust in the government and maintaining the prestige of the government.67
Relying on such operations, the CCP has established its standard operating

procedures (SOP) for the control of network public opinion. These sophisticated
operating procedures may constitute one of the factors that sustain the
survival of the CCP as an authoritarian regime. This study does not intend to make any
bold statement that the operating procedures will lead to the perpetuation of the CCP regime. As a
matter of fact, and as embodied by the experience of other countries, the
public have also tried to strengthen their resistance to government control
by learning about network technology. As observed by William J. Dobson, social
campaigners inside authoritarian states also know how to bring innovation and
technology into play in their resistance.68 Thus, it is very difficult for the author to
exclude the possibility that there are protest leaders in contemporary China who are able to learn and
move with the times, and who can thereby help break the governments authoritarian control of its

this article intends to answer the question of

why the assertion of democratization being driven by network technology
may not be a general theory, such as the tide of the Jasmine Revolution failing to sweep over
people. Starting with the existing problem,

contemporary China. However, it is not the intention of this article to make any bold predictions as to

the contemporary CCP regime

has indeed equipped itself with more sophisticated network control
technology and SOP than other authoritarian states. This level of sophistication is
Chinas future development. Seen from objective comparisons,

rarely seen in other authoritarian states. While other authoritarian states also hope to employ network
technology control to restrain the occurrence of democratization, it would appear that they have not
developed network control skills that are as sophisticated and unique as those developed and
implemented by the CCP regime. That fact may not be the only solution to the puzzle, but it is
nevertheless a factor that cannot to be ignored. In other words, many factors exist which may lead to a

the
dissatisfaction of the public with the general national environment or the
central government can be deemed to be structural factors. A successful
association of network public opinions, on the other hand, constitutes a
catalyst.69 If the government is able to control the aid provided by the
network to the association and formation of public opinion, then, even when
the occurrence of an anti-government movement cannot be totally avoided,
the occurrence rate and success rate of such movements can be reduced.
This explains why the CCP has invested so heavily in recent years in terms
of both manpower and capital, to study the procedures of network public
opinion control. The unique SOP of the CCP has been figured out only gradually. An interviewee
successfully launched anti-government movement in a society. On the one hand,

told the author that, particularly after the turbulent public opinion triggered by the SARS outbreak in
2003, each time network public opinion got out of control, the propaganda departments of the CCP at all
levels would draw lessons from their 2003 failures and try to identify the fault links for the purpose of

the CCP has explored

and learned network control skills used in other countries. The CCP has also
tried to absorb some of its own social control institutions and utilize them in
the field of network control through transformation. Through the aforementioned
efforts, the CCP has become increasingly active in network control and has
gradually mastered and applied network technology to assist its governance.
As a result, the current networked authoritarian regime has
improved performance in the future.70 Gradually over the past decade,

gradually taken shape.

CCP - Internet
CCP leadership k2 internet development and governance
Yang, 2016
Yifan, Lau China Institute, Kings College London, London, UK 2 School of
International Studies, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, The
Internet and Chinas Foreign Policy Decision-making, Chin. Polit. Sci. Rev.
(2016) 1:353372 DOI 10.1007/s41111-016-0021-3,
http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/578/art
%253A10.1007%252Fs41111-016-0021-3.pdf?originUrl=http%3A%2F
%2Flink.springer.com%2Farticle%2F10.1007%2Fs41111-016-00213&token2=exp=1467074295~acl=%2Fstatic%2Fpdf%2F578%2Fart
%25253A10.1007%25252Fs41111-016-0021-3.pdf%3ForiginUrl%3Dhttp
%253A%252F%252Flink.springer.com%252Farticle
%252F10.1007%252Fs41111-016-00213*~hmac=598a22a41b773c7a70b162cf7a611feafae26055120144ecce7172a
6e3e3dbd6, Accessed: June 27, 2016, YDEL Information and
*Communication Technologies (ICT), foreign policy decision-making
(FPDM)**,
Conclusion As this study has demonstrated, the rapid development of the Internet
in China has benefited hugely from governmental support . The
administration in Beijing recognizes the importance of ICTs in promoting
economic development and reducing the gap between China and developed
countries and, therefore, supports the establishment of information
infrastructure of such a quality and depth that it amounts to a particularly rare example among
developing countries. Nowadays, because of the diversity and increased speed of
information circulation, the freedom of information transmission and online
opinion expression, the huge proportion of Chinese netizens, and the rapidly
increasing access to Internet-enabled mobile devices, the countrys political
and social system has been affected in almost every aspect. This study defines
the Internet as an instrument of mass media in a networked world and has
identified the Internets influence on Chinese FPDM in two aspects that can be
summarized in the following Fig. 1. On the one hand, the utilization of the Internet
communication changes the context of Chinese FPDM by increasing the
diversity and velocity of foreign policy information and raising public
awareness of foreign policy issues, which makes public discussion and
public opinion possible and constitutes the atmosphere for Chinas FPDM in
a networked world (as shown in the outer circle, Fig. 1). On the other hand, public opinion exerts
pressure on the process of Chinese FPDM through influencing the selection of decision problems and
limiting the space for decisionmakers, which reflects the specific dynamic of Chinese FPDM (as showed

Internet influences Chinese

FPDM at macro- and micro-level at the same time, but also helps us
understand how these two levels interact and impact the decision-making
process. Thus, it also has a positive side for Chinese policymakers: to win the competition
with various information sources and maintain its dominant position in
decision-making, the government has to build its credibility on the provision
of accurate, reliable foreign policy information to the public. During this process,
in the inner circle, Fig. 1). Figure 1 not only tells us how the

public opinion, formed on the basis of instant, credible information, plays a clear supervisory role in the

process and outcome of Chinese FPDM. This study systematically analyzed the influence of the Internet
on the context and process of Chinese FPDM. Through studying the relationship between the Internet
and Chinese FPDM in theory, Internet communication amounts to a wholly new phenomenon and plays

Since 2012, Xi Jinping has taken charge of

all foreign policy related decision-making units (Jakobson and Manuel 2016,
98), and became the leader of newly established CNSC as mentioned above,
which not only increases policy coordination but also adds new factors to
Chinese FPDM. A detailed discussion regarding the influence of the new leadership
on Chinese FPDM in the Internet era is beyond the scope of this study, but it
merits further study. It is hoped that the findings of this study will help to enlighten the
role of ICTs and the Internet on Chinese politics and, indeed, its foreign
policy decision-making.
an important role in the foreign policy realm.

Chinese authoritarianism helped strengthened the

internet
Steinhafel, 2015
Margaret, Marquette University, International Affairs, Graduate Student,
THE DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL EFFECTS OF NATIONALIST
ACTIVISM IN THE CHINESE ONLINE SPHERE, Marquette University, May
6, 2015,
http://static1.squarespace.com/static/52ec255ee4b0238ad7f7ebb6/t/55661d
4ae4b02498921f7ccb/1432755530197/Draft+3+-+Research+paper++Chinese+nationalist+online+activism.pdf, Accessed: July 5, 2016,YDEL
In the early years of the Internet, there was an expectation that the Chinese
government would be unable to censor the Internet, eventually forcing the
state to decide between cutting itself off from modern technology or giving
up its authoritarian politics. Former U.S. President Bill Clintons speech reflects popular opinion during the Internet revolution, with
many believing that the web was too large and widely dispersed to possibly be blocked or contained. To attempt to limit its reach would be, as Clinton phrased it, like

As a result, scholars of this period also suggested that

Chinas acceptance of the Internet would perhaps lead to democracy and/or
a regime change in China. This change, it was suggested, would be the result of increased access to information and ideas from around
the world, a platform to air grievances and interests, and a virtual public sphere to associate with others (Breslin and Shen 2010). Today,
scholars recognize a dramatically different reality . Not only has Chinese
trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.

authoritarian rule survived the Internet, but it has also been

strengthened by it. With a great deal of skill, China has rewritten the Internets rules to
serve its own agenda: gaining firm control over society and setting an
example for other repressive regimes (A Giant Cage 2013). The CCP has systematically
financed and implemented large-scale software projects and development;
including the Great Firewall, which keeps out undesirable foreign
websites, and the Golden Shield, which monitors activities within China (A
Giant Cage 2013). The success of these projects is that much more staggering
considering how China has more Internet users than the United States has
citizens. According to a 2010 White Paper provided by Chinese officials, roughly 384 million users 30 percent of the states population had Internet
access by the end of 2009.2 This is compared to the 150,000 Chinese who had access less than a decade earlier (Barme and Ye 1997). Figure 2 (Zheng and Wu 2005)

years marked by a new era of confidence

for the CCP and the introduction of new technology and propaganda work to
promote nationalism (Brady 2009). So what was the Chinese governments motivation for such quick and widespread expansion? The PRCs
offers a visual representation of this growth between 1997 and 2004;

Information Office of the State Council claims that the government is interested in 1) making the Internet part of the state infrastructure, and 2) enabling Chinese

research suggests that this period of technological

modernization correlates with the partys efforts to rejuvenate its
citizens to freely express their opinions. However,

propaganda work a much more likely motivation for quick and vast
Internet expansion. In fact, Brady (2009) identifies that one of Chinas efforts includes the
encouragement of Chinese media to go online, recognizing that the Internet
is a tool for government that should be embraced and used to promote
nationalism and encourage state activism. However, this online activism is not without its restrictions (Zheng and Wu
2005). STATE CONTROLS AND MANAGEMENT OF CHINA'S ONLINE SPHERE AND NATIONALISTIC ACTIVISM THROUGH COMMERCIALIZED CAMPAIGNS
Validating the Chinese governments efforts to promote nationalism online are the following official statistics: more than 457 million bloggers and 72 million blogs
existed in China by the end of 2007, many of which addressed some political element (CNNIC 2007). By the end of 2008, Chinese Internet users were acknowledged
for spending more time online than Internet users in any other country. They were also more likely to contribute to various forms of online social networking sites
such as blogs, forums, chat rooms, photo or video-sharing websites, etc. than all other countries surveyed, except Korea and France (TNS Global Interactive 2008).

These statistics help to explain why the Internet has become the font-line
battleground in China's new "informational politics" (Yang 2008). Steinhafel, 10 Given the
potential of these online tools considering the size and scope of China's
internet using population, the government has established a strict network
of controls and management of the media, balancing just enough
information flow to appease citizens, but not so much that users have an
opportunity to effectively use it as a political tool against the CCP . To achieve this
delicate equilibrium, China employs what Rebecca MacKinnon (2011) refers to as " networked

authoritarianism ." Under this online regime, the single ruling party
remains in control while a wide range of conversations about the country's
problems nonetheless occur on the Internet. The government then follows these online conversations, sometimes
responding to grievances with policy reforms; thereby making the average person feel as if they have a much greater sense of freedom than they actually do.

under networked authoritarianism, there is no guarantee of individual

rights and freedoms "actors perceived to be threats to the state are jailed;
free and fair elections are not held; and the courts and the legal system are
tools of the ruling party" (MacKinnon 2011, 33). Furthermore, a 2004-05 study of Chinese Internet
censorship concluded, "China operates the most extensive, technologically
sophisticated, and broad reaching system of Internet filtering in the world"
However,

(OpenNet Initiative 2005). Most commonly, the international community thinks of China's advanced content filtering systems when they consider Chinese internet
censorship: the "Great Firewall of China," which blacklists website addresses and keywords into advanced routers and systems to control Internet traffic across
Chinese domestic networks; and the state's "Golden Shield Project," a "broad project focused on surveillance, data mining and the upgrading of Internet public
security networks, of which Internet filtering is only a small part" (MacKinnon 2009). These initiatives require the employment of thousands of "Internet police," who
are located in various cities and empowered to determine which websites and posts are blocked to Steinhafel, 11 users of domestic Chinese internet services it is
predicted that tens of thousands of oversees websites are already blocked (MacKinnon 2009).

CCP Cyber Eespionage

CCP sponsors cyber espionage hacking k2 Chinese
technology
Weedon, 2015
Jen, a Manager of Threat Intelligence at FireEye, Inc, Testimony before the
U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Hearing on
Commercial Cyber Espionage and Barriers to Digital Trade in China, June
15, 2015, http://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Weedon%20Testimony.pdf,
Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL
Chinese Commercial Cyber Espionage Driven By National Priorities ;
Groups Relentless in their Pursuits Chinas commercial cyber espionage activity
likely supports Communist Party central planning policies designed to
provide a competitive advantage for Chinese companies. This is a
coordinated approach that pits government-backed Chinese enterprises
against foreign firms in a race for innovation and economic dominance,
often with detrimental effects for U.S. companies. 1 The strategic importance of this
economic espionage means that the actors are both well resourced and
relentless in their pursuit of a corporations proprietary data. If one of these
advanced threats targets a company, a security breach is inevitable. This
even applies to companies with robust and mature cyber defenses. In 2014,
FireEye conducted hundreds of investigations in 13 countries, and during these investigations, we found
approximately 10 new pieces of malware per work-hour that had successfully bypassed the defenses of

Chinese APT groups do not choose their

commercial targets at random. FireEyes research and analysis indicates that there are
probably both formal and informal tasking mechanisms between groups
sponsors and the actors conducting the intrusions. Chinas Strategic Emerging
Industries: A To-Do List for APT Groups No sector has gone untouched by intrusions
from China-based APT groups. In addition to the frequently publicized data theft from
defense companies or government coffers, FireEye has also observed China-based APT groups
targeting U.S. firms involved in strategic industries that are not as widely
discussed. These industry sectors include electronics, telecommunications,
robotics, data services, pharmaceuticals, mobile phone services, satellite
communications and imagery, and business application software. In the past
securityconscious organizations.

year, we have helped many organizations across a broad spectrum of sectors (e.g., business and
professional services, finance, media and entertainment, healthcare, and construction and engineering)
respond to Chinese APT intrusions. Looking at the current active threats and corresponding data from

China-based APT groups consistently target future

growth areas for both China and the U.S. These focus areas are described in
Chinas Strategic Emerging Industries initiative, which is a component of the
governments 12th Five-Year Plan.2 The following table displays Chinas Strategic Emerging
Industries and the corresponding number of distinct threat groups we have seen targeting
those sectors: Strategic Emerging Industry (SEI) No. of China-based APT Groups Targeting this
SEI Clean Energy Technology 3 Next-Generation IT 19 Biotechnology 6 HighEnd Equipment Manufacturing 22 Alternative Energy 7 New Materials 12 New
over ten years of data collection,

Energy Vehicles 6 Figure 1: China-based APT groups targeting of Strategic Emerging Industries
Chinas Economic Reorientation Will Inform its Future Commercial Cyber Espionage Strategy

Chinas nearly 20-year period of rapid economic growth has slowed

following the global financial crisis, creating significant economic pressures .

In response, China has prioritized rapid innovation and focused on
stimulating domestic consumption, consumer spending, and services. 3 This
reorientation will likely have a dramatic effect on the specific targets China
pursues with its commercial cyber espionage program. Chinese
leadership will likely continue to use the theft of intellectual
property through cyber means to acquire, mimic, and co-opt
innovative foreign technologies . Chinas efforts to spur innovation will
take on even greater urgency if the economy continues to slow and
unemployment among college graduates continues to rise. 4 High rates of
unemployment among the young and educated could be a destabilizing force in Chinese society, which is
not something the Communist Party will tolerate. Indeed, were already seeing the targeting
implications of Chinas desire for rapid innovation. This May, FireEyes Mandiant Consultant Services
aided Penn State in an investigation of Chinese hackers who had been so deeply embedded in the
computer network of its engineering college which specializes in aerospace engineering, among other
disciplines that the network had to be taken offline.5 Such an incident is unfortunately not the
exception. In the past year alone, we responded to at least two other cyber espionage incidents involving

APT actors will likely continue

to target U.S. labs, university research institutions, and small businesses
and start-ups organizations that may lack either the understanding of the
risk or the resources with which to secure their technical and scientific
research. APT actors may also try to exploit trusted third-party relationships to compromise
organizations with better defenses. Given the Chinese leaderships focus on
understanding and advancing entrepreneurship, actors may pursue
information on the leadership, management, and organizational culture of
highly innovative organizations.
top U.S. schools engaged in sensitive, state-of-the-art R&D.

Espionage k2 Chinese economic and military growth

Philipp, 2015
Joshua, award-winning investigative journalist at Epoch Times where he
covers national security relating to China. He is an expert on hybrid warfare,
including Chinas roles and approaches in espionage, organized crime, and
unconventional warfare, EXCLUSIVE: How Hacking and Espionage Fuel
Chinas Growth, The Epoch Times,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1737917-investigative-report-china-theftincorporated/, Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL
Elements of Chinas military, state, business, and academia have been
interwoven over decades and organized around one goal: stealing secrets
from the West. This regime of theft takes with impunity, powering
Chinas economy and high-tech military,

while robbing the United States alone of

trillions in value each year. Very late in the game, the United States has started to respond. The U.S.
Justice Department made headlines in May 2014 by indicting five Chinese military hackers from Unit
61398 for their alleged role in economic theft. The system, however, doesnt stop at military hackers.

Organizations throughout China work as transfer centers that process

stolen information into usable designs. Official programs facilitate the theft.
And the whole system runs through a corrupt nexus among government
officials, military officers, business executives, and academics throughout
China. There is a nearly constant stream of news stories about cyberattacks and spies stealing
technology from the West, but the true scale of the cyberattacks and breaches by spies goes far beyond

whats reported. This article is the last of a four-part investigative series that has been two years in the

Tapping the knowledge of intelligence and security experts, it reveals

the inner workings of a state-sanctioned program to rob the West

making.

and feed Chinas economic growth and military strength . We are seeing
only a fraction of actual data breaches reported in the U.S. Many of the data breaches reported in 2014
were of retailers, where compromised consumer personally identifiable information (PII) is required to be
reported, said Casey Fleming, chairman and CEO of BLACKOPS Partners Corp. It will not take long for
every American citizen to be affected by the scale of this economic espionage assault. Casey Fleming,
CEO, BLACKOPS Partners Corp. Fleming is in a unique position. His company tracks both cyberspies
and human spies infiltrating Fortune 500 companies. He said, in addition to what appears in the press,
hundreds of other companies have not reported data breaches due to negative coverageor worse, most

a
tenfold increase in the aggressiveness, depth, and frequency of insider spy
activity and cyberattacks breaching companies. He said they expect the problem to
never detected the breach to begin with. Just in the last year, he added, his company observed

grow worse. Our intelligence units latest estimates are that U.S. companies and the U.S. economy lose
approximately $5 trillion each year, or over 30 percent of the U.S. GDP when you factor the full value of
the stolen innovation, Fleming said. It will not take long for every American citizen to be affected by
the scale of this economic espionage assault in the form of lost jobs, higher prices, and a lower quality of
life, he said. Multiple Sources The large scope of the theft stems from the Chinese regimes grip on
nearly all facets of its society, according to Josh Vander Veen, director of incident response at SpearTip, a
cyber-counterintelligence firm. Vander Veen is a former special agent with U.S. Army
Counterintelligence and worked for more than a dozen years investigating foreign spy operations. The

Chinese government has a hand in so many of its domestic industries, he said,

adding that the platforms it uses for economic theft include the transfer
centers, cyberattacks, and academic research at U.S. universities. In a sense it
is very clear-cut, but we dont want to accept what we see right before our eyes. Richard Fisher,

While the Chinese regime

operates a very large system for stealing and processing intellectual
property, it makes the money back by developing products based on the
stolen information. Many times, the Chinese products based on stolen American
research and development are resold back in the United States at
approximately half the price of the original American product. Theyre busy, and
senior fellow, International Assessment and Strategy Center

they do invest a lot of personnel and a lot of time, Vander Veen said. But really its a fraction of the cost

When trying to understand the

Chinese regimes use of economic theft, and the involvement of its armed
services, corporations, and universities in the theft, We should view it from the
and a fraction of the time it takes to do this kind of research.

Chinese lens, said Richard Fisher, senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
In a sense it is very clear-cut, but we dont want to accept what we see right before our eyes, Fisher

any organization that has a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cell

is capable of conducting intelligence or military operations. The idea of official
state-run companies in China can also be deceiving, since nearly all companies are
required to have officials from the CCP assigned to them , according to a client of
said, adding that

BLACKOPS Partners Corp. who conducts high-level business in China and spoke under conditions of
anonymity. Any company that has more than 50 people in it has a government liaison assigned to it, the

In China, there are only vague and blurry lines

separating government from private industries, military from government,
and private from military. The systems for economic theft likewise take place
across all three of these sectors.
source said. Thats law in China.

PLA needs to steal intellectual property to sustain military

modernization
Philipp, 2015
Joshua, award-winning investigative journalist at Epoch Times where he
covers national security relating to China. He is an expert on hybrid warfare,

including Chinas roles and approaches in espionage, organized crime, and

unconventional warfare, EXCLUSIVE: How Hacking and Espionage Fuel
Chinas Growth, The Epoch Times,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/1737917-investigative-report-china-theftincorporated/, Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL
A Hungry Military The Chinese regimes Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) plays a
special role in the theft of information . The military is required to cover a
portion of its own costs, and over decades this focus on building external
sources of cash has made its military leaders some of the most powerful
people in China. According to a book, Chinas Economic Dilemmas in the 1990s: The Problems of
Reforms, Modernization, and Interdependence, the PLA particularly relies on external
sources for its research and development programs. With only 70 percent of
operating expenses in maintaining troops covered by the state budget, it states, the PLA must
make up the rest and still find supplemental funds for modernization. Just
like the nexus between government and private business in China, the lines between military and state,
and military and private, are likewise thin. They sat down like in The Godfather where they said youre
in charge of docks and Im in charge of loansharking. William Triplett, former chief counsel, Senate

There are many top officials in the PLA who also hold
high-level positions in state-run companies, and many of these individuals
also hold top-level positions in the ruling CCP. Under the Chinese regimes
current leader, Xi Jinping, an unprecedented number of senior cadres from the
countrys labyrinth jungong hangtian (militaryindustrial and spacetechnology) complex are
being inducted to high-level Party-government organs or transferred to
regional administrations, states a Sept. 25, 2014, report from the Jamestown Foundation.
Former leader of the CCP Jiang Zemin had reformed the system in the late 1990s, when the
landscape of large companies in China was almost completely controlled by
the military. According to several experts, however, the changes Jiang made merely shifted control
Foreign Relations Committee

from the military to the hands of those who were then in charge of the companies. They sat down like in
The Godfather where they said Youre in charge of docks and Im in charge of loansharking,' said
William Triplett, former chief counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in a phone interview.

The reforms essentially shifted the system from military-run to state-run,

while allowing top military officers and high-level officials in the Communist
Party to maintain heavy stakes in the companies, and preventing these roles
from ending with their military careers. The Chinese regimes military
maintains somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 front companies in the
United States, and their sole reason for existing is to steal, exploit U.S.
technology, said Lisa Bronson, deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security policy and
counterproliferation, in a 2005 speech. The FBIs former deputy director for counterintelligence later
said the Chinese regime operates more than 3,200 military front companies in the United States
dedicated to theft, according to the 2010 report from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency. State

While this system of state-sponsored theft unleashes individual

initiative, as institutions scramble to steal what they can to turn a profit, the
regime also provides strategic guidance. Project 863 (also called the 863
Program) was started by former Chinese Communist Party leader Deng
Xiaoping in March, 1986. According to a 2011 report from the U.S. Office of the National
Counterintelligence Executive, it provides funding and guidance for efforts to
clandestinely acquire U.S. technology and sensitive economic information.
In its original state, Project 863 targeted seven industries: biotechnology, space,
information technology, automation, laser technology, new materials, and
energy. It was updated in 1992 to include telecommunications, and was updated again in 1996 to
include marine technology. The Chinese regimes official programs to help facilitate
foreign theft are not limited to Project 863, however. It also includes the Torch
Program to build high-tech commercial industries, the 973 Program for
Guidance

research, the 211 program for reforming universities, and countless

programs for attracting Western-trained scholars back to China,' according to
Chinas Industrial Espionage. Each of these programs looks to foreign collaboration and technologies

it encourages Western-trained experts to

help the Chinese regimes technological development by returning to China ,
or serving in place by providing needed information gained while working for their Western
to cover key gaps, the authors note, adding that

employers. They cite a document from the Chinese regime, which states Project 863 maintains a library
of 38 million open source articles in close to 80 databases that contain over four terabytes of
information gleaned from American, Japanese, Russian, and British publications, military reports, and

There is a central nerve allegedly behind the system

of theft that is also a key power within the Chinese regime. Several sources
point to an otherwise unassuming organization hidden deep within the
Chinese regimes military.
standards. The Central Nerve

Demoratic Peace Theory Wrong

General
Democratic peace theory is wrong
Bhatnagar, 2015
(Aryaman, program advisor on peace and security policy at the Friedrich
Ebert Foundation India, The Democratic Peace Thesis: Not a Force for
Peace After All, InPEC Magazine, October 3, 2015,
https://www.google.com/search?
q=democratic+peace+theory+is+wrong&num=100&espv=2&source=lnt&t
bs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A2015%2Ccd_max%3A&tbm=, Accessed: July 2,
2016, YDEL)
Democracies and the Use of Force Do democratic states stay at peace with
each other when their interests clash? If one looks at empirical examples
then it can be said that democracies are still willing to use force in order to
achieve their ends even against democracies (Macmillan, 1996, p.281). When interests
clash even liberal states tend to behave like any other states, bargaining
hard, issuing threats and, at times, using military force. In such situations, the nature
of the adversary regime is of very little value as vested interests tend to
outweigh the liberal principles. The US intervention in the developing world during the Cold War period testifies this fact as the
containment of Communism took precedence over respect for fellow democracies. The CIA helped in overthrowing democratic governments in Chile, Iran, Guatemala

Wars between democracies have

also taken place due to the fixity in the definition of democracy. As a result, a hegemonic
and Nicaragua replacing them with more authoritarian regimes (Rosato, 2003, p.590).

liberalism defines out other historically valid democratic claims and may license violence against them (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999, p.409). This is how the invasions of a

the mutual respect and trust

between democracies can be maintained only if they consider each other to
be liberal. But in the absence of any coherent mechanism to categorise
democracies, the perceptions of states regarding the regime type of another
state comes into picture. They often get another states regime type wrong,
thereby, lessening our confidence in the fact that objectively democratic
states will not fight one another (Rosato, 2003, p.592). It should also be noted that democratic norms
number of democracies, as stated above, during the Cold War were justified by the US. Moreover,

and institutions do not cause democracies to behave differently from

non-democracies in systematic ways (Rosato, 2005, p.467). The public constrain, for
instance, acts as a very small deterrent on the states decision to go to war. If

it was a major constraint then it would be able to prevent them from going to war even against the non-democracies (Rosato, 2003, p.594) as the public should feel
sensitive about the human and material cost of war with any state. At times, the public may actually welcome war as was seen during WW1, which was welcomed by the

these democratic
structures are as likely to drive states to war as to restrain them from it.
Cabinets, legislatures and public were often more belligerent than the
government heads they were supposed to constrain (Owen, 1994, p.91). These can be belligerent towards
public in all participating countries of Europe, even though, some of them were fighting other liberal states. Moreover,

democracies as well. This was evident during the build up to WW1. Apart from looking at such constraints that could prevent war between democracies, it is also

While stable, well

established democracies may not fight one another, a nascent democracy or
rocky transition towards a fragile democracy may not necessarily imply that
countries become immediately more peaceful. The transition phase of
democracies is supposed to be quite dangerous and the nascent democracies
are more likely to be caught up in wars (Ward and Gleditsch, 1998, p.53). The transition in Eastern Europe, for instance,
had left the population free to hate (Ward and Gleditsch, 1998, p.54) resulting in large-scale ethnic cleansing of minority groups. The instability
in such new regimes can hardly create a spirit of mutual trust and respect
that may prevent war between nations. In fact, at times, stable autocratic regimes are
less prone to conflict and escalation to war. This can be seen with a number of non-liberal states like Cuba, Belarus
important to investigate the deepening of a democratic ethos within specific countries (Chan, 1997, p.66).

the
existence of civil wars and insurgencies in liberal states create obstacles in
viewing them as symbols of pacifism. If democratic norms and culture fail to
prevent the outbreak of civil war or insurgency within democracies, what
reason is there to believe that they will prevent the out-break of interstate
wars between democracies (Layne, 1994, p.41). Moreover, the states may use coercive and
violent means to put an end to these movements and if they can resort to
such methods against their own people then there is no guarantee that they
would be not resort to such methods in the context of international relations.
and more recently, China that is emerging as a potential superpower through the use of its soft power. Along with chaos in new democracies,

The independent history of some democratic nations like Sri Lanka, Algeria, Nepal, Lebanon among others have been seriously affected by such violent movements,
which tend to seriously undermine the claim that democratic nations are inherently more peaceful. The failure to recognise the changing nature of war and the
various implications of the word peace have also strengthened this belief of peace among nations. The perception of war being a sustained violent conflict fought by

The
liberal states may not confront each other through conventional warfare but
through proxies or the armed units of the indigenous nations , who were
armed by the superpowers themselves. Thus, while, the occurrence of overt conflict maybe extremely rare, states- even
the liberal ones- have started to confront each other through covert means (Barkawi and Laffey, 1999, p.412). In recent times, India and Pakistan
are said to confront each other through such means. It is alleged that they
try to destabilise each other by arming insurgent or militant groups in each
others territories rather than confront each other through conventional
means. It is for this reason that the absence of war should not be equated with peace as
the two phenomena are conceptually different (Chan, 1997, p.66). The absence of
violence may be replaced by hostile diplomatic relations and constant
threats of war. The Indo-Pak relations have followed such a pattern for the last sixty years, wherein, the threat of war or use of force has generally
overshadowed all other forms of conflict resolution. This situation of negative peace that creates a war
like atmosphere can hardly be conducive to a more literal form of peace and
harmony.
organised armed forces, which are directed by a governmental authority (Starr, 1997, p.154) cannot hold in light of thde changing nature of warfare.

The spread of democracy to nondemocratic states will be

violent conjunction with capitalism makes resistance to
democracy inevitable
Webb, 2009
(Webb, A.J., Articles Editor, University of Cincinnati Law Review. Reality or
Rhetoric: The Democratic Peace Theory (December 2009). Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2169672 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2169672, Accessed: July 4, 2016, YDEL)
Problems with Democratic Peace Capitalism and Democracy Wilkin (2003)
asserts that with the changing political climate, the Democratic Peace
Revolution rhetoric has been so successful that it has been a sign of political
immaturity to be anti-capitalist and anti-democracy. The problem with the
Democratic Peace Revolution and Theory is not necessarily that democracy
is inherently corrupt by nature, although it does have severe limitations
the major problem stems from the mixture of the political and economic
climate of those countries spreading democracy to unwilling states. Those
countries spreading democracy, such as the United States, also force
capitalism into the economic arena, asserting that in order for Democratic
Peace to be a successful mission, capitalism must accompany it. The issue of
capitalism in conjunction with democracy must be addressed in order to see
the effects that such a contagion is having on a global scale. Inherently,
capitalism seeks only pure economic gains and will not rank second among

democracy or human needs. The hidden value of democracy is that it is a

direct threat to capitalism. Where it extends human needs and rights, it also
limits the power of private profit. While democracy to a degree appears
to have succeeded in well-established countries like the United States and
India, the spread of such in Webb 5 conjunction with Democratic Peace has
been met with extreme resistance. Under the banner of Democratic Peace,
the United States in 1984 waged a propaganda campaign to oust the
Sandinistas in Nicaragua in time for the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. The
United States had established a proxy army, the Contras, and numerous
citizens were killed, including 42 during the election campaign. U.S.financially backed conservative business party won the elections after a
decade of war at an estimated cost of $3 billion to the United States. After
an entire decade of terror initiated by the United States to elect a business
party, the banner of Democratic Peace was mute. Citizens were not given a
free choice to elect a government that represented the best interests of the
people, and, instead, were forced by a greater capitalistic republic to
choose the form of government they determined offered the best solutions.
A 2002 Human Development Report by the United Nations painted a bleak
picture, showing that Nicaragua ranked 118th out of 173 countries (United
Nations, 2002) and that 50.3% of the population lived in poverty (CIA, 2002)
showing that the efforts nearly a decade before to elect a form of
government that represented both democracy and capitalism had failed.
Succinctly summarizing the effects of capitalism on democracy, capitalism is
directly threatened by democracy when the aforementioned allows the
citizenry to transform the social order toward on that represents human
needs and ideals before private profit. The only instance when democracy is
completely acceptable in conjunction with a capitalistic economy is when
democracy remains stagnant on the issues of corporate interests (Wilkin,
2003).

Transition to democracy causes escalatory conflict Iraq

and Vietnam prove that war is the only way for
democratization to happen
Webb, 2009
(Webb, A.J., Articles Editor, University of Cincinnati Law Review. Reality or
Rhetoric: The Democratic Peace Theory (December 2009). Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2169672 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2169672, Accessed: July 4, 2016, YDEL)
Colonialism and Imperialism in Modern Democracies
Non-democratic countries have become increasingly skeptical of countries
that are eager to invade and initiate armed conflict in order to spread
democracy. Due to these tendencies, nondemocratic government and
citizens of those countries are more intolerant and less inclined to Webb 6
view democracy in a positive manner, noting that on the surface peace and
foreign relations are often appear to be two variables always at competition.
Modern democracy has not restrained from previous tendencies toward
colonialism and imperialism, indicating to prospective democratic countries
that the valued rhetoric of freedom and equality is only a slogan in order to
aid resource-heavy democracies in their quest to colonize seemingly

incomparable, weaker countries in their expedition to gain more resources

and material in order to remain political powers. As in the case of Iraq, key
policy decision by democracies in the West and East alike are shaping global
opinions on the current status of Democratic Peace Theory in key measures.
Much of the reasoning behind the failed modern era of Democratic Peace
Theory, although the theory is inherently skewed, lies at the hands of
those countries spreading democracy. Many of the recent transitions by
political powers attempting to initiate regime changed have failed because
those countries on the receiving end of such transition did not satisfy
minimum requirements in order to accept democracy. One country may not
immediately insert democracy as a form of governance where it did not exist
before; rather, a country must meet minimum political levels. This holds
especially true in the case of Iraq [mentioned previously in brief] where the
United States did not allow Iraqi citizens to attain freedom on their own
combined with a decent, almost unwavering, political and religious climate
(Archibugi, 2008). Rushed decisions such as these have failed to produce
completely stable and sound democracies; additionally, the United States
did not absolutely defeat the previous regime, leaving shreds of prior
governmental authorities within the nation to continue to spread their ideals
in hopes to regain power (Reiter, 2001). Continuing with the case in
Vietnam, the governmental regime and citizens opposed democracy for
nearly a decade, refusing to adopt any sense of a democratic state on the
basis that it did not truly espouse actual peace and a minimal war state.
Many Webb 7 democratization attempts much like those in Iraq and
Vietnam, among others have resulted primarily from the interventionist
methods used to initiate regime change. With a background more inclined
to support colonialism and imperialism, combined with neglect for minimum
requirements in order to sustain democracies, those institutions seeking to
democratize multiple nations have done so without regard to citizens and
cultural ideals. Iraq and Vietnam were both a case in which war was
thought to be a means to an end. A democracy, claiming absolute peace and
good faith as its core foundation, contradicts itself by spreading democracy
through war and bloodshed. Whether the intentions in these situations were
good or bad, the case for Democratic Peace is a mute point when countries
are unable to waiver from war as their primary tool for the spread of
democracy and peace. Noticing the growing linkage of war and democracy,
many nations refuse to believe that democracy may be exported through
war. Perhaps this may suggest the reason that democracies have declined in
2003, and for the first time since 1990. Aggressor countries that continue to
use colonialism and imperialism as a hidden motive for democratizing other
countries must deviate from their course. Democratization only occurs when
those countries spreading democracy come with absolute intentions of
doing so; however, as numerous incidents suggest, Democratic Peace
Theory has yet to evolve from rhetoric to reality. Until the Theory does
such, its basis as a valid instrument for the adoption of democracy is failed
(Archibugi, 2008).

Democratic Peace Theory flawed doesnt account for

future proxy wars
Webb, 2009
(Webb, A.J., Articles Editor, University of Cincinnati Law Review. Reality or
Rhetoric: The Democratic Peace Theory (December 2009). Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2169672 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2169672, Accessed: July 4, 2016, YDEL)
The case of proxy wars also represents a challenge to the Democratic Peace
Theory. In its entirety, the Democratic Peace theory ultimately fails to
acknowledge the existence or possibility of proxy wars. Future competition
may lead to proxy wars being fought indirectly between democracies in
order to promote interests of a dominant country (Szayna, 2001). Although
current statistical evidence does not show any proxy wars between
democracies though there have been numerous proxy wars between
democratic states and other forms of government there are still
possibilities that a democratic country may support a proxy war between
another democratic state as a means to effectively achieve political and
economic goals without a public, widespread war. During the colonial
period, democratic countries engaged in widespread and public wars to
achieve their imperialistic goals and objectives. In the modern era, Western
and other democracies are using proxy wars and covert military action to
keep their name free from any public war. There is no obvious evidence to
suggest that democratic or liberal states are less prone to adopt proxy wars
compared to other non-democratic states. Much of the same ideals that
promote peace in liberal states also intensify conflicts and crusades between
liberal and non- Webb 12 liberal states, and there is a strong tendency for
democracies to engage in proxy wars, military intervention, and conquests.
Many democracies have fought wars to acquire land or colonies and retain
control of previously independent states within that democracys sphere of
influence. Although concrete evidence on the proxy war theory is still
inconclusive, democracies do have tendencies to engage in warlike conflict,
and simply because they promote peace in a liberal state does not warrant
them void of military intervention and crusades even between other
democracies (Gleditsch, 2003; Lewis, 2009).

Statisical analysis proves there is no correlation between

democracies and war this subsumes all of their evidence
Webb, 2009
(Webb, A.J., Articles Editor, University of Cincinnati Law Review. Reality or
Rhetoric: The Democratic Peace Theory (December 2009). Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2169672 or
http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2169672, Accessed: July 4, 2016, YDEL)
Analysis Upon examining different descriptive and inferential statistics, the
results primarily support the hypotheses proposed from the literature. More
specifically, the results specify that: democracies do not sufficiently
reduce war, democracies increase gross domestic product per capita and
decrease economic regulations, countries with higher rates of democracies

are those that have been established for a period of time, and cultural
conflict is decreased with democracy. Perhaps the most striking conclusion
from the statistical tests is the indication that democracy does not have a
profound effect on the overall reduction of war that a particular country is
engaged in. While the statistical tests do show that democracy contributes to
the reduction of war, it is quite minimal, and certainly not as profound as
the Democratic Peace Theory suggests. Gross domestic product per capita
is the variable that has a greater impact on democracy, and combined with
lower economic regulations, it gives credence to the claims in the literature
review stating that economic interests weigh heavily on democracies and
their neglect for armed conflict, not the mere fact that they are simply
democracies and organized as such. To add Webb 33 further weight to this
claim, the regression between democracy and gross domestic product per
capita is statistically significant to the .01 level. Although the regression
between democracy, war, and economic regulations are not statistically
significant, they should not be discounted the exact relationship between
democracies and the reduction of war, as well as economic regulations, is
difficult to determine. These results are the most striking in competing with
the claims of the Democratic Peace Theory, suggesting that war is not the
only variable of interest, and may certainly not be the most important. One
additional area of note in the results is that those who favored placing age
limits before a state may truly be considered a democracy may be correct.
Regression between democracies and government type indicated that
established governments had the highest rates of democracy, while newer
democracies had lower rates. This relationship was the strongest of all in
regression; further, it was statistically significant to the .01 level. The
results of these tests provide important details into the basis of the
Democratic Peace Theory. If economic interests weigh heavily upon
democracies than other variables, perhaps those ideas should be given more
authority by those who support the theory, rather than assessing that
democracies do not engage in conflict with one another because they are,
simply, democracies. Although emphasis is placed upon the economic
interests on democracies, it is still important to note the relationship
between cultural conflict and democracy. Much of the Democratic Peace
Theory suggests, as mentioned in the literature review, that not only does
less war occur, less cultural conflict exists among the citizens of
democracies. The statistical tests generally support that hypothesis, but
those tests are unable to determine how that cultural conflict is quelled. In
other words, it must be determined whether cultural conflict exists in Webb
34 conjunction with democracy, or whether it is controlled through other
factors, such as economic interests being the reason for limited cultural
conflict. While the variables were unable to independently achieve
statistical significance, Multiple R-Squares shows that the culmination of
those variables were able to achieve significance to the .01 level, suggesting
a strong relationship in those variables between democracy and the
Democratic Peace Theory. Additionally, we may project the results to 60.1%
of all cases in relation to the theory, signifying the importance of those
variables identified in the literature review. This is imperative to note, as it
shows a distinct relationship and further explains and identifies the
variables that more accurately represent the underpinnings of the entire

theory. Overall, the results of the tests are important to note in political
science realms because the Democratic Peace Theory has become an
accepted theory for most political scientists today. While the theory may
have credence within itself, it is important to determine the specific factors
that constitute the theory, instead of relying upon allegations that
democracies do not fight one another on the basis that are in fact
democracies. If other factors exist such as economic interests it is
important to note those factors, because they may constitute the entire
theory alone, instead of being depicted as a subset having a minor impact to
the Democratic Peace Theory. Perhaps the lack of cohesion in truly
determining the factors affecting the Democratic Peace Theory has led to a
division in the political science community, and with further statistical tests
one may determine to what extent democracies create ease within the world
by not engaging in war with one another. In any event, delving into further
details of the Democratic Peace Theory is likely to shape the political
science community in profound ways as the theory has impacted
researchers since Kants Perpetual Peace in 1795.

Transition Fails Elites Resist

Democratization is controversial between the elites
conflict ensures in transition among elites to gain popular
support corruption proves
Ohren, 2015
(Arild, Higher Executive Officer at The Office of International Relations at Norwegian University of
Science and Technology, The Danger of Democratization in China Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Faculty of Social Science and Technology Management, Department of Sociology and
Political Science, Masters Thesis in Political Science, May 2015,

https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2356305/2/Ohren,
%20Arild.pdf , Accessed: June 23, 2016, YDEL)
I will not dedicate a lot of space to this intervening variable. This is not because it is a less important
variable, but it is more that it is not a controversial conclusion to say that there will probably be some

elite or social groups that will feel threatened by a democratization process

in China. Few authoritarian rulers in history have accepted to cede their
power (Minxin Pei 2007: 55), and it is unlikely that all elite-groups will accept this
easily. Corruption can be an example that there are elite-groups that are
threatened. In short, the corrupt fear democracy. Holders of power and
the rich are afraid of openness, transparency, revelations, journalist interviews,
public condemnation, direct elections, legislatures, hearings, testimonies, public trials and the leaking of

Corrupted elites are afraid of the witch hunt that

can follow democratization. Corruption is a big problem in China. Transparency
insider scandals (Gilley 2004: 57).

Internationals Corruption Perception Index ranks China as the hundredth most corrupt nation out of the

It is one of the biggest

challenges to the legitimacy of the CCP, and corruption scandals are quite
common in China. To illustrate the problems of corruption in China, we can look at one of the
most extreme cases, specifically former deputy chief engineer at the Ministry of
Railways, Zhang Shuguang. Zhang was regarded as the father of Chinas high-speed
railways (Asia Times 08.03.2011), and it was reported that he had stashed away $ 2,8 billion
in Swiss and US bank accounts, while simultaneously owning three luxury
homes in Los Angeles (Forbes 01.08.2011). He did this as a prefecture-level official, with an
official monthly salary of just $1240 (Ibid). The problems of corruption in China spans
over many sectors. The sectors considered highrisk with regards to
corruption are land acquisition, the financial sector, state-owned
enterprises, the pharmaceutical industry, and infrastructure projects (Minxin
174 nations in the world (Transparency International 2014).

Pei 2008: 238- 241). One example of corruption in the infrastructure sector is the previous mentioned
case of Zhang Shuguang. However, the most well-known case is that of Liu Zhijun. Liu Zhijun was the
Railway Minster of China from 2003 to 2011, and did oversee a multiple of projects and Liu personally
campaigned for the construction of numerous high-speed railways (New York Times 12.02.2011). This
rapid expansion left the Ministry of Railways saddled with debts of nearly $ 645 billion (New York
Times 10.04.2013). The investigation of his case resulted in the recovery of almost 350 flats and more
than 900 million yuan (South China Morning Post 11.06.2011), and he was sentenced for using his
position of influence to help business 23 associates win promotions and project contracts, and of
accepting 64.6 million yuan in unspecified bribes between 1986 and 2011 (South China Morning Post

The problems with corruption is also the case in the absolute top
of the CCP. This can be illustrated with the recent anti-corruption campaign that Xi Jinping launched
after he took office in 2012. Between 2012 and 2014, 182,000 party officials on
various levels had been investigated. This investigation led to the arrests of
32 leaders who rank at the level of vice minister or above, including five leaders
11.06.2011).

who are members of the 18th Central Committee of the CCP (Cheng Li and McElveen 2014). Just how
many of these investigations were politically motivated remains unclear.

It does however

illustrate that corruption is a problem that CCP takes seriously, and that it is
a problem from lower ranking officials to the top of the CCP. Corrupt
officials and members in the high-risk industrial sectors of the Chinese
economy are examples of elite groups that would feel threatened by
democratization. However, there are also numerous elite and social groups that would benefit
from a democratization process, and people like for example Bo Xilai is a good example of this. Bo Xilai
was aggressively and unprecedentedly campaigned to obtain a seat in the next Politburo Standing
Committee (Cheng Li 2012: 603). Bo Xilais policies in Chongqing won wide populist support, and
especially by the poor. Bo Xilai spent billions of pounds on low income housing, which was considered
a major triumph (The Telegraph 17.04.2012). When Bo Xilai was purged from his position, there was a
short lived demonstration in Chongqing in support for him (Ibid). Bo Xilai was also voted the man of the

I feel that a conclusion

that says that there are elites in China that are threatened by
democratization is not controversial. There are elite and social groups in
China that would be afraid of the uncertainties that a democratic
breakthrough would bring, while there are simultaneously elite and social
groups that would equally benefit from a democratization process. Because of
this, the initial phase of democratization in China would most likely be
year in 2009 in an online poll by Peoples Daily (Cheng Li 2010: 22).

a highly competitive environment where threatened elite and social

groups would fight for popular support

with themselves as well as with elite and

This would lead to the same

political impasse described in democratization and war-theory. 24 Therefore,
social groups that would welcome democratization in China.

the way in which institutions can act as conflict resolution mechanisms between threatened elites and
rising social groups is important, and will be discussed in the following section.

Transition Worse elites use nationalism to spark

nationalist bidding wars or preventive war
Ohren, 2015
Arild, Higher Executive Officer at The Office of International Relations at
Norwegian University of Science and Technology, The Danger of
Democratization in China Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Faculty of Social Science and Technology Management,
Department of Sociology and Political Science, Masters Thesis in Political
Science, May 2015,
https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2356305/2/Ohren,
%20Arild.pdf, Accessed: June 23, 2016, YDEL
As seen, weak institutions to handle conflict creates a political impasse that
becomes increasingly difficult to resolve. One of the best escape
mechanisms of the political impasse of democratization is nationalism.
When the interests of the elite are threatened by democratization, there will
be a big incentive to play the nationalist card in an effort to try to attract
popular support. The nationalist card will not only be played when powerful
groups need popular support, but also when they want to avoid giving away
any real political power to the average citizen (Snyder 2000: 32).
Nationalism provides the elites a doctrine so that they can rule in the name
of the people and not necessary by the people. Nationalism is therefore a
way for elites to gain popular support without necessarily becoming fully
democratic (Snyder 2000: 36). The opportunity to play the nationalist card
to get popular support is also open for other elites, which is problematic due

to the fact that different interests among elites often trigger nationalist
bidding wars (Mansfield and Snyder 2002: 303). This bidding war can get
fast out of the control of elites, and they can trigger policies that are
aggressive and expansionist. 12 For example, in Germany, elites were
pressured to outbid other interests in a nationalist bidding war, which
brought the country into two wars over Morocco and towards a decision to
launch a preventive war in 1914 (Mansfield and Snyder 2002: 303).
Nationalism can therefore be a source of aggression in newly democratizing
states, where elites can use nationalism to push the country towards an
expansionist and aggressive policy if this is in their interests. However,
nationalism also has the potential to take on a life of its own, and push elites
and political leaders towards this policy without meaning to do so.
Therefore, one of the sources of war in a democratization process is
the ability of elites to play the nationalist card. It is therefore
important for this thesis to examine if there is an opportunity for elites to
play the nationalist card in China, and if this is a nationalism that can lead
China into an aggressive and expansionist path. The nature of Chinese
nationalism will therefore be important in order to identify any and
expansionist traits. To see if Chinese nationalism is aggressive is therefore
important, and therefore is my third intervening variable nationalism.

Deterrence

General
CCP leadership k2 effective command of nuclear forces
key to avoid accidental war
Tellis, 2015
(Ashley, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace specializing in international
security, defense, and Asian strategic issues, PhD, MA, University of Chicago MA, BA, University of
Bombay, China, India, And PakistanGrowing Nuclear Capabilities With No End in Sight, Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, February 25, 2015,

http://carnegieendowment.org/2015/02/25/china-india-and-pakistan-growingnuclear-capabilities-with-no-end-in-sight , Accessed: June 27, 2016, YDEL)

Unlike India and Pakistan, China is formally a nuclear weapon state under the nuclear Non-Proliferation

China is also a major nuclear power possessing advanced,

repeatedly tested, and diverse nuclear weapons designs, diverse delivery
systems, and a centralized command and control network that is intended to
ensure that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party can
Treaty (NPT).

exercise effective command of the countrys nuclear weaponry .

In

contrast to the United States and the former Soviet Union, China historically maintained a small nuclear
force consisting primarily of land-based missiles whose warheads were stored separately, with the
delivery vehicles maintained routinely in un-alerted status in silos or caves. This relatively relaxed
posture was viewed as sufficient to protect Chinese security during the Cold War because Beijing
believed that the positive externalities of mutual U.S.-Soviet nuclear deterrence bestowed on China
sufficient protection. Because even a small number of survivable nuclear weapons capable of reaching an

Chinese leaders sought to

maintain relatively modest forces that through a combination of opacity,
sheltering, and sometimes limited mobility, could survive the remote
contingencies of direct nuclear attack at a time when these dangers were
limited principally by the political constraints of strong bipolar competition.
adversarys homeland could wreak unacceptable damage,

With the ending of the Cold War and with the progressive rise of Chinese power, Beijingwhether it
publicly admits it or nothas come to view the United States as its principal strategic competitor.

Given Chinas recognition of the sophistication of U.S. nuclear and

conventional forces in the face of Beijings desire to reclaim the strategic
primacy it once enjoyed in Asia, Chinese nuclear modernization became
inevitable. This modernization, which consists principally of efforts to
increase the survivability of its nuclear deterrent in the face of what it
perceives to be a formidable U.S. nuclear threat supplemented by other
major regional dangers from Russia, India, and other prospective nuclear powers, has taken the

following form: the deployment of new land-based solid-fueled ballistic missiles of varying ranges (to
include intercontinental-range ballistic missiles); ballistic missile submarines with weapons capable of
reaching the continental United States; new highly survivable nuclear weapon storage sites; and a robust
national command and control system that incorporates a resilient, dedicated nuclear command and

The number of nuclear warheads in the Chinese arsenal has

also progressively increased as the nuclear delivery systems have been
augmented, but there still significant uncertainties about the existence and the number of nuclear
control segment.

gravity bombs and tactical nuclear weapons in the Chinese arsenal. The total size of the Chinese nuclear
weapons inventory today is widely believed to consist of some 250 nuclear warheads, but the accuracy of

China has a substantial fissile material

stockpile consisting of some 16 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and
some 1.8 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium, so there are no practical
constraints on its ability to produce an arsenal of any size it chooses . Given the
these or any other numbers is debatable.

choices China makes in regard to delivery systems, it could deploy anywhere up to an additional 150

the Chinese nuclear force

will be oriented fundamentally towards deterring nuclear use (or the threat
warheads over the next ten years. At arsenal levels of such size,

of use) against China by maintaining a survivable retaliatory capacity during

conflicts with any nuclear-armed state and by maintaining the capacity for
escalation dominance vis--vis weaker nuclear adversaries. Toward these ends, China will
continue to reiterate its no first use nuclear policy, though what that doctrine means precisely is
unclear.

Chinese leadership under Xi prevents all scenarios for

conflict with the United States (also could be a useful
impact defense card)
Rudd, 2015
Kevin, Australias 26th Prime Minister (2007-2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010- 2012). He led
Australias response during the Global Financial Crisis, reviewed by the IMF as the most effective
stimulus strategy of all major economies. Australia was the only major developed economy not to go into
recession. Mr. Rudd was a co-founder of the G20, established to drive the global response to the crisis,
and which through its actions in 2009 prevented the global economy from spiraling into depression. As
Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in regional and global foreign policy
leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the U.S. and Russia
in 2010, having in 2008 launched an initiative for the long-term transformation of the EAS into a wider
Asia Pacific Community. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in
2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. He represented Australia at the 2009
Copenhagen Climate Change Summit which produced the Copenhagen Accord, for the first time
committing states to not allow temperature increases beyond two degrees. He was a member of the UN
High Level Panel on Global Sustainability and is a co-author of the report Resilient People, Resilient
Planet for the 2012 Rio+20 Conference. Mr. Rudd drove Australias successful bid for a non-permanent
seat on the UN Security Council for 2012-14. His government also saw the near doubling of Australias
foreign aid budget to approximately $5 billion, making Australia then one of the top ten aid donors in the
world. He also appointed Australias first ever Ambassador for Women and Girls to support the critical
role of women in development and reduce physical and sexual violence against women. Domestically, Mr.
Rudd delivered a formal apology to indigenous Australians. In education, his government introduced
Australias first nation-wide school curriculum, undertook a record capital investment program in
Australian schools with the building of thousands of new state-of-the-art libraries, as well as introducing
the first mandatory national assessment system for literacy and numeracy standards. In health, Mr. Rudd
in 2010 negotiated the National Health and Hospitals Reform Agreement, the biggest reform of and
investment in the health system since the introduction of Medicare 30 years before. His government
established a national network of leading-edge cancer-care centers across Australia, before introducing
the worlds first ever plain-packaging regime for all tobacco products. To improve the rate of organ and
tissue donation, he established the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Authority. In 2010, he
introduced Australias first paid parental leave scheme and implemented the biggest increase in, and
reform of, the age pension in a century. He also founded the National Broadband Network to deliver highspeed broadband for every household, business, school, hospital and GP in the country. Mr. Rudd is
President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. ASPI is a think-do tank dedicated to second
track diplomacy to assist governments and businesses on policy challenges within Asia, and between
Asia, the U.S. and the West. He is also Chair of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism where in
2015-6 he leads a review of the UN system. Mr. Rudd is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School
where in 2014-15 he completed a major policy report on Alternative Futures for U.S.-China Relations.
He is a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in
Chicago. Mr. Rudd is a member of the Comprehensive Test Ban Organizations Group of Eminent Persons.
He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, serves as a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and
co-chairs the China Global Affairs Council of the World Economic Forum. Mr. Rudd in his private
capacity has established the National Apology Foundation to continue the work of reconciliation and
closing the gap with indigenous Australians, as well as the Asia Pacific Community Foundation to promote
regional security, economic, and environmental cooperation, and the development of effective regional
institutional architecture for the future, U.S.-China 21 The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi
Jinping Toward a new Framework of Constructive Realism for a Common Purpose, Harvard Kennedy
School: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, April 2015,

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Summary%20Report%20US-China
%2021.pdf, Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL
Armed conflict between the U.S. and China is highly unlikely in the
coming decade. Xi Jinping is a nationalist. And China, both the U.S. and Chinas
neighbors have concluded, is displaying newfound assertiveness in pursuing its hard security interests
in the region. But

there is, nonetheless, a very low risk of any form of direct conflict

involving the armed forces of China and the U.S. over the next decade. It is
not in the national interests of either country for any such conflict to occur;
and it would be disastrous for both, not to mention for the rest of the world.
Despite the deep difficulties in the relationship, no Cold War
standoff between them yet exists , only a strategic chill. In fact, there is a high
level of economic inter-dependency in the relationship, which some
international relations scholars think puts a fundamental brake on the
possibility of any open hostilities. Although it should be noted the U.S. is no longer as
important to the Chinese economy as it once was. However, armed conflict could feasibly arise through
one of two scenarios: Either an accidental collision between U.S. and Chinese aircraft or naval vessels
followed by a badly managed crisis; or Through a collision (accidental or deliberate) between Chinese
military assets and those of a regional U.S. ally, most obviously Japan or the Philippines. In the case of

after bilateral tensions reached unprecedented

heights during 2013-14, Beijing and Tokyo took steps in late 2014 to deescalate their standoff over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Hotlines between
the two militaries are now being established, reducing the possibility of
accidental conflict escalation. However, the same cannot be said of the South China Sea,
Japan, the report argues that,

where China continues its large-scale land reclamation efforts, where tensions with Vietnam and the
Philippines remain high, and where mil-to-mil protocols are undeveloped. Xi Jinping has neither the
interest, room for maneuver or personal predisposition to refrain from an assertive defense of these
territorial claims, or to submit them to any form of external arbitration. More remote contingencies
remain for conflict between the U.S. and China, notably on the Korean Peninsula and over Taiwan. On
North Korea, this is improbable in the extreme given Xi Jinpings dissatisfaction with Kim Jong-Un over
his continuing nuclear program, and his concern that a nuclear crisis on the Peninsula would

Under Xi, U.S.-China strategic

dialogue on North Korea is deepening, but anything is always possible on the part of the
fundamentally derail Chinas economic transformation.

Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) regime, as are the consequences for regional stability. As
for Taiwan, the period of six years of political and economic engagement between Beijing and Taipei
under Ma Ying-jeou s (Ma Yingjiu ) administration may be coming to an end. If the proindependence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) wins the Taiwanese Presidential elections in 2016,
and if it were to flirt again with the idea of a referendum on independence, Xi would likely take a harder
line than his predecessors. And for the U.S., the provisions of the Taiwan Relations Act have not

Of course, Xi Jinping has no interest in triggering armed conflict

with the U.S., a nightmare scenario that would fundamentally undermine
Chinas economic rise. Furthermore, there are few, if any, credible military
scenarios in the immediate period ahead in which China could militarily
prevail in a direct conflict with the U.S. This explains Xis determination to
oversee the professionalization and modernization of the Peoples
Liberation Army (PLA) into a credible, war-fighting and war-winning
machine. Xi Jinping is an intelligent consumer of strategic literature and
would have concluded that risking any premature military engagement with
the U.S. would be foolish. Traditional Chinese strategic thinking is unequivocal in its advice not
to engage an enemy unless you are in a position of overwhelming strength. Under Xi, the
ultimate purpose of Chinas military expansion and modernization is not to
inflict defeat on the U.S., but to deter the U.S. Navy from intervening in
Chinas immediate periphery by creating sufficient doubt in the minds of
American strategists as to their ability to prevail. In the medium term, the report
analyzes the vulnerability of the U.S.-China relationship to the dynamics of
Thucydides Trap, whereby rising great powers have historically ended up at war with
changed.

established great powers when one has sought to pre-empt the other at a time of perceived maximum
strategic opportunity. According to case studies, such situations have resulted in war in 12 out of 16

Xi Jinping is deeply aware of this strategic

literature and potential implications for U.S.-China relations. This has, in part,
underpinned his desire to reframe U.S.-China relations from strategic
instances over the last 500 years. 6

competition to a new type of great power relationship. In the longer term, neither
Xi Jinping nor his advisors necessarily accept the proposition of the
inevitability of U.S. economic, political and military decline that is often
publicized in the Chinese media and by the academy . More sober minds in Xis
administration are mindful of the capacity of the U.S. political system and
economy to rebound and reinvent itself. Moreover, Xi is also aware of his own countrys
date with demographic destiny when the population begins to shrink, while the populations of the U.S.
and those of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) economies will continue to increase.

For these reasons, the report concludes that the likelihood of U.S.China conflict in the medium to long term remains remote. This is
why Xi Jinping is more attracted to the idea of expanding Chinas
regional and global footprint by economic and political means . This is
where he will likely direct Chinas diplomatic activism over the decade ahead.

Evidence proves that Authoritarian China is a credible

deterrent preventing war
Payne, Schlesinger, and et al 2013
(Keith, Professor and Head of the Graduate Department of Defense and Strategic Studies, Missouri State
University (Washington Campus). Dr. Payne is also President and co-founder of the National Institute for
Public Policy, a nonprofit research center located in Fairfax, Virginia. Dr. Payne served in the
Department of Defense as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Forces Policy. He received the
Distinguished Public Service Medal and the Forces Policy office Dr. Payne led received a Joint Meritorious
Unit Award. In this position, Dr. Payne was the head of U.S. delegation in numerous allied consultations
and in Working Group Two negotiations on BMD cooperation with the Russian Federation. In 2005 he
was awarded the Vicennial Medal from Georgetown University for his many years on the faculty of the
graduate National Security Studies Program. Dr. Payne is the Chairman of the U.S. Strategic Commands
Senior Advisory Group, Strategy and Policy Panel, editor-in-chief of Comparative Strategy: An
International Journal, and co-chair of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum. He served as a Commissioner on
the bipartisan Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, the Secretary of
States International Security Advisory Board, as co-chairman of the Department of Defenses Deterrence
Concepts Advisory Group, and also as a participant or leader of numerous governmental and private
studies, including White House studies of U.S.-Russian cooperation, Defense Science Board Studies, and
Defense Department studies of missile defense, arms control, and proliferation. He was a primary
contributor to the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, and has served as a consultant to the White House
Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and participated in
the 1998 Rumsfeld Study of missile proliferation. Dr. Payne has lectured on defense and foreign policy
issues at numerous colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is the author, coauthor, or editor of over one hundred and fifty published articles and eighteen books and monographs,
some of which have been translated into German, Russian, Chinese or Japanese. His most recent
monograph is entitled, Nuclear Force Adaptability for Deterrence and Assurance: A Prudent Alternative
to Minimum Deterrence (with Dr. John Foster). Dr. Paynes articles have appeared in many major U.S.,
European and Japanese professional journals and newspapers. Dr. Payne received an A.B. (honors) in
political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976, studied in Heidelberg, Germany,
and in 1981 received a Ph.D. (with distinction) in international relations from the University of Southern
California, James, an American economist and public servant who was best known for serving as
Secretary of Defense from 1973 to 1975 under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Minimum
Deterrence: Examining the Evidence, NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY, 2013,

http://www.nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Final-Distro.pdf , Accessed:
June 26, 2016, YDEL)

China remains an authoritarian communist state, and for two decades has been
increasing its military budget by more than ten percent per year . According to
the Pentagons report on Chinas military power, Chinas armed forces are designed to
fight and win local wars under conditions of informatization, or highintensity, information-centric regional military operations of short
duration,168 i.e., against the United States. Called active defense, Chinese strategy is widely

China is spending large sums to

obtain capabilities to prevent U.S. assistance to Taiwan.169 Nuclear weapons
play a key role in Chinas military strategy of active defense.170 Chinese
characterized as an anti-access strategy in the West, and

nuclear doctrine is hidden by political propaganda, most notably a pledge of no first use of nuclear
weapons. A careful look at the Chinese wording of its no first use policy reveals that it commits China

the Chinese military appears to understate

when it says, there is some ambiguity concerning Chinas first use policy,
to nothing. 171 The Pentagon report on

including attacks on Taiwan and nuclear EMP attacks.172 The Kyodo News Agency reported that it

Chinese documents which state that China will adjust [its]

nuclear threat policy if a nuclear missile-possessing country carries out a
series of air strikes against key strategic targets in our country with
absolutely superior conventional weapons173 (i.e., against the United States).
Chinese generals openly threaten nuclear first use against the United States
if it comes to the aid of Taiwan.174 According to the Pentagon, China is deploying
two new ICBMs, the DF-31 and DF-31A; developing a new submarinelaunched ballistic missile (SLBM), the JL-2; and building a new type of
ballistic missile submarine, at least six of which reportedly will be
deployed.175 Taiwan confirmed the reported successful launch of JL-2 SLBMs in December 2011; this
obtained classified

development will probably result in the relatively early deployment of these missiles. 176 In 2012,
China reportedly tested the DF-41, a large heavily MIRVed ICBM (10 warheads). 177 China is

China plans
to deploy 576 MIRV warheads on six submarines . 179 China has continued to develop
reportedly developing a rail-mobile ICBM.178 There are reports in the Asian press that

and deploy new nuclear weapons since the end of the Cold War. It conducted large nuclear tests until
1996 and may have conducted covert nuclear tests since its declared testing moratorium in 1996.180
Xue Bencheng, an important Chinese nuclear weapons scientist, characterized the July 1996 Chinese
nuclear test as a great spanning leap which solved the problem of nuclear weapons
miniaturization.181 This test apparently set the stage for the nuclear modernization programs now
underway. The U.S. government estimates that Chinas nuclear arsenal is a few hundred weapons.182
In 2011, Taiwans defense ministry estimated that Chinas Second Artillery had between 450 and 500

The total number of nuclear weapons would, of course, be

higher because the Second Artillery does not control the nuclear weapons of
the naval or the air forces. Some Russian experts believe China now has one
thousand to several thousand nuclear weapons.184 Col-Gen. (ret.) Viktor Yesin, former
commander of the Strategic Missile Troops, states, My estimate of Chinas nuclear arsenal
today is 1,600 to 1,800 warheads. 185 Irrespective of what the current number is, there is
no doubt it will increase. Summary The Minimum Deterrence claim that Russia and
China do not constitute plausible threats pertinent to nuclear deterrence
and will not do so in the future reflects a hope, but considerable available
nuclear weapons.183

evidence suggests otherwise . At a time when the United States is dramatically reducing
both defense expenditures and nuclear weapons, Russia and China are doing the opposite. At a time
when Minimum Deterrence proposals assert that hostilities between the United States and Russia or
China are implausible, both countries are talking and acting on the opposite premise. Hoping that
benign relations will prevail for now and the future is reasonable; ignoring or discounting opponents
expressions of hostility, and instead basing U.S. calculations of deterrence requirements on hope, is not
reasonable.

North Korea
Strong CCP calms escalatory conflict and deters North
Korea from war collapse of the CCP would mean there
would be no check on North Korean lashout
Horowitz, 2015
Shale, Professor at University Wisconsin, Ph.D., University of California, Los
Angeles (Political Science) M.A., University of California, Los Angeles
(Economics) B.A., University of California, Berkeley, research focuses on
international and ethnic conflict, with an emphasis on East and South Asia
and on the post-communist world; on the politics of international trade and
finance; and on the politics of market transition and institutional change in
the post-communist countries and East Asia. He has taught for a year at
Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and has done research
in many countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, in India,
and in China, Taiwan, and Korea, Why Chinas Leaders Benefit from a
Nuclear, Threatening North Korea: Preempting and Diverting Opposition at
Home and Abroad, Pacific Focus, Vol. XXX, No. 1 (April 2015), 1032.doi:
10.1111/pafo.12039 2015 Center for International Studies, Inha
University, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pafo.12039/epdf,
Accessed: June 27, 2016, YDEL
The Norths behavior primarily reflects the regime survival interests of the ruling Kim family, which long
sought to preserve its autonomy by balancing Soviet and Chinese influence. Yet, since Gorbachevs
withdrawal of support triggered the Norths economic crisis and military decline, China has provided the

North Koreas behavior is necessarily

constrained by Chinas foreign-policy interests . Based upon statements by Chinas
support most vital to the Kim regimes survival. Thus,

leaders, observers have often argued that China has a serious principal-agent problem with the North
with the Norths behavior damaging Chinas interests and China being largely unable to control such
behavior.1Given

the evolving interests and policies of Chinas post-Mao

leaders, it is argued here that North Koreas behavior predominantly
supports rather than threatens Chinas foreign-policy objectives. There is a
tendency to analyze Chinas interests in Korea primarily as a function of
traditional national security interests mainly, in terms of the adverse
military balance of power effects of a Korea unified under the Southern
regime.2However, foreign policy can also be used to increase the internal
political legitimacy and strength of incumbent political regimes and leaders.

Focusing attention on conflicts with external rivals diverts the attention of the public away from difficult
domestic problems for which the regime itself is largely responsible.3Public confrontations with outsiders
also deliver greater prestige and more resources to the security forces, and make it harder for internal
political rivals to criticize current leaders. Such diversionary foreign policies are likely to be
particularly attractive to regimes or leaders with weak internal legitimacy and strong external relative
power. An exclusive emphasis on conventional national security interests provides an incomplete analysis
of Chinese foreign policy even for the Deng Xiaoping period. Although Deng sought to remain in the

support for the North was intended, not just to forestall the
geopolitical costs of a unified Korea, but also to avoid the internal political
fallout of a North Korean regime collapse. More broadly, the patriotic education
background, his

campaign initiated in Dengs last, post-Tiananmen years substituted Chinese nationalism for

communism as the central legitimizing ideology of the Chinese Communist

Party (CCP). In the post-Deng period, Chinas leadership has become more decentralized and
insecure, and its leaders have needed to worry more about securing their own
political power against both intra-regime and mass-level threats . No leader since

Deng has had such strong authority within the CCP and Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). The threat from
below revealed at Tiananmen only becomes more difficult to contain as Chinas population becomes more
urbanized, educated, networked, and well informed. At the same time, C hina

has become more

secure from external threats following the Soviet collapse and the relative
rise of Chinas own economic and military power. These trends imply that
Chinas post-Deng leaders are expected to focus less on Chinas national
interests, while placing higher value on diversionary internal political
benefits of foreign policy even where such diver-sonar internal benefits
have traditional national interest costs. Taking into account both national interests and
diversionary internal politics, what are the CCP regimes main concrete goals in
Korea? Here it is argued that there are six main goals: preserving the Northern regime;
avoiding war; maintain-in a divided Peninsula; diverting resources and
efforts of geopolitical and ideological rivals abroad; Finlandizing or
neutralizing the South Korean regime; and capturing the benefits of
economic relations with South Korea, along with Japan and the United
States. Analysis of these goals indicates that, for Chinas leaders, the benefits of the
Norths nuclear program have been understated relative to the costs. The
main benefits are greater security of the Northern regime and diversion of
foreign rivals resources and efforts not just the traditional national
interest benefits, but also the diversionary political benefits. The main cost is the
potential for rival states to significantly increase their own military mobilization in response. It seems
likely that even Deng who was most strongly concerned with Chinas national interests viewed this

For his successors, geopolitical reactions by rivals have

become increasingly irrelevant, and the diversion of rivals efforts
increasingly valuable, due both to Chinas rapidly rising economic and
military strength, and more importantly, to the increasing focus on internal
threats to political survival. When these leadership preferences and net benefits are taken into
trade-off as favorable.

account, Chinas combined objectives in Korea seem increasingly advantaged by the North Korean

Turning from logic to evidence, it is only Chinas statements

that support the idea that China is opposed to North Koreas nuclearization .
nuclear program.

Chinas actions seem designed to protect the North from retaliation

and prevent the outbreak of war, while providing North Korea with
space to proceed with its weapons program and its proliferation
efforts . From 2006, the North ratcheted up its rhetoric and, more importantly, its threatening
China reacted by making as much of an effort to restrain
the South as the North.
behavior and violence.

CCP would check war with North Korea North Korean

nuclear testing proves
Glaser, 2016
Bonnie, senior adviser for Asia and the director of the China Power Project
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), China's
Reaction to North Korea's Nuclear Test, Center for Strategic and
International Studies, January 6, 2016, https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinasreaction-north-koreas-nuclear-test, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
Q1: Was the official statement by Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs
particularly harsh? A1: No. Chinas foreign ministry statement said that it
is firmly opposed to North Koreas nuclear test. It strongly urged the

DPRK to honor its commitment to denuclearization and stop taking actions

that worsen the situation. The statement also underscored Chinas resolve
to deal with the North Korean nuclear issue within the framework of the Six
Party talks. This language is virtually identical to the wording that Chinas
foreign ministry used after the Norths February 2013 test. A sentence from
the 2013 statement that was not included this time called on all parties to
respond in a cool-headed manner. The exclusion of any reference to other
parties suggests that Beijing is putting the onus on North Korea to act and
views a strong international response as acceptable. After North Korea
conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006, China issued a much
tougher statement. It accused the DPRK of defying the universal opposition
of the international community and flagrantly conducting the test. Use of
the term flagrantly up till then had been used to condemn the actions of
putative adversaries, not those of a socialist ally. That term was not been
again in official Chinese statements that were issued following North
Koreas subsequent nuclear or long-range missile tests. Q2: Is China likely
to support tightening sanctions on North Korea? A2: Beijing is likely to join
in United Nations Security Council (UNSC) actions to condemn North
Koreas latest nuclear test, including authorization of a new UNSC
resolution that includes another round of sanctions. China may be more
willing than in the past to strictly enforce existing and new UN sanctions, for
example by conducting more rigorous inspections of vehicles crossing the
border China-North Korea and more closely monitoring the cargo carried by
North Korean flights over Chinese territory. China may also be prepared
to take unilateral steps to put pressure on North Korea , including
delaying delivery of oil and other forms of assistance. However, it is unlikely
that China will agree to actions that could endanger stability and lead to
economic or political collapse, and result in sudden Korean unification with
the potential deployment of U.S. troops close to the Chinese border. Gaining
Chinese support for UN sanctions that focus on the banking sector is likely
to meet with resistance. Since North Koreas first nuclear explosion,
Beijing has recognized the need to employ pressure in dealing with its
sometimes unruly ally. From Chinas perspective, however, sanctions and
other forms of pressure must be part of a broader strategy that includes
positive inducements and dialogue. Such a grand bargain might include
security assurances, economic assistance, and diplomatic recognition by the
United States and Japan. Sanctions alone, the Chinese believe, are unlikely
to persuade Pyongyang to denuclearize. Q3: What is Chinas most
immediate concern and does it see any opportunities in this crisis? A3:
Preserving domestic stability is, as always, the top concern of Chinese
leaders. The nuclear test took place approximately 100 kilometers (62 miles)
from the China-North Korea border. Tremors from the explosion spread into
northeastern China, raising anxieties about possible injuries to citizens as
well as contamination of the air, water and soil. Chinese schools situated in
towns close to the border were evacuated. Chinas Foreign Ministry said
that environmental officials were monitoring for possible radiation near the
border, but had not detected anything abnormal in the immediate aftermath
of the test. The Chinese Communist Party will attach priority to
ensuring the safety of Chinese citizens and preventing discontent

that could lead to online criticism of the CCP or even protests.

China will also seek to use this opportunity to bolster its image as a
responsible international stakeholder and improve relations with the United
States. By supporting U.N. sanctions, China will showcase its willingness to
uphold international law. Prior cooperation with the US has won Beijing
praise from both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. With
friction persisting on a number of issues, including cyber-enabled theft of
intellectual property and Chinese island building and militarization of the
South China Sea the Chinese will capitalize on North Koreas nuclear test to
engage in limited cooperation with Washington . Q4: How will Chinas
relations with North Korea likely be affected? A4: Chinas relations with
North Korea have been strained in recent years primarily due to North
Koreas insistence on pursuing its nuclear weapons program. After a
prolonged period of tension during which high-level exchanges were
suspended, Beijing became anxious about its lack of both knowledge about
developments inside North Korea and channels to Pyongyang and
subsequently launched an effort to repair frayed ties. In mid-2015, China
hosted Choe Ryong-hae at its military parade celebrating the 70th
anniversary of the end of World War II. A month later Beijing dispatched Liu
Yunshan to Pyongyang to attend its military parade, the first visit by a
member of Chinas seven-man Politburo Standing Committee since 2011.
The nascent improvement in China-North Korea relations apparently
suffered a setback when Kims favorite North Korea pop band canceled its
performances in China, possibly because of Pyongyangs claim to possession
of a hydrogen bomb.

Chinese government prevents Korean instability and

deters North Korea latest UN sanction prove
Fisher, 2016
(Max, editor for Vox, Why China is fighting with its own ally North Korea,
March 3, 2016, Vox, http://www.vox.com/2016/3/3/11148674/china-northkorea-sanctions, Accessed: July 8, 2016, YDEL)

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test way back in January 6, and the very next day the US and
China began negotiating over what to do about it. China is North Korea's protector and sole ally, so
expectations were low. But this Wednesday, two months later, the UN Security Council unanimously
approved a resolution, drafted by the US and China, punishing North Korea with some of the toughest
sanctions in decades. A number of North Korean officials are sanctioned, and all cargo in and out of the

China is
indeed getting tougher on, and less patient with, North Korea. Their alliance
is under some of the greatest strain it's experienced in years, and long-term
trends suggest that strain will only worsen. Nonetheless, the fundamentals of
that alliance remain in force. As much as the US might like to hope there's a China
North Korea breakup coming which would be a big deal, given that
China's support enables North Korean bad behavior there's little reason to believe
country must be inspected, along with other measures. So how big of a deal is this?

this will happen. Big picture, don't expect the status quo to change. The core Chinese strategy that
explains what's happening This all makes a lot more sense if you know China's longstanding policy
toward North Korea, which, like

many Chinese Communist Party policies, is often

boiled down a very simple slogan. In this case, it's just six words: " No war, no
instability, no nukes." In other words, China has three top priorities for the

Korean Peninsula, and those priorities define everything. They're ranked in

order, which is to say that China's top priority is to prevent war on the
peninsula, its second priority is to prevent instability (for example, by way of North
Korea's collapse), and third is to prevent nuclear weapons. That helps explain why
China is going to new lengths to punish North Korea for its January nuclear
test (as well as a February missile test): It really wants to deter North Korea from
further nuclear development, which it sees as bringing risks that could hurt
China as well. But it also shows why we shouldn't expect China to do anything as
drastic as abandoning North Korea altogether. China wants to preserve
stability and the status quo on the Korean Peninsula, with a divided Korea
and a reliably anti-Western North Korea. Those are higher priorities than
deterring North Korean nukes. But there's still a real if almost certainly temporary
breakdown in relations that led to these sanctions. The odd story of how ChinaNorth Korea relations

North Korea's nuclear test itself

was driven, at least in part, by a breakdown in relations with China a breakdown that has
culminated in China's support for Wednesday's UN sanctions. And that
broke down There's some evidence for a theory that says

breakdown may have been precipitated by, bizarre as it may sound, a major diplomatic incident involving
a North Korean all-female pop band. But it goes back to when Kim Jong Un first took power. After North
Korean leader Kim Jong Il died in late 2011, and his son Kim Jong Un took over, China took what analysts
call a "wait and see" approach watching the young and inexperienced new leader before deciding

North
Korea conducted its third nuclear test. Kim perhaps felt he needed to do this
to prove himself to his country's military elite. This infuriated China. "The
Chinese were annoyed with the North Koreans over a lot of their behavior ,
whether to support him. In February 2013, as Kim Jong Un was still consolidating power,

not least the third nuclear test [in 2013], and had reduced the amount of assistance they were giving
North Korea," John Everard, the former British ambassador to North Korea, told the BBC back in
January. "Through most of 2015, North Korea's relations with China its sole ally and major economic
benefactor were distinctly frosty," Everard said. But gradually, China's anger cooled, and besides, it
looked like Kim Jong Un had consolidated his rule. It was time to make up. So in October 2015, Beijing
sent a goodwill gift: Liu Yunshan became the first member of China's paramount leadership body, the
Politburo Standing Committee, to visit North Korea since Kim had taken power. That December, Kim
sent a gift back. He announced the Moranbong Band, North Korea's state-run all-female pop band and
Kim's pet project, would travel to China to perform a concert for Communist Party officials. But

December 10, 2015, is when it all came crashing down. The day the Moranbong
Band arrived in Beijing, North Korean state media announced the country had
developed its first hydrogen bomb. Chinese leaders felt blindsided, seeing it
as a cynical ploy to corner them into accepting the announcement . Senior
Chinese leaders withdrew their attendance from the Moranbong Band shows, sending lower-level officials
instead. The Kim regime, insulted and furious, canceled the shows outright. The Moranbong Band rushed

North Korea tested its

fourth nuclear device, perhaps in a deliberate act of defiance against
Beijing. "Significantly, before previous tests, North Korea has told the Chinese that they're about to
onto a flight home, having not performed. A couple of weeks later,

test," according to Everard. "On this occasion, say the Chinese, they didn't." The breakdown in relations
was, if not a primary driver of North Korea's nuclear test, then at the very least, it would seem, a
significant precipitating factor, as it left North Korea perhaps feeling less constrained by China's wishes.
The fact that North Korea didn't give Beijing advance notice for the test makes it difficult to deny as
much. China is not abandoning North Korea "For Beijing, the goal of sanctions is not regime change,"
Brookings's Paul Park and Katharine H.S. Moon write. This week's sanctions "are not robust enough or

The
poison passing between China and North Korea is likely to dissipate . North
targeted enough to achieve regime change. If they were, China and Russia would not sign on."

Korea has never been a particularly pliant or reliable ally for Beijing. There is no reason to believe that
China's calculus in supporting the regime has changed and that may be part of why North Korea feels
so free to defy its sponsor and only ally. "China

regards stability on the Korean

peninsula as its primary interest," Eleanor Albert and Beina Xu, of the Council on Foreign
Relations, write in a good backgrounder published last month. " Beijing has consistently urged
world powers not to push Pyongyang too hard, for fear of precipitating a
regime collapse." This comes, most crucially, in lopsided trade that serves as a de facto Chinese

subsidy of North Korea: ChinaNorth Korea trade has also steadily increased in recent years: in 2014
trade between the two countries hit $6.39 billion, up from about $500 million in 2000, according to

Recent reports indicate

that bilateral trade dropped by almost 15 percent in 2015, though it is
unclear whether the dip is a result of chilled ties between Beijing and
Pyongyang or Chinas economic slowdown. Nevertheless, "there is no reason to
think that political risks emanating from North Korea will lead China to
withdraw its economic safety net for North Korea any time soon," writes CFR
figures from the Seoul-based Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency.

Senior Fellow Scott Snyder. There's a real irony here. Because North Korea is consistently and
predictably irresponsible, and because China is more sensitive to the risks incurred by North Korean
behavior, ultimately it may be China that works to mend ties. "Chinas

strategic interests in
stability and the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will require
Beijing to improve ties with Pyongyang in order to restore its leverage ,"
Snyder, the CFR fellow, has written. It's quite an ally that China's got there. But, in Chinese leaders'
view, they don't really have another choice.

Disease
Chinese leaderships flexibility and decisiveness prevents
disease outbreak empirically history proves that CCP is
only effective in health reform when leading
Blumenthal and Hsiao, 2015
(David, M.D., M.P.P., is president of The Commonwealth Fund, a national philanthropy engaged in independent research on health and social
policy issues. Dr. Blumenthal is formerly the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Health
Information and Innovation Officer at Partners Healthcare System in Boston. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the National Coordinator for
Health Information Technology, with the charge to build an interoperable, private, and secure nationwide health information system and to
support the widespread, meaningful use of health IT. He succeeded in putting in place one of the largest publicly funded infrastructure
investments the nation has ever made in such a short time period, in health care or any other field. Previously, Dr. Blumenthal was a
practicing primary care physician, director of the Institute for Health Policy, and professor of medicine and health policy at Massachusetts
General Hospital/Partners Healthcare System and Harvard Medical School. He is the author of more than 250 books and scholarly
publications, including most recently, Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and
serves on the editorial boards of the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation. He has also
served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research; is the founding chairman of AcademyHealth, the
national organization of health services researchers; and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Dr. Blumenthal
received his undergraduate, medical, and public policy degrees from Harvard University and completed his residency in internal medicine at
Massachusetts General Hospital. With his colleagues from Harvard Medical School, he authored the seminal studies on the adoption and use
of health information technology in the United States. He has held several leadership positions in medicine, government, and academia,
including senior vice president at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and executive director of the Center for Health Policy and
Management and lecturer on public policy at the Kennedy School of Government. He served previously on the board of the University of
Chicago Health System and is recipient of the Distinguished Investigator Award from Academy Health, an Honorary Doctor of Humane
Letters from Rush University and an Honorary Doctor of Science from Claremont Graduate University and the State University of New York
Downstate, and William, the K.T. Li Research Professor of Economics in Department of Health Policy and Management and Department of
Global Health and Population, at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
He is also a fully qualified actuary with extensive experience in private and social insurance. Dr. Hsiaos health economic and policy research
program spans across developed and less developed nations. He is a leading global expert in universal health insurance, which he has
studied for more than forty years. He has been actively engaged in designing health system reforms and universal health insurance
programs for many countries, including the USA, Taiwan, China, Colombia, Poland, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Sweden, Cyprus, Uganda and most
recently for Malaysia and South Africa. He also designed a single payer universal insurance model for the state of Vermont which intended
to serve as a vanguard for the USA. Vermont passed a law based on his recommendations. However the recent set-back in Vermonts
economic development has put the implementation of the single-payer system in question. In his work for developing nations, Hsiaos
research focuses on sustainable financing mechanisms to provide health care for the poor rural population. With UNICEFs support, he
collaborates with seven universities in China to conduct a nationwide study on health care financing and provision for the 900 million poor
Chinese at that time. Later, he carried out social experiment on community financing that resulted in reforming the design of Chinas health
insurance benefits for the 900 million rural residents and covered prevention and primary care. Currently, with the support of the Gates
Foundation, he launched a large scale social experiment with a population of 600,000 to experiment models to improve the financing and
delivery of basic health care for the 350 million low-income rural residents in China. This model is being replicated to the Western regions of
China. Hsiao developed the control knobs framework for diagnosing the causes for the successes or failures of national health systems.
His analytical framework has shaped how we conceptualize national health systems, and has been used extensively by various nations
around the world in health system reforms. In his past research, Hsiao developed the resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) for
setting physician fees. The RBRVS quantified the variation in resource inputs for different physician services. Hsiao was named the Man of
the Year in Medicine in 1989 for his development of a new payment method. Hsiao and his colleagues also developed a large scale simulation
model that intends to assess the fiscal and health impacts produced by various national health insurance plans. Using time series/crosssectional data, Hsiaos team designed a multi-equation model that employs a number of variables to predict utilization rates and prices of
health services. This model also predicts total health expenditures from supply and demand variables. Hsiao was elected to be a member of
the Institute of Medicine, US National Academy of Science. He was also elected to be a Board member of the National Academy of Social
Insurance and Society of Actuaries. He has published more than 180 papers and several books and served on several editorial boards of
professional journals. Hsiao served as an advisor to three US presidents, the US Congress, the World Bank, the International Monetary
Fund, World Health Organization, and International Labor Organization. He is a recipient of honorary professorships from several leading
Chinese universities and several awards from his profession, Lessons from the East Chinas Rapidly Evolving Health Care System,
International Health Care Systems, April 2, 2015, http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp1410425, Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL

At first glance, China might seem unlikely to offer useful health care lessons
to many other countries. Its health system exists within a unique
geopolitical context: a country of more than 1.3 billion people, occupying a
huge, diverse landmass, living under authoritarian single-party rule ,
and making an extraordinarily rapid transition from a Third World to a
First-World economy. But first impressions can be misleading. Since its
birth in 1949, the Peoples Republic of China has undertaken a series of
remarkable health system experiments that are instructive at many levels.
One of the most interesting lessons from the Chinese experience concerns
the value of an institution that many countries take for granted: medical
professionalism. Because the changes in Chinas health care system
have been so rapid and profound, it is helpful to briefly review its
recent history.1 What might be seen as the first of four phases began
when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. The new

government created a health system similar to those of other communist

states such as the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. The
government owned and operated all health care facilities and employed the
health care workforce. No health insurance was necessary, because
services were nearly free. A distinctive accomplishment of this phase was
the systems successful use of community health workers, so-called barefoot
doctors, to provide basic public and personal health services at the village
level. Between 1952 and 1982, Chinas infant mortality rate fell from 200 to
34 per 1000 live births, and age-old scourges such as schistosomiasis were
largely eliminated.2 In 1984, a second phase began: China turned its
health system on its head, almost as an afterthought to dramatic freemarket reforms in the rest of its economy. Led by Communist Party leader
Deng Xiaoping, China converted to a market economy and reduced the role
of government in all economic and social sectors, including health care.
Government funding of hospitals dropped dramatically, and many health
care professionals, including barefoot doctors, lost their public subsidy. The
government continued to own hospitals but exerted little control over the
behavior of health care organizations, which acted like for-profit entities in
a mostly unregulated market. Many health care workers became private
entrepreneurs. Physicians working for hospitals received hefty bonuses for
increasing hospital profits. As they responded to these new economic
imperatives, Chinese physicians had little history or tradition of
professionalism or independent professional societies to draw on. China had
transitioned from a society organized according to Confucian principles
(which did not envision the existence of a modern, independent profession
such as medicine) to a communist country (in which clinicians were state
employees owing their primary allegiance to the Communist Party) to a
quasi-market environment. At no point along this journey did physicians
have the opportunity or support to develop the norms and standards of
medical professionalism or the independent civic organizations that could
promote and enforce them. Indeed, the Chinese language has no word for
professionalism in the Western sense. To make Chinas experiment with
free-market health care even more dramatic, the Chinese reforms left the
vast majority of the population uninsured, since the government did not
provide coverage and no private insurance industry existed. As of 1999, a
total of 49% of urban Chinese had health insurance, mostly through
government and state enterprises, but only 7% of the 900 million rural
Chinese had any coverage.2 Thus, a population largely unprotected against
the cost of illness confronted a health care delivery system intent on
economic survival and a health professional workforce that had never had
the opportunity to develop as independent professionals. Indeed,
prevailing new economic rules and incentives strongly encouraged
physicians to operate like entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy. The
government kept its hand in one major aspect of health care: pricing.
Presumably to ensure access to basic care, it limited the prices charged for
certain services, such as physicians and nurses time. However, it allowed
much more generous prices for drugs and technical services, such as
advanced imaging. The predictable result: hospitals and health care
professionals greatly increased their use of drugs and high-end technical
services, driving up costs of care, compromising quality, and reducing

access for an uninsured citizenry. By the late 1990s, this market reform
experiment had resulted in public anger and distrust toward health care
institutions and professionals, and even in widespread physical attacks on
physicians. Discontent with lack of access to health care fueled public
protests, especially in less affluent rural areas, that threatened social
stability and the political control of the Communist Party. In 2003, a third
phase began, when the Chinese government took a first step toward
mitigating popular discontent with health care by introducing a modest
health insurance scheme covering some hospital expenses for rural
residents. The focus on hospital care reflected the fact that hospital
services were expensive and therefore drove many patients into poverty.
But this hospital orientation also reflected limitations in the leaderships
understanding of the critical role that competent primary care plays in
managing health and disease and controlling the costs of care. Chinese
authorities were also preoccupied with relieving the financial burden
created by much more expensive hospital services. Not surprisingly, the
2003 reforms proved insufficient to ameliorate Chinas deep-seated health
care problems. By 2008, Chinas leaders had concluded that major reforms
in both insurance and the delivery system were necessary to shore up the
system and ensure social stability. In a fourth and ongoing phase of
evolution, they officially abandoned the experiment with a health care
system based predominantly on market principles and committed to
providing affordable basic health care for all Chinese people by 2020. By
2012, a government-subsidized insurance system provided 95% of the
population with modest but comprehensive health coverage (see table).3
China also launched an effort to create a primary care system, including an
extensive nationwide network of clinics.

Chinese government vital to health reform for public

hospitals only CCP can increase medical innovation
Yip and Hsiao, 2016
(Winnie, Blavatnik School of Government; University of Oxford; Oxford, UK,
and William, Harvard School of Public Health; Boston, MA USA, What Drove
the Cycles of Chinese Health System Reforms?, Health Systems & Reform,
1:1, 52-61, DOI: 10.4161/23288604.2014.995005, Accessed: June 30, 2016,
YDEL)
The Latest Health System Reform2013 and Onward The year 2013
ushered in a new Chinese regime whose priorities imply a different set of
social values. The Third Plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the
Communist Party, held in November 2013, stipulated that the country would
place a higher priority for economic growth by deepening its economic
reform with the market playing a decisive role in the allocation of resources.
This pro-market approach also applies on the latest cycle of health
reform. Reforming public hospitals takes center stage in the current
health reform cycle. As analyzed in earlier sections, Chinese public hospitals
are for-profit entities that deliver wasteful, inefficient, and low quality

medical services. Yet these public hospitals provide over 90% of the
countrys inpatient services and more than 50% of outpatient services. The
success of Chinese health system reform therefore depends on whether the
public hospitals can be restructured. This time, the pro-market camp won
the ideological struggle; China turned to the market as a strategy to reform
its public hospitals. This reform promotes private investment in hospitals,
including privatizing public hospitals, with the target of private hospitals
reaching a 20% market share by 2015, from its current share of 10%.5355
Private hospitals would operate in an unfettered free market and their
charges will not be regulated except for services contracted by the three
health insurance schemes. The reform policy went one step further,
restricting any expansion of public hospitals.56 Although not made explicit,
the motivation behind privatization can be interpreted partly as a strategic
move to use private sector competition to stimulate changes in the
otherwise stymied public hospital reform, and partly naively treating the
health sector as just another sector to boost economic growth. Furthermore,
relying on private investors to fund hospitals would reduce the need for
public investment in hospitals. Besides the hospital sector, the current
reform contains some other pro-market measures in the insurance market.
It encourages private health insurance to cover private hospital services
and to supplement the basic social health insurance, including long-term
care; considering using private insurance firms to serve the purchaser role
under Chinas social health insurance program; similar to the US Medicare
program and allowing private insurance companies to set up their own
health care facilities.57,58 In addition, China designated health
services and biomedical as top growth industries that would enjoy
favorable government tax and fiscal policie s.59 Domestic and
international private investors have responded enthusiastically to the latest
reform. The return on capital is expected to reach 25%. Pharmaceutical and
medical device conglomerates are building or purchasing private hospitals.
Some cities are selling their public hospitals to investors. The impacts of
these changes are yet to unfold. However, if international experience can be
a guide, we can predict that the private hospitals will largely serve the
affluent households who can either pay high charges out-of-pocket or
purchase private insurance to cover the expenses. Chinas health system
will become a two-tiered system. With private hospitals operating in an
unfettered free market, health expenditure inflation will accelerate as public
and private hospitals engage in a medical high technology arms race

Economy

Authoritarian Good For Econ

Chinese authoritarianism makes capitalism sustainable
Evans, 2015
Toby, Examine whether authoritarian capitalism is a viable alternative to its
Western liberal version, to promote long term economic growth and
development, Mont Pelerin, Dec 19, 2015, https://www.montpelerin.org/wpcontent/uploads/2015/12/Toby-Evans.pdf, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
For years the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism has been producing
steady increases in growth and economic output. Economic policy is
decided by the top echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and
passed down. Many economists have lauded the use of "Beijing Consensus"
as an effective means of introducing economic selfdetermination, growth
and sustainability , and an alternative for liberaldemocratic capitalism. 18
Before Mao's death in 1976, China suffered from the same economic
problems as many of the other socialist and communist governments of the
era. Namely, economic stagnation brought about by a lack of incentives,
outdated machinery and inefficient governance.19 After Mao's death, the
leaders of the CCP decided that significant reform was necessary to boost
China's economic stability. Thus, many neoliberal economic policies were
introduced, while maintaining the primacy of the Party. This has lead to the
socialist economy and its inefficiencies largely being swept aside by the fast
tempo of Chinese economic development and the introduction of a
capitalist system in the country. The Chinese government has introduced
neoliberalism as a method of obtaining lasting economic growth and
development it is being used as a tool rather than a political ideal. 20 Where
a liberaldemocratic country decides economic policy based on a measure of
consensus and public opinion, as mentioned above, the Chinese system
involves decision making by a small oligarchy of rulers whose policies are
quickly initiated nationwide. Thus, many capitalistic policies have been
initiated in China, such as the introduction of the free market and the
privatisation of the elements of production, reductions in social welfare and
the attraction of foreign investment. 21 These policies have produced
great success for China's economy . According to a 2006 Congressional
brief from the Federation of American Scientists, China's average annual
gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate in the postreform period (19792005) is around 9.7%, whereas the prereform (19601978) figure is just
5.3%. 22 According to the brief, this growth was brought about through a
large increase in foreign investment, coupled with an increase in industrial
productivity. Furthermore, there was a reallocation of resources to areas of
strength, including agricultural reforms which allowed rural peasants to
seek employment in manufacturing and other industries, as well as
economic decentralisation and noninterference in new enterprise. 23 Thus,
we can see that through the introduction of an authoritarian
capitalist model at the expense of socialism, China has almost
doubled its yearly growth rate.

Strong CCP sustains constant economic growth

Deng, 2016
Yong, Professor of Political Science at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis,
Maryland. He is the author of Chinas Struggle for Status: The Realignment
of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His latest
essay is China: The Post-Responsible Power, The Washington Quarterly,
Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter 2015), Dealing with Assertive China: Time for
Engagement 2.0, Harvard International Review, January 12, 2016,
http://hir.harvard.edu/dealing-assertive-china-time-engagement-2-0/,
Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL
Domestic preoccupation with the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)state security, sustained growth, nationalism, political and territorial defense
of sovereignty, and great-power status are the persistent goals in Chinas
foreign policy. The global financial crisis accelerated the relative power shift
in Chinas favor and undermined the institutional and political authority of
the post-cold war world order. But international events must be filtered
through domestic politics to account for the real challenges posed by an
assertive China. The change started from home. In the past several years,
Chinese politics has turned inward towards its own history and national
conditions in search of a uniquely Chinese form of government. If his
predecessor Hu Jintaos harmonious society emphasized inclusive growth
and social-economic justice President Xis China dream reflects an
explicitly nationalist approach to politics. The national dream of
prosperity and greatness can only be fulfilled with a uniquely suited
Chinese style of governance under the CCP leadership. Constructed in
contrast to Western multi-party democracy, the Chinese model emphasizes
separation from, and often superiority to, Western political systems.
Ironically, such political confidence fuels fear of Western conspiracy to start
a color revolution, a cascade of popular uprisings that could bring down the
communist regime. As a result, the current government has ratcheted up
regulation over intellectual debate, political activism, civil society, and
foreign non-governmental organizations. As China becomes the second
largest economy, its industrial policy is no longer just for catch-up
development but favors the state sector and its own strategically important
industries in order to improve national competitiveness relative to advanced
economies. Beijings economic statecraft has shifted from a piecemeal policy
tool to an explicit strategic instrument. Chinas economic globalization is not
simply a one-way street whereby it would adapt to the global marketplace
and comply with the international regimes. The fact that many economies
that are deeply dependent on China are also politically and strategically
ambivalent towards the country has contributed to a unique set of security
externalities that Beijing has to contend with. Beijing is hardly pleased that
many of its economic partners turn to the United States for political support
and security protection. As its economy grows stronger, China has stepped
up efforts to leverage its economic prowess for diplomatic and strategic
purposes. The global financial crisis decidedly facilitated Chinas economic
expansion abroad in trade, investment, finance, and even outbound tourism.
That gives Beijing non-military instruments to punish trading partners for

stepping over the line. More importantly, however, China has used its
economic prowess to cultivate circles of friendly nations. Since 2013,
President Xi has launched a well-coordinated program of economic
globalization westward towards Europe on land and at sea, known as the
Silk Road. While focused on Chinese investment in infrastructure
development, the program is tied to the economic and geopolitical agendas
of the next phase of Chinas domestic and international transitions. As part
of the plan, China has led the creation of multilateral institutions, such as
the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with 60-plus inaugural
member states, and BRICS Development Bank.

Chinese government provides basis for sustainable

economy
Rudd, 2015
Kevin, Australias 26th Prime Minister (2007-2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010- 2012). He led
Australias response during the Global Financial Crisis, reviewed by the IMF as the most effective
stimulus strategy of all major economies. Australia was the only major developed economy not to go into
recession. Mr. Rudd was a co-founder of the G20, established to drive the global response to the crisis,
and which through its actions in 2009 prevented the global economy from spiraling into depression. As
Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in regional and global foreign policy
leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the U.S. and Russia
in 2010, having in 2008 launched an initiative for the long-term transformation of the EAS into a wider
Asia Pacific Community. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in
2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. He represented Australia at the 2009
Copenhagen Climate Change Summit which produced the Copenhagen Accord, for the first time
committing states to not allow temperature increases beyond two degrees. He was a member of the UN
High Level Panel on Global Sustainability and is a co-author of the report Resilient People, Resilient
Planet for the 2012 Rio+20 Conference. Mr. Rudd drove Australias successful bid for a non-permanent
seat on the UN Security Council for 2012-14. His government also saw the near doubling of Australias
foreign aid budget to approximately $5 billion, making Australia then one of the top ten aid donors in the
world. He also appointed Australias first ever Ambassador for Women and Girls to support the critical
role of women in development and reduce physical and sexual violence against women. Domestically, Mr.
Rudd delivered a formal apology to indigenous Australians. In education, his government introduced
Australias first nation-wide school curriculum, undertook a record capital investment program in
Australian schools with the building of thousands of new state-of-the-art libraries, as well as introducing
the first mandatory national assessment system for literacy and numeracy standards. In health, Mr. Rudd
in 2010 negotiated the National Health and Hospitals Reform Agreement, the biggest reform of and
investment in the health system since the introduction of Medicare 30 years before. His government
established a national network of leading-edge cancer-care centers across Australia, before introducing
the worlds first ever plain-packaging regime for all tobacco products. To improve the rate of organ and
tissue donation, he established the National Organ and Tissue Transplant Authority. In 2010, he
introduced Australias first paid parental leave scheme and implemented the biggest increase in, and
reform of, the age pension in a century. He also founded the National Broadband Network to deliver highspeed broadband for every household, business, school, hospital and GP in the country. Mr. Rudd is
President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York. ASPI is a think-do tank dedicated to second
track diplomacy to assist governments and businesses on policy challenges within Asia, and between
Asia, the U.S. and the West. He is also Chair of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism where in
2015-6 he leads a review of the UN system. Mr. Rudd is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School
where in 2014-15 he completed a major policy report on Alternative Futures for U.S.-China Relations.
He is a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, and a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in
Chicago. Mr. Rudd is a member of the Comprehensive Test Ban Organizations Group of Eminent Persons.
He is proficient in Mandarin Chinese, serves as a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and
co-chairs the China Global Affairs Council of the World Economic Forum. Mr. Rudd in his private
capacity has established the National Apology Foundation to continue the work of reconciliation and
closing the gap with indigenous Australians, as well as the Asia Pacific Community Foundation to promote
regional security, economic, and environmental cooperation, and the development of effective regional
institutional architecture for the future, U.S.-China 21 The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi
Jinping Toward a new Framework of Constructive Realism for a Common Purpose, Harvard Kennedy
School: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, April 2015,

http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/Summary%20Report%20US-China
%2021.pdf, Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL
Sorry, but on balance, the Chinese economic model is probably
sustainable. On the sustainability of Chinese economic growth as the
continuing basis of Chinese national power, on balance we should assume a
Chinese growth rate in the medium to medium-high range (i.e. in excess of
6 percent) as probable for the period under review. This takes into account
both official and unofficial statistics on the recent slowing of the rate. It also
takes into account lower levels of global demand for Chinese exports, high
levels of domestic debt, the beginning of a demographically driven shrinking
in the labor force, continued high levels of domestic savings, at best modest
levels of household consumption, an expanding private sector still
constrained by state-owned monoliths, and a growing environmental crisis.
But it also takes into account the vast battery of Chinese policy responses to
each of these and does not assume that these are by definition destined to
fail. Furthermore, if Chinas growth rate begins to falter, China has
sufficient fiscal and monetary policy capacity to intervene to ensure the
growth rate remains above 6 percent, which is broadly the number policy
makers deem to be necessary to maintain social stability. It is equally
unconvincing to argue that Chinas transformation from an old economic
growth model (based on a combination of high levels of state infrastructure
investment and low-wage, labor-intensive manufacturing for export), to a
new model (based on household consumption, the services sector and a
strongly innovative private sector) is also somehow doomed to failure. This
is a sophisticated policy blueprint developed over many years and is
necessary to secure Chinas future growth trajectory through
different drivers of demand to those that have powered Chinese
growth rates in the past . There is also a high level of political backing to
drive implementation. The process and progress of implementation has so
far been reasonable. Moreover, to assume that Chinas seasoned policy
elites will somehow prove to be less capable in meeting Chinas next set of
economic policy challenges than they have been with previous sets of major
policy challenges over the last 35 years is just plain wrong . China does
face a bewildering array of policy challenges and it is possible that any one
of these could significantly de-rail the Governments economic program. But
it is equally true that Chinese policy elites are more sophisticated now than
at any time since the current period of reform began back in 1978, and are
capable of rapid and flexible policy responses when necessary. For these
reasons, and others concerning the structure of Chinese politics, the report
explicitly rejects the China collapse thesis recently advanced by David
Shambaugh. It would also be imprudent in the extreme for Americas China
policy to be based on an implicit (and sometimes explicit) policy assumption
that China will either economically stagnate or politically implode because
of underlying contradictions in its overall political economy. This would
amount to a triumph of hope over cold, hard analysis.

China is stable now but continued economic success is

necessarythe CCP could collapse
THE GUARDIAN 2015
(China's workers abandon the city as Beijing faces an economic storm, August 26,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/27/china-small-time-recyclers-down-ontheir-luck-amid-stock-market-turmoil)

the human impact of the Chinese

slump which has been gathering pace since late 2011 was still relatively muted. You
dont see mass unemployment yet. That may come but you dont necessarily see it now.
Fraser Howie, the co-author of Red Capitalism, said

China slowdown is the world's next nightmare

Read more

Chinas stability-obsessed Communist party rulers would be

deeply troubled by the prospect of growing unrest.
Much of the partys legitimacy comes from the economy and from the
Faustian bargain of limited political freedoms and social freedoms against
economic prosperity, said Howie. Any time there is a slowing economy the
government is concerned about it for exactly those reasons the people lose their jobs, there
Nevertheless,

will not be the wage growth, people will not be able to enjoy the benefits of prosperity.

party stability is on
the line if the economy doesnt work.
Intra-party battles are already going on thick and fast. The Chinese
Communist party is more worried than almost any outside observer about
the stability of the party. Foreigners always say: Oh, yes, it will be fine. But
I think the Chinese communists are far better aware of how they could be
toppled or how their party could collapse from the inside relatively quickly.
There are lots of reasons to see these as very fragile times, very brittle times. There is an
appearance of strength but actually things could crack or break relatively
easily. It is hugely difficult.
The Beijing-run Global Times recognised these concerns on Thursday. If the Chinese economy
crumbles and people are on the edge of starvation, no regime can sustain its
rule, it said in an editorial. But will periodic economic slowdowns and difficulties
in adjustment hurt the legality of Chinas political system? Thats a delusion .
Nor was social upheaval the partys only concern. The fear has to be that

Impact
Chinese economic downturn sparks war and lashout
Chang, 2013
(Gordon, worked in Shanghai and Hong Kong for almost two decades and now write primarily on China,
Asia, and nuclear proliferation. I am the author of two Random House books, The Coming Collapse of
China and Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World. My writings have appeared in The New
York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard, among other
publications. I blog at World Affairs Journal. I have given briefings in Washington and other capitals and
have appeared on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, CNBC, and PBS. I served two
terms as a trustee of Cornell University, The Biggest Threat To China's Economy, April 14, 2013,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonchang/2013/04/14/the-biggestthreat-to-chinas-economy/#2d4b44343690, Accessed: July 13, 2016, YDEL)

There are many reasons for Beijing new assertiveness, but one
Forbes,

stands out: slowing GDP growth , evident since the early summer of 2011. The
economic problems in particular have created a dangerous dynamic,
trapping China in a self-reinforcingand self-defeatingloop . In this loop,
the slumping economy is leading to a crisis of legitimacy, the legitimacy
crisis is causing Beijing to fall back on nationalism and increase friction with
its neighbors, and the increased friction is aggravating the countrys
economic difficulties. Caught in a trap of their own making, Beijing leaders will
continue to blame foreigners for the problems evident in Chinese society
and then lash out , as they did in September against Japan, over the uninhabited Senkaku
Islands in the East China Sea. And as they lash out, they are making their problems
worse. The anti-Japan protests in China last fall, for instance, are resulting in Japanese industry
reducing its commitment to China by shifting investments into Southeast Asia, as Nissan announced at
the end of October. That, in turn, could push the Chinese economy past the tipping point. Moreover,

the North Korean crisis, which Beijing has been aggravating behind the
scenes, is not helping the Chinese economy either. Commerce between China and the
North seems largely unaffected, as various reports from the border crossings indicate. But the Kim
regime in Pyongyang seems to be targeting the South Korean economy with
its threats, and that is beginning to have some effect. The North Koreans
are now using the propaganda in an extreme form to try to damage foreign
direct investments into South Korea, says Tom Coyner, author of Doing Business in
Korea, to the New York Times. They are, in a sense at this point, winning in an
asymmetrical psychological warfare, attacking the economic strength of
South Korea. And as the Times points out, South Koreans know their globalized
economy has much more to lose than the Norths isolated and already highly
sanctioned economy. Yet Pyongyang leaders may be taking down more than just the South. In
an interconnected world, they may be damaging the other networked economies in the region, those of

All three economiesSouth Korea, Japan, and Chinahave

integrated themselves into the others, for instance making the others part of
the global supply chains of their companies. In these circumstances, it is unlikely
that only South Korea will be damaged. The South is Chinas third-largest
trading partner, and it is Chinas fifth-largest source of foreign direct
investment. Trade between China and South Korea increased 40 times in 20 years. It rose 18.6% in
2011 to $245.6 billion, a record high. So South Koreas troubles will eventually becomes
Chinas. Ultimately, Beijings strategy of making itself a danger to its
neighbors cannot be good for its economy. Worse, China is making itself an
Japan and China.

adversary of its most important customer, the United States. Last month, Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper elevated cyber attacks above terrorism as the
most serious national security threat. China, of course, is Americas number one
cyber adversary. Being named your biggest customers biggest threat is not
smart strategy. And there is a broader issue. For more than four decades, Washington has
sought to engage Beijing and bring it into the international community .
Inside the existing geopolitical order China prospered, and in the past quarter century the people who
have benefited the most from the American-led system are not the Americans but the Chinese. In a
peaceful world the Chinese manufactured and traded their way up through the ranks of nations and, as a
consequence, transformed their country for the better. Yet their leaders no longer accept the world as it
is. Once deft, subtle, and patient, Chinese diplomacy has, especially since the end of 2009, become shrill
and hostile.

And Beijing has increasingly set itself against America as well

as its generals and admirals. We are now hearing war talk in the Chinese capital from civilians, such as
new leader Xi Jinping, and flag officers alike.

Unfortunately for Chinese policymakers,

the

resulting controversies are occurring in conjunction with others,

both internal and external . As Fitch suggested last week, more geopolitical risk is
the one factor, during this period of economic fragility, that could push the
Chinese economy over the edge.

Chinese economic collapse causes hardline takeover and

civil warthe impact is worldwide nuclear and biological
war and WMD terrorism
MARCUS 2015
(Staff writer, OTG News, The REAL Chinese Economy Exposed, Off the Grid News,
date is copyright date; accessed 12/13/2015,
http://www.offthegridnews.com/financial/the-real-chinese-economy-exposed/)

An obvious victim of economic collapse in China will be the Chinese Communist

Party, which has staked its reputation on economic success. The economic success

now looks like a giant con game, and guess who the Chinese mob will blame? Hint: it wont be the United
States of America.

Events in Russia in 1991 and the Middle East last year showed us how quickly
totalitarian and authoritarian governments can collapse. The situation is often here today,
gone tomorrow. This can create a power vacuum that can lead to worse
tyranny and war. The collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and 30s led to
Hitler and the Nazis. The collapse of the Russian Empire led to Lenin and the Soviet Union.
The situation in China today is a lot like that in France in 1789, where the
monarchy, having bankrupted the country, turned to the middle class for help. Bungled attempts at
financial reform led to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror in which the king and queen and

The result was Napoleon and twenty years

of war that tore Europe apart. Napoleon, like Hitler, tried to solve his nations
economic problems by invading other nations and pillaging them.
Chinese Chaos Could Lead to Catastrophe
many innocent people were sent to the guillotine.

It is unclear who or what would replace the Chinese Communist Party. The party has effectively crushed

there is simply nobody outside the party

capable of exercising any sort of real leadership. The result will probably be
chaos on a massive scale, particularly if the Chinese military and security forces dont get paid.
or stifled all opposition. As in Russia in 1991,

Something else to remember and get scared of is that China has nuclear weapons. Unlike North Korea
and Iran,

China has nuclear missiles capable of hitting the U.S. right now. What

happens to them if there is no government left in Beijing? Who would be

controlling the 3,000 nuclear weapons in China right now?
This doesnt even count other weapons of mass destruction that China might have. When the Soviet
Union collapsed, it was discovered that the Russians had a massive secret stockpile of biological weapons

there are huge stockpiles of

biological weapons or massive biological weapons factories in China today.
What happens to those weapons if the Communist government collapses and
Chinese military personnel are going hungry? One possibility is that those
weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists . Another is that they could fall into the
hands of homegrown Chinese extremists, such as diehard Communists, Islamic
insurgents, or Messianic cults.
they hadnt told anybody about. Theres a strong possibility that

Environment

General
No one other than authoritarianism in China can solve
environmental degradation
Beeson, 2015
(Mark, Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia. Before rejoining UWA in
2015, he taught at Murdoch, Griffith, Queensland, York (UK) and Birmingham, where he was also head of
department. Marks work is centred on the politics, economics and security of the broadly conceived
Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of more than 150 journal articles and book chapters, and the
founding editor of Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific (Palgrave). Recent books include, Institutions of the
Asia-Pacific: ASEAN, APEC and Beyond, (Routledge, 2009, Securing Southeast Asia: The Politics of
Security Sector Reform, (with Alex Bellamy, Routledge, 2008), Regionalism and Globalization in East
Asia: Politics, Security and Economic Development, (Palgrave, 2007), and edited collections Issues in 21st
Century World Politics (with Nick Bisley, Palgrave), and The Routledge Handbook of Asian Regionalism,
Routledge (with Richard Stubbs). He is co-editor of Contemporary Politics, and wants to encourage
colleagues to consider this rapidly improving journal as an outlet for their next publication,
Environmental Au thoritarianism and China, July 24, 2015,

https://www.academia.edu/14542093/Environmental_authoritarianism_and_
China, Accessed: June 26, 2016, YDEL)
Democracy is a remarkable invention, but as recent events in the Middle
East and even parts of Europe remind us, it is fragile and susceptible to
rollbacks (Diamond 2008). In the absence of the right sort of economic
and social conditions it is difficult to achieve and sustain. Many observers
have drawn attention to the potential impact a deteriorating environment
may have on social and political life (Homer-Dixon 1999; Dyer 2010). Such
implacable material forces may prove a challenge for established
democracies, let alone those with no history of such practices. Much will
depend on the scale and severity of the changes triggered by climate
change and the ability of governments of any sort to counter them.
Unfortunately, the likes of Ophuls and Heilbroner may ultimately prove to
be alarmingly prescient, but not quite in the way they imagined, perhaps.
Ironically, the fate of the remarkably resilient and now universal
capitalist system may ultimately rest with the leaders of a
notionally communist and still authoritarian state . While it is not
clear that authoritarian regimes will prove any more capable of dealing with
the sorts of unprecedented challenges governments of all sorts confront in
dealing with environmental problems, there are a number of reasons for
believing that authoritarian responses are increasingly possible, even likely
in places such as China. First, China already is an authoritarian regime and
political change has been limited even in comparatively favorable
circumstances. Second, the sorts of massive, rapid shifts in energy and
infrastructure provision needed to address environmental degradation seem
more feasible in China given its extant track record. This is no guarantee of
success, of course, which leads to a third consideration. If Chinas leaders
are unable to engineer a massive change in the health and sustainability of
the natural environment then existing patterns of social unrest are likely to
intensify. To judge from Chinas history and the absence of any democratic
tradition, social instability is more likely to trigger a Tiananmen-style
authoritarian crack down, than it is a democratic revolution. The best hope,
perhaps, is that the Chinese leadership will have the political space and
time to institute reforms that will make a difference to the way the country

is governed, the way the economy works, and the way the natural
environment is managed. It has been suggested that China is uniquely
placed to develop some sort of middle way between Asian-style technocratic
rule and the market-oriented democracies of the West. The hope is that this
will result in a form of intelligent governance that will reconcile
knowledgeable democracy with accountable meritocracy (Berggruen and
Gardels, 2013: 13). It may prove to be wishful thinking, but it is important to
recognize how astounding and unprecedented Chinas experience has
already been. As even the liberal, pro-market Economist (2013: 18), points
out, If China cannot do it, no one can.

Democracy is overstated structural problems undermine

effective policies toward climate change
Beeson, 2015
(Mark, Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia. Before rejoining UWA in
2015, he taught at Murdoch, Griffith, Queensland, York (UK) and Birmingham, where he was also head of
department. Marks work is centred on the politics, economics and security of the broadly conceived
Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of more than 150 journal articles and book chapters, and the
founding editor of Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific (Palgrave). Recent books include, Institutions of the
Asia-Pacific: ASEAN, APEC and Beyond, (Routledge, 2009, Securing Southeast Asia: The Politics of
Security Sector Reform, (with Alex Bellamy, Routledge, 2008), Regionalism and Globalization in East
Asia: Politics, Security and Economic Development, (Palgrave, 2007), and edited collections Issues in 21st
Century World Politics (with Nick Bisley, Palgrave), and The Routledge Handbook of Asian Regionalism,
Routledge (with Richard Stubbs). He is co-editor of Contemporary Politics, and wants to encourage
colleagues to consider this rapidly improving journal as an outlet for their next publication,
Environmental Au thoritarianism and China, July 24, 2015,

https://www.academia.edu/14542093/Environmental_authoritarianism_and_
China, Accessed: June 26, 2016, YDEL)
The interconnected significance of politics and economics is especially
pertinent in a Chinese context. Not only has the uneven development of capitalism within
the world and China itself created major problems and contradictions (Smith 2008; Wang and Hu

Chinas historical developmental experience means that political

and economic forces are tightly enmeshed in ways that shape environmental
politics, too. Indeed, the central comparative point to emphasize in this
context is that Chinas history has been quite unlike that of the West and
shows no sign of converging on any sort of Western template in the
foreseeable future. On the contrary, one of the most striking contradictions and paradoxes to
1999), but

emerge in Chinas recent history is that despite what is essentially a highly successful capitalist class
coming to dominate economic activity in the Peoples Republic, the reality is that they have shown
little collective inclination to push for the sort of political liberalism that was the hallmark of Europes

Chinas unique historical

experience merits emphasis for two further reasons. First, one of the
reasons that Chinas expanding capitalist class has played little part in
pushing for political liberalization isin part, at leastbecause China has
subscribed to East Asias state-led tradition of economic development.
Powerful interventionist states have been the norm, especially in northeast Asia, and they have often
transition to capitalism some 200 years or so earlier (Tsai 2007).

enjoyed a good deal of performance legitimacy as a consequence (Beeson 2014). It is striking that
such surveys of popular opinion as do exist in China routinely show higher levels of satisfaction among
the general population than exist in the United States or Western Europe (Tang et al. 2013). It is also

people are broadly satisfied with their standard of living and

seemingly willing to make the implicit trade-off between economic
development and political emancipation (Han 2012). Plainly, environmental pressures
evident that many

could change this picture, but even if they do, it is far from clear that this will presage a shift to

a second reason for stressing

Chinas distinctive developmental trajectory is that there is no history of
democracy in mainland China and civil society remains relatively underdeveloped and closely controlled. Lo (2010: 1016) claims that Chinese discourse
democracy or a more inclusive attitude to public policy. Indeed,

on climate change is highly pragmatic and dominated by

governmental actors . . . Opposition social forces are perhaps even
less influential in China than in other major developing countries.
Of course, things could changeperhaps abruptly. Many observers have questioned whether the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can maintain its grip on power when its ideological raison dtre has
long since disappeared and its primary function has been to oversee the management of the economy
and the constellation of elite level economic and political interests that effectively constitute it

environmental issues generally

represent a profound threat to the extant orderas they do everywhere, for that
matter. What gives the issues a particular immediacy in China is both the well documented
deterioration in the environment itself, and the potential impact this could
have on economic activity (The Economist 2013). The key concern here is that
Chinas environmental problems are becoming so severe, that they have
the potential to bring the country to its knees economically (Economy 2004: 25).
Chinas environmental problems are, like everything else about the country, on an epic
scale. The recent much-publicized problems with Beijings air quality are but the latest in a series of
(Brdsgaard 2012; Li 2012). It is in this context that

problems revolving around water shortages, soil erosion, and pollution which are quite literally taking

Chinese case especially

significant in this regard, however, is not simply the size of the problem, but
the response this has triggered on the part of the state. One of the great paradoxes
years off the lives of its citizens (Silk 2013). What makes the

of authoritarian rule in China is what has been described as its fragmented nature (Lieberthal 1992).
While Chinas political system may appear monolithic this conceals inter-agency rivalries, factional
politics, and intense competition over the nature of policy. As in much of the world, the

failure of
environmental policies is related to the dominance of economic policy
institutions over environmental policy institutions (He et al. 2012: 35). As a
consequence, environmental policies can seem rather schizophrenic and contradictory at times. On the
one hand,

energy

China has become the worlds largest investor in renewable

(Crooks 2011).

On the other hand, however, policy continues to be heavily influenced by power companies, the oil industry, and powerful

state-owned industries who are opposed to reform. These companies have either ignored the directives of government or used their positions on various committees to

Chinas elites acutely conscious of

the potential the environment has to create social unrest, especially given the
water down the reforms themselves (Wong 2013).

Recent events have made

growing importance of social media (Hille 2013). Premier Li Keqiangs (2014: 2930) address to the
Twelfth National Peoples Congress acknowledged that environmental pollution has become a major
problem, which is natures red-light warning against the model of inefficient and blind development.

Chinas leadership apparently increasingly willing to acknowledge

the extent of the problem, but Xi Jinping is widely regarded as the most
powerful president since Deng Xiaoping (Sheridan 2014). Xi consequently has the
potential to act in ways that may have eluded some of his more factionally
constrained predecessors, but this is no guarantee that this power will be used in constructive ways. On the contrary, not only do
Not only is

Chinas leaders seem preoccupied with pursuing territorial claims and historical grudges with neighbors (Chan 2014), but one of the main responses to pollution
along the densely-populated Eastern seaboard is to shift the offending industries to the far west (Scott 2014).

Democratic policies empirically fail China can best shape

international norms to combat global climate change
Beeson, 2015
(Mark, Professor of International Politics at the University of Western Australia. Before rejoining UWA in
2015, he taught at Murdoch, Griffith, Queensland, York (UK) and Birmingham, where he was also head of
department. Marks work is centred on the politics, economics and security of the broadly conceived
Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of more than 150 journal articles and book chapters, and the

founding editor of Critical Studies of the Asia Pacific (Palgrave). Recent books include, Institutions of the
Asia-Pacific: ASEAN, APEC and Beyond, (Routledge, 2009, Securing Southeast Asia: The Politics of
Security Sector Reform, (with Alex Bellamy, Routledge, 2008), Regionalism and Globalization in East
Asia: Politics, Security and Economic Development, (Palgrave, 2007), and edited collections Issues in 21st
Century World Politics (with Nick Bisley, Palgrave), and The Routledge Handbook of Asian Regionalism,
Routledge (with Richard Stubbs). He is co-editor of Contemporary Politics, and wants to encourage
colleagues to consider this rapidly improving journal as an outlet for their next publication,
Environmental Au thoritarianism and China, July 24, 2015,

https://www.academia.edu/14542093/Environmental_authoritarianism_and_
China, Accessed: June 26, 2016, YDEL)
Nevertheless, it is clear that China now has the capacity, by intent or
inadvertence, to shape policy outcomes of concern to the international
community. The inverted commas are merited because it is questionable whether such a grouping actually
exists in this or any other policy domain (Ellis 2009). The reality, of course, is that even in less
challenging policy areas, such as financial sector reform, where the
problems seem clear and the remedies are feasible, agreements are made
difficult by clashing national interests, influential lobbies, and the
unwillingness of established states to cede authority and influence to
newcomers (Wade 2011). The great hope held by many outside China has
been that Chinas elites and diplomats will be socialized into the
ways of Western diplomacy and adjust their behavior accordingly.
Although there is clear evidence that this has happened to some extent (Johnston 2008)China is plainly not the
destabilizing revolutionary force it once wasthe

technical and political impediments to

international agreements over complex, contested issues remain formidable.
It is often assumed that it will continue to be the West that is in the
vanguard of shaping the international order in the future. Great expectations
were held about the EUs capacity to play a leadership role in climate
change politics in particular (Patterson 2009), before economic crises, the failure of its
carbon trading scheme, and the renaissance of the coal industry effectively
put paid to such hopes (Peiser 2013). Now however, it is authoritarian China rather
than the EU or the United States that is making the biggest
contribution to both creating and addressing some of the most
fundamental environmental challenges of our time. Significantly, however, it is
primarily domestic rather than international pressure that is forcing the
Chinese government to act as it is compelled to address the reality of a
degraded environment that represents a failure of its developmental model
and the leaders who guide it. While the ability of domestic NGOs to influence government policy is still
comparatively limited and evolving (Zhan and Tang 2013), there is no doubt that what Economy (2014) describes as
the

environmental awakening of the Chinese people is now an entrenched

and growing part of national life to which governments are scrambling to
respond. Although we cannot know how successful Chinas people and its leaders will be in dealing with these
monumental and unprecedented challenges, it is possible that non-democratic responses to
dealing with environmental problems are likely to become more common
rather than less. If China is even moderately successful this could add to the
relative standing of the so-called China model in particular and of the
attraction of top-down, state-led responses to environmental problems more
generally (Zhang and Sun 2012). According to one high profile report, at least, the net result may well be that,
Among political systems, authoritarian ideologies would certainly be the
winners. One way or the other, severe climate change will weaken the capacity of liberal democratic systems to
maintain public confidence (Campbell et al. 2007: 77).

Chinese Communist Party best equipped to combat global

warming even though they are the leading cause of
pollution, they have want to curb emissions in their
national interest cites UN Climate Chief
Bastasch, 2014
Michael, covers energy and the environment at the Daily Caller News
Foundation, UN climate chief: Communism is best to fight global warming,
January 15, 2014, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2014/01/15/unclimate-chief-communism-is-best-to-fight-global-warming/, Accessed: July 5,
2016, YDEL
United Nations climate chief Christiana Figueres said that
democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming.
Communist China, she says, is the best model. China may be the
worlds top emitter of carbon dioxide and struggling with major pollution
problems of their own, but the country is doing it right when it comes to
fighting global warming says Figueres. They actually want to breathe air that they dont have to look at, she said. Theyre
not doing this because they want to save the planet. Theyre doing it
because its in their national interest. Figueres added that the deep partisan divide in
the U.S. Congress is very detrimental to passing any sort of legislation to
fight global warming. The Chinese Communist Party , on the other hand, can push
key policies and reforms all on its own . The countrys national
legislature largely enforces the decisions made by the partys Central
Committee and other executive offices. Communism was responsible for the deaths of about 94 million people in China,
the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century. China alone was responsible for 65 million of those deaths under communist rule.

The country set a

goal of getting 15 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2020. In
2012, China got 9 percent of its power from renewables the U.S. by contrast got 11 percent in
Environmentalists often hail China as a model for fighting global warming, since they are a leader in renewable energy.

2012. However, the country still gets 90 percent of its power from fossil fuels, mostly from coal. In fact, Chinese coal demand is expected to explode as the country
continues to develop. China has approved 100 million metric tons of new coal production capacity in 2013 as part of the governments plan to bring 860 million metric
tons of coal production online by 2015.

China has publicly made big efforts to clean up its

environment. The countrys booming industrial apparatus has caused so much pollution that the skies have been darkened over major cities and the air
quality has heavily deteriorated. The Wall Street Journal notes that Chinas air quality was so bad that about 1.2 million people died prematurely in China in 2010 as a
result of air pollution and Chinese government figures show that lung cancer is now the leading cause of death from malignant tumors. Many of those dying are

The Communist Partys National

Action Plan spent $275 billion to combat rampant pollution through 2017,
including reducing particulate matter 2.5 levels in the Beijing region by 25
percent.
nonsmokers. The Soviet blocs environmental track record was similarly dismal.

Western democracies lack the decision-making process to

solve environmental degradation only a risk that Chinese
authoritarianism solves through new urbanization
Chen, Noesselt, and Witt 2016
Geoffrey, Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Germany, Nele, Professor at the Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST,
University of Duisburg-Essen, Lukas, Associate
Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Environmentalism without Democracy? Green Urbanization in China,

Conference Paper, 21 23 March 2016,

https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/conference/papers/2016/Conference
%20Paper_PSA2016_3.pdf, Accessed: June 25, 2016, YDEL
In the above analysis, our study on the case through the priorities of the
different leaders showed that, at the level of institutional strategies, the
process of green urbanization indicates a transitional paradigm of
authoritarian environmentalism, which differentiated the Hu-Wen and Xi-Li
administrations in regarding centralization as a government policy tool. In
other words, the top-down mode of governing strategies (Dingceng sheji)
has been seen as a kind of state managing approach for reconciling
endogenous contradictory imperatives of developmental and environmental
needs. Under the fifth generation of leadership, we find that, in operating
practices, the participatory mode of decision-making that originated
from the emancipatory tradition of environmentalism in the
Western context is still lacking in the decision making process ; in
the face of the situation of crisis, the Chinese Communist Party did not
seek to set its policy in accordance to the global environmental governance
paradigmsustainable developmentto delegate the policy decision-making
power to the lower level of government and to cultivate dialogue in the civil
society. On the contrary, they have sought to implement the opposite
institutional reconfigurations of New Urbanization: defragmented
instruments that use cohesive political control mechanisms to re-centralize
policy incentives and enforcement implementations with the aim of reduce
negative consequences of rapid modernization. Being aware of the policy
differences in its large-scale treatment system, the policy elites standardize
the implementation of urban policies from top to bottom. The recent policy
documents indicate that the new preference is intended to strengthen the
existing top-level structure of the hierarchical command system to
consolidate the powers of environmental and urban planning. This change of
defragmented environmentalism is precisely designed to solve the
drawbacks of economic decentralization since the reform and opening-up
process, which include large-scale population flux, unequal development
between migration and urban residents, and naturally, carbon emissions
and the arising crisis of environmental setback resulting from the
modernization process. The process of rapid modernization monolithically
focuses on accumulating local GDP data that show the lack of policy
incentives for mitigating the justice gap and the under performance of
environmental policies. The findings show that the policy leaders have
sought to regain control through direct intervention of the carbon-reliance
industry. And the central state has conducted institutional punishing
mechanisms by imposing rules over the coal industry, attempting to go
beyond the tradition of Western environmentalism that has long failed to
resolve the dilemma: the binary oppositions have been a conflict between
the state and non-state actors under the guidelines of stakeholder
participation but still failed to effectively limit the monopolization of large
private fossil fuel giants (Giddens 2011). The effect of emerging
defragmented authoritarian environmentalism seems to come from the

opposite expectation of those who advocate for decentralization as a tool to

solve ecological crisisto go beyond limiting the veto players participation
in the policy process. The changing patterns of the governing process in
new urbanization indicate that the policy elites have been trying, in a way,
to restore some of the centralized planning decisions in order to accelerate
the implementation process that has long been constrained by interest
negotiation among and between levels of the hierarchy (Lampton 1992:
57). The so-called new green urbanization process promoted by the fifth
generation of leaders seems to be based and built on a shaky yet decisive
process that aims to consolidate the Partys controlling mechanisms in the
process of modernization, albeit with a partial return of a centralized
planning mode of decision making combining the non-participating
mechanisms under the established hierarchical model to resolve the long ill
of fragmented authoritarianism (Lieberthal and Oksenberg 1988; Lampton
1992) described by a number of China watchers.

Environmental authoritarianism policies are starting

points to solve environmental crisis
Chen, Noesselt, and Witt 2016
Geoffrey, Institute of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Germany, Nele, Professor at the Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST,
University of Duisburg-Essen, Lukas, Associate
Institute of East Asian Studies IN-EAST, University of Duisburg-Essen,
Environmentalism without Democracy? Green Urbanization in China,
Conference Paper, 21 23 March 2016,
https://www.psa.ac.uk/sites/default/files/conference/papers/2016/Conference
%20Paper_PSA2016_3.pdf, Accessed: June 25, 2016, YDEL
Regarding green urbanization, one of the possibly most significant keys for
the delivery of policy outcomes is the restructuring of the recurrent carbonbased energy industry. On whether or not conventional utilities economic
interests should be repressed, the fifth generation of leaders seems to be
starting to show its top-down decision power in the process of policy
implementation, unlike past leaders passive rhetoric, seeking to provide a
new path toward which energy waste could genuinely be reduced and at
the same time keep the growth of economic development (Xu 2014a). This
so-called new path implies that a series of new, strict, controlling measures
over the industry has been introduced with the aim to mitigate large
industrial greenhouse gas emissions. It implies, for example, the central
government should use a variety of tools such as energy-saving assessment
reviews, environmental impact assessments, finance and land use preassessments, and other gateway controls for steel, nonferrous metals,
building materials, petrochemical, and chemical industry products,
requiring these business actors to implement the environmental impact
assessment before being given appropriate administrative approval 11 in
order to solve consequences resulting from the exaggerated modernization
process. In addition, for the air quality issues of particulate matter 11
Although it seems too early to conclude ultimately whether China will really
decouple the use of fossil fuels and economy growth, some optimistic signs

have shown that, during the past two years, the amount of Chinas coal use
has been reduced: Economic growth in 2014 remained at the same level as
the previous year, but the use of coal in 2014, however, fell by 1.6 percent
(Macauley 2015). Perhaps what is more surprising is that in 2014 Chinas
carbon emissions also fell for the first time after being ushered in by reform
and opening up. According to an estimation by the International Energy
Agency, Chinas annual carbon emissions fell by 2 percent in 2014 alone
(Lean 2015). (PM2.5 and PM10), we saw in 2014 a so-called top-down
approach emphasizing energy and economic structural changes was
reflected in a number of adjustment policies. In 2013, the Action Plan for
Atmospheric Pollution Prevention was introduced, which was coordinated
by a number of central government apparatuses12 combined with so-called
economical civilizations to enforce the implementation process by
subjecting local governments to accept the assessment of such an
implantation plan. Seeing the patterns of the policy initiatives and the
implementation mechanisms by the fifth generation of leaders, we can
detect that such a coercive experience has been, and perhaps will continue
to be, guided by the centralized power of the state and may not be
accompanied by a radical bottom-up reform of the political system. As
mentioned earlier, the central government has further implemented a cap on
coal electricity (Meidian zongliang guanzhi, ).13 In 2014, the
NDRC also set a clear requirement for a number of key enterprises14 to
submit their exact amount of greenhouse gas emissions (State Council
2014b). In addition, it introduced standardized guidelines for the accounting
and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions for the purpose of allowing the
central government to manage and control the total amount of emissions
and to preempt the problems of asymmetric information in the central-local
relationship in the large-scale system of governance in the PRC. According
to the action plan jointly issued by the NDRC and the Ministry of
Environmental Protection, at least 150 gigawatts of coal-fired electric plants
should 12 This includes the National Development and Reform Commission,
Ministry of Environmental Protection, Ministry of Industry and Information
Technology, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs,
National Bureau of Energy, and so on. 13 The plan of implementing the cap
on coal electricity was written in the Strategies for Energy Industry to
Strengthen Air Pollution Control (Nengyuan hangye jiaqiang daqiwuran
fangzhigongzuo fangan. 2014. No. 506) and the Energy-Saving and
Emission Reduction: The Action Plan for Upgrading and Transforming the
Coal-Fired Power Industry for 20142020(Meidian jieneng jianpai shengji
yu gaizao xingdong jihua, 20142020. 2014. No. 2093). 14 This refers to
enterprises that reached 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide in 2010 or those
corporations whose total energy consumption reached 5,000 tons of
standard coal in 2010. be terminated by 2015; then, in 2020, another 350
GW of coal power fuel will also be phased out (Xinhua 2014, as cited in
China Daily 2014). The importance of this initiative is that it is an
unprecedented way to incrementally phase out the use of coal that since
Maos era has been exalted and has been considered as the only energy
choice to fulfill endogenous technological development, self-sufficiency of
economic development, and security in China. However, it seems the
environmental safety risks have compelled the new leaders to realize the

stringent necessity to restructure the energy structure at the present time.

These changes can also be reflected in recent new responsibilities taken on
by China in international climate politics such as the US-China cooperation.

EIARTR (Regional restrictions on environmental impact

assessment approval) prove effectiveness in environment
Zhu, Zhang, Ran, Mol 2015
Xiao, Law School, Research Center of Civil and Commercial Jurisprudence,
Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, Lei, School of Environment and
Natural Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, Ran, School
of International Studies, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China, Arthur,
Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University, The Netherlands,
Regional restrictions on environmental impact assessment approval in
China: the legitimacy of environmental authoritarianism, Journal of Cleaner
Production, January 3, 2015, http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0959652615000074/1s2.0-S0959652615000074-main.pdf?_tid=0c95eebc-3b03-11e6-914400000aacb35e&acdnat=1466879676_c53262ca9fecfea52cd4677384de3964,
Accessed: June 25, 2016, YDEL
First, EIARTR has forced local leaders to attach importance to
environmental protection and has changed their behavior with respect to
implementation of environmental measures. EIARTR has touched on the
core interest of these local leaders (that is: economic development in their
region) and this has enhanced priority given to environmental targets and
standards. This measure often also came with changed power balances
between the different local governmental agencies, often in favor of
environmental protection bureaus. For instance, after EIA approval was
restricted by Sichuan provincial EPB in 2006, Luzhou municipal government
established an environmental targets-based assessment system to hold
administrative and party leaders responsible for not meeting environmental
targets (Luzhou EPB document no. 177, 2006). This enhanced the power of
the local EPB vis-a-vis their economic counterparts. According to Pan Yue,
the then deputy directorgeneral of SEPA, the three-month EIARTR in 2007
achieved much more than any previous enforcement campaign of EIA. It
not only solved some serious environmental problems left over by history,
but also forced local governments to change the track of development and
accelerated the industrial transformation towards sustainable
development. 13 Second, in the regions affected by EIA restriction the
capacity of local environmental (or rather: EIA) law enforcement staff was
strengthened and enhanced, and the environmental budget of the local EPB
was increased 9(both for staff and monitoring equipment). For instance, in
the case of Luzhou the municipal government immediately approved the
additional employment of 4 EPB staff and planned to appoint an additional
10 staff members to enhance environmental investigation and supervision,
which did materialize. At the same time, budgets for both operation and
equipment were increased (Luzhou EPB document no. 177, 2006). Third,
EIARTR did temporarily stop industrial investment in polluting industries
and projects, but it is unclear what the longer term environmental effects

have been. After lifting the restrictions industrial investment and output
often increased more than before, but it is unclear whether this industrial
output was of a different, less polluting, nature. For instance, the EIA
restrictions in Luzhou lasted for two months (26 December 2006 to 26
February 2007), and came together with a major set-back in industrial
investments, and even a small set back in industrial output growth during
these months. But during the two months after that period, industrial
investment was higher than before the restrictions, as was industrial output
growth.14 However, it is not possible to relate these changes in industrial
investment and output causally to changes in environmental performance.
Fourth, some environmental targets were achieved to a certain extent
through applying EIARTR, especially when the EIA restriction aimed at
major environmental accidents in the region. For instance, MEP imposed
the EIA restriction to Huzhou municipality in 2011 following a major lead
pollution accident. MEP required Zhejiang provincial EPB to ensure that
Huzhou government investigated and punished the responsible enterprises
and scrutinized all enterprises involved in heavy metals. Enterprises that
did not have an EIA or did not implement the EIA adequately had to stop
operations. And the most severe environmental pollution problems with
most complaints had to be addressed before the set deadline and the
responsible persons had to be punished (MEP document no.584, 2011). In
MEP's notice to Zhejiang provincial EPB on lifting the restriction, MEP
argued that based on the on-site investigations and checks by both of them,
MEP trusted that Huzhou had met the required conditions for lifting the
restriction. Hence, this would indeed point at a significant environmental
improvement and an effective instrument to obtain such improvements
(MEP document no. 1267, 2011). Fifth, one could also imagine that frequent
application of EIARTR may result in a preventive effect towards local and
provincial governments. The possibility of being targeted for EIA
restrictions in their jurisdiction might lead local leaders to take action to
prevent a condition where EIA restriction could be enforced upon them. It
is rather difficult to prove such a preventive effect and no such indications
have been found yet. A sound legal basis of these measures, implementation
of transparency, apply a longer time period and more experience with
EIARTR makes such preventive behavior of local environmental authorities
more likely.

Authoritarianism solves emissions elites work with the

government to instill enforce regulatory policies
Gilley, 2012
Bruce, (Ph.D. 2008, Princeton University) is an Associate Professor of Political Science. His research centers on
democracy, legitimacy, climate change, and global politics, and he is a specialist on the comparative politics of China and
Asia. He is the author of four university-press books, including The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy
(2009) and China's Democratic Future (2004) in addition to several co-edited volumes. His articles have appeared in
Foreign Affairs, Comparative Political Studies, environmental politics, Politics and Policy, Democratization, and the
European Journal of Political Research. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy and the Journal of
Contemporary China, Professor Gilley has received grants from the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Taiwan
Foundation for Democracy. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University from 1989 to 1991 and a Woodrow
Wilson Scholar at Princeton University from 2004 to 2006, Authoritarian environmentalism and Chinas response to
climate Change, Environmental Politics Vol. 21, No. 2, March 2012, 287307, Accessed: June 26, 2016, YDEL

Following policy analysis models used elsewhere (Haug et al. 2010), policy
can be divided into three parts: outputs, implementation, and outcomes. The
key policy output is the emissions intensity reduction policy (4045% by
2020 compared to 2005) announced in 2009. Several economic studies
conclude that absolute emissions in China could be controlled without
reducing growth because of the countrys low levels of energy efficiency and
its high carbon energy mix (50% more CO2 intensive than other newlyindustrialising countries (NICs)) (Steckel et al. 2011). In other words,
higher emissions and energy use in China are not required for continued
economic growth (Zhang and Cheng 2009, Wang et al. 2010, Zhang 2010,
Fan 2011). Thus, an optimal policy would have set an absolute emissions
cap prior to 2030 to be achieved through energy efficiency and structural
shifts away from energy-intensive industry and carbon-intensive energy.
Even assuming some deadweight costs in terms of economic growth, any

costbenefit framework that took into account Chinas impact on

global climate change would still have made an absolute emissions
cap worthwhile. In the event, while policy outputs have been rapid and
comprehensive, notes Lo (2010a, p. 5960), the ambition allows very little
compromise of economic interest and is couched in managerial terms. A
reconstruction of the decision to adopt the weaker emissions intensity
approach based on interviews with government climate change
researchers2 and public policy documents (Chen 2003, Jiang et al. 2009)
yields several insights. First, emissions were seen by the leadership largely
as a matter of international diplomacy rather than environmental
sustainability. To the extent that there was a domestic imperative, especially
after the energy turn, it centred on reducing energy dependence, reducing
environmental degradation, and avoiding the lock-in of inefficient
technologies, while maintaining rapid growth and strategically investing in
green technologies, a finding that reflects long-standing motivations in
Chinas energy policy (Aden and Sinton 2006). The fact that the NDRC
rather than the Ministry of Environmental Protection was the lead agency in
formulating climate change policy, especially after the release of a 1994
policy document that advocated only no regrets policy measures (National
Environmental Protection Agency and State Planning Commission 1994),
resulted in a clear emphasis on growth and other Environmental Politics
295 goals. The NDRC pushed for a target that it believed would be relatively
easy to attain. In the years 2007 to 2009, when the policy was being
formulated, for instance, both foreign (Levi 2009) and Chinese energy
analysts (Cai et al. 2007) were predicting a 2545% reduction in emissions
intensity by 2020 under a reference case scenario in which Beijing
continued its existing energy efficiency and renewables policies in place
since 1995 (Chandler and Wang 2009, p. 5, Levi 2009, Ni 2009, p. 72, Zhou
et al. 2010). Since emissions intensity had declined by 57% between 1978
and 2005 (Stern and Jotzo 2010, p. 6, Figure 1), leaders believed that the
intensity target could be easily achieved. The issue was framed in a manner
that de-emphasised climate change and emphasised nonclimate change
goals. In the event, local governments were forced to impose rolling
blackouts and factory shutdowns in 2009 and 2010 in order to achieve their
targets, measures that Premier Wen described as deceptions. Achieving

the 2020 target will require equal reductions in the 20112015 and 2016
2020 periods despite the difficulties of achieving the supposedly lowhanging fruit reductions (such as in cement production) in the 2006 to 2010
period (see Figure 1). A Natural Resources Defense Council study argues
that without additional measures (like a national carbon tax), China will, as
Chinas climate change experts acknowledge in private,3 fall short of its
Copenhagen goal (Cohen-Tanugi 2010). Even if achieved through stricter
implementation or more fundamental restructuring, those modest goals will
be far from the optimal goals that could have been attained. As a Lawrence
Berkeley report notes about the governments focus on the 1000 biggest
industrial emitters: Due to rapid implementation, program targets were
established without detailed assessments . . . A more ambitious goal likely
could have been set based on assessment of potential savings in industrial
sub-sectors (Price et al. 2011b, p. 2170). Would a feasible democratic
process have led to better policy outputs? Li and Miao (2011) believe that,
because of the tradition of state domination, Chinas authoritarian
approach is the only one feasible . However, this ignores the legal and
institutional foundations for participatory environmentalism sketched above.
While public opinion as a whole remained relatively unconcerned about
climate change, a broadening of the eco-elites beyond state actors to
include environmentally informed and motivated social elites could have led
to a discussion of an absolute emissions target, as advocated by several
environmental policy groups (Lo et al. 2010). As to the coherence and
clarity of the policy outputs, Marks (2010, p. 979) notes that the enthusiasm
for rapid-fire regulations and laws led to a system of vague or overly
complex policies that left much room for interpretation. More than 40
different regulations were issued between 2005 and 2008 to enforce energy
intensity cuts (Zhou et al. 2010). Aizawa and Yang (2010, pp. 136137)
describe the tendency to layer one policy instrument over another rather
than creating a coherent regulatory framework. For instance, the green
credit policy under which banks are rewarded for lending to ESER projects
and penalised for lending to poor ones, competed with rival policies that
encouraged banks to lend to employment-intensive sectors to stimulate
growth.

Air Pollution
Centralized Chinese government key to solve air pollution
Topal, Chung, and Gardner 2014
Claire, Vice President of International Health and Society, Director of the Center for Health and Aging
(CHA), and Managing Director of the Pacific Health Summit. Ms. Topal directs research, publications,
and health policy labs for CHA. Her areas of focus include health information technology; malnutrition;
emerging infections and pandemics; vaccines; and maternal, newborn, and child health. As Managing
Director for the Pacific Health Summit, she oversees the development of the agenda and relationships
with key partners and participants. Since joining NBR in 2005, she has worked closely with the Executive
Director and Executive Committee to shape and implement the Summit's strategic direction, Yeasol,
former intern for NBR's Center for Health and Aging, and Daniel, the Dwight W. Morrow Professor of
History and East Asian Studies at Smith College, Chinas Off-the-Chart Air Pollution: Why It Matters
(and Not Only to the Chinese) - Part Two, An Interview with Daniel K. Gardner, January 27, 2014, The
National Bureau of Asian Research,
Accessed: July 13, 2016, YDEL

http://www.nbr.org/research/activity.aspx?id=397,

To what extent does the Chinese government acknowledge the countrys pollution problems, and what

The Beijing government is not in denial

about the profound pollution problems facing the country. There appears to be a
forms does the government response take?

general agreement in the upper echelons of the party that the unbridled economic growth of the past few
decades has come at a heavy environmental cost that is no longer tenable. The challenge, as they see it,
is to curb environmental degradation without halting the countrys economic development. And thats a
challenge indeed, since fossil fuels, especially coal, have been the engine driving economic momentum.
Over the last decade, China has built on average two new coal-fired power plants every week; and today
China consumes slightly more coal than all other countries in the world combined. [4] The government
now is walking something of a tightrope: on the one hand, economic prosperityand bringing hundreds
of millions of people out of povertyhas been a powerful source of legitimacy for the Communist Party;
on the other hand, the damage resulting from that prosperity, to the air and the waterand to peoples

The party plainly is

struggling to find the right balance between continued economic growth and
protection of the environment. The Beijing leadership is promoting
well-beingis clearly fueling irritation and discontent among the people.

serious measures to reduce carbon emissions , from putting caps on

coal consumption in highly polluted regions, to shutting down small and
inefficient coal plants, to banning the building of new coal-fired power plants
in the three key economic regions (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangzi River Delta, and the
Pearl River Delta), to introducing trial carbon-trading programs in Beijing, Shanghai,
Shenzhen, and, Guangzhou. To offset reduced dependence on coal, the government
is looking to expand the countrys energy reserves coming from other fuel
sources: namely, natural gas, wind, solar, hydroelectric, and nuclear (each of
which, of course, presents its own set of challenges). Importantly, the government is also
looking to improve overall energy efficiency and thereby lessen
energy consumption.

To be sure, formulating policies and enacting measures are not a

the government is aware of the harm

being done to the air, the health of the people, and perhaps even its own
legitimacy, and it is actively responding. Indeed, constructing an ecological
civilization has been a mantra of the Chinese Communist Party since a 2007
guarantee of success. But the point here is, yes,

speech by then president Hu Jintao. [5] In addition to these measures, the State Council (Chinas
cabinet) issued an Air Pollution Prevention Action Plan 20132017 in September 2013. Whatever its

the plan leaves little doubt that the Communist Party feels
some urgency to tackle the countrys pollution problems now. Between 2013 and
the end of 2017, the government proposes to spend $277 billion to begin
ultimate effectiveness,

to clean up the air. The plan includes among its 33 measures reducing
PM2.5 levels in key industrial hubs, cutting coal consumption, increasing
non-fossil fuel use, removing from the roads in China all cars registered
prior to 2005, and requiring that the countrys oil refineries produce the
much cleaner China V gasoline. With its concern for vehicle emissions, the government
in the past few years has offered a variety of rebate programs to offset the
costs of hybrid and electric vehicles. It has also sponsored trade-in programs
designed to rid the roads of big, inefficient vehicles and replace them with
smaller, fuel-efficient ones. And as anybody who has recently traveled to China is aware, the
governments investment in expanding the public transportation systemespecially in the tier 1 cities
continues unabated.

Air pollution risks nuclear war with Russia

Nankivell, 2006
(Nathan, Senior Researcher at the Office of the Special Advisor Policy,
China's Pollution and the Threat to Domestic and Regional Stability,
January 4, 2006, The Asia Pacific Journal, http://apjjf.org/-NathanNankivell/1799/article.html, Accessed: July 13, 2016, YDEL)
Other Security Concerns While unrest presents the most obvious example of a
security threat related to pollution, several other key concerns are worth noting. The
cost of environmental destruction could, for example, begin to reverse the
blistering rate of economic growth in China that is the foundation of CCP
legitimacy. Estimates maintain that 7 percent annual growth is required to preserve social stability.
Yet the costs of pollution are already taxing the economy between 8 and 12
percent of GDP per year [1]. As environmental problems mount, this percentage will increase, in
turn reducing annual growth. As a result, the CCP could be seriously challenged to
legitimize its continued control if economic growth stagnates. Nationalists
in surrounding states could use pollution as a rallying point to muster support for
anti-Chinese causes. For example, attacks on Chinas environmental
management for its impact on surrounding states like Japan, could be used to
argue against further investment in the country or be highlighted during
territorial disputes in the East China Sea to agitate anti-Chinese sentiment.
While nationalism does not imply conflict, it could reduce patterns of cooperation
in the region and hopes for balanced and effective multilateral
institutions and dialogues.

Finally, Chinas seemingly insatiable appetite for timber and

other resources, such as fish, are fuelling illegal exports from nations like Myanmar and Indonesia. As
these states continue to deplete key resources, they too will face problems in the years to come and
Territorial Expansion or Newfound
Alliances In addition to the concerns already mentioned, pollution, if linked to a specific issue like
water shortage, could have important geopolitical ramifications . Chinas northern
plains, home to hundreds of millions, face acute water shortages. Growing demand, a decade
of drought, inefficient delivery methods, and increasing water pollution have
reduced per capita water holdings to critical levels. Although Beijing hopes to relieve

hence the impact on third nations must be considered.

some of the pressures via the North-South Water Diversion project, it requires tens of billions of dollars

to the north
lies one of the most under-populated areas in Asia, the Russian Far East.
While there is little agreement among scholars about whether resource shortages lead to
greater cooperation or conflict, either scenario encompasses security
considerations. Russian politicians already allege possible Chinese territorial
and its completion is, at best, still several years away and, at worst, impossible. Yet just

designs on the region. They note Russias falling population in the Far East, currently estimated
at some 6 to 7 million, and argue that the growing Chinese population along the
border, more than 80 million, may soon take over. While these concerns
smack of inflated nationalism and scare tactics, there could be some truth to
them. The method by which China might annex the territory can only be speculated
upon, but would

surely result in full-scale war between two powerful,

nuclear-equipped nations.

General
China legitimacy stable authoritarianism increases
economic growth and deflect criticism away from the
central government and to the local authorities
Nathan, 2003
(Andrew J, Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia
University. He is co-editor with Perry Link of The Tiananmen Papers (2001)
and co-author with Bruce Gilley of Chinas New Rulers: The Secret Files
(2002), AUTHORITARIAN RESILIENCE, Journal of Democracy, Volume 14,
Number 1, January 2003, pp. 6-17 (Article),
https://myweb.rollins.edu/tlairson/china/nathanauthoresil.pdf, Accessed:
June 23, 2016, YDEL)
One of the puzzles of the post-Tiananmen period has been the regimes apparent ability to
rehabilitate its legitimacy (defined as the publics belief that the regime is lawful and should
be obeyed) from the low point of 1989, when vast, nationwide prodemocracy demonstrations revealed
the disaffection of a large segment of the urban population. General theories of authoritarian regimes,
along with empirical impressions of the current situation in China, might lead one to expect that the
regime would now be decidedly low on legitimacy: Although authoritarian regimes often enjoy high
legitimacy when they come to power, that legitimacy usually deteriorates for want of democratic

In the case of contemporary China, the

regimes ideology is bankrupt. The transition from a socialist to a
quasimarket economy has created a great deal of social unrest. And the
regime relies heavily on coercion to repress political and religious dissent.
Direct evidence about attitudes, however, shows the contrary . In a 1993
procedures to cultivate ongoing consent.

nationwide random-sample survey conducted by Tianjian Shi, 94.1 percent of respondents agreed or
strongly agreed with the statement that, We should trust and obey the government, for in the last
analysis it serves our interests. A 2002 survey by Shi found high percentages of respondents who

There is much other

evidence from both quantitative and qualitative studies to suggest that
expressions of dissatisfaction, including widely reported worker and peasant
demonstrations, are usually directed at lower-level authorities, while the
regime as a whole continues to enjoy high levels of acceptance. A number
answered similarly regarding both the central and local governments.11

of explanations can be offered for this pattern. Among them: Most

peoples living standards have risen during two decades of economic
growth. The Party has coopted elites by offering Party membership to able persons from all walks of
life and by granting the informal protection of property rights to private entrepreneurs. This new
direction in Party policy has been given ideological grounding in Jiang Zemins theory of the Three
Represents, which says that the Party should represent advanced productive forces, advanced culture,
and the basic interests of all the Chinese working peoplethat is, that it should stand for the middle
classes as much as or more than the workers and peasants. The Chinese display relatively high

The Chinese
population favors stability and fears political disorder. By pointing to the example of
interpersonal trust, an attitude that precedes and fosters regime legitimacy.12

postcommunist chaos in Russia, the CCP has persuaded most Chinese, including intellectualsfrom
whom criticism might be particularly expectedthat political reform is dangerous to their welfare.

there is no organized alternative to the

regime. Coercive repressionin 1989 and aftermay itself have generated
legitimacy by persuading the public that the regimes grip on power is
unshakeable. Effective repression may generate only resigned obedience at
first, but to maintain cognitive consonance, citizens who have no choice but
to obey a regime may come to evaluate its performance and responsiveness (themselves
Thanks to the success of political repression,

components of legitimacy) relatively highly.13 In seeking psychological coherence, citizens may

convince themselves that their acceptance of the regime is voluntaryprecisely because of, not despite,
the fact that they have no alternative. All these explanations may have value. Here, though, I would like
to develop another explanation, more directly related to this essays theme of institutionalization:

The regime has developed a series of input institutions (that is,

institutions that people can use to apprise the state of their
concerns) that allow Chinese to believe that they have some
influence on policy decisions and personnel choices at the local
level.

The most thorough account of these institutions is Tianjian Shis Political Participation in

Beijing, which, although researched before 1989, describes institutions that are still in place. According
to Shi, Chinese participate at the local and work-unit levels in a variety of ways. These include voting,
assisting candidates in local-level elections, and lobbying unit leaders. Participation is frequent, and
activism is correlated with a sense of political efficacy (defined as an individuals belief that he or she is
capable of having some effect on the political system). Shis argument is supported by the work of
Melanie Manion, who has shown that in localities with competitive village elections, leaders policy
positions are closer to those of their constituents than in villages with noncompetitive voting.14 In
addition to the institutions discussed by Shi and Manion, there are at least four other sets of input
institutions that may help to create regime legitimacy at the mass level: The Administrative Litigation
Act of 1989 allows citizens to sue government agencies for alleged violations of government policy.
According to Minxin Pei, the number of suits stood in 1999 at 98,600. The success rate (determined by
court victories plus favorable settlements) has ranged from 27 percent to around 40 percent. In at least
one province, government financial support is now offered through a legal aid program to enable poor

Party and government agencies maintain

offices for citizen complaintsletters-and-visits departments (xinfangju)which
citizens to take advantage of the program.15

can be delivered in person or by letter. Little research has been done on this process, but the offices are
common and their ability to deal with individual citizen complaints may be considerable. As peoples
congresses at all levels have grown more independent along with peoples political consultative
conferences, United Front structures that meet at each level just prior to the meeting of the peoples
congressthey have become an increasingly important channel by which citizen complaints may be
aired through representatives. As the mass media have become more independent and marketdriven,
so too have they increasingly positioned themselves as tribunes of the people, exposing complaints

These channels of demand- and complaintmaking have two common features. One is that they encourage individual
rather than group-based inputs, the latter of which are viewed as
threatening by the regime. The other is that they focus complaints against
specific local-level agencies or officials, diffusing possible aggression
against the Chinese party-state generally. Accordingly, they enable citizens to
pursue grievances without creating the potential to threaten the regime as a
whole.
against wrong-doing by local-level officials.

Authoritarianism disincentizies corruption even if there

is corruption, multiple checks that prevent corruption
some having harmful effects
Hualing, 2013
(Fu, professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong. He
teaches and researches constitutional law and criminal law with a focus on
China, Stability and Anticorruption Initiatives: Is There a Chinese Model,
University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 2013/032,
http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?
ID=8721190911241120260181000041250940870490730700640250211111
1307010207009410111612100012003206200600602700211310710911007
5023002000029026049019123069081018092082011034006054124068098

0040651111210640720280021180750900960981040861120980811041010
64114086&EXT=pdf, Accessed: June 26, 2016, YDEL)
Anticorruption and the thesis of authoritarian resilience As an ideal type, the China model
offers a three-fold argument in relation to corruption in China. First is the authoritarian efficiency thesis,

China is able to maintain a stable political environment,

sustainable economic growth and high level of human development because
of its authoritarian system. The identifiable characteristics include the
absence of political opposition to the Party, the dominant role of the Party in
state affairs, a parchment division of powers within the state and between the state and society, a
rubber stamp congress and a compliant judiciary, and above all, managed public participation. In
spite of institutional adaptation and innovation, the political structure in its
core remains intact and the Party remains in control (Naughton and Yang 2004).
The concentration of political power allows the Party to make tough
decisions and remain decisive in designing and achieving its policy
objectives, and the decisiveness in decision-making and effectiveness in
policy implementation in turn allow the Party to better manage corruption
and reduce the negative impact that corruption may otherwise have. The
which argues that

structure of corruption differs in different regime types and correspondingly corruption may have a

Because of the
effective macro-control, corruption in China is more managed and less
destructive and predatory than is the case elsewhere. There are variants in that argument,
different impact on the political and economic system (Wedeman 1997, 2012).

ranging from the view that corruption plays a facilitative role in Chinas unique economic transition; or

corruption is stable, regularized and can be absorbed effectively as part

of the cost in doing business in China; to the view that the impact of the otherwise
that

predatory corruption is back-loaded, with its destructive nature to be revealed only in a distant future.
Despite the variation, the common thread that ties the argument together is that

while

corruption remains prevalent, it is well managed so as not to

undermine the Chinese economy and social stability.
Authoritarianism allows the Party to take draconian anticorruption measures
that are often unconstrained by law and unaccountable to the public .
Commentators have pointed out the powerful Party disciplinary mechanism that wields extraordinary
extra-legal power in investigating and disciplining Party officials, including extra-legal power of
detention incommunicado, aggressive interrogation without legal representation, a compliant legal
system to rubber-stamp the Partys decisions, periodical campaigns against corruption, and use of harsh
penalties (Sapio 2011). Ultimately it is the disciplinary power of a Leninist Party and its disregard for
laws and rights that matter most in anti-corruption enforcement (Hsu 2011). Second is the

the Party is not only powerful but

also claims to exercise power as guardian of the national interest. It is often said
that Chinas one party state has an anti-democracy instinct, which co-exists
with an anticorruption instinct. The Party gained its political power by overthrowing a
corrupt regime, and has been vigilant in preventing and punishing corruption. As
authoritarian benevolence thesis. According to that thesis,

powerful as it is, the Party claims that it does not have any interest of its own and holds political powers
merely to serve the best interest of the nation and the people (Nathan 1986). The Partys claim has

state leaders in the Confucian tradition tend

to be paternalistic and more self-constraining in exercising power, thus less
prone to grand corruption as is often observed among dictators elsewhere. For all its
historical resonance. It has been said that

authoritarian traits, Confucianism emphasizes a strong and meritocratic system of bureaucracy with
personal ethics and moral obligations to be accountable to the people, which serve as external and

Being moderated by
Confucian ethics, rulers in that tradition are self-limiting and self-correcting
in the exercise of power, and a built-in self-regulatory mechanism serves to
prevent excessive corruption and abuses. As corrupt as they may be,
political leaders are committed to nation building and long-term growth (Hsu,
internal controls over the rulers (Bell 2012, Fukuyama 2005, 2007, 2011).

and will not allow corruption to undermine their larger

nationalist agenda. Under that cultural tradition, corruption may be less predatory and less
Wu and Zhao 2011)

destructive to the economy (Wedeman 1997). In the Chinese case, the Party is ready to acknowledge
the shocking degree of corruption within the political system and the potential political damage that
corruption may inflict, and is determined to face up to the challenges. Importantly, Party leaders in
China are not widely known to be predatory in enriching themselves, a trait that characterizes other
high-corruption states. Simply put, China is not (yet) a kleptocracy. 5 Finally there is the authoritarian

Because of the combination of efficiency with benevolence, the

authoritarian government receives wide popular support, with labour,
entrepreneurs, and the middle class all expressing a high level of trust in
the regime (Bell 2012, Nathan 1995, Perry 2007, Wright 2010). Indeed this level of trust is so high
that there is little need for mobilization and non-institutional participation. Manifestations of this
high trust have two characteristics. One is that anticorruption activities are
locally oriented with goals rarely beyond attracting the attention of higher
authorities, punishing corrupt local officials and stopping egregious local
practices. Petitioners, protesters and other stakeholders who demonstrate a high degree of
legitimacy thesis.

deference to, and confidence in, the higher level authoritys commitment and competence in solving the
problem, are more prone to petition to higher authorities. In doing so, they expressly attribute the cause
of the corruption squarely to the failure of policy implementation at the local levels and abuse by local
officials in the process (Bell 2012, Li 2008). In sum, it is the bad apples that are to blame

CCP leadership strong and prevents major domestic

conflicts
Wang and Minzner, 2015
(Yuhua, assistant professor in the Department of Government at Harvard University. My research has focused on state
institutions and state-business relations in China. I am the author of Tying the Autocrats Hands: The Rise of the Rule of
Law in China (Cambridge University Press, 2015). I received B.A. and M.A. from Peking University (Beijing, China) in
2003 and 2006 and Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Michigan in 2011. From 2011 to 2015, I was assistant
professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Carl, expert in Chinese law and governance. He has
written extensively on these topics in both academic journals and the popular press, including op-eds appearing in the
New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. Representative academic
works include China After the Reform Era, in the Journal of Democracy (2015), exploring China's transition away from
the three-decades-long reform era characterized by political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth;
The Rise and Fall of Chinese Legal Education in the Fordham International Law Journal (2013), examining both the
expansion of Chinese legal education since the late 1990s, and its impending retrenchment; and China's Turn Against
Law, in the American Journal of Comparative Law (2011) analyzing Chinese authorities shift against legal reforms of the
1980s and 1990s. Prior to joining Fordham, he was an Associate Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis.
In addition, he has served as Senior Counsel for the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, International Affairs
Fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, and Yale-China Legal Education Fellow at the Xibei Institute of Politics and
Law in Xi'an, China. He has also worked as an Associate at McCutchen & Doyle (Palo Alto, CA) and as a Law Clerk for
Hon. Raymond Clevenger of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Education JD, Columbia Law School
MIA, Columbia School of International and Public Affairs BA, Stanford University, The Rise of the Chinese Security
State, The China Quarterly, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S0305741015000430, YDEL)

An analysis of more than three decades of data on Chinese political-legal

leaders shows that the Chinese state has become increasingly securitized.
The rank of public security chiefs vis--vis court and procuratorate leaders
has been raised within the Party apparatus, the reach of the Party politicallegal apparatus has been expanded into a broader range of governance
issues, and the incentive structure of local officials has been altered to
increase the sensitivity of local authorities to social protest. We show that
the rise of the security state can be traced back to the early 1990s when the
Party-state systematically restructured the security apparatus as a response
to the events of 1989. We also observe a pluralization of security work in
recent years. Domestic security work in the mid-1980s largely consisted of
coordinated campaigns of court, procuratorate and police personnel led by
Party PLC officials. Recent years have seen the emergence of a more
pluralized organizational structure involving a wider net of Party,

government and social institutions. In part, this reflects the fact that an
increasingly complex Chinese society is generating a more complicated set
of disputes. Individual government bureaus cannot handle these on their
own. Before 1978, labour disputes might be successfully managed within
the confines of a single state-owned enterprise. Now, handling a mass
protest by the employees of a construction company might require the
coordination of local police, the courts, the labour bureau, labour unions
and the private enterprise not to mention the state media and propaganda
authorities (to control the dissemination of information via social media).
But the pluralization of security work also reflects the fact that, rather than
facilitating the emergence of independent institutions (such as courts)
endowed with the autonomy and legitimacy to handle such disputes,
Chinese authorities are blurring the distinction between security and nonsecurity Party work. Housing management bureaus ( fangwu guanliju
), which might not have been considered part of the domestic security
apparatus in the 1980s, are now expected to be directly involved in settling
protests arising from land seizures. As one Chinese state cadre fumed after
learning of directives instructing him to prevent family and relatives from
engaging in protest activity surrounding a local construction project, at the
cost of his own job, Now, as long as you are part of the state bureaucracy,
you are part of the weiwen apparatus. Chinas regime stability in the last
30 years is not simply the result of coercion; it is far more. The China field
has provided a wide spectrum of theories explaining the macro-level
stability of the regime, including the CCPs revolutionary tradition and
cultural resources,57 institutionalization of elite politics,58 the cadre
evaluation system,59 the media,60 nationalism,61 the Partys co-optation
strategy,62 and foreign direct investment.63 To this list, we would add the
bureaucratic shifts within the Chinese political-legal system that the state
has adopted to respond to escalating levels of social conflict. The ultimate
success or failure of these efforts, of course, will be left for history to
answer.

Modernization
Chinese authoritarianism vital to continued modernization
Tang, 2016
(Liang, a Professor at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Japan. Tang
received his PhD in Political Science from Keio University, Tokyo of Japan, and BA and MA in Political
Science from Peking University. He specializes in contemporary Chinese politics. He is the chief
researcher of a research project, focusing on comparative studies of governance and domestic politics in
China, Russia and India. He is the author of the Party-Government Relationship in Communist China,
Keio University Press, 1997, in Japanese, Awarded for the Promotion of Studies on Developing
Countries; Transformation of Politics and Society in the Post-Mao China, Tokyo University Press, 2001,
in Japanese, Awarded for the 18th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize: Contemporary Chinese Politics,
Iwanami-shinsho, 2012, in Japanese, The China model and its efficacy in a comparative context, Journal
of Chinese Governance, March 8, 2016,

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23812346.2016.1138705 ,
Accessed June 26, 2016, YDEL)

China has developed at a rapid 9% average annual economic growth since

the 1980s. Political liberty and political power have incrementally expanded.
Chinas international position has also improved. However, the process of
Chinas modernization remains far from complete. Issues such as the large
income disparity between rural and urban, between coastal and inland
areas, and among different social strata, environmental pollution and
resource scarcity remain severe. Political liberty and rights remain strictly limited. The
combination of miraculous development achievements and serious ongoing economic and social
problems means the prospects of Chinese development are far from clear. In
this context, three major positions on the effectiveness of the China model can be identified, those who
support it, those who reject it and those who argue the model does not exist yet. In this section, I offer
my analysis and evaluation of the debate in two ways, firstly in light of its universal values and secondly
in terms of the efficacy of development method. I also present my views on its prospect as a theory of
development. As mentioned above, the western model and socialism model ideas of their model such as
market economy, democracy and liberty as universal values and tried to export them to the developing

Compared with the two other major modernization models,

advantages the authoritarian developmentalism demonstrated are
universal values as principals of political and economic institutions, but its
effectiveness as an institutional instrument of promoting the process of
modernization. In the post-war years, South Korea, Taiwan and countries in Southeast Asia,
implemented the authoritarian developmentalism. Their achievements in
modernization have demonstrated the effectiveness of the methods
employed. Since Chinas transition from the socialist model to the authoritarian
developmentalism, it has sustained a 30-year period of rapid economic
growth and steady although slow improvement in political liberty and
rights. Vietnam has referenced the China model in its own reform since the late 1980s and is also
achieving rapid economic development. These repeated successes show that the
countries.

authoritarian developmentalism, or what can be described as the

Chinese version of the authoritarian developmentalism, has certain
universality as an effective means of implementing the goal of
modernization.

It needs to be emphasized that when carrying out an effective analysis of the

authoritarian developmentalism, the benchmark of comparison should not be the Western nations that

Instead, the comparison should be

with those developing countries that have modernization as a state goal,
especially, those developing countries that were at the same starting point
started early and have already completed modernization.

but have employed different models of modernization. Qin Huis thesis on the
advantage of low human rights seized on the fact that China uses cheap labor to
increase its international competitiveness. However, using low wages to try to negate,
the effectiveness of the China model is mistaken in my view. In the early stages of
modernization, developing countries critically lack capital, technology and
administrative expertise. Under these circumstances, a cheaply priced labor
force provides the main competitive advantage for developing countries as
they seek to develop under intense international competition. During their
developmental phases, average income and welfare in Japan, South Korea and other places was well
below the standards in Western developed countries. However, not all countries are able to take
advantage of its low cost labor because they adopt a model of modernization that is not well suited to
national conditions. On the contrary, the authoritarian developmentalism including its Chinese version
has failed to propose ideas and values which are appealing to other countries. Moreover, social
conditions not only remain far from ideal but in many countries, underdevelopment is still the order of
the day in many areas. Between developed democracies and developing countries large gaps remain in
the level of economic development, standard of living, provision of public services, social order and
stability and safeguards on liberty and rights. For developed Western countries, the China model is not
an ideal to follow. For developing countries, the Western model sets the standard or template in many

the
authoritarian China only shows some efficacy as an instrument of
modernization during the catch-up phase of modernization.
areas, including the politico-economic institutions and the process of modernization. But

Chinese authoritarianism preserves modernization

Tang, 2016
(Liang, a Professor at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Japan. Tang
received his PhD in Political Science from Keio University, Tokyo of Japan, and BA and MA in Political
Science from Peking University. He specializes in contemporary Chinese politics. He is the chief
researcher of a research project, focusing on comparative studies of governance and domestic politics in
China, Russia and India. He is the author of the Party-Government Relationship in Communist China,
Keio University Press, 1997, in Japanese, Awarded for the Promotion of Studies on Developing
Countries; Transformation of Politics and Society in the Post-Mao China, Tokyo University Press, 2001,
in Japanese, Awarded for the 18th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize: Contemporary Chinese Politics,
Iwanami-shinsho, 2012, in Japanese, The China model and its efficacy in a comparative context, Journal
of Chinese Governance, March 8, 2016,

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23812346.2016.1138705 ,
Accessed June 26, 2016, YDEL)

Concluding remarks Modernization broadly defined refers to the process

of economic growth, social development and political democratization. A countrys
politico-economic system is the requisite institutional carrier for such a
process to unfold. Since World War Two, the three main models of modernization have been the
Western model, the socialist model and the authoritarian developmentalism. China in Mao era

China
has transitioned to the authoritarian developmentalism, through promoting
reform and opening up. Comparing with other authoritarian states, the Chinese
implemented the socialist model, but experienced setbacks in development. Since the 1980s,

authoritarian state showed its high ability of maintaining political

cohesion, social control and resource mobilization, based on the
legacies of socialist political and economic institution. We may call the
China model the Chinese version of the authoritarian developmentalism. After transitioning to
the authoritarian developmentalism in the 1980s, the Chinese economy has
maintained consistent rapid growth and incrementally expanded the
political liberty and rights of citizens. These accomplishments demonstrate
that the Chinese version of the authoritarian developmentalism or China
model has been an effective means of implementing the goal of

modernization . But as in the case of other authoritarian developmentalisms, there are major
limitations to the China model in its universality of values and in restricting freedom and rights. All that
the China model has demonstrated so far is its efficacy as a means in the catch-up phase of late

Chinas authoritarian developmentalism and the Western

model still display great differences in the ideals and politico-economic
systems. However, one need not view the two models as diametrically opposite to each other. Just as
the Western model continuously evolves through the development process, the authoritarian
developmentalism in China has incrementally incorporated ideas from the
Western model over the last 30 years and it may continue to explore institutional
innovations in the process of adapting to the new environment. Because the
modernization process is going on, many questions remain for answer,
including, whether the China model is capable of realizing the goal of
modernization, whether it will achieve democratization as the other East Asian countries and
modernization. Today,

whether China can create a new universal model that integrates the best practices of the Western model
and Chinese civilization.

Strong Chinese government driving force for economic,

military, environmental, cyber, and space modernization
Tiezzi, 2015
Shannon, Editor at The Diplomat. Her main focus is on China, and she writes on Chinas foreign
relations, domestic politics, and economy. Shannon previously served as a research associate at the U.S.China Policy Foundation, where she hosted the weekly television show China Forum. She received her
A.M. from Harvard University and her B.A. from The College of William and Mary. Shannon has also
studied at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Why 2020 Is a Make-or-Break Year for China The deadline for
Chinas first centenary goal will test the political legitimacy of the CCP, The Diplomat, February 13,

http://thediplomat.com/2015/02/why-2020-is-a-make-or-break-year-forchina/, Accessed: June 28, 2016, YDEL

2015,

Those perusing Chinas reform plans cant help but notice a certain date popping up with surprising

By 2020,
leaders say, China will: achieve a 60 percent urbanization rate; complete
construction on the Chinese space station; become an Internet power;
place a cap on coal use and transition to clean energy; and even (according
to unofficial reports) have its first domestically-built aircraft carrier . Perhaps
most importantly, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has pledged that by 2020,
China will be a moderately well-off society meaning, in hard terms, that the
per capita income in China will be double the 2010. figure. China will also
attempt to double its current GDP in that same timeframe That, in turn, is
supposed to help China establish its international image and build up soft
power. What do these goals have in common, other than their projected completion date? They are
all benchmarks of China becoming a prosperous, powerful, modern country .
frequency: 2020. A number of key goals, all seemingly unrelated, are pegged to this date.

And that is exactly the accomplishment China wants to showcase at the 100th anniversary of the

Chinas
government wants to have handfuls of concrete gains to show the people.
2021 marks the first of Chinas two centenary goals, pegged to the 100th
anniversaries of the CCP and the Peoples Republic of China. These goals
were put down in writing by the 18th Party Congress in 2012 the same Party Congress
that saw Xi Jinping assume the position of Chinas top leader. Xi himself linked
founding of the CCP, which will take place in 2021. Before then in 2020, in other words

these goals to a catchier slogan: the Chinese dream. In Xis speeches, the two centenary goals are
often paired with the Chinese dream or the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as twin
aspirations. At

present, the Chinese people are striving to realize the Two

Centenary Goals and the Chinese Dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese
nation, Xi said in July 2014. Linking the two concepts means that there is

effectively a deadline for achieving the Chinese dream. By 2021, the dream must
be at least partially complete. That in turn means that the CCPs political
legitimacy is closely tied to reaching its self-set benchmarks in
2020. Failing to reach these goals in time for the first centenary would
call into question the CCPs claim that only the Party can possibly lead China
toward a prosperous future. Whats intriguing about these 2020 goals, then, is that so many of
them are objective. Even the subjective goal of creating a moderately well-off society has been given
hard meaning by pegging it to Chinas per capita income growth and GDP (which may, incidentally, be
one reason China is not yet willing to back off from GDP growth targets). Theres no gray area involved
by 2020, either China will have a functioning space station and domestically-produced aircraft carrier or

That, in turn, indicates just how confident the CCP is that it can
deliver on its promises and unveil all the trappings of a modern China by the
beginning of 2021. In the next five years, China will accelerate its progress in all
the areas mentioned above military, space and cyber technology,
economic development, even environmental protection. Even Xis new
foreign policy vision for China, what Zheng Wang calls Chinas alternative diplomacy, is
driven by a desire to get China more respect on the international stage,
another crucial underpinning of the Chinese dream that will be evaluated in 2020.
it wont.

Chinas assertive moves, whether in the South China Sea or in the Chinese technology market, should

the CCP has a looming deadline for achieving

Chinas rejuvenation. Of course, China will not be completely finished growing in 2020. For
all be read against this backdrop:

that, the world will have to wait for the second of Chinas centenary goals to come around 2049, the
100th anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China. By that date, Chinas leaders have

China will be a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong,

democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious. Luckily for Xi Jinping, he wont be
pledged,

the leader stuck dealing with that ambitious target.

Poverty
Chinese government has eliminated almost all poverty in
the status quo continued government action is needed to
solve the rest
Stuart, 2015
Elizabeth, senior policy advisor for Oxfam International, China has almost
wiped out urban poverty. Now it must tackle inequality, The Guardian,
August 19, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/business/economicsblog/2015/aug/19/china-poverty-inequality-development-goals, Accessed:
July 1, 2016, YDEL
Whether its the currency devaluation or the stock market rout, the
economic news coming out of China seems unremittingly negative and
thats not to mention the horrific explosions in Tianjin. But heres some good
news. Yet-to-be-released data shows that China has all but eradicated
urban poverty . For a country with huge numbers of poor people streaming
into its cities, many of whom living initially in conditions of abject misery,
this is an extraordinary success. It has been achieved, in large part, because
of a government subsidy paid to urban dwellers to bring incomes up to a
minimum level of 4,476 yuan ($700 or 446). The data comes from the latest
survey in the China Household Income Project (Chip) series and will not be
formally published until next year. It shows that in 2013 the share of people
living in cities below this minimum income line was just 1.6%, adjusted for
purchasing power parity. According to Prof Li Shi, director of Beijing Normal
Universitys institute of income distribution who works on Chip, thats
mostly accounted for errors in targeting by the government. And it
seems that the data is unusually robust: it is based on a behemoth household
survey for which more than 100,000 families recorded their income and
consumption every day for a whole year. China has lifted more people out of
poverty than anywhere else in the world: its per capita income in increased
fivefold between 1990 and 2000, from $200 to $1,000. Between 2000 and
2010, per capita income also rose by the same rate, from $1,000 to $5,000,
moving China into the ranks of middle-income countries. Between 1990 and
2005, Chinas progress accounted for more than three-quarters of global
poverty reduction and is the reason why the world reached the UN
millennium development goal of halving extreme poverty. This incredible
success was delivered by a combination of a rapidly expanding labour
market, driven by a protracted period of economic growth, and a series of
government transfers such as the above urban subsidy, and the introduction
of a rural pension. The question now is whether the government can repeat
this success and eradicate extreme poverty entirely: after all up to one
person in 10 in the country remains poor. The current economic and social
five year plan (the countrys 12th) aims to eliminate all poverty by 2020 (10
years ahead of the newly agreed UN Sustainable Development Goal poverty
eradication target, and it seems likely that this target will be

reiterated in the new five year plan to be agreed by the Chinese

Communist partys central committee next year . If thats to be
achieved, the government will need to keep up its expensive transfer
programmes, even at a time of economic downturn.

Chinese government helped 600 million people out of

poverty continued leadership is key to effective
programs.
Zhang, 2015
(Larry, senior at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics.
Outside of math and science, he is interested in business and economics,
particularly behavioral economics, A 2020 VISION, November 9, 2015,
http://atlasbusinessjournal.org/a-2020-vision/, Accessed: July 1, 2016, YDEL)
At the 2015 Global Poverty Reduction and Development Forum, Xi Jinping
vowed to eradicate poverty in China by 2020. At first, it seems like a
ridiculously unrealistic, overly optimistic preposal. But over the past 30
years, 600 million people in China have been helped out of poverty .
Much of the economic success occurred in an indirect manner, through
building roads, factories, and hospitals, which increased employment and
income. This made China the first developing country in the world to
attain the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of
reducing poverty in half by 2015, and represents the single largest
effort made by any country to eradicate poverty. However, not all is
done. President Xi remarked that Despite the achievements, China remains
the worlds biggest developing country, and narrowing the urban-rural gap
remains a big challenge for us. Precisely, there are still more than 70
million in China living below the poverty line of 2,300 yuan, or $362 US
dollars. In order to execute the 2020 plan, the Chinese government and
Chinas Office of Poverty Alleviation & Development have developed a plan
that includes introducing more effective and specific measures to reducing
poverty, such as educational campaigns, which will prioritize, well,
education. This should be most beneficial to those in the remote, rural areas
of Chinas poorest provinces, where children struggle with receiving a
proper education. If given such opportunity, escaping poverty will be much
more of a reality than it is currently. Other measures include new financial
programs designed to educate people about money specifically. The Chinese
government plans on teaching people living in poverty how to better manage
their money through financial specialists. The last big measure involves
raising publicity to inform people not living in poverty, especially those in
urban areas. This should promote middle class Chinese to aid in fighting
against the poverty experienced largely by their rural counterparts.

Social Stability
Chinese authoritarianism is able to resolve social
instability and popular unrest
Lee and Zhang, 2013
(Ching Kwan, Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She obtained her PhD
in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong
and University of Michigan before moving to UCLA. She is a former member of the Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton (2006-7) and a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (20034). Her publications have focused on labor, social activism, political sociology and development in China
and the Global South. Lee is author of Against the Law: Labor Protests in Chinas Rustbelt and Sunbelt
(2007), winner of the American Sociological Associations Sociology of Labor Book Award in 2008 and
Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (1998), co-winner of the Best Book
Award given by the Asia and Asian American Section of the American Sociological Association in 1999.
Her edited and co-edited books include From the Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers
and the State in a Changing China (2011); Reclaiming Chinese Society: New Social Activism (2009), Reenvisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (2007)
and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (2007), and Yonghong,
Masters Degree in Applied Economics at Sun Yat-Sen University, The Power of Instability: Unraveling
the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 118,
No. 6 (May 2013), pp. 1475-1508, The University of Chicago Press,

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/CKLee/AJS%202013.pdf , Accessed: June

23, 2016, YDEL)

CONCLUSION: ONE PARTY, MANY BARGAINS In postsocialist China, when the market economy has
substantially reduced popular dependence on the authoritarian state, the use of force has become
politically undesirable, and ideological indoctrination ineffective ,

the Chinese government has

developed a multipronged repertoire for the quotidian management of
popular unrest: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and
patron-clientelism. These processes preserve stability by depoliticizing
state-society confrontation and by allowing aggrieved citizens a certain
degree of political leverage and relatively expansive opportunities to obtain
material concessions and symbolic rewards from the state. We term this
bargained authoritarianism , as all three practices of domination pivot on bargaining,
be it during street protests, inside the bureaucratic labyrinths, or in communities and neighborhoods.

state domination is experienced as

nonzero sum, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of rooms for
maneuvering. Material gain has become the linchpin of subordination. This explains why the
majority of social unrest in China seldom challenges the legitimacy and
system of one-party rule but has mostly focused on issues of livelihood and
material interests. We maintain that this is not a result of any deep-seated tendency in Chinese
Thanks to the pervasive practices of bargaining,

political culture Perry 2008 but at least partly of the states strategy of domination. A poignant

our fieldwork well illustrates the popular subjectivity of

instrumental gamesmanship in participating in and thereby reproducing
state authoritarianism. A demobilized soldier, who staged protests with several dozen others
moment in

demanding higher pensions, was asked by a street official to state his demands in exchange for stopping
the protests. The demobilized soldier self-righteously responded, without losing a beat: How come you
can be a civil servant and I cannot? I want my daughter to be a civil servant too.34 Notwithstanding the
large numbers of mass incidents, polls show that government employment has consistently been the
most preferred career option among university graduates in China. A government post brings
employment security, handsome salaries, and superior benefits especially in terms of housing, in
addition to family prestige and personal status. While we have mostly trained our sociological gaze at
the molecular interactions between the grassroots state and disgruntled citizens in the critical

macroscopic forces and institutional reforms

that have over time contributed to the Chinese regimes resilience and
moments of unrest, we are not oblivious to

stability. On the one hand, selective but systematic repression is still meted out
to dissident intellectuals, human rights lawyers, and organized religious and
political dissenters who show any inkling of cross-class and cross-locality
mobilization. On the other hand, the government has launched policy reforms to
address the most salient socioeconomic grievances. Eliminating the millennia-old
agricultural taxes, introducing a rural social insurance scheme, and imposing programmatic increments
in minimum wages indicate the Chinese states responsiveness, albeit one without accountability, to
decades of farmer and worker unrest. More recently, the states rhetorical responses to popular
livelihood concerns such as pollution, land grab, and income inequality seem to have become even more

the Chinese states overall capacity to

orchestrate and maintain economic growth , even as the global economy
slows, has allowed it to continue making claims of performance legitimacy
expedient and proactive. Last but not least,

Zhao 2001

Chinese authoritarianism increases better governance

Teets, 2014
(Jessica, Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Middlebury College, and Associate Editor of the
Journal of Chinese Political Science. Her research focuses on governance and policy diffusion in authoritarian regimes,
specifically the role of civil society. She is the author of Civil Society Under Authoritarianism: The China Model
(Cambridge University Press, 2014) and editor (with William Hurst) of Local Governance Innovation in China:
Experimentation, Diffusion, and Defiance (Routledge Contemporary China Series, 2014). Dr. Teets was recently selected
to participate in the Public Intellectuals Program created by the National Committee on United States-China Relations
(NCUSCR), and is currently researching policy experimentation by local governments in China, Civil Society under
Authoritarianism: The China Model, January 2014, Cambridge University Press, Pages 33-37, Accessed: June 23, 2016,
YDEL)

BETTER GOVERNANCE UNDER

AUTHORITARIANISM Support for the liberal oppositional model of statecivil society relations is most clearly illustrated through the practice of some
states and agencies of providing international aid to associations operating
in authoritarian or hybrid regimes for the promotion of democracy. Since the end of the Cold
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS RESEARCH:

War, democracy promotion has been an explicit doctrine of U.S. foreign policy, with funding for
democracy programs increasing by more than 500 percent between 1990 and 2,003.73 According to this
model, an autonomous civil society confronts the authoritarian state and causes democratization through
overthrow of the existing regime. For example, in the 2,004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, civil society
groups helped mobilize and coordinate protests against the state, ultimately bringing the democratic

although the democratic

potential of the global associational revolution provokes much excitement in
policy and academic circles, the outcomes to which these groups contribute
are often unclear and contradictory.75 Although civil society may play a
facilitating role in democratization, many empirical studies find little support
for a determining role.76 For example, several analysts note that the color revolution in Ukraine
opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko to power.74 However,

was led by political parties and a spontaneous public outpouring of support rather than a coordinated
campaign by existing civil society groups, attributing more of a contributing role to these groups.77
Moreover, research on the consolidation of new democracies finds that civil society can also help
facilitate a reverse wave of democratization, as seen in some countries in Latin America.78 Thus, civil
society contributes to a variety of potential outcomes, sometimes confronting and sometimes
collaborating with an authoritarian state. In short, much More variation exists in the relationship
between-state and associations than allowed for in current liberal civil society theories. Whereas some
of the euphoria over the democratic potential of civil -society is justified, as seen in the fall of communism

basing foreign policy and academic theory on an

oppositional model of civil society and the authoritarian state is dangerous.
The primary danger, in addition to simple inaccuracy, is that as these groups
fail to live up to their democratic potential or policy makers and funding
agencies question their legitimacy as independent civil society actors and
either stop funding vital projects or attempt to dictate projects from abroad,
in countries such as Poland,

which obviates the benefits of local civil society participation . Second, as I argue
throughout this book, this idea of civil society held by funding agencies , such as
USAID, generates distrust between nondemocratic states and associations,
leading to the creation of an oppositional relationship that might not have
been present before. In this way, advocating a liberal view of state-civil society
relationships in authoritarian states creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that
might destroy the chance of other potential relationship models , such as the CA
model. In fact, this hybrid CA model that developed in China in the mid-2000s illustrates the variation in
authoritarian state-civil society relationships, especially in response to officials' experience with these
groups over time. This new model resulted from learning by policy makers from both personal
experiences with civil society groups emerging in China in the 1990s, such as Greenpeace, and by
observing international experiences with civil society, such as the color revolutions and the Western
regulatory-state model. Through this process, local officials learned that civil society could offer many
benefits in service delivery, development, and policy innovation; however, these groups also presented a
danger to authoritarian regimes because of their ability to mobilize "citizens and transmit information

officials learned about civil society, they developed a

new model seeking to maximize the benefits while minimizing the dangers
represented by these groups. The development of this new model of
consultative authoritarianism transforms how scholars understand both the
role of civil society and institutional change in authoritarian regimes. First, CA
independent of the state.79 As

fundamentally changes the nature of policy making in China by expanding, the definition- of who is .a

In China, as in most
authoritarian regimes, policy making is a nontransparent and insular
process. Allowing the participation of civil society organizations alters the
process of policy making to create more transparency and social feedback.
These changes create mechanisms for durable authoritarianism
policy maker to include non-state actors such as civil society.

through a flow of information heretofore restricted by the

institutional structure of authoritarian institutions. Second, the causal
role of learning in catalyzing institutional change .in state-society relations
highlights a vital role for civil society in authoritarian regimes. As I find, these
groups facilitate a learning process both within-and across regimes. In the following chapters, I examine
the creation of the CA model in China. Conventional, models of authoritarian state-civil.society relations
are often understood as, either-repression or incorporation; this model instead depicts a more pluralistic
and nuanced relationship, whereby selected groups possess channels for limited participation in the
policy process,. By increasing transparency and pluralism in the policy making process,

civil

society improves governance and contributes to improved welfare

outcomes in China.

This has important implications for the world's poor, many of whom live

the diffusion of this model across China is not a

democratizing trend but rahter a method for achieving better governance
under the conditions of authoritarian rule.
under authoritarian rule. However,

Chinese authoritarian regimes responsiveness to social

welfare checks social tensions and provides political
stability
Chen, Pan, and Xu, 2015
(Jidong, Assistant Professor as Business School, Beijing Normal University
Jennifer, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, Yiqing, Ph.D.
Candidate, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Sources of Authoritarian Responsiveness: A Field Experiment

in China, American Journal for Political Science, 2015, Stanford University

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/ajps.12207/asset/ajps12207.pdf;j
sessionid=589A833F7C2688981F4E3D607FBD3166.f02t03?
v=1&t=ipsrjrud&s=a7601a95d926b037951380ba12e666fa15c7f706,
Accessed: June 23, 2016, YDEL)
Conclusion Using an online field experiment to directly measure the
responsiveness of subnational officials to citizen requests, we find that
almost one-third of county governments in China are responsive to citizen
requests related to social welfare. We find that threatening collective action
causes a 10 percentage point increase in the overall response rate (or a
30% increase in the overall response rate), a 10 percentage point increase
in the probability of providing a publicly viewable response, and a 6
percentage point increase in receiving direct, detailed responses. In
contrast, while threatening to complain to upper levels of government
causes a 8 percentage point increase in overall responsiveness, these
threats of tattling have no detectable causal effect on publicly viewable
responses. Finally, deferential claims of long-standing loyalty to the CCP do
not on average cause increases in responsiveness. While the Chinese regime
may be particularly sensitive to citizen engagement and while the Chinese
state may have outsized capacity to engage in information gathering and to
respond to societal actors compared to other authoritarian regimes,
responsiveness is an increasingly familiar refrain heard among state across
many authoritarian regimes. Whether it is driven by a concern for regime
stability or due to the influence of international organizations, regimes from
the Middle East and North Africa to East and Southeast Asia are
increasingly stressing the importance of responsiveness and some form of
accountability to citizens (Harris 2013; Malesky and Schuler 2010; Reilly
2013).30 For scholars focused on other regions of the world, our work
shows that in the absence of meaningful electoral competition,
responsiveness could stem from top-down mechanisms of oversight, which
we may expect in authoritarian regimes with higher degrees of top-down
control and discipline, but responsiveness could also stem from bottom-up
pressures from citizen engagement through channels set up by the regime
(in our case, forums on government websites). Furthermore, our work
shows that top-down mechanisms of oversight are activated by citizen
input, that it is the interactions between top-down mechanisms of oversight
and citizen engagement that generate authoritarian responsiveness,
pointing to a possible refinement of existing theories. Upper-level
authorities use citizens as an oversight mechanism on subnational officials,
which imbues citizens with the ability to sanction lower-level officials and
generates responsiveness among local officials to citizen demands. These
results show that regardless of whether responsiveness derives from topdown mechanisms or bottomup pressures, citizen engagement is
consequential . Citizen engagement provides information that officials pay
attention to, and it can result in greater levels of governmental attention
and response. Uncontrolled engagement is often a concern for authoritarian
regimes, and authoritarian responsiveness appears to be one attempt at
diffusing societal tensions and maintaining regime durability.

Key to political and social stability

Tang, 2016
(Liang, a Professor at the School of Political Science and Economics, Waseda University, Japan. Tang
received his PhD in Political Science from Keio University, Tokyo of Japan, and BA and MA in Political
Science from Peking University. He specializes in contemporary Chinese politics. He is the chief
researcher of a research project, focusing on comparative studies of governance and domestic politics in
China, Russia and India. He is the author of the Party-Government Relationship in Communist China,
Keio University Press, 1997, in Japanese, Awarded for the Promotion of Studies on Developing
Countries; Transformation of Politics and Society in the Post-Mao China, Tokyo University Press, 2001,
in Japanese, Awarded for the 18th Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize: Contemporary Chinese Politics,
Iwanami-shinsho, 2012, in Japanese, The China model and its efficacy in a comparative context, Journal
of Chinese Governance, March 8, 2016,

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23812346.2016.1138705 ,
Accessed June 26, 2016, YDEL)

Chinas system of authoritarianism comes in the form of one-party rule. It

enjoys a relatively high degree of political and social stability for a
variety of reasons . First, China severely restricts freedom of association,
essentially not permitting opposition parties to exist. Social groups are
subject to strict government supervision by the government from
registration to daily activities. Second, the Chinese state owns and controls
the media, and it carries out thorough supervision of reporting and opinion
pieces. Third, there are restrictions on direct elections for peoples
congresses at the county level and below and officials use a variety of
methods to control the electoral process. The space for opposing the system
by using elections to advance political activities is very limited. The
potential of the opposition and discontented social groups to organize largescale mobilization and protest is blocked by these restrictions. Compared
with other authoritarian countries, protest movements are on the whole
limited to a small scale, such as within social groups, groups of friends and
relatives or suburban areas. As such, it is very easy for the government to
control the situations. Even though in recent years, the Internet, mobile
phones and other means of mobilization have started to be used during
mass incidents, they also face heavy controls. Under military and
personalistic regimes, the ruling party maintains their existence through the
electoral process, but political institutionalization is relatively low and
political leadership remains heavily dependent on the highest leader.
Consequently, high level leadership transition frequently leads to political
disorder. For example, South Koreas political situation became highly
unpredictable after Park Chung-Hee was murdered in 1979. In order to
control the situation, Chun Doo Hwan arrested Kim DaeJung and other
opposition party leaders and the military purged opponents and
implemented martial law throughout the country. These operations
triggered student and citizen protests and demonstrations, and the resulting
military repression led to bloody sacrifices by several hundred people
during the infamous Kwangju incident. In China, the authoritarian rule is
built around the Politburo and its Standing Committee, the core of the Party
central committee, which provides relatively strong political cohesiveness
and leadership ability. First, political power is highly centralized. This is
manifested not only in the central control over the local government, the
party control over the state, military and society, but also in the authority

and discretionary power in the hands of a few leaders. Second, the decisionmaking authority of all levels of the party committee is extensive and the
Party has the executive authority to intervene in socioeconomic activity.
Third, authority over personnel and ideological supervision (controlling
ideological orthodoxy through policy interpretation, information control and
manipulating public opinion) are instruments that ensure the political
leadership of the party central committee and safeguard the system of
command and control. Fourth, even though the highest leaders have
enormous power and authority, this is based on the edifice of a centralized
organizational authority of the party, where rigorous discipline and thought
control accompany a relatively high level of institutionalization of political
authority.

CCP leadership promotes the overall good of the country

Ya and Yue, 2015
Tan, Ph.D., College of Marxism, Southwest University, Chongqing, China,
and Chen, Professor, College of Politics and Public Administration,
Southwest University, Chongqing, China, Leadership of Chinese
Communist Party Is the Fundamental Guarantee for Comprehensively
Promoting Ruling the Country by Law, Canadian Social Science Vol. 11, No.
10, 2015, pp. 119-123 DOI:10.3968/7636,
http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/css/article/viewFile/7636/7636pdf,
Accessed: June 30, 2015, YDEL
In order to comprehensively promote ruling by law, we need to have a right direction and a strong
political guarantee.

The leadership of Chinese Communist Party is the

fundamental guarantee to comprehensively promote ruling the

country by law. Firstly, the leadership of Chinese Communist Party
ensures the correct direction for comprehensively promoting ruling
the country by law.

In order to build a country ruled by law and establish legal awareness in

the whole society, we must clarify the premise that correct ideological theory, legal theory and legal
spirit are the guidance to take the road of building socialism with Chinese characteristics. Whether
they are based on Marxism and its achievements in Chinathe theory of socialism with Chinese
characteristics, or based on Western bourgeois legal theory and legal spirit determine the direction of
our road of promoting ruling by law, determine Chinas legal construction and the future and destiny of
the nation.

Xi Jinping pointed out at the symposium of provincial-level leading

cadres study and implement the spirit of comprehensively promoting ruling
the country by law advocated by the 4th Plenary Session of the 18th CPC
Central Committee that, every form of ruling by law has a political theory
behind, every mode of ruling by law has a political logic, and every road of
ruling by law has a political stand beneath. (CPC Central Committee Literature
Research Center, 2015, p.34) Historical logic and reality determine that the
construction of ruling China by law, just as Chinas modernization as a
whole, must be based on the guidance of Marxism and its achievements in
China. Only in this way can we ensure the correct direction and ensure a
better future for the country and the nation. Secondly, the leadership of
Chinese Communist Party ensures the correct organizational

mechanism for comprehensively promoting ruling the country by

law. As an overall and systematic project, comprehensively promoting ruling by law
requires to simultaneously promote governing the country by law, ruling
according to law and administration according to law, put state and social
affairs, management of economic and cultural undertakings into the way of
ruling by law; It also requires to jointly construct law-based country, law-based government and
law-based society, make all citizens, social organizations and state organs exercise their rights or

These
can only be led by the ruling party. In China, Chinese Communist Party is at the center to
direct the overall situation and coordinate with all parties. Only by adhering to the
leadership of Chinese Communist Party, bringing the fighting force and
exemplary role of the Party organizations at all levels into full play, and
gathering the strength of various parties, organizations and the masses of
the whole society, we can fully integrate socialist legal spirit into economic,
political, cultural, social and ecological civilization constructions, promote and
powers, perform their duties or responsibilities in accordance with the Constitution and laws.

ensure that national organs of power, administrative organs, judicial organs and procuratorial organs
act independently, responsibly and coordinately in accordance with the Constitution and laws, and lead
all members of the society conduct within the scope of the Constitution and laws.

Additionally,

the leadership of Chinese Communist Party ensures a solid financial

guarantee for comprehensively promoting ruling the country by
law. As a superstructure, laws emergence and development is subject to
the constraints of economic foundation and social development, so ruling by
law cannot be isolated and promoted statically, but is impacted by
economy, politics, society, culture, technology and other factors. Since Chinas reform
and opening up, with the rapid development of the economy and society, the construction of socialist

the basic national

condition that China is still and will remain at the primary stage of socialism
does not change, and development will always be the top priority in the
Partys governance and rejuvenation of the country. Promoting economic
ruling by law has made historic achievements. But it should also be noted that

construction, political construction, cultural construction, social construction, ecological civilization

construction and Party building will be a dynamic and long-term process. Especially with the
comprehensive deepening of the reforms advocated by the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central
Committee, it determines that comprehensively promoting ruling by law must uphold the Partys
leadership, play the Partys central role in building a comprehensive well-off society, comprehensively
deepening reforms, and comprehensively promoting ruling by law, so as to constantly move forward
towards the goal of building a country ruled by law.

Finally, only by adhering to the

leadership of Chinese Communist Party can we ensure good laws to

be established and properly implemented . Communist Party of China is
the vanguard of working class and the vanguard of all nationalities in China.
It has not its own interests, and is able to represent the fundamental
interests of the vast majority of Chinese people. Adhering to the Partys
leadership on legislation and promoting the Partys claim to be the national
will and law can make the Constitution and legal system better unify the
Partys claim and peoples will. We should effectively consolidate the Partys
ruling status, fully protect the peoples rights as the masters, adhere to the
people oriented idea of legislation for people, and get rid of department
arbitrariness tendency in legislation, so that each law can be in line with the
spirit of the Constitution, reflect peoples will and get peoples support .
Under the leadership of the Party, we should also effectively promote

administration according to law, play the role of Party organizations at all levels in leading,
protecting, supporting and supervising so as to ensure fairness, standardization
and protection of human rights.

Technology
CCP k2 tech innovation strong leadership is necessary
for implementation
McLaughlin, 2016
Kathleen, journalist based in Beijing, China, who writes for The Economist,
The Guardian, and numerous other media outlets. She has reported across
Asia and East Africa on science and medical issues, including the legacy of
Chinas plasma industry and resulting AIDS epidemic, Chinas influence on
health care in Africa and counterfeit malaria drugs and the spread of drugresistant malaria in Asia and Africa, Science is a major plank in Chinas
new spending plan, Science,
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/science-major-plank-china-s-newspending-planm Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
China will invest heavily in S&T over the next 5 years and cut red tape
hampering science spending with the hope that innovation will help the
country weather its economic slowdown. In a speech to open the National
Peoples Congress on 5 March, Chinese Premier Li Keqiangthe countrys
top economic officialgave a broad-brush overview of the central
governments draft plan for economic development during the 13th 5-year
plan, which runs from 2016 to 2020. Major elements include boosting
science spending, which will rise 9.1% this year to 271 billion yuans ($41
billion), reducing bureaucratic barriers for scientists, and improving
environmental protection while curbing carbon emissions and other
pollutants. Innovation is the primary driving force for development
and must occupy a central place in China's development strategy , Li
told delegates on the first day of the 2-week congress. Lis speech,
considered a guidepost for the specific policies that will be fleshed out in the
next year or two, used the word innovation 61 timesnearly double the
mentions it received in his work report last year, the state-run Xinhua News
Agency pointed out. The 5-year plan, which serves as a framework for the
Chinese Communist Partys long-term development goals, contains few
concrete details on exactly how such measures will be implemented or
funded. Instead, it contains a long list of priorities, from building national
science centers and space programs to expansion of major infrastructure
with thousands of kilometers of new high-speed rail and roadways. Chinas
new plan promises that by 2020, R&D investment will account for 2.5% of
gross domestic product, compared with 2.05% in 2014. Chinese scientists
welcome the budget boost for science, but note that the real impact remains
in the as-yet unknown details. The government always has big plans, but
its an uncertain time for the economy so we have to watch what happens
next. Implementation is crucial , says Wang Tao, an energy and climate
analyst with the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing.
Chinas economic growth slowed to 6.9% in 2015, and the government has
set a 5-year GDP growth target of 6.5% to 7%. In Lis outline, technology

and infrastructure investments figure prominently in what officials clearly

hope is a new growth strategy less reliant on manufacturing and heavy
industry. Themes in the new 5-year plan include the domestic production of
gas-turbine engines and planes, and increased focus on neuroscience and
genetic research, national cyberspace security, and deep space exploration .
Chinese aerospace officials told state media last week they hope to launch a
Mars probe by 2020. Big data, high-tech medical devices, and cloud
computing also earned mention as priority projects. Li spoke of tax breaks
for companies that invest in high-priority endeavors and promised a
reduction of bureaucratic hurdles to promote R&D. We will implement the
strategy of innovation-driven development, see that science and technology
become more deeply embedded in the economy, and improve the overall
quality and competitiveness of the real economy, Li said. The plan spells
out some measures for Chinas environmental protection and energy
production, but its unclear how much the measures will differ from what is
already underway. By 2020, the government wants to reduce energy
consumption by 15% and carbon emissions by 18%. In a news conference
yesterday, Xu Shaoshi, the head of the National Development and Reform
Commission in Beijing, said China will remove 500 million tons of coal
production capacity in the next 3 to 5 years. Meanwhile, nuclear power
capacity is slated to double to 58 gigawatts installed by 2020. China is
reorganizing its environment ministry to create separate departments
focused on water, air, and soil. Scientists applaud what they view as a
concerted government effort to tackle soil pollution. After so many years of
rapid industrialization and urbanization in China, soil pollution is clearly
now evident and needs due attention, says Yong-Guan Zhu, director general
of the Institute of Urban Environment in Xiamen. He says that measures
should include creation of a national soil surveillance system.

Leadership now allows tech innovation collapse of

Chinese Authoritarianism destroys all progress
Huaxia, 2016
(Xi sets targets for China's science, technology mastery, Xinhua, May 30,
2016, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-05/30/c_135399301.htm,
Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL)
BEIJING, May 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping set the target of
China becoming a leading power in science and technology (S&T) by the
middle of this century as he addressed a major S&T conference on Monday.
China should establish itself as one of the most innovative countries by 2020
and a leading innovator by 2030 before realizing the objective of becoming a
world-leading S&T power by the centenary anniversary of the founding of
the People's Republic of China in 2049, Xi said. He made the remarks at an
event conflating the national conference on S&T, the biennial conference of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Chinese Academy of
Engineering (CAE), and the national congress of the China Association for
Science and Technology (CAST). The conference, chaired by Premier Li
Keqiang, was also attended by senior leaders Zhang Dejiang, Yu
Zhengsheng, Liu Yunshan and Wang Qishan. IMPORTANCE OF
INNOVATION Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China

(CPC) Central Committee, stressed the role of S&T as a bedrock upon which
"the country relies for its power, enterprises rely for success, and people
rely for a better life." "Great scientific and technological capacity is a must
for China to be strong and for people's lives to improve," he said, calling for
new ideas, designs, and strategies in science and technology. China now
ranks among the world's most advanced countries in some important fields
in S&T development, Xi said. The country is in an important transitional
stage from quantity to a leap in quality, and from breakthroughs in limited
areas to an improvement in overall capacity, he said. The president hailed
innovation as an important force in promoting development of a country as
well as mankind. "It won't do without innovation, nor will it do if the
innovation is carried out slowly," Xi said. "We could be thrown into an
unfavorable situation and miss opportunities for development -- or miss an
entire era -- if we fail to recognize changes, respond to changes and
innovatively seek changes," he added. It is "an inevitable choice" for China
to implement its strategy of innovation-driven development, Xi said. This
strategy aims to ensure China's decision-making power for its own
development, improve its core competitiveness, accelerate adjustment of its
development pattern, solve deep-rooted problems, better guide economic
development in the "new normal," and maintain sustainable and healthy
economic development, Xi said. In seeking to become a world-leading S&T
power, China aims to speed up S&T innovations in all fields and seize the
initiative in global S&T competition, Xi said. PRIORITIES FOR
INNOVATION Speaking at the event, the president listed five priorities for
innovation. Stressing the priority of developing cutting-edge science and
technology, Xi said China should strive to take a leading role in S&T
research. To this end, the country should have a global vision, establish
development strategies in a timely manner, be confident in innovation, and
be known for original theories and discoveries, he said. Xi also called for
efforts on launching key projects to create a world-class research network.
"Currently, the state needs the strategic support of science and technology
more urgently than ever before," said the president. The CPC Central
Committee has outlined the nation's long-term scientific and technological
strategies by the year 2030, and decided to roll out a large number of S&T
projects, he noted. He encouraged scientists and technicians to respond to
the country's major strategic demands, strive to advance research into core
technologies and move up to the world's S&T "high ground." To be the
world's major S&T power, the state will have to champion first-class
institutes, research-oriented universities and innovation-oriented
enterprises. This will also support the authoring of a substantial amount of
original research, said Xi. Moreover, the president stressed the role that
scientific research plays to bolster overall economic and social
development. In the process of advancing the supply-side structural reform
and implementing the tasks of cutting overcapacity and excess inventory, deleveraging, reducing costs and addressing points of weakness, more
advances in innovation are needed, Xi said. Public S&T services should be
increased, so that the people can enjoy a more livable environment, better
health care and safer food and medicine, he added. Reforming science
management and operation mechanism was another priority the president
listed in his speech. He stressed that the government will try to form an

energetic science management and operation mechanism through

deepening reform and innovation, while continuing to better allocate
resources and evaluate research findings. Xi said the country will provide
bigger support for tech companies, especially small and medium firms, and
reorganize research institutes and universities. The country also plans to
create a few cities or regional centers that are attractive to outstanding
innovation industries. "Our biggest advantage is that we, as a socialist
country, can pool resources in a major mission," the president said. Xi
also stressed the establishment of a rich talent pool of scientists with global
vision, and entrepreneurs and technicians good at innovation. He promised
to respect the creativity of scientists and support free and bold scientific
exploration. "Scientists should be allowed to freely explore and test the bold
hypotheses they put forward," Xi said. He promised to grant leading
scientists more power and liberty to decide upon the direction of their
research, and greater management of research funds and resources. The
government's duty is to draw up strategies and work out plans, and enact
policies and offer services, he said.

Chinas centralized regime provide the foundation for

China to become a global technological leader
Huang, 2015
Can, Professor and Deputy Head of Department of Management Science and Engineering at School of
Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of
Science and Public Policy, NTUT Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Management, African Journal of
Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, and Science and Management (Ke Xue Yu Guan Li).
Earlier from 2007 to 2013 he was a Research Fellow and subsequently a Senior Research Fellow at
United Nations University-MERIT, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial
Management from the University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, an M.S. in Engineering and a B.A. in
Economics from Renmin University of China, Beijing, China. He was a visiting research fellow at the
Technology Policy and Assessment Center, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, the United States in 2006. After studying and working in Europe and the United States for 11
years, he returned to China to join Zhejiang University in September 2013. Prof. Can Huang's research
interests include innovation management, intellectual property right and science and technology policy.
From 2007 to 2015, Prof. Can Huang, as principal investigator or co-principal investigator, has
undertaken research projects funded by the European Commission, the OECD, the UK Intellectual
Property Office, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the State Intellectual Property
Office of China. The topics include science, technology and innovation performance of China; intellectual
property rights and returns to technology investment; employment and innovation; and nanotechnology
R&D. Among these, the ObservatoryNano project funded by the European 7th Framework Program had a
budget of four million Euros. He obtained research funding of 194,740 Euros for his work on that
project. Prof. Can Huang has been active in international collaboration while disseminating his
research results. During the period of 2007-2015, he (co-)organized five international academic
conferences and he has been invited to give more than 30 guest lectures or workshop presentations in
governmental agencies such as the European Parliament, the Delegation of the European Union to China,
the State Intellectual Property Office of China and universities in The Netherlands, Belgium, France,
Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland
China, and so on. In addition, he has attended more than 30 international academic conferences, Global
Technology Leadership: The Case of China, HKUST IEMS Working Paper No. 2015-11 February 2015,

http://iems.ust.hk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IEMSWP2015-11_rev.pdf ,
Accessed; June 30, 2016, YDEL

On the way to becoming global technological leaders, Chinese companies

have benefited significantly from the Chinese governments industrial

policy, which is unmatched in scale and strength by Western standards.

Analysts who have studied the success of high-technology industries in the United States acknowledge that American technological leadership in the early postwar
era reflected massive private and public investments in R&D and scientific and technical education after World War II. Those countries, including China, that have

adopted the US model have spared no effort to boost their own state-backed R&D investments. Even though the United States is currently by far the largest R&D
performer (US$453 billion in 2012, PPP), accounting for about 31 per cent of the global total (a figure that has nevertheless declined from 38 per cent in 1999),

China has made significant progress by becoming the second-largest global

performer of R&D (US$293 billion in 2012, PPP), accounting for about 20 per cent of the
global total (OECD 2014). The pace of real growth in Chinas overall R&D
expenditure over the past ten years (19992009) in particular remains exceptionally high, at about 20 per cent annually. In
comparison with that of the U.S., Chinas R&D expenditure-to-GDP ratio remains relatively low (2.08 per cent in 2013), but it has more than doubled from 0.8 per cent
in 1999 (NSF 2014). At the National Science, Technology and 17 Innovation Convention held on July 67, 2012, President Hu Jintao vowed to raise the ratio to 2.5
per cent by 2020. Indeed, China had already, in March 2006, launched its National Mid- and Long-Term Science and Technology Development Plan for 20062020, in
which the term indigenous innovationwhereby Chinese firms undertake independent R&D and claim intellectual property rightswas first mentioned (Xinhua
News Agency 2012; Cao et al., 2006). The Plan represents the

Chinese leaderships ambition to sustain

economic growth and social development through indigenous

innovation and increased government-led R&D investments. The
Plan demonstrates the Chinese authorities view that innovation is critical to
both the domestic economys long-term health and Chinese companies
global competitiveness. If President Hus target is met and China becomes the worlds largest
economy by around 2020, then the total R&D investment in China by that
time will equal that of the United States (which in turn will help Chinese
firms increase their technological sophistication). The use of industrial
policy to help domestic companies upgrade technological capabilities is
widespread globally. Michael Lind, Policy Director at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., observed that even in the United
States government-enacted industrial policy facilitated its growth as an industrial powerhouse (Lind 2012). Such policies have their roots in Hamiltonian economic
philosophy, which holds that a big country needs big organizations to succeed and that the federal government in particular should partner with private enterprise to
build roads and schools, guarantee loans, and finance scientific research, thereby providing resources and infrastructure that individual businesses lack.7

Chinas centralized power k2 green technological

improvements
Huang, 2015
Can, Professor and Deputy Head of Department of Management Science and Engineering at School of
Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of
Science and Public Policy, NTUT Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Management, African Journal of
Science, Technology, Innovation and Development, and Science and Management (Ke Xue Yu Guan Li).
Earlier from 2007 to 2013 he was a Research Fellow and subsequently a Senior Research Fellow at
United Nations University-MERIT, Maastricht, The Netherlands. He holds a Ph.D. in Industrial
Management from the University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal, an M.S. in Engineering and a B.A. in
Economics from Renmin University of China, Beijing, China. He was a visiting research fellow at the
Technology Policy and Assessment Center, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology,
Atlanta, the United States in 2006. After studying and working in Europe and the United States for 11
years, he returned to China to join Zhejiang University in September 2013. Prof. Can Huang's research
interests include innovation management, intellectual property right and science and technology policy.
From 2007 to 2015, Prof. Can Huang, as principal investigator or co-principal investigator, has
undertaken research projects funded by the European Commission, the OECD, the UK Intellectual
Property Office, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the State Intellectual Property
Office of China. The topics include science, technology and innovation performance of China; intellectual
property rights and returns to technology investment; employment and innovation; and nanotechnology
R&D. Among these, the ObservatoryNano project funded by the European 7th Framework Program had a
budget of four million Euros. He obtained research funding of 194,740 Euros for his work on that
project. Prof. Can Huang has been active in international collaboration while disseminating his
research results. During the period of 2007-2015, he (co-)organized five international academic
conferences and he has been invited to give more than 30 guest lectures or workshop presentations in
governmental agencies such as the European Parliament, the Delegation of the European Union to China,
the State Intellectual Property Office of China and universities in The Netherlands, Belgium, France,
Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, mainland
China, and so on. In addition, he has attended more than 30 international academic conferences, Global
Technology Leadership: The Case of China, HKUST IEMS Working Paper No. 2015-11 February 2015,

http://iems.ust.hk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IEMSWP2015-11_rev.pdf ,
Accessed; June 30, 2016, YDEL

Most of the centralized power that enabled China to run a planned

economy remains in place , so the government is still able to play a
significant role in shaping increasingly market-oriented economic activities.
The Chinese government therefore has more policy instruments at its
disposal than do its counterparts in the West, and this enables it to
facilitate technological learning on the part of indigenous firms . For
example, in 2006 the Chinese government announced a comprehensive
policy to promote the wind power industry and develop a large domestic
market by mapping wind power resources and regulating wind farms. The
policy also promoted indigenous R&D investment and established
technological standards and a quality inspection system for wind turbines
(National Development and Reform Commission 2006). This policy, together
with wind power concession projects and a preferential feed-in tariff policy
launched by the Chinese government in 2003, led to the rapid development
of the Chinese wind turbine manufacturing industry (Lewis 2011). Before
2000, the domestic wind turbine market in China relied almost exclusively
on equipment imported from Europe; installed wind power capacity in
China was virtually zero as recently as 2005. However, the installed capacity
doubled each year from 2006 to 2009 and, by 2010, one of every three
newly installed wind turbines worldwide was located in China. By the end of
2013, cumulative installed capacity amounted to 91.4 gigawatts, the
highest in the world, accounting for 29 per cent of the worlds total. As the
domestic market grew, so did the indigenous industry. In 2013, the top four
wind turbine manufacturers in the countryGoldwind, Guodian United
Power, Mingyang Wind Power, and Sinovelwere among the top ten players
in the world (Chinese Wind Energy Association 2014). Among them,
Goldwind is the worlds largest wind turbine company engaged in the nextgeneration technology of direct-drive permanent magnets, eliminating the
need for a gearbox. Without a gearbox (i.e. fewer moving parts), the chance
of costly mechanical failure is reduced dramatically and the turbines
lifespan is increased. With 20 per cent of its 4,000 staff involved in R&D
activities and its turbines operating in six continents, Goldwin has been
recognized twice (in 2011 and 2012) by the MIT Technology Review as one
of the 50 most-innovative companies in the world. In addition to bolstering
the wind turbine industry, the Chinese government has also targeted a
series of strategic emerging technologies, which include environmental
technology, information and telecommunications, biotechnology, advanced
manufacturing, renewable energy, advanced material, and green vehicles.
Beneficial policies that promote such industrial development include largescale government grants, tax concessions, easy access to bank loans, and
supportive policies regarding intellectual property, standardization, and
human resources. According to Bloomberg, in 2010 China invested more
resources in clean energy and related technologies than any other
country. Chinese commercial investment in clean energy technologies,
which Bloomberg defines to include wind, solar, biofuels, and energy
efficiency, rose almost exponentially from less than US$1 billion in 2004 to
US$53 billion in 2010, with the bulk of Chinas investment in wind energy
$45 billion (NSF 2012). There is, of course, considerable concern in the

United States and elsewhere that Chinas growing power is due in part
to its unwillingness to play by the rules of international trade . This,
too, is a symptom of its style of governance, whereby secrecy prevails.
Indeed, in 2011 the Office of the US Trade Representative challenged the
Chinese government in the WTO over its subsidies to wind turbine
manufacturers that required the use of local content. The dispute was not
resolved until China agreed to halt the subsidies (Office of the US Trade
Representative 2011). The United States has also successfully prompted
China to delink indigenous innovation from government procurement by
eliminating preferences for Chinese firms over foreign firms. Additionally, it
must be acknowledged that the highest-end technologies in some industries,
such as aerospace, micro-electronics, and nuclear energy, are still legally
barred from China by United States export control restrictions.8 Still, many
observers see these capitulations as small bumps in Chinas road to
technology leadership.

Turn Protest Good

Turn protests in China contribute to more social stability
CCP uses protests to better prevent social anxieties
Martin, 2015
(Philippe, PhD Candidate in the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, specializing in
comparative politics and international relations. His dissertation investigates the provision of social
welfare services by non-state providers such as non-governmental, not-for-profit and private sector
organizations, in China. His broader research interests include comparative social policy, migration and
labour, political regimes and the state, and state-society relations, with a particular focus on East Asia
and especially China, Liking Popular Protests to Authoritarian Regime Resilience in Contemporary
China, Volume IV Political and Economic Crises and their Implications, Concordia University, 2015,

https://www.concordia.ca/content/dam/artsci/polisci/docs/psgsa/Volume
%20IV%20Political%20and%20Economic%20Crises%20and%20their
%20Implications.pdf#page=39, Accessed: June 23, 2016, YDEL)
As Chinese society becomes more differentiated, complex, and pluralistic,
the need for feedback mechanisms and input institutions to reduce political
stress and enhance government performance has become ever more
important.90 Indeed, with the demise of Marxist ideology the CPCs regime has come to rely mostly
on performance legitimacy and, as pointed out by scholars, many challenges
faced by China are related to public goods provision and political
aggregation. 91 As explained by Zhao government performance stands alone as the sole
source of legitimacy in China. If the state becomes unable to live up to popular expectations, the government and regime will be in
crisis. 92 The emergence of widespread protests represents a focal point of the
Chinese party-state management of, and adaptation to, the conflicts and
rising public expectations that have accompanied rapid and destabilizing
social and economic changes following the processes of reform and growth.
In his book Power in Movement Tarrow explains that: By a cycle of contention, I mean a phase of heightened conflict across the social system, with rapid diffusion
of collective action from more mobilized to less mobilized sectors, a rapid pace of innovation in the forms of contention employed, the creation of new or transformed
collective action frames, a combination of organized and unorganized participation, and sequences of intensified information flow and interaction between
challengers and authorities. [] It demands that states devise broad strategies of response that repressive or facilitative, or a combination of the two. And it
produces general outcomes that are more than the sum of the results of an aggregate of unconnected events.93 While scholars used to try to explain the resilience
of the authoritarian Chinese regime in spite of growing number of protests,

recent research suggests that

protests may have actually helped the regime survive . Indeed, it is possible
to posit that the overall strategy of the Chinese regime has been to defuse
the threat to persistence of CPC rule by containing the cycle of contention
that has emerged in recent years in China. As Chen explains, when the claims of
social groups are partly incorporated into the political system and when
policy outcomes are more or less acceptable, the possibility for antisystem
actions such as rebellions and revolutions becomes quite low.94 The strategic
management of protests by the Chinese state and the realization that they
can serve as information-gathering mechanisms for regime
resilience must be understood in this context. In a similar vein, recent research
suggests that Chinese authorities have pursued an approach to censorship
that, arguably, parallels or complements the strategic management of
protest: the Chinese leadership tolerates a great deal of comments that are
critical of policies, leaders, and the government in general, to a surprising
degree. The important distinction is that discussions (e.g. commentaries, blog posts, etc.) associated with the regime itself or with events that have a
potential for mass collective action are systematically suppressed and removed from the Web, because they are perceived as regime-threatening.95 Moreover, recent

the concept of
consultative authoritarianism, a new model of state-society relationship in
research looking at civil society in China also indicates a complementary logic at play. Jessica Teets has put forward

China whereby a relatively autonomous civil society, with some access to the
policy process, is heavily influenced by the states sophisticated and
indirect methods of social control, which includes the use of fiscal incentives, to guide NGOs towards meeting state
objectives. 96 In turn, this type of state-civil society relationship contributes to
better governance and more resilient authoritarianism. 97 Likewise, Froissarts research suggests
that NGOs defending migrant workers rights, framing their demands in the language of collective bargaining, may have contributed to regime stability by helping
to identify labour-related grievances and working within the established authoritarian legal framework towards their resolution.98

The CPC

regime benefits from the visibility and the positive effects of

national policies, and can avoid blame-generating situations when
things go wrong at the local level . The vast and growing economic
resources in the hands of the central government has allowed it since the
2000s to increase investment in social welfare spending in response to
rising inequality, such as the establishment of a minimum livelihood guarantee program. For example, the central government also abolished the
agricultural tax in 2004the subject of much peasant grievances and local abuse. These expenditures and programs have contributed to the central government

Research
and independent surveys show that Chinese citizens tend to have a high
level of trust in the central government,100 which is also partly reflected in
their appeal to higher-level authorities through participation in the petition
system.101 Hence, the evidence suggests that in spite of the increasing
being seen as benevolent redistributor even after the demise of the socialist economy and to mitigate some of the impacts of rising inequality.99

number of protests, Chinese citizens have continued to hold a

positive view of central authorities of the regime. Xi Chen claims that social
protests in China can be approached as a form of contentious bargaining. 102 In
this view, most protests are rational and strategic and provide an opportunity for
relatively powerless people to promote their interests in the Chinese
political system under the continuing domination of the CPC.103 State authorities have been
found to provide concessions to protestors following a cost-benefit analysis whereby the costs of concessions is weighted against the benefits of reducing
discontent.104 Further, Ching Kwan Lee points to a general shift from a top-down pattern of concessions to common bargaining between the state and
protestors.105 More research is needed on this phenomenon. Yet, a strategy of selective toleration of protest requires the presence of a credible threat of

The CPC has not only maintained control of all means of coercive
power but has strengthened these instruments of control and repression after
Tiananmen. 106 It controls the military (the Peoples Liberation Army) and all
coercive institutions. These include the Peoples Armed Police, Peoples Militia, the Ministry of State Security and the Ministry of Public
punishment.

Security.107 This also includes the various different ministries and administrations that share responsibility for stability maintenance (weiwen), 108 under
supervision of the Central Political and Legislative Affairs Committee, one of the CPCs Central Committees principal bodies. Stability maintenance work is taken

To
conclude, this paper has examined two mechanisms protest as signaling
and the divided power structurethat help understand the Chinese
governments strategic relationship with protest, and help account for
Chinas authoritarian regime resilience after 1989. It must be emphasized that I have not argued that these
seriously, and the size of the weiwen budget has reportedly exceeded that of the military.109 Ultimately, the regime maintains a high capacity to repress.

mechanisms will prevent the breakdown of the Chinese authoritarian regime or that they are the main explanation for the success or survival of the regime until

I have drawn on recent research in order to provide an explanation as

to why the high-capacity Chinese regime do not repress protest to the
extent we might expect: because the strategic management of protest has
been linked to authoritarian regime resilience. The real causes of Chinas authoritarian resilience are
now. Rather,

without any doubt complex and multi-faceted. While the Chinese regime appears to have realized the importance of gathering concrete information on the effects of
policies, on public opinion and discontent, going back to Kuran and Lohmann, some degree of preference falsification likely remains. Protestors may frame their
collection action in rightful, loyalist and pro-regime ways for opportunist reasons, but this might not represent their true preferences towards the regime.

Protests good relieves social anxiety that could turn into

a violent revolution
Huang, Boranbay, Huang 2016

Haifeng, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California,

Merced; Serra, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Tepper School of
Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Ling, Assistant Professor of
Economics, University of Connecticut, Media, Protest Diffusion, and
Authoritarian Resilience, April 22, 2016,
http://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?
ID=1730221011190661020680860281271120640570720380350750280880
7511310100412500600502711112412212702801804202607211310902502
0007098060013004075058111114083080065127030014065077087125095
0840020961220050250300710840050900891100840940081120230740890
25123069&EXT=pdf, Accessed: June 27, 2016, YDEL
Why is the Chinese media frequently allowed to report and discuss social
protests, despite the governments high capacity to censor media
(Lorentzen 2014) and the previous literatures argument that such coverage
is politically destabilizing? The standard theory about media reports of
social unrest endangering authoritarian rule focuses on protests that reveal
information about the unpopularity of the regime (Kuran 1991; Lohmann
1994). From this perspective, media reports are harmful because they can
induce antigovernment protest cascades. We show that this standard theory
is incomplete if citizen protests are targeted at local officials corruption,
transgressions, or incompetence, rather than the whole regime. Allowing
media the freedom to report such local protests has two potential benefits
for the regime, precisely because this may cause protests to spread. First,
by enabling protest diffusion free media can help the regime identify and
address more local grievances, before they turn into resentment against the
national regime and threaten its survival. In other words, media-induced
protest diffusion can help release potential revolutionary pressure on the
regime. Second, the threat of protest diffusion has a deterrence effect, and
local bureaucrats will be forced to be less corrupt to preempt potential
protests. Having better behaved bureaucrats lowers citizen grievances and
potential demand on the regimes resources to address such grievances.
The underlying pressure that can be channeled to a revolution against the
regime itself can also decrease. Thus, even though giving media the
freedom to report local protests may lead to an increased incidence of
citizen protest, it can also bring about a net gain to the regime under many
circumstances and contribute to its resilience. In other words, the regime
often wants protest diffusion or the threat of it!

Terrorism
President Xi necessary to combat terrorism
Tanner and Bellacqua, 2016
Murray Scot, a Senior Research Scientist in the China Studies Division at CNA. Before joining CNA in
2008, Dr. Tanner served as Co-Chairmans Senior Staff Member for the Congressional-Executive
Commission on China. He has also served as a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, and
Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University. Scot has published widely on East Asian
security affairs, and Chinese foreign and defense policy, internal security, policing, and human rights
issues. His writings include Distracted Antagonists, Wary Partners: China and India Assess their Security
Relations (CNA, Alexandria, VA., 2011); Chinese Economic Coercion Against Taiwan: A Tricky Weapon to
Use (RAND, 2007); The Missions of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force, in Richard P. Hallion, et
al, eds., The Chinese Air Force: Evolving Concepts, Roles, and Capabilities (2012), and Principals and
Secret Agents: Central vs. Local Control over Policing and Obstacles to Rule of Law, in China, The
China Quarterly (2007). Scot received his B.A. in political science and East Asian languages and
literature, as well as his Ph.D. in political science, from the University of Michigan. He received
intensive training in Chinese (Mandarin) at the InterUniversity Program (Stanford Center) at the
National Taiwan University, James, Asia Security Analyst at the CNA Corporation, Chinas Response to
Terrorism U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 2016,

http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Chinas%20Response
%20to%20Terrorism_CNA061616.pdf, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
This chapter takes an institutional view of the terrorism challenge,
examining the leading organizations that develop and enforce
counterterrorism policy in China; hence the chapter focuses overwhelmingly
on the bureaucratic organizations of the system. Yet because President Xi
Jinping has played an important role in the organizational leadership and
policy guidance of counterterrorism work, the chapter begins with an
examination of Xis role since his accession to power. It then focuses on the
roles played by leading organs of the Communist Party, the judiciary (the
courts and procuracy), Chinas government departments, and military
organizations in policymaking and enforcement. This chapter, however, can
provide only a snapshot of the current counterterrorism roles and missions
of these organizations. The system is not static. Recent documents and
speechesnotably, the 2013 Third Plenum of the 18th Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) Congress documents and the 2015 Counterterrorism Law
indicate that the Xi leadership envisions future changes in counterterrorism
aimed at making the system stronger, more centralized, and reflective of Xi
Jinpings systemwide overall strategy for fighting terrorism.187 Atop the
system: Xi Jinpings role in counterterrorism policy An analysis of Chinas
counterterrorism policy system must begin by noting that Xi Jinping has
demonstrated a high level of personal interest in internal security affairs,
including the fight against terrorism . The available evidence appears to
indicate that, in organizational terms, no CCP General Secretary since the
PRCs founding has taken a more hands-on approach to internal security
policy than Xi Jinping (see Appendix D).188 Some of Xis first major
speeches and meetings focused on internal security affairs, and he created
and took personal charge of the new National Security Commission (NSC)
and the Central Cyber Security Leading Group. Xi has given important
policy speeches on national security affairs, including counterterrorism.189
Along with other central party-state leaders, Xi, has issued important
directives (zhongyao zhishi; ) on strengthening counterterrorism
work that were issued as guidance for the counterterrorism campaign

launched in May 2014. On April 25, 2014, Xi convened a study session of the
CCP Politburo that focused on national security issues, during which he
further elaborated on his holistic view of security laid out to the NSC ten
days earlier. Xis remarks not only focused onmore than any other issue
his concerns regarding terrorism, separatism, and religious
extremism, but also set the overall tone for counterterrorism policy and the
campaign launched the following month.191 Xis speech doubled down on
the partys established two-pronged strategy of tough enforcement and the
promotion of regional economic growth.1

Xi and Strong CCP needed to install reforms for

counterterrorism efforts
Tanner and Bellacqua, 2016
Murray Scot, a Senior Research Scientist in the China Studies Division at CNA. Before joining CNA in
2008, Dr. Tanner served as Co-Chairmans Senior Staff Member for the Congressional-Executive
Commission on China. He has also served as a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, and
Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University. Scot has published widely on East Asian
security affairs, and Chinese foreign and defense policy, internal security, policing, and human rights
issues. His writings include Distracted Antagonists, Wary Partners: China and India Assess their Security
Relations (CNA, Alexandria, VA., 2011); Chinese Economic Coercion Against Taiwan: A Tricky Weapon to
Use (RAND, 2007); The Missions of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force, in Richard P. Hallion, et
al, eds., The Chinese Air Force: Evolving Concepts, Roles, and Capabilities (2012), and Principals and
Secret Agents: Central vs. Local Control over Policing and Obstacles to Rule of Law, in China, The
China Quarterly (2007). Scot received his B.A. in political science and East Asian languages and
literature, as well as his Ph.D. in political science, from the University of Michigan. He received
intensive training in Chinese (Mandarin) at the InterUniversity Program (Stanford Center) at the
National Taiwan University, James, Asia Security Analyst at the CNA Corporation, Chinas Response to
Terrorism U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 2016,

http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Chinas%20Response
%20to%20Terrorism_CNA061616.pdf, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
Looking forward: pending efforts to strengthen Chinas counterterrorism
bureaucracy This chapter has provided a snapshot of the roles and missions
of the organizations in Chinas counterterrorism bureaucracy. In closing, it
is important to stress here that Chinas counterterrorism system is a work in
progress, and the Xi leadership appears to still be trying to reshape the
structure of the system to reflect its overall, comprehensive approach to
security, and to establish a more centralized national counterterrorism
network. Even before some of the most prominent terrorist incidents
occurred in early 2014, Xi Jinping and the CCP leadership had made
clear their discontent with the overall structure of Chinas national security
policymaking system, and promised important restructuring. As Xi noted at
the CCP Central Committees November 2013 Third Plenum, the party
leadership did not feel the system was prepared to confront the interplay of
domestic and international security challenges that China was facing: All
kinds of foreseeable and unforeseeable risks are increasing significantly, but
our security system is not good enough to meet the demands of ensuring
national security.287 As noted earlier, even though Xi in 2013 described as
urgent the need to structure a new national security systemwith the
NSC playing a strong rolethe available evidence does not yet indicate that
such a system has emerged. Xi called for the NSC to become a strong
platform to coordinate our national security work that would strengthen
unified leadership of national security at the central level. It is also unclear

what role the NSC played in drafting Chinas first-ever national security
strategy issued in January. The Counterterrorism Law of the Peoples
Republic of China, passed in December 2015, also envisions a strong,
centralized system for guiding counterterrorism work. 288 The law
stipulates the creation of a counterterrorism work leadership structure,
with a national counterterrorism leadership institution, which would
exercise unified leadership and command over the nations vast
counterterrorism network. Provincial and municipal authorities would
organize their own counterterrorism work leadership structures, which
would take charge of counterterrorism work in their jurisdictions under the
leadership of the national counterterrorism system. County-level
governments would also establish corresponding counterterrorism organs to
cooperate with this structure.289 To further strengthen strategic
leadership, the law also requires that counterterrorism be incorporated into
Chinas national security strategy guidelines.290 The counterterrorism
bureaucracy envisioned in the Counterterrorism Law clearly seems to
reflect Xi Jinpings overall comprehensive approach to security and
counterterrorism. The Counterterrorism Law designates a wide array of
organizations that would be expected to play a role in counterterrorism
work, and they would not be limited to traditional security organizations
such as the public security, state security, PLA, armed police, courts,
procurators, and justice departments. The draft law underscores the
leaderships view that terrorism is also a social, ethnic, religious, media,
informational, educational and financial challenge, and it calls for state
ethnic affairs departments, religious affairs departments, educational
institutions, departments charged with telecommunications, news and
publications, broadcasting, film, television, and cultural affairs, and for
telecommunications operators and internet service providers all to play a
role (Article 17). Article 14 also stipulates the role for financial institutions
in freezing assets and other counterterrorism duties. The apparently
unrealized goals for Chinas new NSC, and the bureaucratic structure
envisioned in the new Counterterrorism Law, indicate that we should
continue to expect bureaucratic reforms on counterterrorism from the Xi
Jinping leadership. These reforms are likely to aim at strengthening the
counterterrorism bureaucracy, and trying to forge a system that strengthens
centralized leadership, while taking a wide-ranging overall approach to
fighting terrorism, separatism, and extremism.

CCP enforcement key to resist instability in Xinjiang

only strong CCP can prevent terrorist outbreaks
Tanner and Bellacqua, 2016
Murray Scot, a Senior Research Scientist in the China Studies Division at CNA. Before joining CNA in
2008, Dr. Tanner served as Co-Chairmans Senior Staff Member for the Congressional-Executive
Commission on China. He has also served as a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, and
Professor of Political Science at Western Michigan University. Scot has published widely on East Asian
security affairs, and Chinese foreign and defense policy, internal security, policing, and human rights
issues. His writings include Distracted Antagonists, Wary Partners: China and India Assess their Security
Relations (CNA, Alexandria, VA., 2011); Chinese Economic Coercion Against Taiwan: A Tricky Weapon to
Use (RAND, 2007); The Missions of the Peoples Liberation Army Air Force, in Richard P. Hallion, et
al, eds., The Chinese Air Force: Evolving Concepts, Roles, and Capabilities (2012), and Principals and
Secret Agents: Central vs. Local Control over Policing and Obstacles to Rule of Law, in China, The

China Quarterly (2007). Scot received his B.A. in political science and East Asian languages and
literature, as well as his Ph.D. in political science, from the University of Michigan. He received
intensive training in Chinese (Mandarin) at the InterUniversity Program (Stanford Center) at the
National Taiwan University, James, Asia Security Analyst at the CNA Corporation, Chinas Response to
Terrorism U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, June 2016,

http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Chinas%20Response
%20to%20Terrorism_CNA061616.pdf, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
Chinese security officials view Xinjiang as one of the countrys greatest
security challenges. The CCP has characterized Xinjiang as the main
battleground in Chinas counterterrorism efforts, while President
Xi Jinping has described it as the frontline of Chinas struggle
against terrorist threats .136 Beijing has responded to the terrorism and
ethno-religious violence in Xinjiang by enhancing its security presence in
the autonomous region. As stated earlier, the Chinese government has not
disclosed specific figures on the number of PLA, PAP, and public security
personnel deployed to Xinjiang. The PRC State Council Information Offices
2009 white paper, Development and Progress in Xinjiang, for instance, notes
that plenty of human, material, and financial resources have had to be
allocated to combat crimes of terror and violence and ensure social stability
in Xinjiang.137 The numbers of PAP forces, at least, are thought to be above
average compared to those in other Chinese provinces. Xinjiang is one of
only three provinces to which Chinese Central authorities have deployed
two of the mobile PAP divisions (jidong shi; ). These units were
created for rapid response to major incidents of unrest when these forces
were transferred from the regular PLA in 1997 (Division 8660 in Yining, and
Division 8680 which was at least for a time deployed to Kashgar, Xinjiang).
These units, although they were distributed to numerous locations around
China, remain directly subordinate to the central PAP Headquarters in
Beijing.138 The U.S. Department of Defense has also noted in its annual
survey of Chinese military power that Chinese officials in June 2013
deployed at least 1,000 armed police to take control in parts of Urumqi in
response to unrest which caused 35 deaths. The same report notes that PAP
units, especially their mobile divisions, continue to receive equipment
upgrades.139 According to a 2010 article in China Daily, spending on
security in the autonomous region has also increased. In 2010, the Xinjiang
regional government spent 2.89 billion RMB (USD 455 million) on security,
an increase of nearly 88 percent from the previous year. The increase was in
response to deadly rioting in July 2009, which claimed 197 lives and
severely damaged social stability, in the words of Xinjiang governor Nur
Bekri. Commenting on the increase, Wan Haichuan, director of Xinjiang
Regional Governments Finance Department, stated that the increased
spending on public security was designed to enhance social stability in
Xinjiang.140 Additionally, Beijing has launched periodic strike hard
campaigns in Xinjiang (and in neighboring Tibet), which are designed to
crack down on terrorism, separatism, and criminal behavior as well as
to confiscate illicit weapons and explosives. The first strike hard campaign
in Xinjiang was launched in 1996 and specifically targeted separatism and
illegal religious activities according to Human Rights Watch.141 The most
recent began on May 25, 2014, three days after a deadly attack in Urumqi
which killed 32 and injured 90. Minister of Public Security Guo Shengkun

described the 2014 strike hard campaign as a one-year effort to crack

down on terrorist elements and would be concentrated in Xinjiang.142
Arrests and convictions on terrorism-related charges rose during the
campaign, according to Chinas Supreme Peoples Court. Chinese courts
nationwide handled 14.8 percent more cases of terrorism and separatism
charges in 2014 than in 2013, and sentenced 13 percent more people on
these charges than the year before.143 Chinese authorities also made use of
executions as part of the campaign, although data on the total number of
executions for these or other charges in China are unknown. Xinhua did,
however, report on cases involving at least 21 executions on terrorismrelated charges in Xinjiang during 2014.144 The PRC government
credits the operations of its security forces in Xinjiang for
significantly reducing the level of violence in the autonomous
region. Referenced in an article by China Daily, Xinjiang Daily reported
that in the first six months of the 2014 strike hard campaign, over one
hundred terrorist cells had been eliminated in Xinjiang, ensuring that
most terrorist attacks in Xinjiang were prevented before they could be
carried out.145 The 2015 PRC State Council Information Office white paper
on Xinjiang states that most of the terrorist groups in Xinjiang have been
knocked out in the planning stage, and that the trend of frequent
eruptions of violent and terrorist attacks in Xinjiang has been somewhat
checked. It credits this to the work of Chinas public security
forces, which remain on high alert for signs of violent attacks and
terrorism, and respond with the utmost severity .1

Terrorism in Xinjiang poses a huge threat to China

centralized government is crucial for peace
Julienne, Rudolf, and Buckow 2015
(Marc, Research Associate at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Moritz, worked as head of the
working group Asia and Oceania, with special focus on domestic and international conflicts regarding
the Peoples Republic of China, at the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research. Moritz
Rudolf completed his studies in economics in 2010 and passed the first state examination in law, with
special focus on international law, at the University of Heidelberg in 2014. In addition, he studied as a
language student at the Beijing Language and Culture University and spent one semester abroad at the
Tsinghua University, studying economics. Moreover, he was an intern at the Economic and Financial
Section at the Delegation of the EU to China. His research focuses on foreign policy, geostrategy, and
legal policy (judical reform), and Johannes, research fellow at the Department of Politics at the University
of Trier, The Terrorist Threat in China A closer look at the nature of the terrorist threat facing China.
Part one of a four-part series, May 26, 2015, The Diplomat,

http://thediplomat.com/2015/05/the-terrorist-threat-in-china/, Accessed: July 15,

2016, YDEL)

The main terrorism threats in China originate from the Xinjiang Uyghur
Autonomous Region in the northwest of the country. For roughly three
decades, the region has been rocked by social unrest involving the
indigenous populations consisting mainly of Uyghurs and Han Chinese, the
ethnic majority of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), but also of Tajiks, Kazakhs,
Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Hui. Among the local groups opposing Beijings authority some

more radical factions have emerged. Xinjiang today is caught in a vicious

circle. On the one hand, there are violent separatist and extremist groups among
the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs, although the vast majority simply seek
to freely practice their religion and customs. On the other hand, over the years Beijing
has become more and more obsessed with stability. The central government has
increasingly responded to social unrest with repression and has heightened
the presence of its security apparatus in the region. This policy has alienated many
Uyghurs from Beijing and nourished anti-Han Chinese sentiments among the Uyghur population. The
current tensions have a long history. Since Chinas western expansion in the 18th century and the

The
Uyghurs have long been fighting for the preservation of their culture against
the perceived Han invasion. After a decade of resurgent expression of Uyghur culture and
annexation of Xinjiang, the region and the central government have had a troubled relationship.

religion, 1989 marked a turning point for both Chinese authorities and the Uyghur population, as well as

From Beijings perspective, the Tiananmen Square

incident and the increasing local (student) protests reinforced the need for
tighter control of the population and the crucial establishment of stability.
From the Xinjiang separatists perspective, the defeat of the Soviet Union by
the mujaheddin in Afghanistan was a source of hope and fueled radical
Islamism in Xinjiang. Nevertheless, it is crucial to distinguish between the
general Uyghur population (Uyghurs who are politically active in favour of more autonomy)
and others who would go so far as to take part in terrorist activities . Although
Western countries have been very reticent to talk about terrorism in China, facts show that in
a new rise of separatist ideas.

recent years the PRC has been facing a genuine terrorism threat.
it remains difficult to ascertain the nature and source of all alleged
terror incidents that occur in Xinjiang. Very little official information is released and there
However,

are very few independent journalists on the ground. Moreover, information relayed by Chinese media and

It is therefore a
fundamental challenge to differentiate between acts of social insurgency,
state repression, and terrorism within the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region. In fact, the overall social and ethnic situation in Chinas Western
region blends into a broader conflict between Uyghurs and Han Chinese. The
officials statements provide hardly any evidence or verifiable figures.

Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict Research even labeled the situation in Xinjiang a limited

Still, it is indisputable that major terrorist attacks have occurred

recently in Xinjiang (Urumqi 2014) and elsewhere in China (Beijing 2013, Kunming
2014). The current terrorist threat appears to be caused by scattered local
unconnected groups rather than a single well-organized network with a
clear chain of command. Yet the PRC government constantly blames the
East Turkestan Islamic Movement as being behind most terrorist attacks
and insurgencies. This organization, however, seems to have been replaced by the Turkestan
war in 2014.

Islamic Party, or partly absorbed into the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The Turkestan Islamic Party
did claim the attacks against buses in Shanghai and Kunming in 2008, as well as the Urumqi railway
station attack in April 2014. The vast majority of the attacks, though, remain unclaimed by any
organization.

Chinese Authoritarianism
Bad

CCP Collapse Inevitable

CCP collapse inevitable
Shambaugh, 2015
(David, a professor of international affairs and the director of the China Policy Program at George
Washington Universityand a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. His books include
"China's Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation" and, most recently, "China Goes Global: The Partial
Power, The Coming Chinese Crackup; The endgame of communist rule in China has begun, and Xi
Jinping's ruthless measures are only bringing the country closer to a breaking point,

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-chinese-crack-up-1425659198 ,
Accessed: July 8, 2016, YDEL)
On Thursday, the National People's Congress convened in Beijing in what has become a familiar annual
ritual. Some 3,000 "elected" delegates from all over the country--ranging from colorfully clad ethnic
minorities to urbane billionaires--will meet for a week to discuss the state of the nation and to engage in
the pretense of political participation. Some see this impressive gathering as a sign of the strength of

Chinese politics has always

had a theatrical veneer, with staged events like the congress intended to
project the power and stability of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP .
the Chinese political system--but it masks serious weaknesses.

Officials and citizens alike know that they are supposed to conform to these rituals, participating
cheerfully and parroting back official slogans. This behavior is known in Chinese as biaotai, "declaring
where one stands," but it is little more than an act of symbolic compliance. Despite appearances,

China's political system is badly broken , and nobody knows it better

than the Communist Party itself. China's strongman leader, Xi Jinping, is hoping that
a crackdown on dissent and corruption will shore up the party's rule. He is
determined to avoid becoming the Mikhail Gorbachev of China, presiding over the party's collapse. But

Xi may well wind up having the same

effect. His despotism is severely stressing China's system and society--and
bringing it closer to a breaking point. Predicting the demise of authoritarian
regimes is a risky business. Few Western experts forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union
instead of being the antithesis of Mr. Gorbachev, Mr.

before it occurred in 1991; the CIA missed it entirely. The downfall of Eastern Europe's communist states
two years earlier was similarly scorned as the wishful thinking of anticommunists--until it happened. The
post-Soviet "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan from 2003 to 2005, as well as the
2011 Arab Spring uprisings, all burst forth unanticipated. China-watchers have been on high alert for
telltale signs of regime decay and decline ever since the regime's near-death experience in Tiananmen

several seasoned Sinologists have risked their

professional reputations by asserting that the collapse of CCP rule was
inevitable. Others were more cautious--myself included. But times change in China, and
so must our analyses. The endgame of Chinese communist rule has
Square in 1989 . Since then,

now begun , I believe, and it has progressed further than many think. We don't know what the
It will probably be highly unstable
and unsettled. But until the system begins to unravel in some obvious way,
those inside of it will play along--thus contributing to the facade of stability.
Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly. A single event is unlikely
to trigger a peaceful implosion of the regime. Its demise is likely to be
protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in
pathway from now until the end will look like, of course.

a power struggle or coup d'tat. With his aggressive anticorruption campaign--a focus of this week's
National People's Congress--he is overplaying a weak hand and deeply aggravating key party, state,
military and commercial constituencies. The Chinese have a proverb, waiying, neiruan--hard on the
outside, soft on the inside. Mr. Xi is a genuinely tough ruler. He exudes conviction and personal
confidence. But this hard personality belies a party and political system that is extremely fragile on the

Consider five telling indications of the regime's vulnerability and the

party's systemic weaknesses. First, China's economic elites have one
inside.

foot out the door, and they are ready to flee en masse if the system

really begins to crumble. In 2014, Shanghai's Hurun Research Institute,

found that 64% of the "high net worth individuals"
whom it polled--393 millionaires and billionaires--were either emigrating or planning
to do so. Rich Chinese are sending their children to study abroad in record numbers (in itself, an
which studies China's wealthy,

indictment of the quality of the Chinese higher-education system). Just this week, the Journal reported ,
federal agents searched several Southern California locations that U.S. authorities allege are linked to
"multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses that enabled thousands of Chinese women to travel here and

Wealthy Chinese are also buying property

abroad at record levels and prices, and they are parking their financial
assets overseas, often in well-shielded tax havens and shell companies. Meanwhile, Beijing is
trying to extradite back to China a large number of alleged financial fugitives living abroad. When a
country's elites--many of them party members--flee in such large numbers, it is a
telling sign of lack of confidence in the regime and the country's future.
Second , since taking office in 2012, Mr. Xi has greatly intensified the political
return home with infants born as U.S. citizens."

repression that has blanketed China

since 2009. The targets include the press, social

media, film, arts and literature, religious groups, the Internet, intellectuals, Tibetans and Uighurs,
dissidents, lawyers, NGOs, university students and textbooks. The Central Committee sent a draconian
order known as Document No. 9 down through the party hierarchy in 2013, ordering all units to ferret
out any seeming endorsement of the West's "universal values"--including constitutional democracy, civil

A more secure and confident government

would not institute such a severe crackdown. It is a symptom of the party
leadership's deep anxiety and insecurity. Third, even many regime
society, a free press and neoliberal economics.

loyalists are just going through the motions.

It is hard to miss the theater of false

pretense that has permeated the Chinese body politic for the past few years. Last summer, I was one of a
handful of foreigners (and the only American) who attended a conference about the " China

Dream,"
Mr. Xi's signature concept, at a party-affiliated think tank in Beijing. We sat
through two days of mind-numbing, nonstop presentations by two dozen
party scholars--but their faces were frozen, their body language was wooden, and their boredom
was palpable. They feigned compliance with the party and their leader's latest mantra . But it was
evident that the propaganda had lost its power, and the emperor had no
clothes. In December, I was back in Beijing for a conference at the Central Party School, the party's

highest institution of doctrinal instruction, and once again, the country's top officials and foreign policy
experts recited their stock slogans verbatim. During lunch one day, I went to the campus bookstore-always an important stop so that I can update myself on what China's leading cadres are being taught.
Tomes on the store's shelves ranged from Lenin's "Selected Works" to Condoleezza Rice's memoirs, and a
table at the entrance was piled high with copies of a pamphlet by Mr. Xi on his campaign to promote the
"mass line"--that is, the party's connection to the masses. "How is this selling?" I asked the clerk. "Oh, it's
not," she replied. "We give it away." The size of the stack suggested it was hardly a hot item.

Fourth, the corruption that riddles the party-state and the military
also pervades Chinese society as a whole . Mr. Xi's anticorruption
campaign is more sustained and severe than any previous one, but no campaign can
eliminate the problem. It is stubbornly rooted in the single-party system,
patron-client networks, an economy utterly lacking in transparency , a state-controlled
media and the absence of the rule of law. Moreover, Mr. Xi's campaign is turning out to be
at least as much a selective purge as an antigraft campaign . Many of its targets to
date have been political clients and allies of former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. Now 88, Mr. Jiang is still
the godfather figure of Chinese politics. Going after Mr. Jiang's patronage network while he is still alive is
highly risky for Mr. Xi, particularly since Mr. Xi doesn't seem to have brought along his own coterie of
loyal clients to promote into positions of power. Another problem: Mr. Xi, a child of China's firstgeneration revolutionary elites, is one of the party's "princelings," and his political ties largely extend to
other princelings. This silver-spoon generation is widely reviled in Chinese society at large.

China's economy

--for all the Western views of it as an unstoppable juggernaut--

Finally,

is stuck

in a series of systemic traps from which there is no easy exit . In

November 2013, Mr. Xi presided over the party's Third Plenum, which unveiled a huge package of

Yes, consumer
spending has been rising, red tape has been reduced, and some fiscal
reforms have been introduced, but overall, Mr. Xi's ambitious goals have
been stillborn. The reform package challenges powerful, deeply entrenched
interest groups--such as state-owned enterprises and local party cadres--and they are plainly
blocking its implementation. These five increasingly evident cracks in the regime's control can
proposed economic reforms, but so far, they are sputtering on the launchpad.

be fixed only through political reform. Until and unless China relaxes its draconian political controls, it
will never become an innovative society and a "knowledge economy"--a main goal of the Third Plenum

The political system has become the primary impediment to China's

needed social and economic reforms. If Mr. Xi and party leaders don't relax their grip, they
reforms.

may be summoning precisely the fate they hope to avoid. In the decades since the collapse of the Soviet
Union, the upper reaches of China's leadership have been obsessed with the fall of its fellow communist
giant. Hundreds of Chinese postmortem analyses have dissected the causes of the Soviet disintegration.
Mr. Xi's real "China Dream" has been to avoid the Soviet nightmare. Just a few months into his tenure, he
gave a telling internal speech ruing the Soviet Union's demise and bemoaning Mr. Gorbachev's betrayals,
arguing that Moscow had lacked a "real man" to stand up to its reformist last leader. Mr. Xi's wave of
repression today is meant to be the opposite of Mr. Gorbachev's perestroika and glasnost. Instead of
opening up, Mr. Xi is doubling down on controls over dissenters, the economy and even rivals within the
party. But reaction and repression aren't Mr. Xi's only option. His predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu
Jintao, drew very different lessons from the Soviet collapse. From 2000 to 2008, they instituted policies
intended to open up the system with carefully limited political reforms. They strengthened local party
committees and experimented with voting for multicandidate party secretaries. They recruited more
businesspeople and intellectuals into the party. They expanded party consultation with nonparty groups
and made the Politburo's proceedings more transparent. They improved feedback mechanisms within the
party, implemented more meritocratic criteria for evaluation and promotion, and created a system of
mandatory midcareer training for all 45 million state and party cadres. They enforced retirement
requirements and rotated officials and military officers between job assignments every couple of years.
In effect, for a while Mr. Jiang and Mr. Hu sought to manage change, not to resist it. But Mr. Xi wants
none of this. Since 2009 (when even the heretofore open-minded Mr. Hu changed course and started to
clamp down), an increasingly anxious regime has rolled back every single one of these political reforms
(with the exception of the cadre-training system). These reforms were masterminded by Mr. Jiang's
political acolyte and former vice president, Zeng Qinghong, who retired in 2008 and is now under
suspicion in Mr. Xi's anticorruption campaign--another symbol of Mr. Xi's hostility to the measures that

experts think that Mr. Xi's harsh tactics

may actually presage a more open and reformist direction later in his term. I
don't buy it. This leader and regime see politics in zero-sum terms: Relaxing
control, in their view, is a sure step toward the demise of the system and their own downfall. They
also take the conspiratorial view that the U.S. is actively working to subvert
Communist Party rule. None of this suggests that sweeping reforms are just around the corner.
We cannot predict when Chinese communism will collapse, but it is hard not
to conclude that we are witnessing its final phase. The CCP is the world's
second-longest ruling regime (behind only North Korea), and no party can rule
might ease the ills of a crumbling system. Some

forever.

Looking ahead, China-watchers should keep their eyes on the regime's instruments of

control and on those assigned to use those instruments. Large numbers of citizens and party members
alike are already voting with their feet and leaving the country or displaying their insincerity by
pretending to comply with party dictates. We should watch for the day when the regime's propaganda
agents and its internal security apparatus start becoming lax in enforcing the party's writ--or when they
begin to identify with dissidents, like the East German Stasi agent in the film "The Lives of Others" who
came to sympathize with the targets of his spying. When human empathy starts to win out over ossified
authority,

the endgame of Chinese communism will really have begun .

Cybersecurity
CCP control over the Internet hampers economic growth
Cook, 2015
Sarah, Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, How Beijings Censorship
Impairs U.S.-China Relations, July 23, 2015, Freedom House,
https://freedomhouse.org/blog/how-beijing-s-censorship-impairs-us-chinarelations, Accessed: July 5, 2016, YDEL
Over the past two years, the Chinese authorities have taken new steps to block
Chinese citizens access to information from U.S. companies and media.
These actions not only limit Chinese citizens access to news and entertainment, but they also
harm U.S. businesses, media outlets, and innovators . In effect, the Chinese
Communist Partys aggressive efforts to defend its political
monopoly are costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars a year.

These dynamics pose a challenge to smoother bilateral relations . They

undermine trust, create obstacles to cooperation, and infuse
business interactions with an underlying sense of unfairness . As such,
they should be high on the agenda of any meeting between American and Chinese officials, be it the just
concluded U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue or Xi Jinpings upcoming U.S. visit in September.
From bad to worse Covering China has never been easy for American journalists. But pressure on
foreign media companies and harassment of their correspondentsespecially via website blocks, visa
delays, and de facto expulsionshas increased over the past seven years, following a brief period of
relaxation surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Moreover, virtually any U.S. firm operating any
information service or website that is accessible to Chinese users faces pressure to implement
Communist Party surveillance and censorship directives. Those who refuse risk being shut out of the
worlds largest web market. Despite these long-standing challenges, since Xi took over the party helm

Chinese government actions have introduced new impediments to

the free flow of information between the United States and China. First,
new blocks have been imposed on previously available U.S. websites and
online services, including some that have been accessible to Chinese users for years. Between May
in late 2012,

and September 2014, photo-sharing applications Flickr and Instagram, as well as virtually all Google
services, were blocked. In December, Gmail access from third-party applications like Outlook or Apple
mail was also disrupted. According to data from Greatfire.org, an organization that tracks accessibility of
foreign websites in China, all of these services had been freely available for at least two years prior to the
blocks. Second, blocks have begun to target widely used cloud services. Last
summer, Dropbox and Microsofts OneDrive were rendered inaccessible. In November, segments of
Verizons Edgecast were blocked, affecting commercial platforms like Sony Mobile alongside activist sites

Many businesses in China

both foreign and domesticrely on these cloud services to store and share
data, meaning the blocks disrupt their daily operations in a more meaningful way than the restriction of
access to a single news website. Third, a new form of aggressive cyberattack has
emerged. A massive cyber attack on GitHuba code-sharing platform used by programmers
like FreeWeibo, which publishes microblog posts censored in China.

worldwidein March featured the hijacking of traffic passing through Chinas virtual borders en route to
the servers of leading Chinese search engine Baidu. The traffic was then redirected toward the target to
implement an overwhelming denial-of-service attack that incapacitated the platform for five days.
According to technical experts, neither the unsuspecting users nor the Chinese company Baidu had a way
of preventing the assault. But an investigation by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab published in April found
compelling evidence of a government connection to the attack, and labeled the new tool Chinas Great
Fourth, a series of pending draft laws and regulations would
significantly increase intrusive demands and restrictive measures affecting
U.S. actors across a range of sectorsfinance, academia, nonprofits, and
technology, to name a few. For example, rules circulated in early 2015 would require firms selling

Cannon.

computer equipment to Chinese banks to share secret source codes and provide so-called back doors to
the authorities. Draft laws on counterterrorism, national security, and foreign nonprofits would
increase digital surveillance (and requests for user information) and subject the China activities of U.S.based civil society groups, foundations, and universities to oversight by the Ministry of Public Security.
This would enhance the risk of reprisals for Chinese contacts and the likelihood that permission for even
apolitical activities would be denied. Business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have joined
civil society organizations to voice rare public opposition to the changes. Decrees from a black box
Many of the recent restrictions have emerged from a remarkably opaque and arbitrary decision-making
process. This is especially noticeable when long-accessible websites and online services are suddenly
blocked. With no visible change in the laws and no official explanation offered in writing, China watchers
are left to speculate on the reasons and timing of the new obstructions. Was the catalyst a sensitive
event like prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, and if so, will the block be lifted after it concludes? Or
was the service flagged for blocking because it reached a critical mass of users and therefore presented a
meaningful threat to the Communist Partys information control? Had it become too strong of an
economic competitor for a local brand that the government wants to champion? Or as Tech in Asias
Steven Millword put it, Maybe some guy just pulled the wrong lever. Even when a formal document
has been issued, many observers in the United States and China have been puzzled that the full
implicationsand potential contradictions with existing rulesdo not appear to have been given much
consideration. This unpredictability and apparent caprice makes it extremely difficult for U.S. companies

Economic costs and damage to bilateral

communication Official actions that suddenly change the rules of the game
generate genuine concern in both the United States and China because they
have a real-world impact on the financial sustainability of news outlets, the
profitability of corporations, and access to information for millions of expat
and local users in China. A 2012 block on The New York Times English and
Chinese websites in response to the papers investigative report into the wealth of then premier
Wen Jiabaos kin, caused the Times stock to lose 20 percent of its value
overnight and required agreements with advertisers to be renegotiated. Although the stock slowly
recovered, the paper suffered notable revenue losses. Chinese government censorship
narrows the range of business opportunities for American companies,
forcing them to make do with whatever activities are still open to them .
to develop a viable business model for China.

Facebook and Twitteralthough blocked in Chinahave allowed Chinese businesses to advertise to their
overseas users. Google Play similarly permits Chinese developers to sell their applications outside China.
These ventures are creative and apparently profitable, but they represent a tiny sliver of the business
that could be generated with unrestricted access to the Chinese market. They are also fundamentally
unfair, in that

Chinese entrepreneurs can take full advantage of the

companies global reach, but the U.S. firms are cut off from Chinas
consumers. Censorship pressure has also generated conflict within U.S.
media companies, as it becomes clear that intrepid news gathering and
adherence to journalistic principles will carry an economic cost. This problem
gained greater international attention last year after senior executives at Bloomberg News apparently
decided to retreat from publishing investigative reports on the wealth of the Chinese political elite due to
the potential damage that government reprisals could inflict on Bloombergs other interests in China,
Similar dilemmas have afflicted
technology and social media companies as they confront compliance
pressures that their Chinese competitors must meet simply to stay in
business. Google eventually decided to retreat from its search business in mainland China rather than

primarily the sale of its financial data terminals.

censor results, and LinkedIn is currently treading a fine line to maintain its presence. In March,
CloudFlare cut off its service provision to Lantern, a group that was using the content-delivery network to
offer Chinese internet users access to uncensored information. GitHub, responding to its recent Great
Cannon bombardment, said we believe the intent of this attack is to convince us to remove a specific
class of content. But it appears they were unconvinced, and the site continues to host the pages of the
Over time, the various
obstacles thrown up by Beijing have had a deleterious effect on international
news coverage and information sharing on important topics . But even as foreigners
feel the impact, it remains Chinese citizens who pay most dearly for their
governments censorship. The Communist Partys latest blocks and

New York Times Chinese edition and the anticensorship group Greatfire.

regulations have increased the share of the Chinese population that

is losing contact with the international community and its diverse
information sources . According to one college counselor from Shanghai, the censorship adds
new difficulties for Chinese students applying to study at U.S. universities and, more generally, limits
their worldview.

CCP control over the Internet undermines cooperative relations with China

Cook, 2015
Sarah, Senior Research Analyst for East Asia, How Beijings Censorship
Impairs U.S.-China Relations, July 23, 2015, Freedom House,
https://freedomhouse.org/blog/how-beijing-s-censorship-impairs-us-chinarelations, Accessed: July 5, 2016, YDEL
Consequences for U.S.-China relations From a geopolitical perspective,
these developments have a profound impact on the relationship between the
worlds two largest economies. The divided and distorted information
landscape breeds mistrust and increases the potential for
misunderstanding. Chinese audiences receive a partial and misinformed
perspective of U.S. policy and society. Americans see Chinese officials taking
steps that threaten the United States economic wellbeing , but are barred
from hearing the views of Chinese citizens who may disagree with their
government. This results in both sides having a more negative view of the
other than each may deserve, a recipe for greater tension now and in the
future. On a more practical note, the restrictions create higher hurdles for
U.S. investment in China and hinder day-to-day cooperation in the arts, nonprofit, and academic sectors. Moreover, the Chinese governments actions
contradict its own stated policies, like not interfering in other countries
affairs, and undermine key goals popular with Chinas citizens, such as
earning global respect for the nation. Unfortunately, Beijing has done itself
no favors with its public responses to censorship incidents. Official
spokespeople and state-run media are often dismissive, plead ignorance,
conflate incomparable situations, or present a disingenuous version of the
facts. Most commonly, they fall back on the claim that any restrictions are
imposed according to the law, which all companies and individuals must
follow. In October 2014, Chinese internet czar Lu Wei said of Facebook:
Foreign internet companies can come to China if they abide by the law. At
first glance, this seems reasonable. The problem is that the law in todays
Chinaespecially on topics like freedom of expression is actually a tangle
of arbitrary regulations, extralegal party directives, and politically controlled
courts that are incapable of impartially adjudicating disputes or upholding
rights listed in the constitution. The United States, of course, is not entirely
without fault. Edward Snowdens revelations of the transnational
surveillance by U.S. spy agencies have also undermined trust between the
two countries and invited accusations of hypocrisy when U.S. officials call for
greater internet freedom. According to some observers, the U.S. programs
have contributed to the Chinese governments desire to restrict the use of
American-made hardware and software. But however intrusive or disturbing
U.S. surveillance may be, it does not set out with the goal of suppressing
freedom of information. The U.S. political system is founded on the idea that

such freedoms must be protected, not least as boons to business and

international relations. The Chinese Communist Party , by contrast ,
sees freedom of information as a fundamental threat to its rule.
This is the crux of the conflict. Indeed, the steps being taken by Chinese
authorities go far beyond any legitimate interest in protecting government
offices from potential U.S. surveillance, preventing terrorist attacks, or
combatting perceived social ills like gambling or pornography. Rigorous
research has repeatedly shown that the content targeted for censorship in
China most often relates to critically important topics like official corruption,
police brutality, religious persecution, ethnic relations, and public health.
Many measures also serve to ensure Communist Party control over key
nodes in the information flow, regardless of what is being communicated. An
opportunity for Beijing and Washington The best solution for both sides
would be for the Chinese government to relax its controls and create truly
autonomous entities to define and implement remaining restrictions on
content that is internationally recognized as harmful. Unfortunately, the
current Chinese leadership has offered no sign that it is moving in
that direction. Rather, it is turning more sharply toward arbitrary
and politically repressive policies.

Dollar Hegemony
Chinese centralized government controls the Yuan
Desloires, 2015
(Vanessa, writes on Business, Real Estate, Markets, News. Based in our
Melbourne newsroom, Dirty Float: how China manages its currency,
August 11, 2015, The Sydney Morning Herald,
http://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/currencies/dirty-float-how-chinamanages-its-currency-20150811-giwgcs.html, Accessed: July 17, 2016,
YDEL)
The People's Bank of China's move to lift its US dollar/yuan fixing rate by
1.9 per cent on Tuesday stunned the markets and sparked a 1 US cent fall in
the Australian dollar. It's also sparked confusion among those of us who are
used to floating currencies, such as the Australian dollar. Like the majority
of China's markets , its government largely controls its currency
movements, and unlike floating exchange rate currencies which are
determined by market forces (supply and demand), its currency
moves as a crawling peg to the US dollar. How does China's currency
work? In 1994 China's currency, the renminbi, was pegged to a fixed rate
of 8.28 yuan to the US dollar. That remained until July 2005, when it was
loosened to allow it to fluctuate 2.1 per cent from a set midpoint determined
daily. RELATED CONTENT Aussie suffers collateral damage after China
devalues yuan The system is also referred to as a crawling peg and had
been very stable in recent months, barely moving from its peg of US16.1 to
the yuan between April and now. Over the course of the past decade, that
peg has been adjusted by the government as it deemed necessary, including
placing a halt on its appreciation during the global financial crisis as
demand for Chinese goods slowed. Since 2005 the renminbi moved to what
is known as a managed float system against major currencies. Also more
excitingly known as a dirty float, it is controlled through central bank's
buying and selling currencies in a bid to cap its appreciation. Why does
China use this system to regulate its currency? Market analysts widely
suggest that the yuan is held at a substantially undervalued level to make its
exports more globally competitive. This is where the reference, or fixing
rate comes in. The yuan is pegged to the US dollar at a daily reference rate
within a fixed band to control the value of the yuan. The government caps
appreciation by selling yuan and buying greenback. On a real exchangerate basis, however, more recently yuan has been considered overvalued by
around 13 per cent as it followed the US dollar up against other major
currencies (the Aussie included). The move on Tuesday created a drop of
1.4 per cent to 6.3 yuan to the US dollar in Shanghai, while it fell 1.6 per
cent in its offshore Hong Kong trade, according to Bloomberg. Wait, what?
What are onshore and offshore rates? As the names suggests, onshore
(CNY) yuan is traded on the mainland, while offshore (CNH) is traded
through the Bank of China in Hong Kong and available to be bought and sold
by international investors. The CNH floats freely, unlike its onshore

counterpart, and was introduced as part of China's efforts to internationalise

the yuan. Loosening the grip on the yuan's reference rate effectively brings
the CNY and CNH closer together, narrowing the gap between the market's
value of the yuan and the government's artificial rate. "It looks like this is
the end of the fixing as we know it," Khoon Goh, a Singapore-based
strategist at ANZ Banking Group told Bloomberg. "The one-off
devaluation of the fix and allowing more market-based determination takes
us into a new currency regime," he said.

Dollar is about to be replaced by the Yuan collapse of

CCP solves
Karinja, 2015
(Filip, founder and editor of Hang the Bankers website, China is almost
ready to replace the US dollar, March 20, 2015, Hang the Bankers,
http://www.hangthebankers.com/china-is-almost-ready-to-replace-the-usdollar/, Accessed: July 17, 2016, YDEL)
As the US dollars reign as global reserve currency appears to be ending,
are we seeing the beginning of a new dawn in the east? Throughout history,
global reserve currencies have proven to last for only so long. Before the
United States currency reigned supreme, the currencies of Great Britain,
France, the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal all had their day. We dont
know exactly when the dollars run as reserve currency will end, but
everywhere you look, there are seismic shifts away from the
greenback. For one, the number of bilateral trade agreements signed
between countries is rising at an alarming rate. And then there are the
Chinese. Even just a few years ago, the Chinese yuan was not even one of
the ten most traded currencies; now, as of last year, its number five on the
list recorded by SWIFT, an international financial transaction agency. In fact,
international payments settled in yuan jumped a MASSIVE 104% in 2014!
But the Chinese arent ones to be satisfied easily; they know whats at stake
on the global stage and are moving hastily to seize the opportunity. So later
this year, China is expected to launch what will be known as the China
International Payment System (CIPS), an international system that will
further the yuans internationalization and its status as a dominant currency
on the global level for cross-border transactions. Add to this several other
significant developments: First, the Chinese are now seeking to have the
yuan added to the IMFs special drawing rights (SDRs) pool of reserve
currencies. At present, that pool consists only of the U.S. dollar, the euro, the
Japanese yen and the British pound. Second, China is heading up the new
alternative to the World Bank and IMF, known at the New Development
Bank, which is part of the BRICS system and is run out of Shanghai. Finally,
on top of all of this, China has created the Asian Infrastructure Investment
Bank (AIIB), which competes with the predominantly U.S.-controlled
financial institutions and focuses on the Asia-Pacific region. As of this week,
the UK and Australia have joined the AIIB, much to the disapproval of the
U.S. government. France, Germany and Italy are set to follow. All roads
are leading away from the U.S. and over to China.

That hurts US hegemony sanctions of Iran and North

Korea would be ineffective
Economist 2015
(IF THE YUAN COMPETES WITH THE DOLLAR CLASH OF THE
CURRENCIES, The Economist, July 1, 2015,
http://worldif.economist.com/article/12117/clash-currencies, Accessed: July
17, 2016, YDEL)
America has good reason to worry about the yuan. Its emergence as
a credible alternative to the dollar would undermine a cornerstone
of American power. Sanctions against Iran and North Korea have had bite
because of the dollars centrality to global finance. Some 45% of all crossborder transactions are denominated in dollars. So any bank with
international business needs access to the American banking system, to
clear payments or manage cash. And for that it needs an American licence,
which means it had better heed the sanctions . China knows how potent this
is. In 2013, after America hit North Koreas main foreign-exchange bank
with sanctions, Bank of China stopped serving its North Korean client. In
2012, at the height of American pressure on Iran, China grudgingly cut
imports of Iranian oil. The dollars political leverage will dissipate as
the yuan goes global . China is already close to launching a system for
processing cross-border yuan payments. Although described blandly as a
platform for facilitating transactions, its consequences could over time be
far-reaching. It will allow banks and companies to move money around the
world on a financial superhighway delinked from the dollar. America will
find it far harder to track who is using the China International Payment
System (CIPS) and for what. The threat of exclusion from the American
financial system will start to lose its force. And China would have a new
tool to propagate its way of thinking. When heads of state meet the
Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader regarded by China as a separatist,
they may find their banks placed on the CIPS blacklist. This tactic would
damage the yuans standing if used too liberally, but the mere threat of
punishment might be enough for China to get its way. A global yuan
would also win China more respect . China has shown that it wants to be
seen as a good citizen of the world at times of trouble. In 1997-98, during
the Asian financial crisis, and in 2008-09, during the global one, it locked the
yuan in place against the dollar. This reassured other countries that it would
not use depreciation as a crutch for its economy. As international use of the
yuan increases, China will be in a position to do more, by serving as
backstop to the global financial system.

Economy
Root cause of Chinas economic decline is its authoritarian
regime elite opposition and short-term fixes prevent
growth makes collapse inevitable with CCP
Fisher, 2015
Max, editor for Vox, China's authoritarianism is dooming its economy, Vox,
July 9, 2015, http://www.vox.com/2015/7/9/8916609/china-economy-crash,
Accessed: July 4, 2016, YDEL

Based on past incidents, it's a safe bet that China will pull out of this crisis as it has past crises. But, long

China's economic model was

unsustainable and doomed to collapse into recession and, possibly, the sort
of resulting political turmoil the country saw in the late 1980s. One reason I believe this is that
I am joined by some of the people in the best position to know: the Chinese
leadership. "I want to remind those cadres who are staying on the job beyond me: My biggest
worry right now is an overheating economy," Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji
said in a January 2003 Cabinet meeting, his last before leaving office. "I've already worried about this
for a year now," Zhu said in comments released only years later. "I wouldn't say this publicly,
but only bring it up to the top leadership, that overheating is the one thing
that preoccupies my mind. Many signs seem to have emerged, and if we're
not vigilant, the economic situation will be difficult to rein in." The next
premier, Wen Jiabao, warned in 2007 that China's economic model of skyrocketing
export-based growth was "unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and
ultimately unsustainable." The Chinese government knows it can't maintain power through
term, I have always suspected that the pessimists were right, that

censorship, propaganda, and riot police alone. It needs to maintain economic growth to keep Chinese
citizens happy, but it also needs to slow down that growth to keep the economy healthy in the long term.

The basic problem at the core of the Chinese economy is that it needs to be
dramatically restructured to remain healthy . But Chinese leaders appear
either unable or unwilling to make those changes, held back by the
unusual nature of China's authoritarian, one-party political system.
China's leaders have seen the problem for a while: They've been warning one another for
years that their economic model was "unsustainable." But they never fixed
it, which is why we're seeing this week's latest economic lurch. The reason they never fixed it
isn't that the economy was unready, or that they didn't know what to do. It's
that they are incapable of doing it. The very nature of China's authoritarian
model, by basing its power on a sprawling governing elite that is heavily
invested in the status quo, might now make it impossible for officials to do
the things they need to do to keep the system afloat. China's one-party rule has
looked impossible for so long that we sometimes don't even see anymore how improbable its continued
rule really is. China watchers, not to mention people within China itself, have been warning for decades
that the system was unsustainable. But the Communist Party pulled itself out of so many dire-seeming
crises that those warnings started to sound silly. But maybe they weren't. Maybe they were right. The

China's
government has premised political stability on delivering consistent
economic growth. No one is sure what will happen if Beijing fails on that
implicit promise, but Chinese leaders certainly fear the worst. In a democracy, if
stakes here are enormous. Since not long after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre,

people feel their government has failed them, they can vote that government out of office. But in an
autocracy like China's, popular discontent can be more dangerous. China's leaders have long planned to
change the country's economic model. But they thought they would have decades to do it; as long as
China remained much poorer than developed countries, the old system would hold. When Zhu and Wen

issued their warnings, they saw the problem as urgent, but on a long timeline. That timeline got much
shorter after the 2008 financial crisis, which crippled Western economies as China's was growing. The

China's economic model began

looking less viable. In recent years, China's economy has been based on exporting to wealthy,
gap between China and rich countries shrank, and suddenly

developed countries. For that export-driven system to work, China's economy needs to remain weaker
than those of its buyers. One of the biggest reasons China sells so much stuff is because it can produce
that stuff cheaply. But as China's growth accelerates and European and American growth slows due to
financial crises, China's wages are catching up with the developed economies faster than anyone had
anticipated. If and when China gets too wealthy to continue exporting cheap products (or if the
developed economies become too weak to keep buying them), it will be in big trouble. The financial crisis
meant that China needed to accelerate its plan to restructure its economy. China needs to shift its
economic emphasis from selling exports at times driven by state-run industrial enterprises to selling
to domestic Chinese consumers. This means moving wealth from the state and state-run companies to
Chinese households, which would then drive China's continued growth. That was always going to
require some trade-offs. An urban middle class that's wealthy enough to drive sufficient domestic
consumption is also going to be too wealthy to work cheap factory jobs. And this is also going to require a
Chinese currency that is too strong, relative to those of wealthy importers like the US and Japan, for
China to keep pumping out cheap exports. It was going to hurt export industries and state-run

It did increase
domestic spending, and exports have dropped, but rather than pumping that
money into the middle class and businesses to serve it, too much of that
money has gone into massive and at times wasteful infrastructure spending.
And that gets to the ways that China's political model is coming to stand in
opposition to its economic model. There are several ways in which China's
political system makes it very hard for it to confront its economic challenges .
enterprises, which means hurting the elite. China's solution to this was not ideal.

One of them is something that I sometimes shorthand as China's steel problem. A few years ago, China
announced that the country would cut steel production. I asked a journalist who covers Chinese industry
if this was good news. After all, China was producing and exporting way too much steel, flooding global
markets and dropping prices not to mention keeping China's economy on the export-led model it needs
to drop. So this must be a good step, right? He responded that it probably would be if not for the fact
that China had been announcing this policy for years, and for years Chinese steel production had been
rising. Beijing, he said, could make all the declarations it likes, but there are a lot of high- and mid-level
officials, not to mention the powerful state-run industries, that might not see it as in their interest to go
along. Often, they don't, sometimes rewriting policy as it happens. China's steel production did finally
dip a bit in the first quarter of this year, the first production drop in 20 years, after US and EU producers
called for tariffs to punish Chinese overproduction. This goes to show how hard it is for China to make
any sort of economic pivot; it wasn't until steel producers faced the threat of tariffs that they finally

A major problem of the Chinese system, which

can look efficient and monolithic from the outside, is that local officials, midlevel officials, and senior officials sometimes have divergent incentives
and they often have enough political autonomy to go on their own way. Beijing
obeyed the order to drop production.

might ban forced abortions, for example, but the practice still happens in places where the local official

This gets to the larger problem with China's needed

economic transition to a consumer economy: The leadership can't pull it off
unless the larger Chinese system wants to make it happen. And the system
gives every indication of not wanting it to happen, for the simple reason that
it would be bad for the people who dominate that system . China's growth
has created some very powerful industries and interests in the country. The
firms that made a lot of money became politically connected, and vice versa. State-run industries
and rich elites hold an awful lot of power in China, to the extent that the line
between officialdom and the business elite is blurred at best. All of them
benefit generally from the status quo, and specifically from the current
system that prioritizes state-run enterprises, export industries, and certain domestic industries such as
housing and construction that are not healthy outlets for growth. These people are going to
want to resist change, even change that's good for China overall. That's true
of efforts to shift to a consumption-driven economy, which would be bad for
their business and political interests. And it's true of redistributive policies to build up the
thinks he or she knows better.

middle class, which would hurt their interests. In 2011, the Eurasia Group issued a lengthy report on

China's current five-year plan, warning that this opposition could be enough to stop China from making

The group's prediction was severe: "China's

leadership will fail to introduce the bold reforms necessary to meaningfully
redistribute wealth from corporations and government to households . For
instance, big state-owned firms will fiercely resist contributing large chunks of their
dividends to government social security funds." But the same tendency to intervene in
the necessary changes to its economy.

the economy, particularly in China's financial system, could well set up a battle over capital allocation and
investment decisions, in which powerful stakeholders will resist any attempt to transfer wealth to new

China's leaders are unlikely to deal with these powerful

"losing" interest groups holistically. Nor is a strongman or tightly knit group
of leaders likely to be able to overcome them. Ultimately, then, China's
political environment will defeat many elements of the FYP [five-year plan].
constituencies. And

Without significant changes to governance structures--and to the role the state plays in capital
allocation--China's

economic landscape will not change as fundamentally as the

FYP's designers (and many foreigners) hope. The report warns that the Chinese
Communist Party could endanger the very stability of Chinese politics if it
fails to implement the needed reforms. "China's rebalancing agenda is not
merely about economics but, ultimately, the political viability of the Chinese
system," the report conclude. "That income and development gap is unsustainable
both economically and politically." If what China wants is a healthy, consumer-driven
economy that will keep the country prosperous and stable, then one thing it really needs to get there is
freer financial institutions. This is a big part of how you direct money to serve domestic consumption,
building up things like local businesses. And, indeed, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has talked a lot about
making this a priority. But it turns out that China's leaders didn't really mean it. As we learned this

they might have seen the long-term benefits of freer markets,

they are unwilling to bear the short-term costs and they want to keep control

week, much as

of banks to keep diverting money to those entrenched state-run industries and elite interests. The 2011

The senior political leadership is not

receptive to reforms that would weaken the Chinese Communist Party's
power over the financial system and thus jeopardize its ability to bankroll
massive industrial policy spending on powerful constituencies, which constitutes
another major 12th FYP priority. Given this discord, Beijing is unlikely to articulate or
pursue a convincing plan for remedying the financial sector's most glaring
inefficiencies over the next five years. That goes a long way to explain why the Chinese
Eurasia Group report predicted exactly this:

government responded to this week's stock crash with such drastic interventions. "The economic hopes
invested in Xi [Jinping] and [Premier Li Keqiang] stemmed from their pledge in late 2013 to let market
forces play a 'decisive role' in allocating resources," the Economist's Simon Rabinovitch wrote. "The
actions of the past ten days have made abundantly clear that it is still the other way around: the Chinese
government wants a decisive role in markets." The reasoning here, as the Eurasia Group's report
explained, is almost certainly about politics. Keeping firm control of China's financial sector is in the
short-term interests of the state-run industries and elites who are so powerful in China. But it is against
the long-term interests of China's economic health, making it harder to grow the middle class and
domestic consumption. In China, everything the government does comes down, at some point, to
maintaining stability and Communist Party rule. The leadership believes, with reason, that it needs to
keep economic growth high: Rising urbanization and wages means that the cost-of-living is going up all
the time, and growth has to keep pace with that to maintain the rising standard of living. And maintaining
the standard of living is, at this point, a core premise of Communist Party rule and thus of the country's
stability. The smart way to deal with this problem would have been to liberalize the financial sector,
allowing for more investment in new businesses that serve domestic consumers, and to redistribute more
wealth to the middle classes so that they'll go out and spend it. But for the reasons discussed above,

Xi Jinping did try to address this larger problem with a

massive anti-corruption campaign and crackdown on misbehaving officials.
This was meant, among other things, to get the elite in line for the necessary
reforms. Xi, like other Chinese leaders before him, did see the problem and
did try to address it, but the system has been just too big and resistant to
change. China's stopgap to keep the economy moving was to funnel huge amounts of money into
China couldn't do that.

things like massive state-run infrastructure projects the famous empty airports and hotel complexes.

This did indeed help maintain economic growth. But a lot of that spending was just waste, and the
"growth" was unsustainable. At the same time, this encouraged Chinese consumers to pour their money
into unwise investments like real estate or, more recently, the stock market. Because Beijing kept
dumping money into these projects, it looked like they would grow forever. And the absence of a
liberalized financial sector meant that consumers had few other places to put their money. So consumers
helped drive what has been a set of bubbles across the Chinese economy. Everyone is focused right now
on the enormous bubble in the Chinese stock market driven in part by regular Chinese investors who
followed the terrible logic of bubbles by dumping money into investments that looked like they would
grow forever. But maybe a more instructive example is the enormous real estate bubble. In 2011, 13
percent of Chinese GDP came from real estate investment. Urban housing stock constituted 41 percent of
Chinese household wealth. The result of this is that China watchers have been just sort of waiting for
China's real estate to implode, and hoping that it wouldn't be totally catastrophic when it did. The same
goes for the Chinese stock market, which has been in an obvious and obviously dangerous bubble

The fact that

the current downturn was entirely foreseeable and yet not prevented speaks
to the larger danger looming over China. Its ever-worsening failure to make
the necessary economic transition is just as obvious, and the consequences
just as foreseeable. China's leaders are really smart people who can see all of this coming.
The fact that they haven't taken the necessary steps to avert either this little
disaster or what could be the potentially much larger disaster of a failed
transition tells you something pretty scary: It might just not be in their
power.
for some time. That bubble currently appears to be, to at least some extent, popping.

CCP strength is an obstacle to economic growth

Burgman Jr, and Friedle, 2016
Paul, holds an M.A. from the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore, where he studied the Chinese economy and Chinese foreign policy. He currently
lives and works in China. Andrew M. Friedle holds an M.A. in economics with specialties in public choice
and urban economics, and Andrew, graduated from The Pennsylvania State University with High
Distinction and Honors in Economics. He is currently a PhD candidate at West Virginia State University,
with specialties of Public Choice and Urban Economics, China's Political Culture Is Paralyzing Its

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinaspolitical-culture-paralyzing-its-economy-16019?page=3 , Accessed: July 2, 2016,

Economy, May 2, 2016, The National Interest,

YDEL, This evidence is modified due to ableist language

Economic Reforms and Political Obstructionism

For the past twenty years, the source of the Communist

Party of Chinas (CPC) political legitimacy has been economic prosperity. The CPC has maintained their grip on power through performance-based legitimacy, writes

After years of double-digit

growth, a global slowdown in trade and consumption has to begin to erode
this core source of legitimacy. For the first time since Deng Xiaoping opened up the mainland to international-capital inflows,
China's outbound investment in 2015 surpassed that of inbound investment.
The decrease in inbound investments is not unexpected, and in fact highlights what everyone from
economists to CPC politicians already know: the current Chinese economic model is outdated and in
desperate need of reform. Despite CPC political power brokers knowing
what needs to be done, Beijing is facing a nightmare scenario in which
President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang must paradoxically reduce CPC
influence over social and political life while simultaneously cultivating
respect for the rule of law. This paradox is rooted in the Chinese proverb: tian gao, hungd yuan (heaven is high and the emperor is far
economist Guy de Jonquires in a policy brief for the European Center for International Political Economy.

away). While examples of this proverb can be seen in many elements of Chinese civil society, such as driving, Chinese political leaders and civil servants are especially

It is this attitude and code of

conduct that is [preventing] paralyzing China from moving forward with its
economic reforms. Instead of promoting healthy competition between
different regions, the decentralization of power necessary to many economic
reforms going forward may give way to political brinkmanship where
politicians tempt fate with how much power and wealth they can amass
before they attract the ire of Beijing. A recent example of this political brinkmanship gone awry is the 2013 trial and
susceptible to this modus operandi and it is the fundamental reason guanxi is so important.

subsequent conviction of Shandong Provinces rising star, Bo Xilai. While Xi may be unable to enforce the rule of law on his countrymen for fear of civil unrest, he can

certainly enforce codes of conduct on fellow party members. In a January 2015 speech, Xi stated, Political discipline and rules exist to enable CPC cadres to defend the
authority of the CPC Central Committee and cadres must follow those rules, aligning themselves with the committee in deed and thought, at all times and in any
situation. Party unity must be ensured. While many Western analysts have claimed that Xis call for party unity is nothing but a pretext for consolidating power and
embracing a cult of personality, one wonders whether this is necessarily a bad political move given the current lack of party unity and susceptibility of politicians to
believe that Beijing is too far away to notice their use of guanxi or their antipathy for Beijings rules. In fact, Xis political ambitions are more nuanced than
appearances suggest. Guy de Jonquieres argues in his policy brief that there are at least two additional factors guiding Xis very public anticorruption campaign. The

corruption has long been reluctantly accepted as the price of

economic prosperity. But the inefficiencies caused by such unproductive
rent-seeking behavior have become such a drag on economic activity that
Beijing can no longer simply ignore it. The second is the dismantling of
vested interest groups lodged within the CPC that are opposed to economic
reforms. These groups have profited handsomely from the Old Normal and they dread the approaching New Normal that Xi and his supporters are
posturing to enact. These vested interest groups have amassed such enormous
amounts of wealth and political capital through their use of guanxi that they
will resist any threat to the status quo.
first is publicity:

Even though Chinese authoritarianism has worked in the pastits ineffective for further economic growth
Bandow, 2015
(Doug, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and
civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan
and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading
publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street
Journal, and the Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic
conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been
a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and
MSNBC. He holds a JD from Stanford University, Can Authoritarian China
Keep Its Economic Miracle Going?, November 30, 2015, CATO Institute,
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/can-authoritarian-china-keepits-economic-miracle-going, Accessed: July 17, 2016, YDEL)
the China Model is looking a bit frayed . All is not well in the worlds second
the countrys dramatic and
rapid economic rise may be over. China has slowing growth, a property
bubble, ghost cities, inefficient state enterprises, a stock market crash , badly
skewed demographics, overextended banks stuffed with political loans, and
unbelievable official statistics. Despite President Xi Jinpings talk of placing more influence on
market economics, the regime has moved in the opposite direction . And
corruption continues, by some estimates costing as much as three percent of
GDP. The governments crackdown, though widely welcomed, has not resulted in
more efficient administration. Instead, one American diplomat told me, more often the result
Yet

largest and by some measures largest economy. Indeed,

has been paralysis. With pervasive pay-offs virtually every official, especially at the local level, is a

it now can be harder to get necessary decisions since the old

corruption lubricant may be gone but dispassionate rule of law has yet to
appear. Beijing also has put foreign companies in its gunsites, often arresting
potential target. So

employees and holding them for months without charges. The OSI Group is but one recent example. This
makes Western firms even more nervous over investments which often have not paid off as expected.

Foreign direct investment continues to grow, but less quickly than before.
Economic problems mean political problems . The Communist Party still formally
reigns. Maos beneficent visage watches over Tiananmen Square. But there is no benevolence
in party rule. The regime has been cracking down on domestic dissent and

foreign influence. What educated Chinese see today is corrupt apparatchiks turning revolution into
a prosperous career. President Xis take-down of high-flying tigers is welcomed, but viewed as cynical
politics mostly targeting his adversaries. Although an authoritarian state where public criticism
through traditional or social media is punished, China is remarkably open in other ways. Dissent is
widely expressed, especially by students, who Ive been addressing for years. Unsurprisingly, they
generally dislike government controls over their lives. In front of classmates they have denounced
internet controls, lauded American democracy, asked about Tiananmen Square, and worried that Xi
Jinping was becoming another Mao Zedong. Yet wimpy liberals they are not. They are patriots, with a
nationalist bent. Taiwan is Chinese, they tell me. So are disputed territories in nearby waters. And they
arent that enthralled with Washington lecturing their government. Its an interesting tension that I
found common during my recent trip to China. A successful businessman educated in America
forthrightly declared that democracy might not be best for the worlds most populous state. He offered
little praise for the Communist Party, but he obviously didnt want to be ruled by a peasant majority
either. Yet when the issue of internet controls was raised, he said that of course he had to get to Google
documents for the book that he was writing. Evading these government restrictions, at least, was a

China is an ancient
civilization and complex nation that has gone through multiple,
extraordinary transformations, most rapidly over the last three decades
when it has rocketed from isolated Maoist madness to global economic
leader. Yet its current trajectory is slowing, and perhaps even heading
downward. Particularly interesting is the question whether growing repression will impede Chinese
given. Trying to predict the PRCs future direction is more than dangerous.

growth. Beijing recognizes it faces a challenging future: for instance, it has just dropped its destructive

repressive policies inevitably hinder commercial

development, especially in todays Internet/information-dominated economy.
one-child policy. Other

Perversely, the PRC is encouraging students to look West for school and a future life. Moreover, theres
evidence of at least a modest exodus of wealthier Chinese, perhaps fearful of being targeted by their
government not only for possible economic corruption, but for their affection for Western influences

the attempt to tighten central

party control may generate widespread political instability. A reported 100,000
and desire to express their opinions. Equally significant,

party members are under investigation. Having taken on the tigers, such as past security chief Zhou
Yongkang, Xi Jinping has upset the post-Mao policy of not targeting previous leaders. Indeed, Xi is
rumored to be taking aim at still influential former president Jiang Zemin. There is wide disagreement

Open political conflict,

especially with the madness of the Cultural Revolution still within many peoples memory, could
prove especially unsettling.
over whether Xi is secure on the mountaintop or standing on a precipice.

Environment

General
Even if eco-authoritarianism worked no spillover to
Western countries
Shahar, 2015
Dan Coby, University of Arizona at Department of Philosophy, Rejecting
Eco-Authoritarianism, Again, Environmental Values, Volume 24, Number 3,
June 2015, pp. 345-366(22), White Horse Press, Accessed: July 4, 2016,
http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/whp/09632719/v24n3/s
6.pdf?
expires=1467647650&id=87889311&titleid=1473&accname=Wake+Forest
+Univ&checksum=4F5900A794B101B11F3D1C95688C3016, YDEL
This paper therefore attempts to take eco-authoritarianism seriously on its
own terms in order to evaluate its merits as an alternative to market liberal
democracy. As a point of departure, I adopt a number of pessimistic
assumptions about the future of market liberalism that eco-authoritarians
(and many other environmentalists) will likely regard as well grounded. I
grant for the sake of discussion that our future environmental challenges
will be extremely severe, that private actors in the free market will not be
able to devise methods to cope with these challenges satisfactorily, and
that market liberal democracies will be hard-pressed to implement policies
to effectively ameliorate these challenges due to messy partisan wrangling
of the sort that has dominated politics throughout all of recent memory. It
should be stressed that these assumptions may not be true: all of them have
been challenged at one point or another in voluminous bodies of literature,
both by optimistic market liberals who believe that our current institutions
will suffice to handle any coming ecological challenges6 and by less radical
neo-Malthusians who believe that market liberalism can be reformed to
address our problems without moving all the way to authoritarianism.7 But I
take it that if eco-authoritarianism cannot be sustained with these
assumptions in place, then it will not be defensible if they are relaxed in
market liberalisms favour. In spite of these pessimistic assumptions, I
ultimately conclude that embracing eco-authoritarianism would be unlikely
to improve the capacity of Western societies to respond to ecological
challenges over what the market liberal status quo would offer. Even if
market liberal societies will predictably face severe hardships due to an
impending environmental crisis, shifting towards more authoritarian forms
of political organisation should not be seen as an attractive strategy for
ameliorating these problems. Indeed, while it is hard to imagine that such a
shift would generate better consequences, there is good reason to suspect
that embracing eco-authoritarianism would only make things worse.

Environmental solutions cannot come from an Chinas

authoritarian regime
Shahar, 2015

Dan Coby, University of Arizona at Department of Philosophy, Rejecting

Eco-Authoritarianism, Again, Environmental Values, Volume 24, Number 3,
June 2015, pp. 345-366(22), White Horse Press, Accessed: July 5, 2016,
http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/whp/09632719/v24n3/s
6.pdf?
expires=1467647650&id=87889311&titleid=1473&accname=Wake+Forest
+Univ&checksum=4F5900A794B101B11F3D1C95688C3016, YDEL
Some observers of modern-day China have suggested along similar lines that the Communist
Party maintains its power over an increasingly critical public only by
consistently giving the people what they want, particularly increased economic
opportunities and improved standards of living.64 This means that the continued success
of the party in maintaining control of the country may depend on its
continued success in producing favourable outcomes. As political scientist Yuchao
Zhu has recently mused: By nature, a performance based legitimacy is very fragile. Given the high
discontent developing in Chinese society and the increasingly confrontational state-society relationship

good governance
provides the regime with breathing room rather than long term political
allegiance and social consent. There could still be a legitimation crisis if any dramatic and
in various localities despite the faade of Hu-Wens harmonious society,

destructive developments occur.65 History seems to teach us that the only reliable way to achieve true
autonomy from citizens demands is through an active and sustained commitment to suppressing
would-be dissenters and to imposing policies without compromise. For both the Soviet Union and
Peoples Republic of China, the price of political openness was the risk of instability and political
upheaval when citizens came to disapprove of their leaders actions, and there is good reason to think
that this outcome was not a coincidence.66 It is only by preventing robust civil discourse and open
dissent from emerging in the first place through consistent repression that authoritarian governments
have been able to retain and exercise their power with relative impunity.67 The good news for ecoauthoritarians position is that when pursued consistently, political repression does seem to work quite
well at achieving its purposes: suppressive, uncompromising authoritarian regimes have demonstrated
an often terrifying ability to insulate themselves from the wills of their constituents. However,

such

regimes have also been notoriously incapable of formulating and

implementing policies to actually make their nations better off. I contend
that this fact should not surprise us: suppressive, uncompromising
authoritarian regimes face serious challenges that more open, politically
sensitive administrations do not. For one thing, an absence of free and open
public discourse makes it easy for administrators to get locked into
narrow, rigid ways of thinking that impede their ability to make
good decisions . A fearful and uninvolved citizenry is also not likely to
provide the sort of honest, informative, and critical feedback that would
enable administrators to calibrate policies to the details of local
circumstances, detect their own mistakes, and catch misbehaving officials
who undermine the pursuit of public goals. Thus bureaucrats who are insulated from
public opinion through the naked exercise of state coercion quickly find themselves operating in a
bubble, making it difficult to formulate and implement good policies regardless of their own personal
virtues as administrators. It is partly for this reason that some real-world authoritarian regimes have
recently been moving in the direction of greater interaction with the public rather than less. In 2002,
Larry Diamond memorably hailed an unprecedented growth in the number of regimes that are neither
clearly democratic nor conventionally authoritarian, noting that while many nations have embraced
certain avenues for public participation in politics, they have not gone so far as to adopt the full raft of
reforms normally associated with liberal democracy including not only democratic elections but solid
protection of civil liberties under a strong rule of law.68 Such hybrid

regimes have become

particularly prevalent in South-east Asia, leading some commentators to
suggest that these structures may represent not halfway houses69
between authoritarianism and liberal democracy but rather genuine
political alternatives of their own.70 Although these movements toward public inclusion

one should
not overlook an increasing recognition by authoritarian governments that
state agendas may be better promoted by fostering citizen involvement
rather than excluding it. For example, as Elizabeth Economy has argued at length, the Peoples
have been driven in part by popular and international demands for democratisation,

Republic of China has deliberately become increasingly dependent on efforts by non-governmental

organisations, local constituencies, and the media to ensure the successful formulation and
implementation of its environmental policies, particularly on matters of ecological conservation, urban
renewal, and pollution prevention.71 She writes: Chinas leaders have allowed the establishment of
genuine NGOs, encouraged aggressive media attention to environmental issues, and sanctioned
independent legal activities to protect the environment, partly to compensate for the weakness of its
formal environmental protection apparatus. Grassroots NGOs have sprung up in many regions of the
country to address issues as varied as the fate of the Tibetan antelope, the deterioration of Chinas
largest freshwater lakes, and mounting urban refuse. And nonprofit legal centers have emerged to
wage class action warfare on behalf of farmers and others whose livelihood and health have suffered
from pollution from local factories.72 As Maria Francesch-Huidobro has recently chronicled, the
Republic of Signapore has also been making progressively more room for civil society in the shaping of
its environmental governance.73 These trends reinforce the suggestion discussed in section IV that
todays most effective democratic regimes can trace much of their success to the constructive impacts of
citizen participation in political processes. Although it remains to be seen whether so-called hybrid

regimes will be able to match the administrative efficacy of the worlds bestperforming democracies, it nevertheless seems fair to suppose for the sake
of discussion that authoritarian governments may eventually be able to
achieve a very high level of state effectiveness through increased inclusion
of citizens into the political process. If this is to be the case, however, it will only
come alongside a commitment to abstain from the sorts of suppressive,
uncompromising state tactics that would make possible the sort of
administrative immunity that eco-authoritarians applaud. A government that
quashes dissent and ruthlessly imposes its will on its citizens will never be able to foster the kinds of
open discursive environments upon which modern authoritarian states have increasingly come to rely
for effective policy-making. In practice, then,

it seems that authoritarian regimes

have to choose between the immunity from public demands extolled

by eco-authoritarians and the well-functioning civil society that
makes possible the high level of administrative efficacy that ecoauthoritarians see as necessary to address an environmental crisis.
If this is true, then the remaining case for eco-authoritarianism crumbles. In the previous section, I

a shift toward authoritarianism could be defended if the capacity to

impose politically unpopular policies were sufficiently valuable, even if it
turned out that an eco-authoritarian regime would likely be populated by
administrators of imperfect capacity and benevolence. But now it seems that this
argued that

apparent advantage is essentially worthless . In order to employ its capacity to

impose favoured measures in the face of public opposition, an authoritarian regime would
have to employ repressive tactics that would predictably erode its efficacy in
formulating and implementing policies. And if it did not employ this capacity, then it
would find itself bound by the same political realities that supposedly render
democratic market liberal regimes incapable of addressing the
environmental crisis. At best, then, eco-authoritarianism would seem to be
capable of more or less matching the performance of market liberalism: at
worst, its officials would find themselves trapped in a bubble of suppressive,
uncompromising inefficacy. If eco-authoritarians cannot claim the capacity
to implement unpopular policies as a point in their favour, then it is not
clear what they can say to assuage our concerns about giving essentially
unlimited power to only moderately capable and imperfectly benevolent

administrators. The objection would not necessarily be that a political transition of this sort would
be disastrous: after all, I have suggested that hybridised authoritarian regimes might potentially be
able to achieve a level of functioning equal to that enjoyed in democratic countries. Rather, the point
would be that this transition would come at a clear cost namely, our individual and political rights

it is hard to see why we should

accept eco-authoritarianism even if it looks like democratic market
liberalism is unlikely to deliver favourable results.
and it would present us with no clear benefit. Accordingly,

Even if Chinese authoritarian regime can implement effective

policies policies will inevitably fail because of the lack of
participation on the public level
Shahar, 2015
Dan Coby, University of Arizona at Department of Philosophy, Rejecting
Eco-Authoritarianism, Again, Environmental Values, Volume 24, Number 3,
June 2015, pp. 345-366(22), White Horse Press, Accessed: July 5, 2016,
http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/whp/09632719/v24n3/s
6.pdf?
expires=1467647650&id=87889311&titleid=1473&accname=Wake+Forest
+Univ&checksum=4F5900A794B101B11F3D1C95688C3016, YDEL
THE DUBIOUS TRACK RECORD OF ACTUALLY EXISTING
AUTHORITARIANISM As eco-authoritarianism has re-emerged into
contemporary environmental discourse, a number of scholars have begun to
pay closer attention to the environmental and political performance of
actual authoritarian societies, primarily including but not limited to China.
This scrutiny has revealed a mixed track record including some important
successes alongside significant shortfalls. Critics of China in particular have
questioned the ability of the Communist Party to successfully implement and
enforce its high-minded directives,42 noting that sometimes being
aggressive has no bearing on being effective .43 Reservations about
the actual effectiveness of authoritarian environmental policies have been
echoed in discussions of regimes in Egypt,44 Iran45 and Thailand.46
Bolstering these concerns, a recent study by Hanna Bck and Axel
Hadenius has suggested the existence of a more general J-shaped
relationship between democratisation and administrative efficiency across
various countries and time periods. According to Bck and Hadenius,
administrative quality is higher in strongly authoritarian states than in
states that are partially democratised; it is highest of all, however , in
states of a pronouncedly democratic character.47 They suggest that this
may be because highly democratic states can rely on a well-developed civil
society for help in making sure that policies are well calibrated to particular
contexts and for constructive feedback on policies once they are
implemented.48 The authors note that authoritarian governments can
sometimes perform better than partially-democratised societies with poorly
developed civil societies, but that they have thus far been hard-pressed to
find an effective substitute for the genuine citizen participation that enables
the best democracies to formulate and implement their policies

successfully.49 Thus although authoritarian governments may be free from

certain policy-making constraints faced by governments in liberal regimes,
administrators in even the most successful authoritarian countries have
historically failed to match the levels of state capacity enjoyed by
citizens of prosperous democratic countries like Finland, New Zealand
and the Netherlands.50 The dubious performance of actually existing
authoritarian governments may be thought to cast some doubt on the
viability of eco-authoritarianism as a response to the ecological crisis. Thus
Anthony Giddens has defended democracy against Shearman and Smith by
observing that totalitarian states have generally had poor or disastrous
environmental records. So also have most of those that have undergone
processes of authoritarian modernization, such as China, Russia or South
Korea.51 What Giddens fails to appreciate, however, is the extent to which
contemporary eco-authoritarians accept his observations. Shearman and
Smith, for example, begin The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of
Democracy by announcing, we agree that existing authoritarian societies,
largely based upon Marxist doctrines, have had an appalling environmental
record. We accept that there is no example of an existing authoritarian
government that does not have a record of environmental abuse.52 It is
critical to recognise, then, that the case for eco-authoritarianism is not built
on the assertion that global society should collectively strive to be more like
the Peoples Republic of China, the Republic of Singapore, or any other
modern authoritarian nation. Rather, it is built on the assertion that the
system of governance instantiated in China and Singapore has more
potential to resolve the environmental crisis than market liberal democracy.
Accordingly, the roles of China and Singapore in eco-authoritarian
arguments are not so much those of examples to follow uncritically as of
imperfect illustrations of an ideal type. Eco-authoritarians believe that realworld societies including China and Singapore themselves should strive
to be more like the imagined system of governance that those nations
approximate and represent. By criticising the performance of real-world
authoritarian regimes, we can certainly raise some concerns about the
viability of the eco-authoritarians vision: if attempts to implement this
vision have been widely unsuccessful, then this may suggest that the vision
itself is impotent as an ideal, much in the same way that the ideal of
enlightened central planning was a bad ideal in early eco-authoritarian
literature. But todays eco-authoritarians can quite plausibly object that
current authoritarian governments are far from representing the full
potential of the system of governance that they instantiate. Thus a decisive
refutation of eco-authoritarianism would have to go beyond empirical
observations and show why the main changes it implies would be
unattractive on a more theoretical level.

Chinese economic growth is incompatible with environmental

change Chinese government continues environmental
degradation
Smith, 2015

(Richard, economic historian. He wrote his UCLA history Ph.D. thesis on the
transition to capitalism in China and held post-docs at the East-West Center
in Honolulu and Rutgers University. He has written on China, capitalism and
the global environment and on related issues for New Left Review, Monthly
Review, The Ecologist, the Journal of Ecological Economics, Real-World
Economics Review, Adbusters magazine and other publications. His book To
Save the Planet, Turn the World Upside Down will be published in 2015,
China's Communist-Capitalist Ecological Apocalypse, June 15, 2015, TruthOut, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31478-china-s-communist-capitalistecological-apocalypse, Accessed: July 15, 2016, YDEL)
China Self-Destructs For more than three decades, China's "miracle"
economy has been the envy of the world or at least the envy of capitalist
economists for whom wealth creation is the highest purpose of human life.
Since 1979, China's GDP has grown by an average of just under 10 percent
per year. Never, the World Bank tells us, has a nation industrialized and
modernized so quickly or lifted so many millions out of poverty in such a
short time. From a backward, stagnant, largely agrarian socialism-inpoverty, Deng Xiaoping brought in foreign investors, introduced market
incentives, set up export bases, turned China into the light-industrial
workshop of the world and renovated China's huge state-owned enterprises
(SOEs). "Fast fashion" is speeding the disposal of the planet. Three
and a half decades of surging economic growth lifted China from the world's
10th largest economy in 1979 to No. 1 by 2014. What's more, after decades
of export-based growth, China's 12th Five-Year Plan 2011-2015 sought to
refocus the economy on internal market demand to realize Xi Jinping's
"Chinese Dream" of national rejuvenation and turning China into a mass
consumer society on the model of the United States. As China sailed right
through the global near-collapse of 2008 to 2009, hardly missing a beat,
while Western capitalist economies have struggled to keep from falling back
into recession, even the Thatcherite Economist magazine had to concede
that China's state capitalism may be in certain respects superior to capitalist
democracies and is perhaps even the wave of the future. But China's rise
has come at a horrific social and environmental cost . It's difficult to
grasp the demonic violence and wanton recklessness of China's profit-driven
assault on nature and on the Chinese themselves. Ten years ago, in an
interview with Der Spiegel magazine in March 2005, Pan Yue, China's
eloquent, young vice-minister of China's State Environmental Protection
Agency (SEPA) told the magazine, "the Chinese miracle will end soon
because the environment can no longer keep pace." Pan Yue added: We are
using too many raw materials to sustain [our] growth ... Our raw materials
are scarce, we don't have enough land, and our population is constantly
growing. Currently there [are] 1.3 billion people living in China, that's twice
as many as 50 years ago. In 2020 there will be 1.5 billion ... but desert areas
are expanding at the same time; habitable and usable land has been halved
over the past 50 years ... Acid rain is falling on one third of Chinese territory,
half of the water in our seven largest rivers is completely useless, while one
fourth of our citizens do not have access to clean drinking water. One third
of the urban population is breathing polluted air, and less than 20 percent of

the trash in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable

manner ... Because air and water are polluted, we are losing between 8 and
15 percent of our gross domestic product. And that doesn't include the costs
for health ... In Beijing alone, 70 to 80 percent of all deadly cancer cases are
related to the environment. And criticizing Western economists who
reassure us that more growth is the key to repairing the environmental
damage done from growth, Pan said: And there is yet another mistake ...
It's the assumption that economic growth will give us the financial
resources to cope with the crises surrounding the environment , raw
materials, and population growth. [But] there won't be enough
money, and we are simply running out of time. Developed countries
with a per capita gross national product of $8,000 to $10,000 can afford
that, but we cannot. Before we reach $4,000 per person, different crises in
all shapes and forms will hit us. Economically we won't be strong enough to
overcome them. (3) Pan Yue's searing honesty got him sidelined but if
anything, he understated the speed, ferocity and scale of China's ecological
destruction, a destruction that extends far beyond China itself.

Chinese Authoritarianism no solve environmental damage

focuses on only short term goals
Eaton and Kostka, 2014
Sarah Eaton and Genia Kostka (2014). Authoritarian Environmentalism
Undermined? Local Leaders Time Horizons and Environmental Policy
Implementation in China . The China Quarterly, 218, pp 359-380
doi:10.1017/S0305741014000356, Accessed: June 30, 2016, YDEL
Discussion and Conclusion The evidence gathered in interviews suggests that, while cadre rotation has
some benefits for environmental policy implementation, high cadre turnover has generated significant
negative and unintended consequences. We find that cadre rotation affects both cadres incentives and
their implementation capacities. In terms of incentives, shuffling cadres around every three to four years
keeps officials feet to the fire, as they are required to report accomplishments regularly to superiors.
Yet, as with leaders in Dionnes study of HIV/AIDS policy, Chinese leaders

with short time

horizons tend to select cheap and quick approaches to environmental policy
implementation. All else being equal, they prefer short-term highly visible
projects that yield outcomes during their own tenure periods, while longterm, costly and complex initiatives are often sidelined. As mentioned, state
leaders are increasingly concerned about short-termism and local leaders
themselves see the constraints of this system. For example, Geng Yanbo demanded a
five-year term in Datong so that he could make significant changes and receive credit for them. One
informant told us: When Geng was working in Taiyuan as vice-mayor [20062008] and he knew he was
going to be sent elsewhere, he demanded to be stationed in Datong for at least five years, otherwise he

While
the effect of frequent rotation on officials incentive structures is
problematic, the implications for cadres implementation capacity is more
mixed. On the one hand, by frequently moving them around departments and regions, cadres can
would not want to go. He wanted to make a long-term impact and be a leader with vision.63

play a role in the dissemination of new ideas and resources. Cadres with previous work experience in
SOEs are well-placed to negotiate effectively with managers the implementation of onerous
environmental regulations. On the other hand, cadres who come in as outsiders to a new locality lack
the local knowledge and networks essential for drawing local businesses into greener growth initiatives

When local leaders

have attained sufficient understanding of local conditions and interests to
serve as effective leaders, it is already time to take up a new post
or for obtaining additional funding from provincial and central governments.

elsewhere. How might Chinas policymakers rectify the adverse effects of high cadre turnover
highlighted in our interviews? This is a complex question deserving of its own paper; our analysis
suggests that national leaders could strive to increase local cadres time
horizons. A step forward in this regard was the central governments 2006
Interim provisions on the tenure of leading Party and government
cadres,64 which stipulates that, except in special cases, leading cadres ought to serve out their fiveyear terms in full. Short-termism associated with tenure rush (gan renqi )
prompted the Guangdong provincial Party committee in 2011 to remind
local leaders that success does not have to be realized in my tenure
(gongcheng bu bi zai wo renqi ).65 In spite of recent national calls to adhere strictly to

there has not yet been a discernible impact on

official tenures at the provincial and municipal level; indeed, the current
trend is towards faster turnover of officials. In all, the considerable
the recommended five-year rules,

perverse effects of local officials short time horizons give reason to

doubt the more optimistic claims about Chinas version of
environmentalauthoritarianism.

The purported authoritarian advantage is that, in

comparison to their counterparts in democratic systems, eco-elites enjoy greater freedom of action
owing to their relative autonomy from interest groups and secure positions in power.

Our

analysis suggests that behaviour linked to leadersshort time

horizons serves to undermine any such potential advantage. Local
leaders under pressure to produce political achievements in a few short
years tend to select the path of least resistance in selecting quick, lowquality approaches to implementing environmental policies and, while
nominally following national directives, are actually putting off the difficult
business of creating a sustainable growth path.

Warming
Chinese government cannot effectively combat warming
Bastasch, 2015
Michael, covers energy and the environment at the Daily Caller News
Foundation, Paper: China Cant Be Trusted To Fight Global Warming,
December 2, 2015, The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/02/paperchina-cant-be-trusted-to-fight-global-warming/, Accessed: July 17, 2016,
YDEL
China is making big pledges to fight global warming at the United Nations
climate talks, including a new one to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants 60 percent in
five years. But take these pledges with a grain of salt , says a veteran economist
who works extensively in China, because Chinas Communist Party knows that to stay
in power its highest priority it must maintain the economic growth rates
that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition
at bay. With Chinas economic growth faltering, the last thing the
Communist Party wants is to hobble its economy further by
curtailing the use of the fossil fuels upon which its economy
depends, writes economist Patricia Adams, the executive director of the Toronto-based Probe
International a group that works closely with Chinese NGOs. A major cutback in fossil fuel use
represents an existential threat to the Communist Partys rule. It simply isnt going to happen, writes
Adams in a new paper published by the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy Foundation. China has made
several major promises in the last year to cut carbon dioxide emissions in the coming years, boosting
hopes among environmentalists the communist country will sign a legally binding U.N. climate treaty.

Chinas government promised to cut emissions from the power

sector 60 percent by 2020, but gave no specifics on how this will be
achieved. Its announcement of further CO2 cuts comes as world leaders hash out a successor
Most recently,

agreement to the Kyoto Protocol in Paris. China also knows that Western leaders have no firm

their paramount goal is to

maintain face at the Paris talks, which would collapse without Chinas
presence. China is deftly preparing the stage in Paris to position itself as the Third Worlds defender
expectation of concrete commitments in Paris, she notes. Rather,

and also as a recipient of the billions in climate aid that it is demanding from the West. We can expect
more announcements, agreements, and soaring rhetoric from global politicians at the Paris Conference,
along with an agreement to meet again next year, Adams writes. What

we cannot expect are

reforms designed to reduce Chinas carbon emissions. Environmentalists
also hope Chinas horrible air quality will encourage the country to tackle
CO2 emissions. A recent report from the nonprofit Berkeley Earth claims Chinese air pollution kills
some 4,000 people a day. But hoping air pollution worries will curb CO2 is a
false hope , says Adams. A programme to rapidly reduce pollutants harmful to
human health would be at odds with a programme to reduce CO2, writes
Adams, adding that CO2 is a colorless, odorless gas that has no effect on human health. The opposite is
true, writes Adams. Not

only do the goals of reducing carbon emissions and air

pollution not reinforce each other, they conflict Efforts to reduce it rely on
unproven abatement technologies, and are prohibitively expensive. In contrast,
abating air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide rely on proven technologies and are
relatively inexpensive. The U.S. had a similar experience in dealing with air pollutants. Since 1980, air
pollution has fallen 63 percent due to regulations and new technologies all while CO2 emissions
increased 17 percent, according to federal data. The U.S. has recently seen a dip in CO2 emissions, but
this is almost entirely due to increased natural gas use thanks to hydraulic fracturing and horizontal

drilling. I have never heard of a public protest in China against carbon dioxide emissions, notes
Adams. CO2 is a major concern for Western NGOs with offices in Beijing but its a non-issue for Chinese

There are other reasons to be

pessimistic about Chinas pledge to cut CO2 emissions. First , China has
tripled its coal use since 2000 and plans on increasing it another 16 percent
by 2020 coal use has been key to reducing poverty in China. China also
has plans to build 155 new coal-fired power plants in the coming years. Its not
clear if all will be built because of policy changes or economic conditions, but it suggests China is
more serious about growing its economy than cutting CO2 emissions.
Second , China wont be able to make substantial cuts to CO2 emissions
even if it wanted to if its unable to maintain high levels of economic
growth. If the recent slowdown in Chinas economy continues, it could derail
any attempts to cut CO2. I think low growth makes it more difficult to
achieve their target, says Shoichi Itoh with Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ). They
want to reduce energy consumption and emissions for their own purposes, Itoh says. If Chinese
economy slows down, they cant expect people to pay more for energy . So
people might lose their appetite for reducing emissions.
citizens and environmentalists at the grassroots.

Structural Violence

Ethical Obligation to Reject Engagement

Ethical Obligation to not engage with China CCP kill to
maintain power
ET, 2012
(Epoch Times, Commentary 7: On the Chinese Communist Partys History
of Killing, The Epoch Times, May 13, 2012,
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/3949-commentary-7-on-the-chinesecommunist-partys-history-of-killing/full/, Accessed: July 5, 2016, YDEL)
The 55-year history of the CCP is written with blood and lies. The stories behind this bloody
history are both extremely tragic and rarely known. Under the rule of the CCP, 60 to 80
million innocent Chinese people have been killed, leaving their broken
families behind. Many people wonder why the CCP kills. While the CCP recently
suppressed protesting crowds in Hanyuan with gunshots [in November
2004] and continues its brutal persecution of Falun Gong practitioners , many
people wonder whether they will ever see the day when the CCP will learn to speak with words rather
than guns. Mao Zedong summarized the purpose of the Cultural Revolution, After the chaos the world
reaches peace, but in seven or eight years, the chaos needs to happen again.[1] In other words, there
should be a political revolution every seven or eight years, and a crowd of people needs to be killed every

A supporting ideology and practical requirements lie behind

the CCPs slaughters. Ideologically, the CCP believes in the dictatorship of the
proletariat and continuous revolution under the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Therefore, after the CCP took over China, it killed the landowners
to resolve problems with production relationships in rural areas. It killed the
capitalists to reach the goal of commercial and industrial reform and solve
the production relationships in the cities. After these two classes were eliminated, the
problems related to the economic base were basically solved. Similarly, solving the problems
related to the superstructure also called for slaughter. The suppressions of
the Hu Feng Anti-Party Group and the Anti-Rightist Movement eliminated
the intellectuals. Killing the Christians, Taoists, Buddhists, and popular folk
groups solved the problem of religions. Mass murders during the Cultural
Revolution established, culturally and politically, the CCPs absolute
leadership. The Tiananmen Square massacre was used to prevent political crisis and squelch
seven or eight years.

democratic demands. The persecution of Falun Gong is meant to resolve the issues of belief and
traditional healing.

These actions were all necessary for the CCP to

strengthen its power and maintain its rule in the face of continual
financial crisis

(prices for consumer goods skyrocketed after the CCP took power, and Chinas

economy almost collapsed after the Cultural Revolution), political crisis (some people not following the
Partys orders or some others wanting to share political rights with the Party), and crisis of belief (the
disintegration of the former Soviet Union, political changes in Eastern Europe, and the Falun Gong

almost all the foregoing political movements

were utilized to revive the evil specter of the CCP and incite its desire for
revolution. The CCP also used these political movements to test CCP
members, eliminating those who did not meet the Partys requirements.
Recurring slaughters every seven or eight years serves to refresh peoples memory of terror. Killing
is also necessary for practical reasons. The Communist Party began as a group of thugs
issue). Except for the Falun Gong issue,

and scoundrels who killed to obtain power. Once this precedent was set, there was no going back.

Constant terror was needed to intimidate people and force them to accept,
out of fear, the absolute rule of the CCP. On the surface, it may appear that the CCP was
forced to kill and that various incidents just happened to irritate the CCP evil specter and accidentally

these incidents serve to disguise the

Partys need to kill, and periodical killing is required by the CCP. Without
these painful lessons, people might begin to think the CCP was improving
and start to demand democracy, just as those idealistic students in the 1989 democratic
trigger the CCPs killing mechanism. In truth,

movement did. Recurring slaughter every seven or eight years serves to refresh peoples memory of

works against the CCP, wants to

challenge the CCPs absolute leadership, or attempts to tell the truth
regarding Chinas history, will get a taste of the iron fist of the dictatorship
of the proletariat. Killing has become one of the most essential ways for
the CCP to maintain power. With the escalation of its bloody debts, laying
down its butcher knife would encourage people to take vengeance for the
CCPs criminal acts. Therefore, the CCP not only needed to conduct copious and thorough killing,
but the slaughter also had to be done in a most brutal fashion to intimidate the
populace effectively, especially early on, when the CCP was establishing its
rule. Since the purpose of the killing was to instill the greatest terror, the CCP
selected targets for destruction arbitrarily and irrationally. In every political
movement, the CCP used the strategy of genocide. Take the Suppression of
the Counter-Revolutionary Movement as an example. The CCP did not really
terror and can warn the younger generation: Whoever

suppress the reactionary behaviors, but the people whom they called the counter-revolutionaries. If one
had been enlisted and served a few days in the KMT Army but did absolutely nothing political after the
CCP gained power, this person would still be killed because of his reactionary history. In the process of
land reform, in order to remove the root of the problem, the CCP often killed a landowners entire

the CCP has persecuted more than half the people in China .
An estimated 60 million to 80 million people died from unnatural causes.
This number exceeds the total number of deaths in both World Wars
combined. As with other communist countries, the wanton killing done by the CCP also includes
family. Since 1949,

brutal slayings of its own members in order to remove dissidents who value a sense of humanity over the

The CCPs rule of terror falls equally on the populace and its
members in an attempt to maintain an invincible fortress. In a normal society,
Party nature.

people show care and love for one another, hold life in awe and veneration, and give thanks to God. In the
East, people say, Do not impose on others what you would not want done to yourself.[2] In the West,
people say, Love thy neighbor as thyself.[3] Conversely, the CCP holds that The history of all hitherto

order to keep alive the struggles

within society, hatred must be generated. Not only does the CCP take lives,
it encourages people to kill each other. It strives to desensitize people
toward others suffering by surrounding them with constant killing. It wants
them to become numb from frequent exposure to inhumane brutality and
develop the mentality that the best you can hope for is to avoid being
persecuted. All these lessons taught by brutal suppression enable the CCP to
maintain its rule. In addition to the destruction of countless lives, the CCP also
existing society is the history of class struggles.[4] In

destroyed the soul of the Chinese people . A great many people have
become conditioned to react to the CCPs threats by entirely surrendering
their reason and their principles. In a sense, these peoples souls have diedsomething more
frightening than physical death.

Human Rights
Under the CCP, human rights take a back seat to CCP
interests
Lum, 2015
(Thomas, Specialist in Asian Affairs, Human Rights in China and U.S. Policy:
Issues for the 114th Congress, Congressional Research Service,
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R43964.pdf, Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL)
Assessing Human Rights Conditions in China The PRC government is led by the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), whose rule is referenced in the preamble to Chinas Constitution. The
legislature and judiciary lack powers to check the CCP and the state. The PRC
Constitution guarantees many civil and political rights, including, in Article 35, the freedoms of speech,

the state restricts these rights

in practice. Chinas leaders view these rights as subordinate to their own
authority and to the policy goals of maintaining state security and social
stability, promoting economic development, and providing for economic and
social rights. They assert that perspectives on human rights vary according
to a countrys level of economic development and social system, implying
that human rights are not universal as some statements by U.S. government
press, assembly, demonstration, and religious belief. However,

officials have emphasized. PRC leaders frequently denounce foreign criticisms of Chinas human rights
policies as interference in Chinas internal affairs. Over 25 years since the 1989 demonstrations for
democracy in Beijing and elsewhere in China and the subsequent military crackdown, the Communist
Party remains firmly in power. Many Chinese citizens have attained living standards, educational and
travel opportunities, access to information, and a level of global integration that few envisioned in 1989.

little progress has been made in the areas of political freedom and
civil liberties. Chinas leaders have rejected institutional reforms that might
undermine the Partys monopoly on power, and continue to respond
forcefully to signs and instances of social instability, autonomous social
organization, and independent political activity. They seek to prevent the
development of linkages among individuals, social groups, and geographical
regions that have potential political impact. The government maintains
However,

severe restrictions on unsanctioned religious , ethnic, and labor

activity and groups, political dissidents, and rights lawyers.

Government

authorities have imposed harsh policies against Tibetans and Uighurs, and continue efforts to eliminate

Human rights conditions in China reflect

contradictory trends. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has implemented some reforms
that may help to reduce some human rights abuses and bolster its legitimacy, but the state has
arrested hundreds of critics of government policy since 2013. Rights awareness
the spiritual practice of Falun Gong.

among the general public, rights activism, and civil society have developed, although many Chinese

Public protests and

demonstrations occur on a daily basis through the country, but they
predominantly are focused on local economic issues rather than national
political ones. Although some observers have referred to CCP General Secretary and State
place greater importance upon political stability than change.

President Xi Jinping as the most forceful Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping, he faces daunting
domestic challenges, including internal party disputes; political corruption; a slowing national economy;
a high level of income inequality; violent unrest in Xinjiang; a national religious resurgence; severe
environmental pollution; and rising popular expectations. In some ways, the Chinese central government
has continued to demonstrate a measure of sensitivity toward popular opinion, reflecting a style of rule
that some experts refer to as responsive authoritarianism.6 The CCP has striven to meet the demands
and expectations of many Chinese citizens for competent and accountable governance and fair
application of the law, while policymaking processes have become more inclusive.

In recent years,

the PRC government has implemented some legal and institutional reforms
aimed at preventing some rights abuses and making government more
transparent and responsive. Changes include criminal justice reforms, formally abolishing the
Re-education Through Labor penal system (RETL), a reduction in the use of the death penalty, and the
loosening of the one-child policy. The state has limited repressive measures largely to selected key
individuals and groups, although the scope of those targeted has widened under President Xi. Xi
Jinping has carried out a campaign against corruption, a key source of popular discontent, and

However , this effort has shown little

regard for due process or procedural protections provided in Chinas
constitution and laws, and has not addressed the political sources of
corruption, according to experts. 7 In 2014, the government announced some measures
investigated and punished thousands of officials.

aimed at reducing government influence over the courts, including reducing the role and influence of

Yet the
Plenum did not fundamentally alter the institutions that permit the Party
and its policies to remain above the law. 8 Commenting on the 25th anniversary of the
1989 Tiananmen events, Jerome Cohen, an expert on Chinese law and politics, stated, economic
and social progress, enactment of better legislation, improvements in legal
institutions, and reformist official policy statements do not guarantee either
the enjoyment of civil and political rights or the protection of political and
religious activists and their lawyers against the arbitrary exercise of state
and party power.9 After a period of cautious optimism as Xi Jinping took over the reins of power
the Party Central Committees Political and Legal Affairs Commission in most legal cases.

in 2012 and early 2013, many observers have expressed deep disappointment over the PRC
governments human rights policies. During the leadership transition period, there was talk in wellconnected intellectual circles about the need for political reform and how to address these issues.10

Many
citizens who had openly discussed political issues, engaged in political or
civic activism, attempted to defend dissidents or rights activists in court, or
tried to expose corrupt officials have been punished.11
However, President Xi has carried out a crackdown on political dissent and civil society.

Chinas authoritarian regime is the worst abuser of human

rights
Williams, Ph.D.
(Theologian, Author, Speaker, Consultant and Certified Sommelier.
Permanent research fellow at the Center for Ethics and Culture, Notre Dame
University, Report: China Had Worst Year Ever for Human Rights Abuses in
2015, March 8, 2016, Breitbart, http://www.breitbart.com/biggovernment/2016/03/08/report-china-had-worst-year-ever-for-human-rightsabuses-in-2015/, Accessed: July 17, 2016, YDEL)
Human rights and rule of law conditions in China have been on a downward
trend since Xi Jinping took power as Chinese Communist Party General
Secretary in 2012, resulting in 2015 being the worst year on record for
human rights violations in China, according to a recent Congressional
report. For the commemoration of International Womens Day on March 8,
rights groups denounced Chinas dismal record of rights abuses targeting
women, especially regarding Chinas draconian family control policy. Reggie
Littlejohn, President of Womens Rights Without Frontiers, told Breitbart
News that forced abortion and involuntary sterilization continue under
Chinas new Two-Child Policy. Unmarried women and third children
continue to be forcibly aborted, Littlejohn said. Women are still routinely
sterilized after their second child. On International Womens Day, we call

upon the Chinese government to call off the womb police and immediately to
abandon all coercive population control. In its 2015 report, the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) documented
measures by the Chinese government to silence dissent, suppress human
rights advocacy, and control civil society, resulting in a situation of
oppression that is broader in scope than any other period documented
since the Commission started issuing Annual Reports in 2002. On March 1,
2016 the Commission released a Chinese-language Translation of an
Executive Summary of its report, stating that 2015 saw the tightening of
controls over the media, universities, civil society, and rights advocacy, and
on members of ethnic minorities. In its report, the Commission said that
Chinas coercive population control policy, now known as the Two-Child
Policy, continued to employ torture methods such as forced abortion and
sterilization despite a widespread public outcry. Many provincial laws in
China explicitly instruct officials to carry out abortions for illegal
pregnancies, with no requirement for consent. The CECC report highlighted
the anti-woman practices of Communist authorities, who just before
International Womens Day had detained five women and held them in
abusive conditions for more than five weeks for planning to distribute
brochures against sexual harassment. To make up for the enormous gender
gap caused by decades of sex-selective abortions, trafficking of women and
girls for forced marriage and sexual exploitation is on the rise in China, the
report said. There are currently approximately 37 million more men living in
China than women. CECC leaders said that Chinas recent switch to a TwoChild Policy was a mere distraction from the reality of the deadliest and
most hated policy of forced population control, and called on President
Obama and world leaders to insist that China abolish the practice
completely. Families that want a third child will still face the pressure to
abort their child or pay exorbitant fines, said CECC Chair Rep. Chris Smith
regarding the Two-Child Policy, which began officially on January 1. The
Congressional report states that China is not moving toward a rule of law
system, but is instead further entrenching a system where the Party utilizes
statutes to strengthen and maintain its leading role and power over the
country. Many of Chinas religious and political prisoners are subject to
harsh and lengthy prison sentences as well as various forms of extralegal
and administrative detention, including arbitrary detention in black jails
and legal education centers, the report stated. The report said that
Chinas Communist Party leaders are seeking a new type of U.S.-China
relations and aim to play an expanded role in global institutions, while
continuing to ignore international human rights norms . Chinas
entrenchment in absolutist control over the lives of citizens in defiance of
the rule of law have significant implication for U.S. foreign policy, the report
said. The security of U.S. investments and personal information in
cyberspace, the health of the economy and environment, the safety of food
and drug supplies, the protection of intellectual property, and the stability of
the Pacific region are all linked to China, the report stated.

Chinas government actively endorsing oppresion

HRW, 2015

(World Report 2015: China, Human Rights Watch,

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2015/country-chapters/china-and-tibet,
Accessed: July 17, 2016, YDEL)

China remains an authoritarian state, one that systematically curbs

fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, association,
assembly, and religion, when their exercise is perceived to threaten
one-party rule.

Since a new leadership assumed power in March 2013, authorities have

undertaken positive steps in certain areas, including abolishing the arbitrary detention system known as
Re-education through Labor (RTL), announcing limited reforms of the hukou system of household
registration that has denied social services to Chinas internal migrants, and giving slightly greater
access for persons with disabilities to the all-important university entrance exam. But during the same

authorities have also unleashed an extraordinary assault on basic

human rights and their defenders with a ferocity unseen in recent yearsan
alarming sign given that the current leadership will likely remain in power
through 2023. From mid-2013, the Chinese government and the ruling Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) have issued directives insisting on correct
ideology among party members, university lecturers, students, researchers, and journalists. These
documents warn against the perils of universal values and human rights,
and assert the importance of a pro-government and pro-CCP stance. Rather than
period,

embrace lawyers, writers, and whistleblowers as allies in an effort to deal effectively with rising social unrest, the government remains hostile to criticism. The
government targets activists and their family members for harassment, arbitrary detention, legally baseless imprisonment, torture, and denial of access to adequate
medical treatment. It has also significantly narrowed space for the press and the Internet, further limiting opportunities for citizens to press for much-needed reforms.
The Chinese governments open hostility towards human rights activists was tragically illustrated by the death of grassroots activist Cao Shunli in March. Cao was
detained for trying to participate in the 2013 Universal Periodic Review of Chinas human rights record at the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva.
For several months, authorities denied her access to adequate health care even though she was seriously ill, and she died in March 2014, just days after authorities
finally transferred her from detention to a hospital. The government continued its anti-corruption campaign, taking aim at senior officials, including former security
czar Zhou Yongkang, as well as lower-level officials. But the campaign has been conducted in ways that further undermine the rule of law, with accused officials held in
an unlawful detention system, deprived of basic legal protections, and often coerced to confess. The civic group known as the New Citizens Movement, best known for
its campaign to combat corruption through public disclosure of officials assets, has endured especially harsh reprisals. In response to the Chinese governments
decision on August 31 denying genuine democracy in Hong Kong, students boycotted classes and launched demonstrations. Police initially tried to clear some
demonstrators with pepper spray and tear gas, which prompted hundreds of thousands to join the protests and block major roads in several locations. While senior
Hong Kong government officials reluctantly met once with student leaders, they proposed no changes to the electoral process. Hundreds remained in three Occupy
Central zones through November, when courts ruled some areas could be cleared and the government responded, using excessive force in arresting protest leaders and
aggressively using pepper spray once again. Protests continued in other areas, some student leaders embarked on a hunger strike with the aim of re-engaging the
government in dialogue, while other protest leaders turned themselves in to the police as a gesture underscoring their civil disobedience. Despite the waning of street
protests, the underlying political issues remained unresolved and combustible at time of writing. Human Rights Defenders Activists increasingly face arbitrary
detention, imprisonment, commitment to psychiatric facilities, or house arrest. Physical abuse, harassment, and intimidation are routine. The government has convicted
and imprisoned nine people for their involvement in the New Citizens Movementincluding its founder, prominent legal scholar Xu Zhiyongmostly on vaguely worded
public order charges. Well-known lawyer Pu Zhiqiang and journalist Gao Yu, among others, were arrested around the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre in
June 2014. Many activists continue to be detained pending trial, and some, including lawyers Chang Boyang and Guo Feixiong, have been repeatedly denied access to
lawyers. Virtually all face sentences heavier than activists received for similar activities in past years. The increased use of criminal detention may stem from the
abolition of the RTL administrative detention system in late 2013. China has 500,000 registered nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), though many are effectively
government-run. An estimated 1.5 million more NGOs operate without proper registration because the criteria for doing so remain stringent despite gradual relaxation
in recent years. The government remains suspicious of NGOs, and there are signs that authorities stepped up surveillance of some groups in 2014. In June, a Chinese
website posted an internal National Security Commission document that announced a nationwide investigation of foreign-based groups operating in China and Chinese
groups that work with them. Subsequently, a number of groups reportedly were made to answer detailed questionnaires about their operations and funding, and were
visited by the police. In June and July, Yirenping, an anti-discrimination organization, had its bank account frozen and its office searched by the police in connection with
the activism of one of its legal representatives. Xinjiang Pervasive ethnic discrimination, severe religious repression, and increasing cultural suppression justified by
the government in the name of the fight against separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism continue to fuel rising tensions in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region (XUAR). In March, at least 30 people were killed when Uighur assailants attacked people with knives at the train station in Kunming, Yunnan Province. In May,
31 people died when a busy market in Urumqi was bombed. In August, official press reports stated than approximately 100 people died in Yarkand (or Shache) County in
XUAR when assailants attacked police stations, government offices, and vehicles on a road. The Chinese government has blamed terrorist groups for these attacks.
Following the Urumqi attack, the Chinese government announced a year-long anti-terrorism crackdown in Xinjiang. Within the first month, police arrested 380 suspects
and tried more than 300 for terror-related offenses. Authorities also convened thousands of people for the public sentencing of dozens of those tried. In August,
authorities executed three Uighurs who were convicted of orchestrating an attack in Beijings Tiananmen Square in October 2013. Fair trial rights remain a grave
concern given the lack of independent information about the cases, the governments insistence on expedited procedures, the fact that terror suspects can be held
without legal counsel for months under Chinese law, and Chinas record of police torture. While there is reason for the governments concern with violence,
discriminatory and repressive minority policies only exacerbate the problem. In January, police took into custody Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor at Beijings Minzu
University critical of the Chinese governments Xinjiang policy. Tohti remains detained and is charged with separatism, which can result in life imprisonment. In
August, Uighur linguist Abduweli Ayup was given an 18-month sentence for illegal fundraising after trying to raise money for Uighur-language schools. Tibet A
series of self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese government repression appeared to have abated by early 2014. The authorities punished families and
communities for allegedly inciting or being involved in these protests; punishment of individuals included imprisonment, hefty fines, and restrictions of movement.
Authorities were intolerant of peaceful protests by Tibetans, harshly responding with beatings and arrests to protests against mines on land considered sacred and
against detention of local Tibetan leaders. According to press reports, in June, police beat and detained Tibetans for protesting against copper mining in southwestern
Yunnan province. In August, police in the Ganzi prefecture of Sichuan province fired into a crowd of unarmed protesters demonstrating against the detention of a village
leader. Also in June, Dhondup Wangchen, who had been imprisoned for his role in filming a clandestine documentary in Tibetan areas, was released after six years in
prison. Chinas mass rehousing and relocation policy has radically changed Tibetans way of life and livelihoods, in some cases impoverishing them or making them
dependent on state subsidies. Since 2006, over 2 million Tibetans, both farmers and herders, have been involuntarily rehousedthrough government-ordered
renovation or construction of new housesin the TAR; hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau have been relocated or
settled in New Socialist Villages. Hong Kong In January 2013, Hong Kong professor Benny Tai first proposed the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement,
designed to pressure Beijing to grant genuine democracy to Hong Kong in accordance with the Basic Law, Hong Kongs quasi-constitution, which applies the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to the territory. The ICCPR requires that people should have equal rights to vote and to stand for election. In
June 2014, nearly 800,000 voted in favor of democracy in an unofficial referendum organized by Occupy Central; in July, at least 510,000 people marched for
democracy. On August 31, Chinas top legislature announced it would impose a stringent screening mechanism that effectively bars candidates the central government
dislikes from nomination for chief executive. In response, students boycotted classes in late September and held a small peaceful protest outside government
headquarters. The police responded by dispersing the students with pepper spray and arrests. These tactics prompted hundreds of thousands to join the students.
Organizers of the Occupy Central movement announced that they were officially launching their planned demonstrations and joined the student protest. On September
28, Hong Kong police declared the protest illegal and cordoned off the government headquarters grounds. This decision prompted more protesters to gather in the areas
near government headquarters, demanding that police reopen the area. The two groups of protestersthose corralled in the government headquarters and their
supporters on the other sideeventually walked out onto the major thoroughfares between them and effectively blocked the roads. The protests eventually occupied
several large key areas in Hong Kongs business and government centers. After several incidents of excessive force on the part of police against the overwhelmingly
peaceful protests, including continued aggressive use of pepper spray and several beatings recorded on video, the government adopted a passive stance, waiting for
private groups to win injunctions before moving to clear out protest sites in a strategy of waiting for public opinion to turn against the demonstrators. When courts

handed down the injunctions, police cleared two areas and later thwarted an effort to block access to government offices, but two other smaller sites in the city
remained occupied at time of writing with students considering whether to abandon occupation as a tactic. The underlying political issues, however, remained
unresolved, with both Chinese and Hong Kong authorities standing firm on Beijings August 31 decision. Benny Tai and other Occupy Central leaders tried to turn
themselves in to police to underscore both respect for rule of law and their stance of civil disobedience, while student leaders held peaceful hunger strikes in an effort to
persuade the government to reengage in dialogue. Although media has greater freedom in Hong Kong than elsewhere in China, journalists and media owners,
particularly those critical of Beijing, came under increasing pressure in 2014. In February, a prominent editor, Kevin Lau, was stabbed by unidentified thugs; in July,
HouseNews, a popular independent news website known for supporting democracy in Hong Kong, was shuttered by its founder, who cited fear of political retaliation
from China; throughout 2014, Jimmy Lai and his media businesses, known for critical reporting on China, were repeatedly threatened. Freedom of Expression The
Chinese government targeted the Internet and the press with further restrictions in 2014. All media are already subject to pervasive control and censorship. The
government maintains a nationwide Internet firewall exclude politically unacceptable information. Since August 2013, the government has targeted WeChatan instant
messaging app that has gained increasing popularityby closing popular public accounts that report and comment on current affairs. Another 20 million accounts
were shuttered for allegedly soliciting prostitutes. Authorities also issued new rules requiring new WeChat users to register with real names. In July and August 2014 ,
it suspended popular foreign instant messaging services including Kakao Talk, saying the service was being used for distributing terrorism-related information.
Authorities also tightened press restrictions. The State Administration of Press Publication, Radio, Film, and Television issued a directive in July requiring that Chinese
journalists sign an agreement stating that they will not release unpublished information without prior approval from their employers and requiring that they pass
political ideology exams before they can be issued official press cards. In July, the CCPs disciplinary commission announced that researchers at the central Chinese
Academic of Social Sciences had been infiltrated by foreign forces and participated in illegal collusion during politically sensitive periods. The party subsequently
issued a rule that would make ideological evaluation a top requirement for assessing CASS researchers; those who fail are to be expelled. Freedom of Religion
Although the constitution guarantees freedom of religion, the government restricts religious practices to officially approved mosques, churches, temples, and
monasteries organized by five officially recognized religious organizations; any religious activity not considered by the state to be normal is prohibited. It audits the
activities, employee details, and financial records of religious bodies, and retains control over religious personnel appointments, publications, and seminary applications.
In 2014, the government stepped up its control over religion, with particular focus on Christian churches. Between late 2013 and early July, the government removed
150 crosses from churches in Zhejiang Province, which is considered to be a center of Christianity. In July, the government handed down a particularly harsh 12-year
sentence to Christian pastor Zhang Shaojie. Also in July, Zhuhai authorities raided the compound of Buddhist leader Wu Zeheng and detained him and at least a dozen
followers, although no legal reason was given for doing so. The Chinese government also expelled hundreds of foreign missionaries from China, according to press
reports, and it failed to publicly respond to Pope Franciss mid-August statement that the Vatican wishes to establish full relations with China. The government
classifies many religious groups outside of its control as evil cults. Falun Gong, a meditation-focused spiritual group banned since July 1999, continues to suffer state
persecution. In June, authorities in Inner Mongolia detained 15 members of what it called another evil cult called the Apostles' Congregation" for dancing publicly and
tempting people to become new members. Women's Rights

Womens reproductive rights and access

to reproductive health remain severely curtailed under Chinas

population planning regulations. That policy includes the use of legal
and other coercive measures, such as administrative sanctions, fines, and
coercive measures, including forced insertion of intrauterine devices and
forced abortion, to control reproductive choices. In September and October, female
protestors in Hong Kong alleged that assailants sexually assaulted them, and that police at those
locations did little to intervene. China was reviewed under the Convention on the Elimination of All

The committee expressed

concerns over the lack of judicial independence and access to justice for
women and retaliation against women rights activists . Chinese authorities prevented
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in October.

two activists from participating in the review: Ye Haiyan, Chinas most prominent sex worker rights
activist, was placed under administrative detention, while HIV-AIDS activist Wang Qiuyun's passport was

the government released for comment the long-awaited

law against domestic violence. While a step in the right direction, it falls short of
international standards and good practices. The definition of domestic
violence is overly narrow, and the protection orders that women can seek
are poor and are tied to victims subsequently filing a court case against the
abuser. Disability Rights Although China ratified the Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities (CRPD) in June 2008, persons with disabilities face a range of
confiscated. In November,

barriers, including lack of access to education and forced

institutionalization (including as a form of punishment). In China,
one in four children with disabilities is not in school because of
discrimination and exclusion. Official guidelines even allow universities to
deny enrollment in certain subjects if the applicants have certain disabilities.
In April, the Chinese Education Ministry announced that it would allow Braille or electronic exams for
national university entrance, but in a landmark case to test this initiative, blind activist Li Jincheng was
not provided with the electronic exams he had requested, but a Braille version which he did not know

people with disabilities have in being

provided with reasonable accommodation, a right that is still not recognized
under Chinese law. New regulations on access to education for people with
disabilities drafted in 2013 were not adopted in 2014. The Mental Health Law, which
how to read. Lis case highlights the difficulties

came into effect in 2013, stipulates that treatment and hospitalization should be voluntary except in cases
where individuals with severe mental illnesses pose a danger to, or have harmed, themselves or others.
In an important step in November, a patient currently held in a psychiatric hospital invoked the law in a
lawsuit brought in Shanghai challenging his confinement. According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders
(CHRD), central government rules require local officials to meet a quota of institutionalizing two out of
every 1,000 people who allegedly have serious mental illnesses. Sexual Orientation and Gender
Identity

Homosexuality was decriminalized in 1997, but was remained

classified as a mental illness until 2001. To date there is no law protecting

people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender
identity. There is no legal recognition of same-sex partnership . Despite this
lack of legal protection, individuals and organizations brought cases to court
to try to better protect their rights. In February, an activist sued the government
after the Hunan Province Civil Affairs Department refused to register his
organization focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT)
issues, stating that homosexuality had no place in Chinese traditional
culture and the building of spiritual civilization. The court dismissed the
case in March on the ground that the government had not defamed
homosexuals. LGBT groups continue to document the phenomenon of
conversion therapy, in which clinics offer to cure homosexuality . In March
2014, a man who calls himself Xiao Zhen filed a lawsuit against a clinic in
Chongqing, which he said had administered electroshock therapy to him. It
was the first time a court in China heard a case involving conversion
therapy. In November, a man filed a lawsuit in Shenzhen alleging discrimination on the grounds of
sexual orientation; if the court accepts the case it will be the first such case heard in China. During
Chinas October CEDAW review, a state representative noted that: the rights of all Chinese citizens [are]
protected by Chinese law, regardless of their sexual orientation.

Organ Trafficking
China continues unethical practices of organ harvesting
orders are directly from the leadership of the CCP
Li, 2016
Huige, Professor of Vascular Pharmacology, Institute of Pharmacology,
Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (Germany); DAFOH European
Delegate, Organ procurement from death-row prisoners and prisoners of
conscience in China, April 18, 2016, Organ Harvesting in China,
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/STUD/2016/542201/IPOL_ST
U(2016)542201_EN.pdf, Accessed: July 2, 2016, YDEL
China ranks number 2 in organ transplantation worldwide without an organ
donation system before 2010. Before 2010, about 120.000 organs have been transplanted in China,

The vast
majority of organ transplants in China are procured from unethical sources,
which can be divided into three categories: Category 1: prisoners
which is in contrast to the official number of totally 130 deceased organ donations.

sentenced to death and then executed . This practice had been denied
by the Chinese government for decades before it was finally admitted in
2005. Since then, China presented itself at least twice with untrue statements to the world: the
unfulfilled promise to end the practice in the letter of the Chinese Medical Association to the World
Medical Association in 2007 and the failed Hangzhou Resolution in 2013 .

In December 2014,
Huang Jiefu, Director of the China Organ Donation Committee, announced
that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens could be used for
transplantation after January 1, 2015. This announcement, however, proves
to be a semantic trick, because death-row prisoners are allowed to
voluntarily donate organs, which is clearly against international ethical
standards. On January 28, 2015, Huang told Peoples Daily that death-row prisoners are also
citizens. The law does not deprive them of the right to donate organs. If death-row prisoners are willing

the use of
prisoner organs has not been stopped in China. These organs are now
integrated into the national voluntary donation system and classified as
voluntary donations from citizens. Moreover, by re-defining prisoners as regular citizens for
voluntary organ donation, Chinas national organ donation system may be abused
for the whitewashing of organs from both death-row prisoners and prisoners
of conscience. Category 2: prisoners sentenced to death; organs
to atone for their crime by donating organs, they should be encouraged. Thus,

harvested before death . Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from western

China has testified at a European Parliament hearing on January 29, 2013. In 1995, Tohti
was ordered to harvest organs from an executed prisoner. However, the
body he got was not dead. The gunshot was on the right chest side. He took the liver and the
kidneys from the still-living body. Unfortunately, this was not the only case.
Actually, the history of this barbaric practice is almost as long as
Chinas transplant medicine itself.

An early case was well documented in the book

Chinas eyes. In 1978, Zhong Haiyuan, a school teacher from the Jiangxi Province, was sentenced to
death for her counter-revolutionary thoughts. Her execution was performed by three officers. Two of
them fixed Zhong while the third officer put the gun against her back on the right side and then fired the
bullet. Waiting army doctors immediately took her body for organ harvesting. Years later, one of the
officers told the book author that the order was not to kill Zhong immediately. The kidneys must be
harvested before she dies, because the army doctors wanted high quality kidneys, kidneys from a
living person. In March 2015, Jiang Yanyong, China Hero Doctor who exposed the SARS cover-up by

the Chinese government in 2003, told to Hong Kong reporters that corruption, illegal transplantation
and organ trade were common in military hospitals. Jiang revealed in the TV interview that many
prisoners were shot but not killed before organ harvesting. The purpose was to keep the warm ischemia
time of the donor organs as short as possible.

Category 3: prisoners of conscience

without death sentence . Since 2006, mounting evidence (e.g. investigations by

David Matas, David Kilgour and Ethan Gutmann) suggests that prisoners of conscience
are killed for their organs in China with the brutally persecuted Buddhist
practice, Falun Gong, among others, being the primary target. In a resolution on
December 12, 2013, the European Parliament expressed its deep concern over the persistent and

state sanctioned organ harvesting from

nonconsenting prisoners of conscience in the Peoples Republic of China,
credible reports of systematic,

including from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners imprisoned for their religious beliefs, as well
as from members of other religious and ethnic minority groups. From 2004 to 2006, Wang Lijun, the
former police chief of Jinzhou City carried out a transplantation study entitled "research on organ
transplantation from donors subjected to drug injection". The research was awarded by the Guanghua
Science and Technology Foundation. In his speech at the award ceremony on September 17, 2006,

Wang stated that the outcome of his research was a result of several
thousand cases .

Given that 6,250 executions were reported from 2004 to 2006 in China,

Jinzhou City with a population of about 3 million would have a projected amount of 14 executed death-

This
suggests that the majority of the several thousand people who died for
Wangs transplantation research could not be death-row prisoners. Recent
investigations indicate that the victims were likely to be prisoners of
conscience, primarily Falun Gong practitioners. In 2012, when Wang Lijun was under
row prisoners during this time period in which the transplantation research was performed.

investigation by the Chinese government, World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun
Gong (WOIPFG) investigators conducted phone calls to one of Wang's partners, Dr. Chen Rongshan, the
urology chief physician of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) 205 Hospital in Jinzhou City. The caller
pretended to be a member of the Wang Lijun inter-departmental investigation team from the Chinese
government. The WOIPFG investigator asked Chen, whether he collaborated with Wang Lijun. Chen
didnt answer the question directly but said that Wangs collaboration partners also included the China
Medical University. Then, the investigator continued, Wang Lijun told us that some organ donors were
jailed Falun Gong practitioners. Is that true? Chen answered on the phone, Those were arranged by

In China, courts are the authorities that oversee prisons and labour
camps. Because no Falun Gong practitioners were sentenced to death, the
use of organs from Falun Gong practitioners implies the killing of the organ
donors. Because of the inhuman persecution since 1999, Falun Gong
practitioners have lost all rights in China. There are nearly 4000 documented death cases
the court.

directly caused through torture in detention. None of the torture perpetrators have been charged. If

it is not
implausible Workshop on Organ Harvesting in China PE 542.201 19 that military doctors
are allowed to kill members of this vulnerable group for their organs. The
reality, however, is likely to be worse than this assumption. Recent
investigations suggest that the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their
organs is a crime organized from the very top level of the Chinese
policemen and prison guards are allowed to torture Falun Gong practitioners to death,

Communist Party . The order was issued by the former party chief Jiang
Zemin himself and executed by the military and by the Political and Legal
Affairs Commission (PLAC) of the party. Both Bai Shuzhong (Minister of Health of the PLA
General Logistics Department) and Bo Xilai (former Governor of Liaoning Province) stated in telephone
investigations that Jiang Zemin personally issued the order. In another telephone investigation on organ
harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners, Li Changchun (former propaganda chief and Politburo
Standing Committee member) said that Zhou Yongkang (former PLAC chief) is in charge of this. Tang
Junjie (former vice chief of Liaoning PLAC) admitted to be responsible on the phone and said that this

From the class struggle ideology of the

Communist Party, taking organs from the enemy to save the life of other
was regarded as a positive thing.

people could be perversely regarded as a positive thing.

The EU should help to

enable independent investigations into the forced organ harvesting issue in China, seek prosecution of
those engaged in this crime and call for its immediate end.

War
Chinese government is the root cause for conflict
Roy, 15
Denny, focused mostly on Asia Pacific security issues, particularly those involving China. Recently Roy
has written on Chinese foreign policy, the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis, China-Japan relations, and
China-Taiwan relations. His interests include not only traditional military-strategic matters and foreign
policy, but also international relations theory and human rights politics. Before joining the East-West
Center in 2007, Roy worked at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu for seven years,
rising to the rank of Professor after starting as a Research Fellow. In 1998--2000 Roy was a faculty
member in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey,
California. There he taught courses on China, Asian history, and Southeast Asian politics. He also
designed and taught an innovative course titled Human Rights and National Security in Asia. From 1995
to 1998, Roy was a Research Fellow with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian
National University in Canberra, where he studied and wrote on Northeast Asian security issues. He also
participated in educational activities with the Australian armed forces and the Australian College of
Defence and Security Studies. In January and February 1997 Roy was attached to the Singapore Armed
Forces Training Institute as coordinator for Singaporean students enrolled in the SDSC's M.A. program.
From 1990 to 1995, Roy held faculty appointments in the Political Science Departments of the National
University of Singapore (Lecturer) and Brigham Young University (Assistant Professor), teaching courses
on international relations and Asian politics. Roy has five years of work and residency experience in
Taiwan, Korea and Singapore. He has made presentations at academic conferences in China, Thailand,
Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Australia and the USA. He is conversant in Mandarin Chinese and
fulfilled his graduate school foreign language qualification in Korean. Roy is the author of Return of the
Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security (Columbia University Press, 2013), The Pacific War and its
Political Legacies (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), Taiwan: A Political History (Cornell University Press,
2003), and China's Foreign Relations (Macmillan and Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), co-author of The
Politics of Human Rights in Asia (Pluto Press, 2000) and editor of The New Security Agenda in the AsiaPacific Region (Macmillan, 1997). He has also written many articles for scholarly journals such as
International Security, Survival, Asian Survey, Security Dialogue, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Armed
Forces & Society, and Issues & Studies, Return of the Dragon: Rising China and Regional Security,
October 4, 2015, C OLUMBI A UNIVERSITY PR E SS New York,

https://www.ciaonet.org/attachments/27986/uploads?1443463485 , Accessed: July

13, 2016, YDEL

The previous chapters have generated findings that I will summarize

below. Several regional bilateral disputes are sharpening because of the
rise of China. Chinese interests in avoiding conflict with foreign
governments help form pacifying bulwarks. On balance, however, several
virulent forces appear poised to break or slip through the bulwarks. As an
emerging great power, China is ambitious because it can be. Two additional
factors drive Chinas ambition: the Chinese believe their country is
historically destined to be the leader of the region, and they see heavy
American influence in Asia as threatening and constraining rather than
benign. Chinese feelings of greater entitlement because of Chinas rise are
overlapping with a residual sense of historical victimization stemming from
past weakness. Although China presently has neither the desire nor the
ability to be a superpower, as Chinas relative capabilities increase, Beijing

is aspiring to greater levels of control over the external

environment . Chinese assurances that China does not seek regional
hegemony or a sphere of influence should not be taken seriously. If
Chinas relative strength continues to grow, Beijings calculations about the
costs and risks of trying to expand Chinese influence will change. In a
sense, even if Chinas current leaders had only the most benign intentions,

they could not speak authoritatively about the PRCs future foreign policies.
As Chinas relative power grows, patience will likely diminish and
assertiveness increase. Typical of a rising great power, China is already
struggling to contain its impatience. Chinese heads understand that the
PRC should 259 avoid international confrontation while consolidating
economic development and bringing domestic problems under control, but
Chinese hearts demand greater accommodation and respect from other
countries now that China is powerful. As we have seen, Chinese and some
non-Chinese analysts argue that the PRC will not be a serious threat to
regional security even if the Chinese economy continues its present rate of
growth. According to this argument, surpassing the United States as the
worlds largest economy will not by itself make China the worlds most
powerful country. Most of China will still be poor, forcing the PRC central
government to concentrate funds on raising living standards across the
country. Thus, the PRC will still be too poor to build a military that could
dominate Chinas neighbors. This argument, however, is already disproved
by Chinas rapid military buildup. Even with the objective of nationwide
economic development far from accomplished, Beijing is already laying
aside plenty of resources for expanding and strengthening the PRCs
nuclear weapons arsenal; developing new generations of ships, missiles, and
aircraft; and deploying aircraft carriers. A safety net of pacifying
international forces largely keeps China playing within the rules of accepted
global interaction. In some areas, however, this net is not strong enough to
prevent crises. China is less likely to compromise, less likely to be
deterred, and more likely to overreact when it comes to the hearth
issues: disputes regarding territory within Chinas perceived sphere
of influence, respectful or disrespectful treatment of China by
foreigners, and the legitimacy of the CCP. On these issues, nationalism
trumps the Chinese wish to avoid the appearance of domineering or
aggressive behavior. The PRC feels entitled to and intends to establish a
Chinese sphere of influence in eastern Asia in which major foreign policy
decisions and external military activity by neighboring countries would be
subject to Beijings approval. The Chinese government eventually wants
to uproot U.S. military alliances and bases from the Asia-Pacific region
and to circumscribe the areas in which U.S. military units can operate.
China will defend its claims over disputed maritime territories with
gradually increasing strength. The outlook is dim for the Southeast Asian
claimants in the South China Sea disputes securing Chinas agreement to a
roughly equal settlement. Similarly, Taiwan is in danger of losing its
autonomy as a consequence of Chinas rise.

Basis for conflict is caused by strong Chinese leadership

Norton, 2015
Simon, Junior Policy Associate at the China Studies Centre and an adviser in
antimoney laundering, counter-terrorism financing, and sanctions in the
private sector. He holds a Master of International Security from the

University of Sydney. Simon has previously studied abroad at the Elliott

School of International Affairs at The George Washington University in
Washington DC, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in
China. This policy paper is based on his Masters thesis which was
submitted in June 2015, Chinas grand strategy, November 2015, China
Studies Centre,
http://sydney.edu.au/china_studies_centre/images/content/ccpublications/poli
cy_paper_series/2015/chinas-grand-strategy.pdf, Accessed: July 5, 2016,
YDEL
China has a clear and coherent grand strategy, with strategic guidelines
articulated by its top leadership, and actions aimed at defending its
interests and achieving important long-term goals. China is clear about its
core interests and goals: the CPC remaining in power; ensuring economic
and social development to achieve the twin centenary goals; achieving
reunification with Taiwan; and defending state sovereignty and territorial
integrity. China sees the US and its alliance system and dependence on
foreign resources, particularly energy, as the biggest threats to these goals
and interests. As China has become richer and more powerful, its grand
strategy has evolved from the approach of Deng Xiaoping which involved
keeping a low profile, and hiding its capabilities and biding time. China is
demonstrating greater willingness to use its power and enhanced
capabilities to influence and shape its external environment. China is
pursuing military modernization with a focus on informationization and
maritime security to defend its security interests. It is also acting to
strengthen its maritime territorial claims. At the same time it has sought to
maintain a stable peripheral environment conducive to its development,
keeping its assertive behaviour below levels that could escalate into military
conflict. Diplomatically, it has attempted to assuage fears that a more
powerful China will be 9 aggressive. It has used its economic growth and
trade and investment opportunities to attract and win influence with its
neighbours, while also using the threat of missing out as a deterrent to
countries thinking of infringing on Chinas interests. Its primary policy in
this regard is the Belt and Road initiative, which also seeks to support
domestic growth and open up alternative energy routes that bypass
potential threats in the Strait of Malacca and South China Sea. Grand
strategies evolve over time. For China, change may be driven in response to
reactions of other states, discontinuities in the international order including
shifts in balance of power, in response to leadership transitions including
post transition power consolidation, and by the personal outlook of
individual leaders. Previous generations of leaders have all made their own
unique contributions to Chinas strategic direction. With Xi Jinping still in
the early stages of his leadership, we can expect further change during his
time in power. Watching for changes in Chinas grand strategy and
analysing the drivers of such change presents a rich opportunity for future
scholarship.

Chinese Leadership made China become a revisionist

conflict with US inevitable
Blackwill, 2016

(Robert, the Henry A. Kissinger Ssenior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR). He has also served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for
Strategic Planning under President George W. Bush as well as U.S. Ambassador to India, China's
Strategy for Asia: Maximize Power, Replace America, May 26, 2016, The National Interest,

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-strategy-asia-maximize-powerreplace-america-16359?page=3, Accessed: July 8, 2016, YDEL)

Chinas primary strategic goal in contemporary times has been the
accumulation of comprehensive national power. This pursuit of power in
all its dimensionseconomic, military, technological and diplomatic is
driven by the conviction that China, a great civilization undone by the
hostility of others, could never attain its destiny unless it amassed the power
necessary to ward off the hostility of those opposed to this quest. This vision
of strengthening the Chinese state while recovering Chinas centrality in
international politicsboth objectives requiring the accumulation of
comprehensive national powersuggests that the aims of Beijings grand
strategy both implicate and transcend the United States and Chinas other
Asian rivals, to replace U.S. primacy in Asia writ large. For China, which is simultaneously an ancient
civilization and a modern polity, grand strategic objectives are not simply about desirable rank
orderings in international politics but rather about fundamental conceptions of order. Because the
acquisition of comprehensive national power is meant to both increase the
Chinese states control over its society and maximize the countrys overall
capabilities relative to its foreign competitors, Beijing has consistently pursued four specific operational aims
since the revolutionthough the instruments used to achieve these ends have varied over time. Chinas Four Strategic
Goals - Maintain Internal Order The first and most important aim pursued
by Chinas leaders since the founding of the modern Chinese state has been
the preservation of internal order and the domination of the Chinese
Communist Party. - Sustain High Economic Growth The goal of ensuring
continued and unchallenged Communist rule leads to the second operational
aspiration: sustaining the high levels of economic growth necessary to
preserve social order. - Pacify the Periphery The external advantages
arising from Chinas high growth rates thus far have strengthened its
capacity to achieve the third operational aim deriving from its quest for
comprehensive national power: the pacification of its extended geographic
periphery. Beijing has sought to accomplish this by deepening economic ties with its Asian neighbors to reduce regional anxieties about Chinas rise;
making common cause with some states, such as Russia, that have reasons to resist joining the larger balancing against China now under way in Asia;

embarking on a concerted modernization of the PLA; and renewing older

efforts to delegitimize the U.S. alliance system in Asia. - Cement
International Status The CCPs desire to preserve domestic control is
enhanced by the final element of the strategic goal of maximizing
comprehensive national power: enhancing Chinas status as a central actor
in the international system. The fundamental conclusion for the United States, therefore, is that China does not see its interests served
by becoming just another trading state, no matter how constructive an outcome that might be for resolving the larger tensions between its economic and geopolitical

China will continue along the path to becoming a conventional

great power with the full panoply of political and military capabilities, all
oriented toward realizing the goal of recovering from the United States the
primacy it once enjoyed in Asia as a prelude to exerting global influence in
the future. II. Xi Jinping as Dominating Leader Xi Jinping has fundamentally changed the systems of
strategies. Instead,

Chinese governance. Under the preceding model, previous generations of Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping created a structure that embedded leadership and
decision-making within a collective system of checks and balances that spanned a variety of bureaucratic institutions and included a substantial number of party elites.
These bureaucratic procedures and prerogatives no longer function as before.

Xi has introduced a new system by

limiting collective leadership and marginalizing the traditional institutions of

governance, relying instead on a small coterie of close advisors and an array
of parallel structures to control policymaking. With respect to foreign policy, Xi has reduced the role of the State
Council, Foreign Ministry and military in important decisions, giving him greater freedom from governmental machinery and the political and bureaucratic opponents

Because of Xis unprecedented power and influence,

Chinese policy will increasingly be determined by his background and biases
that can influence Chinese foreign policy.

and therefore will be significantly more unpredictable. The son of a revolutionary who fought alongside Mao, Xi reportedly sees himself and his fellow princelings as
tasked with rescuing and reviving the Communist Party, to which he is dedicated. His dedication to the Party shapes his views on what he perceives as two of the largest
threats to its longevity: corruption and liberalism. What sets Xis foreign policy apart the most is his willingness to use every instrument of statecraft, from military

Xis policy has

been characterized by bullying over territorial issues and selective
beneficence on economic matters, with the looming application of
geoeconomic coercion ever present. A third of my new book on geoeconomics analyzes Chinas use of economic instruments
for geopolitical purposes. This approach has been clearest in Chinas relations with
Southeast Asian states, many of which are embroiled in a simmering
territorial dispute with Beijing over the South China Sea. Beijings
hardening position on these territorial disputes has been accompanied by
generous investment and trade packages to Southeast Asian states , and these too appear
assets to geoeconomic intimidation, as well as explicit economic rewards, to pursue his various geopolitical objectives. In general,

to be coordinated centrally to geopolitical ends. A mixture of hard and soft policies has likewise characterized Chinas relations with India. During Xis first visit to
India, Chinese troops launched one of their largest incursions ever into disputed territory with India. China has sought to use the border to keep India off balance and
reduce its maritime military investments, which is at least one reason Beijing has been unwilling to delineate the Line of Actual Control (LAC) despite Indian Prime

With respect to Japan, China has pursued a

tough and nationalistic policy. Under Xi, China has dramatically escalated its
territorial dispute with Japan through its declaration of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. Aside from
Minister Narendra Modis public request that the two countries do so.

developing stronger ties with other states, an important element of Xis multifaceted strategy has been to energetically create and participate in multilateral institutions.
Some of these, such as AIIB, will be useful for dispensing geoeconomically oriented loans to neighbors. The misguided refusal of the United States to participate in the
AIIBs creation, and Washingtons failed attempt to persuade friends and allies not to join, denied the United States an opportunity to influence the banks rules,
development trajectory and Chinas potential use of the bank as a geopolitical instrument. Diplomacy After the Downturn Economic growth and nationalism have for
decades been the two founts of legitimacy for the Communist Party, and as the former wanes, Xi will likely rely increasingly on the latter. As a powerful but exposed
leader, Xi will tap into this potent nationalist vein through foreign policy, burnishing his nationalist credentials and securing his domestic position from elite and popular
criticism, all while pursuing various Chinese national interests. In the future, Xi could become more hostile to the West, using it as a foil to boost his approval ratings
the way Putin has in Russia. Already, major Chinese newspapers are running articles blaming the countrys economic slump on efforts undertaken by insidious foreign

Xi will be unwilling or unable to make

concessions that could harm his domestic position, and may even seek to
escalate territorial disputes against Japan or South China Sea claimants as a
way of redirecting domestic attention away from the economic situation and
burnishing his nationalist record. Globally, in order to demonstrate at home that China is taken seriously abroad, Xi will maintain a
proactive and assertive Chinese foreign policy that involves institutionbuilding and occasional provocation, while remaining firm in the face of external pressure on the South and East China Seas,
forces that seek to sabotage the countrys rise. On territorial matters,

human rights, conditions in Tibet and Xinjiang, and diplomatic visits by the Dalai Lama. Finally, Xis resistance to Western culture and values may intensify. Because

Xis fear of political instability may push him to adopt even

sterner measures, and new violations of human rights and the emerging
challenges that Western NGOs and businesses face will likely cause renewed friction in Chinas relationships with the West. Chinas Challenge to U.S. Vital
National Interests Although Washington seeks a cooperative relationship with Beijing
on nonproliferation, energy security and the international economy and
environment, the primary U.S. preoccupation regarding American vital
national interests should be a rising Chinas systematic effort to
fundamentally alter the balance of power in Asia, diminish the vitality of the
U.S.-Asian alliance system, and ultimately displace the United States as the
Asian leader. As noted earlier, Beijing seeks to achieve these goals : -replace the
United States as the primary power in Asia; -weaken the U.S. alliance
system in Asia; -undermine the confidence of Asian nations in U.S.
credibility, reliability, and staying power; -use Chinas economic power to pull Asian nations closer to PRC geopolitical
policy preferences; -increase PRC military capability to strengthen deterrence against
U.S. military intervention in the region; -cast doubt on the U.S. economic model; -ensure U.S. democratic values do not
Chinas economy is now slowing,

diminish the CCPs hold on domestic power; and -avoid a major confrontation with the United States in the next decade.