A Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xiii, 293 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$31.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-28121-9.
Following the Leader probes the dreams and nightmares of the PRC’s leadership after Mao, from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping. Lampton, who appreciates the fragility of the PRC’s success and the enormous challenges lying ahead, attempts to “humanize” China’s extraordinary course of development since Deng Xiaoping’s return to power in 1977. His selective history of PRC challenges reveals the frustrations China’s leaders feel, the sheer scale of the challenges they face and, most illuminatingly, “the nightmares disturbing their sleep.” Lampton’s book emerges at a pivotal point in China’s modern history—we still do not know if China’s rapid-paced development is the basis for a more stable and responsive PRC government or if it signals the appearance of a more unmanageable, pluralized polity and society.
Lampton’s book is based on 558 interviews and group meetings with Chinese leaders between 1971–2013, on “innumerable” documents, and is illustrated with case studies. His inside-out or inductive approach helps us understand and anticipate the behaviour of the PRC. The book moves from macro to micro, first narrating the evolution of the Chinese communist revolution, proceeding to a “wide-angle” view, then to an analysis of leaders’ nightmares from an up-close perspective, and finally to forecasting the implications of China’s supersonic development.
Following the Leader is beautifully written and dotted with poetic passages unexpected in a book of political analysis. Describing the dilemma hyper growth has brought to the PRC since Deng Xiaoping’s rise, Lampton illuminates the following nightmare:
Like an automobile driving at high speed on a moonless night in the desert, China is undergoing a rate of domestic change so rapid that the country’s forward momentum cannot be stopped or the direction adequately adjusted in the existing zone of illumination—the PRC is driving too fast for the headlights to reveal what dangers lurk ahead . . . and at any moment China might hit a stationary object that was diffuse and unrecognized in the obscurity of the night. (222)
There are many more PRC nightmares for us to contemplate. In fact, China’s nightmares are so numerous Lampton finds the most appropriate simile for PRC governance to be the “whack a mole” arcade game in which one uses a mallet to try to bash multiple pop-up moles back into their holes. China’s nightmare is that one mallet is not and never will be enough to protect its people from harmful consequences such as severe environmental pollution or water problems that could explode into significant instability. It is clear that China’s economic power is key to China’s future and to its national power. Such economic power, however, can also lead to the greatest nightmare of all: that a government unable to protect its people from such deleterious conditions will soon need protection itself.
Unlike American leaders whose nightmares mainly focus on individuals or small groups, the nightmares of Chinese leaders concern huge social groups, some numbering over 800 million people. Lampton reminds us that at the end of 2011, for the first time in China’s history the rural population fell below half of the total population. China is now an urban nation. A PRC official states the nightmare this situation has produced by asking American officials how they would like to have 800 million farmers when the country only needs 200 million? China also needs upwards of 300 million jobs, equal to the entire population of the United States, to solve its periodically erupting unemployment problem. Worker discontent as a result of terrible factory working and pay conditions is frequently expressed in “mass incidents” as well as worker suicides and other violence.
Lampton considers PRC alternative futures that inspire some of the most traumatic nightmares for Chinese leaders. Perhaps the most frightening involves the fate of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). For several years now there has been a “simmering” argument in the Communist Party about whether the PLA should become a “national army” or remain an instrument of a single political party. Some party thinkers have proposed dividing the Communist Party in two by forming one conservative Communist party and one more liberal Communist party. China would thus become a “democratic” multi-party state with the PLA beholden to the PRC government but not to either party. Such a move would avert a 1989 Tiananmen situation in which a domestic conflict or succession struggle leading to a split within the party could result in a PLA alignment with one side or, even worse, both. Some ask the haunting question: might a PLA beholden to the government and not to one particular party choose to take the government into its own hands?
What is in store for China’s long-range international future seems to be much more the stuff of nightmares for United States’ leaders than for China’s. China’s future destiny has never been more closely connected with that of the international community. Unfortunately for Washington, Lampton stresses, China perceives the United States to be the greatest threat to its security future. The United States struggles to develop a shared vision of international security with the PRC and others. Beijing is clearly uncomfortable with a US-led security order founded on bilateral and multilateral alliances that do not include China. This has led to a struggle for the soul of Chinese foreign policy, between the realities of interdependence and impulses of assertive nationalism. China’s still powerful fear of being bullied, its victim mentality, continues to foster its aversion to being drawn into international obligations. While China’s leaders and people feel empowered to be full and equal participants in regional and world affairs, China still, as a rule, strives for balance while maintaining few or no permanent enemies or friends. What is ominous for those who have spent most their lives engaged with the PRC is not a nightmare but a stark, present reality: for several years now, every time China gets into trouble with its neighbours, the United States is always on the other side.
Justin Jon (Ben-Adam) Rudelson
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA
pp. 690-692