Authoritarians in China and Russia Face an Endgame

The Coming Collapse

By Jackson Diehl

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China and Russia have been constants in the world. They have been autocratic, resistant to the spread of freedom, occasionally belligerent toward their neighbors, and increasingly prosperous. They have consistently joined together in order to block Western initiatives in the UN Security Council and to defend dictatorships like Iran, North Korea, and Syria.

The two countries have created the illusion of durability. Vladimir Putin has just begun a six-year presidential term, with an option for another. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are planning to hand over power in October to a new tandem, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, who are expected to serve for ten years. Yet the evidence is growing that the apparent stability in Russia and China is untenable. For similar reasons, the two states have exhausted their current political and economic systems. Their rulers have grown rigid and are mired in corruption. Both their political elites and their average citizens are growing visibly restless. In the next decade, it is likely that one or both of these global powers will undergo an economic crisis and a dramatic political transformation. When and how it will happen is the most important “known unknown” that Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will face during the next US presidential term.

The predictions that systemic change is inevitable, and that it might be tumultuous, are coming not just from lonely dissidents or hostile Western observers but from stalwarts of the establishments in Moscow and Beijing. In February, a report prepared by experts from China’s Finance Ministry and the Development Research Center of the State Council, in cooperation with the World Bank, concluded that “China has reached a turning point in its development” and that a “strategic” and “fundamental shift is called for,” comparable to Deng Xiaoping’s embrace of the market economy three decades ago. “China 2030” warns:

There is a broad consensus that China’s growth is likely to slow, but when and at what pace is uncertain and there is no saying whether this slowdown will be smooth or not. Any sudden slowdown could unmask inefficiencies and contingent liabilities in banks, enterprises and different levels of government—heretofore hidden under the veil of rapid growth—and could precipitate a fiscal and financial crisis. The implications for social stability would be hard to predict in such a scenario.

Similarly, in late May a group of experts convened by Aleksei Kudrin, a mainstay of the Putin government for more than a decade until his resignation last year, issued a report declaring that “research shows that the crisis” in the Russian economy and political system “has become irreversible, regardless of the scenarios of its further development. Maintaining political stability, let alone a return to the pre-crisis status quo, is no longer possible.” In a press conference, Kudrin said there was a fifty-percent chance that Russia was headed for a recession that would produce a political breakdown and a change of government.

Despite such auguries, the Obama administration continues to pursue a policy toward both Russia and China that assumes that the existing power structures will continue indefinitely. Its primary aim is to “engage” the top leaders on a transactional basis—a strategy that, for Obama, has become a quasi-ideology in foreign policy. Thus did he welcome Xi to Washington in February with talks that focused on economic issues and geopolitical cooperation—and ignored the incipient domestic political turmoil in China that had prompted a senior police official from the city of Chongqing to seek asylum in a US consulate days earlier, in a development that would soon become a full-blown leadership crisis.

After Putin’s controversial election as president in March, Obama, overlooking the growing street protests in Moscow, invited him to an early meeting at Camp David (which Putin later cancelled) and dispatched National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon to Putin’s dacha outside Moscow to deliver what a Russian official described as “a multi-page detailed document, whose main message is that Obama is ready to cooperate with Putin.”

While critiquing these advances, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign also appeared unprepared for the possibility of upheaval in Russia or China. The GOP candidate described both countries not as unstable autocracies but as dangerous powers to be contained. He claimed that Russia “is without question our number one geopolitical foe,” and promised to designate China as a currency manipulator, subject to trade sanctions, on his first day in office.

In short, it appears that neither Obama nor Romney is contemplating the possibility that Russia or China could become destabilized in the next several years, with all of the opportunities and dangers that would pose for the United States. Such shortsightedness is hardly unprecedented: George H. W. Bush denied the possibility of revolutionary change in the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia until it occurred, and Obama himself was blindsided by the Arab revolutions of 2011. Yet by now, after witnessing the successive collapses of dictatorships over a quarter century in Latin America, East Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, US policymakers should know better than to assume that the autocracies of Russia and China are invulnerable. The next administration ought to be prepared for, and encouraging of, changes in both these countries.