The Obama Doctrine: Pushing on a String?

There wasn't much to inspire in Obama's West Point speech. Dan Drezner wished in advance -- fairly, I think -- that Obama would sketch out in some detail for the benefit of allies just how he proposes to use means other than war to enhance collective security -- in the South China Sea, in eastern Europe. He didn't do that  He just touted in rather general terms the sanctions against Iran and Russia as examples of effective collective action.* He also drew a line, with perhaps more specificity than in the past, between vital U.S. interests that would be defended unilaterally if necessary and " issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States," in which collective action, usually nonmilitary, is the appropriate course. Perhaps I've grown accustomed to that distinction through Obamosmosis -- it did not surprise me.

What did strike me was a few rather caustic notes. The speech was short on rhetorical olive branches. For example:

1. China the aggressor and competitor: 

Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors

Regional aggression that goes unchecked – in southern Ukraine, the South China Sea, or anywhere else in the world – will ultimately impact our allies, and could draw in our military.

Twice Obama rhetorically yoked China's aggression with Russia's -- and once, China's economic success with its military muscle-flexing.  No "we do not seek to contain China's rise" reassurances.

Cold War 2.0?

Is a tempting alternative to western democracy gaining currency in the developing world? So I wondered when I read the warning in yesterday's Times by Mohamed Keita, Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, of growing media suppression across Africa:

As Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way. Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors. ...

Keita attributes the trend in large part to

the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

Christopher Caldwell slips into the Fallows Fallacy on China

Noting that toilet maker Kohler has a global hit with an ultraluxury $6,400 toilet that was designed in large part to cater to Chinese tastes, Christopher Caldwell sees "a harbinger of trouble for the U.S":

A stubborn myth, in fact, holds that US creative exports are a more robust foundation for prosperity in the global economy than heavy industry ever was. Anyone can build a car, but Americans’ gift for innovation is ineffable. It is a kind of creative magic that is hard for the country’s sclerotic, overly bureaucratised trading rivals to match. How can you fight what you can’t fathom? Who can compete with a je-ne-sais-quoi?

America’s rivals are much less backward than its cheerleaders assume, however, and the country’s creative dynamism is much less mysterious. Taste tends to follow wealth. It should not surprise us if it turns out that people want US design only so long as the US is perceived as the richest, the best, the hegemon. True, there will always be American products that mix glamour and craftsmanship. But certain US exports are based on glamour alone, and will collapse as US prestige does.

At first read I thought that Caldwell was onto something profound here. And maybe he is, long term.  But I think he's overselling the troublesome toilet as a signifier that we're in deep shit now on the design-and-style front. This may well be an episode of what James Fallows calls the " "I just rode the bullet train to Tianjin, and holy shit, we're doomed!" approach to China's rise:

End of the Age of America? Not quite so fast...

China's GDP is a bit less than half that of the U.S by conventional measures.; its population is about four times as large, and its rate of annual GDP growth about triple.  The IMF is now forecasting that China's GDP will surpass that of the U.S. by 2016.

The IMF gets to that watershed so quickly in large part by adjusting current figures for "purchase power parity" (PPP)-- that is, adjusting for the artificially low exchange value of the yuan.  PPP-adjusted, the IMF pegs China's current GDP at about 74% that of the U.S., as opposed to approximately 40% in 2010 as conventionally measured, according to IMF figures.

Brett Arends, reporting this forecast in Marketwatch, concludes:

This is more than a statistical story. It is the end of the Age of America. As a bond strategist in Europe told me two weeks ago, “We are witnessing the end of America’s economic hegemony.”

I wonder if that is necessarily so. Certainly not immediately.  At present, the European Union's economy is larger than that of the U.S., but it projects nowhere near the comparable military or soft power.

While China's population is about  four times that of the U.S., its per capita income, by conventional measures, was a bit less than 1/10 as large in 2010, according to the IMF. Call it 1/6, PPP-adjusted.  China spends 2.2% of GDP on its military, compared to 4.7% in the U.S (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).  It collects 17% of GDP in taxes, compared to 28% for the U.S (Heritage).

Enough with the "what would China think?" shame spirals

This "whatever can the Chinese think?" meme is getting tired fast.  On Friday, Kerry; today, Kristof:

A bewildered Chinese friend asked me how the world’s leading democracy could be so mismanaged that it could shut down. I couldn’t explain. This budget war reflects inanity, incompetence and cowardice that are sadly inexplicable.

How about "explaining" that when faced with hard economic times extending through two election cycles, the American public twice threw out a set of incumbent officials -- as free electorates do -- and ended up with divided government?  The result is a bitter battle over fiscal policy. Those charged with making policy, instead of knifing out their radically different prescriptions behind closed Politburo doors, fought them out in a public display of negotiating brinkmanship and came up with a settlement in which both sides yielded some (though I personally think that through their own folly Democrats have yielded far too much).  There's nothing here to be embarrassed about before ruthless autocrats who have responded to the latest wave of democratic ferment abroad with a ferocious wave of repression and intimidation of dissent.

Think again, Kerry

I admire the way John Kerry has comported himself since Obama took office -- re Afghanistan, re New Start, re Egypt -- but I think this is a foolish sentiment:

"They've got to be laughing at us right now" in China, said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry. "How terrific that the United States of America can't make a decision."

While Republicans and Democrats have been busy denouncing each other's policies and motives, the Chinese authorities have further reduced their tolerance for denunciation -- or criticism -- from anyone:

"Your train, The End of History, is operating 15-20 years late. We apologize for any inconvenience."

I've often pushed back against those who mock Francis Fukuyama for having suggested, in the wake of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, that the world was heading toward universal embrace of democracy and capitalism and that there was no serious ideological alternative.

I've long suspected that Fukuyama was not wrong, just early, and not even necessarily early, since he never suggested that The End of History was immediately at hand (not in the book version, anyway; perhaps he was less equivocal in the original article) -- just that we were on course for it.  I still like to think he's essentially right, with three caveats, two old, one new, or morphed out of the old.

First: who knows what malign new ideology may arise, command the allegiance of fanatics and proceed to enslave hundreds of millions or billions. I don't think Islamist theocracy qualifies; it's a rearguard action, without a prayer of building or catching hold of a world power -- though it could, through major terrorist attacks, destabilize current powers and perhaps, given our proven propensity to panic over the past ten years, end democracy in America. Which leads to a second caveat: never underestimate humanity's capacity to tear civilization down; chaos or destruction through war or environmental depredation is always possible.

The third caveat is prompted by China's sustained ability over 30+ years to manage rapid economic growth via top-down, autocratic rule. This leads to a revisionist thought: what if the Cold War, or at least the ideological competition underpinning it, never really ended?  As the Soviet Union collapsed and China progressively took the wraps off private enterprise, an assumption took hold in the west that "communism" was an empty ideological shell, that Chinese society, now that it allowed private enterprises to create and accumulate wealth, was essentially capitalist, and that capitalism ultimately entailed democracy.

But the Chinese Communist Party is no empty shell. Is its ideology? I imagine that party members consider "communism" a living ideal, in the sense that the Party, endowed with the the responsibility of ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number, continues to manage an enormous national economy to the overall benefit of the society as a whole (regardless of large groups that get dispossessed or disadvantaged when they're in development's path).  China's rulers have delivered the performance to give such a claim credibility.  The state, moreover, still controls the means of production to the extent necessary to build public infrastructure, dominate major industries, and to control banking in such a way as to prioritize development in particular sectors. Who is to say that this system is not "communist"?

In an op-ed in today's Financial Times, Fukuyama himself acknowledges that China has found itself to a so-far stable (though "sui generis") political-economic system that is unlikely to transition to democracy any time soon. He credits Chinese leaders not only with being able "to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well," but to be quite sensitive, in their way, to "popular discontents." He sees a durable social contract between the ruling party and current and rising elites:

An undeveloped thought

Has anyone noted the structural similarity between Israel's announcement last March, while Biden was dining with Netanyahu, that 1600 new settlements had been approved for East Jerusalem, and China's test flight of its new J-20 stealth fighter during Robert Gates' visit this week?  In both cases, the presidents of the countries visited claimed to be surprised by the embarrassing event, blindsided by decisions taken by the defense ministry (Israel) or the People's Liberation Army (China) .

I will refrain from facile and uninformed speculation as to what this coincidence may suggest about U.S. stature or Chinese stagecraft. 

The clock ticks for liberalization in China

I have argued before -- or rather, deployed more knowledgeable people's observations about China to suggest -- that China is the world's main test case of the Fukuyaman proposition that sheer economic competition pushes all human societies toward democracy as well as capitalism.  It is curiously common for China watchers -- e.g.,  David Pilling and Gideon Rachman, both of the FT -- first to suggest that China's rapid development under an authoritarian regime seems to disprove the notion that prosperity breeds democracy -- and then to tack about and note China's internal pressures in that direction.

So it is with Jonathan Fenby, writing in the FT, who first tells us:

The forecasts in the west in the 1990s that economic liberalisation in emerging countries was bound to bring political liberalisation have been disproved in China, though not across the Taiwan Strait. The mainland’s middle class has been co-opted into the system rather than playing the role of the bourgeoisie in 19th-century Europe, and probably has little desire to see hundreds of millions of poorer urban and rural residents getting the vote to press their own interests.

Then brings the counterpoint:

Still, setting aside moral and ethical arguments for democracy, there is a practical issue at stake and it has been brought to the fore by no lesser a figure than Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister. In remarks at the end of August in the southern city of Shenzhen, the symbolic home of the Dengist revolution, Mr Wen said China needed to protect the democratic and legal rights of the people; mobilise citizens to manage state, economic, social and cultural affairs in accordance with the law; resolve the problems of a centralised power that lacks checks and balances; tackle corruption; and open channels for public monitoring and criticism of government.

Environmental regulation, Chinese style

Even casual readers of news from China (I'm one) are familiar with the difficulty the central government experiences in trying to enforce environmental regulations in the provinces, where local officials respond to legitimate and illegitimate incentives to juice the local economy -- often by winking at illegal or noncompliant mines and factories.

Today's FT reports on a crackdown in China against the illegal mining of antinomy, a rare metal used in fire retardants, of which China produces 90% of the world's supply. The story nicely illustrates both the effects of weak regulation and the Chinese style of getting tough.

First, the status quo as it's played out in Lengshuijiang, an antimony-producing region of Hunan province:

Some green shoots of multipolar leadership?

Like all foreign policies, the Obama administration's more collaborative, less confrontational approach will be judged by its long-term  effects. The administration has certainly had its share of setbacks. Nonetheless, some recent green shoots are worth noting:

• The Chinese have announced that they will allow modest and gradual yuan appreciation - after signs that the Euro debt crisis might scotch their expected move in this direction. On this front, the administration has been under tremendous pressure to pressure, and has done so with delicacy -- amassing developing world allies in the effort, always placing the issue in the context of global rebalancing, sidestepping a deadline to deem or not deem China a "currency manipulator" -- and most recently, doubtless citing the pressure that Congress has been placing on the administration via threats to pass retaliatory legislation (as well as its own very pointed forbearance to this point).
  
  
• China was also brought on board, seemingly against the odds, for new sanctions against Iran.  While the likely impact of those sanctions is questionable at best, the harnessing of China and Russia seemed unlikely and does indicate progress in the U.S. ability to  choreograph collective action..
  
  
• The Israelis have just announced a significant easing of the Gaza blockade, brokered by Tony Blair but underwritten by the U.S. with an immediate rescheduling of the Netanyahu-Obama meeting that was postponed afer the Mavi Marmora boarding.  From the outset of that crisis, U.S. shielding of Israel from Security Council condemnation was balanced by insistence that the blockade in current form was "unsustainable."
  
  

Trouble with China as Euro depreciates?

Michael Pettis sees trouble for the U.S. and a heightening of international tension in the depreciation of the Euro and China's corresponding likely reluctance to let the yuan appreciate as much as recently anticipated:

Most policymakers around the world – while publicly excoriating the US for its spendthrift habits – are intentionally or unintentionally putting into place polices that require even greater US trade deficits.

This cannot be expected to happen without a great deal of anger and resistance in the US.  The idea that suffering countries should regain growth by exporting more to the world, and that rapidly growing surplus countries should not absorb much of this burden, will only force the US into even greater deficits as US unemployment rises to reduce unemployment pressure in Europe, China, Japan and elsewhere.

I would be surprised if the US accepted this with equanimity.  On the contrary, I expect it will only exacerbate trade tensions and ensure that next year the dispute will become nastier than ever.

On the (implicit) plus side, Pettis notes (quoting Bloomberg, in italics below) that the U.S. has natural allies in the developing world vis-a-vis the trade surplus of China at least:

[India’s Finance Minister, Pranab] Mukherjee, who served as the foreign and defense minister in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet before being appointed as the finance minister, is under pressure from local exporters to use the Group of 20 platform to campaign against China’s currency policy.

As Mukherjee’s comments suggest, pressure continues growing from a number of countries, especially in Asia, for a Chinese revaluation, and for a while it seemed pretty obvious that China was going to begin revaluing very soon.

The Obama Administration has indicated a readiness to multilateralize its efforts to get the Chinese to take measures to reduce their trade surplus.  We're going to need all the allies we can get. On that front, perhaps the patronizing dismissal of Brazil and Turkey's brokerage of a fuel swap deal with Iran was not the most long-sighted of diplomatic maneuvers.

Reverse field opinion writing at the FT

Near the outset of his column today, the FT's David Pilling has this to say about a traditional article of faith in what you might call a mainstream American view of history:

Former US president Bill Clinton proselytised the idea that, in a knowledge economy, only those states that were politically open would prosper. China has proved him spectacularly wrong. Indeed, Beijing is busily creating the biggest middle class in the history of the world, yet the Communist party’s hold on power looks as firm as ever.

To rub it in, economies in countries that do not bother with elections have generally performed better than those that regularly go through the rigmarole of transferring power. Even the late Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, gunned down in 1983 for his principled opposition to the Marcos dictatorship, said that freedom of speech meant little to those not free from hunger. China’s growth has averaged 10 per cent a year in the past 30 years. The Philippines has not even managed 4 per cent. 

I start scribbling: Clinton wasn't wrong, just early.  I prepare to cite Pilling's colleague Gideon Rachman in rebuttal:

Ah, soft power: a chorus of nations urges yuan appreciation

On several occasions I have flagged wise voices urging the U.S. to seek allies (Aryind Subramanian) and work through multilateral channels (Jeffrey Garten)  in its effort to convince China to let its currency appreciate. Recently, Larry Summers was singing from the same page:

...we think that countries with large surpluses need to be focused on shifting the pattern of demand towards reliance on domestic demand.

And clearly, exchange rates, which are the relative price of domestic and foreign goods, are one crucial aspect of that, and so I think that’s going to have to be an active area for international consideration going forward because I think all countries have a stake in more balanced growth, and I think where there are large reliance on external growth, that does raise questions about the sustainability of the expansion.

And so in our dialogue with China through the strategic economic dialogue, in our participation in the IMF with its enhanced mechanisms for global surveillance, as we move towards the G20 meetings in Canada and Korea this year, I think these are going to be very important issues (my emphasis).

Not to jump at shadows, but it looks like more pieces on Obama's international chess board may be moving into position on this front.  From today's FT:

China is facing growing pressure from developing countries to begin appreciating its currency, providing unexpected allies for the US in the diplomatic tussle over Beijing's exchange rate policy.

Speaking ahead of a meeting of finance ministers and central bank heads from the Group of 20 countries which starts today in Washington, Indian and -Brazilian central bank presidents have made the most forceful statements yet by their countries about the case for a stronger renminbi. [snip]

Morning in America

Okay, this is a foolish exercise -- capturing some fleeting, flickering hints of good news in the wake of the great health care catharsis.  But on a bright sunny April morning, why not savor a composite screenshot of a world in some senses on the mend:

WSJ: 

A1 Factories Revive Economy

The manufacturing sector geared up production across the globe in March, fueling optimism that the economic recovery has legs.

China Visit Suggests Thaw Over Iran, Yuan

China announced that President Hu Jintao will visit the U.S. to discuss nuclear security, pointing to a potential thaw in one of the worst stretches of U.S.-China relations in recent memory.

C1
Factory Data Put Dow Run At 5 Weeks

Stocks began the second quarter on a high note, helped by new data showing that the economies of the U.S., Europe, and China are improving.

 

NYT:

Tensions Easing, Obama Talks With Chinese Leader

U.S. Adds 162,000 Jobs in March; Rate Remains 9.7%

Obama, in Maine, Needles Republicans Over Calls to Repeal Health Care Overhaul

Reuters:

Instant view: March job growth strongest in 3 years

Obama, Medvedev to sign landmark nuclear arms pact

Index futures rise after March jobs data

Obama urges China's Hu to get behind Iran push

 As for some of those state wards (WSJ):

Citigroup's Primerica IPO Soars 31% 

GM's March Sales in China Cement Top Status

GM to Pay $1 Billion Toward Loan

Benmosche Upbeat on AIG Prospects

It's doubtless extending the selection bias sin to see an Obama effect in this momentary alignment. And meanwhile, Karzai is going rogue, Iraq is in parlous post-election stasis, sanctions will probably have no effect on Iran's nuclear program, the administration remains in a standoff with Netanyahu. But it's fair to say that presidential patience -- and last year's swift action to stave off a Depression -- are paying off on several fronts.

Building a new world order as China rises

Last week, Aryind Subramanian of the Peterson Institute argued in the FT that China's exchange rate policy hurt other developing countries even more than it hurt the U.S., and so the U.S., rather than taking the burden of trying to move Chinese policy on its own, should put together what you might call (okay, what I called) a coalition of the wounded:

It is time to move beyond the global imbalance perspective and see China’s exchange rate policy for what it is: mercantilist trade policy, whose costs are borne more by countries competing with China – namely other developing and emerging market countries – than by rich countries. The circle of countries taking a stand against China must be widened beyond the US to ramp up the pressure on it to repudiate its beggar-thy-neighbourism. But progress also requires that the silent victims speak up.

Today, also in the FT, Jeffrey Garten of Yale makes a complementary argument, looking to the longer term. Garten, too, argues that broad groupings of nations need to cooperate to help move Chinese policy to serve the common interest. But he's looking not so much at short-term goals around which coalitions can coalesce, but rather  in effect to gradually build a new world order: to strengthen existing multipolar organizations like the WTO and build new ones in which China will want to participate:

Summers channels Krugman chanelling Uncle Sam(uelson)

Compare Larry Summers' message at Davos (relayed by Gideon Rachman) to Paul Krugman's shot across China's bow back on New Year's Day.

Summers:

Larry Summers, the chief economic adviser in the White House, was rather more subtle in his flirtation with protectionism. He told the Davos audience that one in five American men aged between their mid-20s and their mid-50s is now out of work. In the 1960s, he pointed out, 95 per cent of this age cohort had been employed. Mr Summers was careful to say that the US remains committed to open trade and can gain from globalisation. But he also pointed out that Paul Samuelson, a famous economist (and uncle of Mr Summers), had argued that the case for free trade might not apply when countries were trading with nations that were pursuing mercantilist policies. The reference to China did not need to be spelled out.

Krugman:

I usually hear two reasons for not confronting China over its [mercantilist] policies. Neither holds water....

...there’s the claim that protectionism is always a bad thing, in any circumstances. If that’s what you believe, however, you learned Econ 101 from the wrong people — because when unemployment is high and the government can’t restore full employment, the usual rules don’t apply.

Let me quote from a classic paper by the late Paul Samuelson, who more or less created modern economics: “With employment less than full ... all the debunked mercantilistic arguments” — that is, claims that nations who subsidize their exports effectively steal jobs from other countries — “turn out to be valid.” He then went on to argue that persistently misaligned exchange rates create “genuine problems for free-trade apologetics.” The best answer to these problems is getting exchange rates back to where they ought to be. But that’s exactly what China is refusing to let happen.

Krugman calls for a trade war with China

When the financial meltdown was in full career, a mantra voiced by a chorus of economists, central bankers and world leaders was to avoid a cascade of protectionist measures like the round of retaliatory tariffs that magnified and prolonged the Great Depression.  "Beggar thy neighbor" -- as in protect your own market, destroy your trading partners' -- had to be the most-employed phrase on the Financial Times Comment page in 2009. Obama, a calming influence at the G-20 in late March, struck this note calling for a measured trade rebalancing on April 3:

Now, the U.S. will remain the largest consumer market, and we are going to make sure that it's open. One of the principles that we very clearly affirmed in London was that protectionism is not the answer. It's not the Germans' fault that they make good products that the United States wants to buy. And we want to make sure that we're making good products that Germans want to buy. But if you look overall, there is probably going to need to be a rebalancing of who's spending, who's saving, what are the overall trade patterns.

For the most part, the warnings held, and major economies held off from imposing major tariffs.  Yet the danger, as framed by Martin Wolf a year ago (Jan. 6, 2009), is a prolonged one, with the pressure to protect national markets increasing over time:

Now think what will happen if, after two or more years of monstrous fiscal deficits, the US is still mired in unemployment and slow growth. People will ask why the country is exporting so much of its demand to sustain jobs abroad. They will want their demand back. The last time this sort of thing happened – in the 1930s – the outcome was a devastating round of beggar-my-neighbour devaluations, plus protectionism. Can we be confident we can avoid such dangers? On the contrary, the danger is extreme. Once the integration of the world economy starts to reverse and unemployment soars, the demons of our past – above all, nationalism – will return. Achievements of decades may collapse almost overnight.

Now comes Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, ringing in the New Year by demanding...our demand back.

Mea Culpa re Obama in China

In my prior post about Obama's speech and q-and-a with students in Shanghai, my usual intoxication with the intricate structure of Obama's speechmaking blinded me to the broader context in which he allowed the speech to take place -- with no broadcast to the Chinese people as a whole. To a degree Obama seems to have hit the mute button on human rights in China, failing either to raise the issues or gain the exposure that Bush and Clinton did before him. The FT's Edward Luce and Geoff Dyer portray a two-track muting:

In contrast to the last two US presidential visits to China - George W. Bush in 2002 and Bill Clinton in 1998, both of whose words were broadcast live and widely to the Chinese public - Mr Obama's 60-minute question-and-answer session in Shanghai was heavily restricted.

Only the citizens of Shanghai were able to watch it live on local broadcasts. Elsewhere, Chinese citizens were theoretically able to view the event on the White House website , although many reported huge difficulties in accessing either images or sound via the site.

The irony was hard to miss. In spite of weeks of pressure from US officials to open the event to the public the Chinese held their ground. Yet in contrast to his two most recent predecessors, who criticised China for detaining dissidents and suppressing freedom of religion in Tibet, Mr Obama studiously avoided giving his hosts any explicit cause for offence.

Furthermore, Mr Obama's dextrous attempts to avoid provoking the Chinese were heavily censored. Phoenix television, a Hong Kong-based channel with broadcasts on the mainland, carried the first few minutes of Mr Obama's speech at the start of the meeting but cut to another item before he made a relatively generic pitch for universal values.

In concert with the (apparently Hillary-driven) flip-flop on stopping Israeli settlement growth, Obama is starting to look like he can be pushed around. I do not believe that that will prove to be the case over time. But Gideon Rachman was right. On the international as well as the national stage, Obama needs to land a punch -- as I expect he will on his own sweet time, with the ground thoroughly laid. Though after the wild flailing of the Bush years, he seems to regard reassurance as the better part of strength. And again, per my prior post, there is a shining, supreme confidence, packing a wallop of its own, in a message such as "we do not seek to contain China's rise."

UPDATE 11/22: James Fallows has choreographed multiple voices to push back powerfully against the dominant media narrative that portrayed Obama's China trip as a failure. The centerpiece, a summary of the state of negotiations on mulitple interviews provided anonymously by a U.S. participant, makes it clear that U.S.-China negotiations are always "water on a stone," that it's too early to judge the effects of this first round, but that the engagement was substantive and constructive. Other informed reports relayed by Fallows indicate that Obama did reach a broad Chinese audience and may have stirred them deeply (as I assumed he would, reading the transcript) in the town hall. I do believe, and never really doubted, that this is true on substance. But as the last voice Fallows has cited in this series so far points out, the Obama team has done a poor job managing perceptions of the trip here in the U.S.

Is a specter haunting Chinese communism?

Back in May, I humbly questioned the conclusions drawn by the authors of an intense statistical study* of the factors contributing to nations' transitions to democracy (humbly, because the researchers' numbers crunching is way beyond me; I was only looking at the conclusions they drew from statistical patterns they themselves identified). The authors concluded that economic growth in non-democratic states does not foster democracy, because their data showed that states experiencing strong GDP growth generally do not make the transition.

But while growth may not trigger a change in government while it's happening, perhaps change tends to come after a period of rapid growth, during a sudden onset of economic stress. People whose standard of living has risen and whose expectations have risen faster may be more inclined than their poorer forbears to hold an autocratic government accountable when it fails (or seems to fail) to deliver the goods.

China's rulers seem to live under the shadow of this possibility. Gideon Rachman, assessing the pace at which China may be moving toward world leadership, notes:

The government’s neurotic obsession with achieving its totemic figure of 8 per cent growth a year hints at the country’s continuing political fragility. Without a democratic mandate, the Communist party relies on rapid growth to keep the system stable. Somehow the country needs to make the transition to a system in which the government can draw upon alternative sources of legitimacy. Twenty years after the Tiananmen massacre, the Communist party shows no outward sign of contemplating a transition to a more democratic system. Meanwhile, the Chinese media speculate openly that social unrest could rise to dangerous levels, if economic growth slackens.

Over time, China may yet prove the much-maligned Francis Fukuyama right in his contention that competitive economic pressure is pushing all countries toward liberal democracy. Fukuyama hedged that hypothesis in various ways and never suggested that the "end of history" was at hand as he wrote. It seems to me that the jury is still very much out.

*Extreme Bounds of Democracy, by Martin Gassebener, Michael J. Lamia and James Raymond Vreeland