These episodes have revealed to the world—and to a sizable portion of the Chinese people—a culture of greed, violence, and deceit at the highest levels of government. The Communists’ power is not in imminent danger, but their legitimacy is.
So-called mass incidents—riots, strikes, and protests—doubled in five years, to 180,000 in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociologist at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.
China already has inequality comparable to the Philippines and Russia and is far less egalitarian than Japan, the U.S., and even Eastern Europe, according to Li Shi, an economist at Beijing Normal University. The top 10 percent of urban Chinese earn about 23 times that of the poorest 10 percent, according to official figures—which are almost certainly understated. Even those whose lives have improved resent those who have climbed even higher by milking the system.
Hu’s “Harmonious Society” campaign, which he initiated in 2005, has curdled into something unwholesome. Harmony has become a synonym for uniformity, obedience, and censorship. In a dig at Hu’s slogan, Chinese whose electronic communications have been blocked or bleeped joke that they have been “harmonized.”
...economist Daron Acemoglu and political scientist James Robinson predict that China’s economic miracle will fade because the security-obsessed government will continue to resist the creative destruction that is crucial to innovation,...
Of about 300 U.S. companies surveyed last November and December by the American Chamber of Commerce in China for its 2012 annual report, 79 percent said enforcement of intellectual property rights was ineffective, up from 70 percent in last year’s report.
Investors are starting to act on their words. In March, foreign direct investment into China fell about 6 percent from a year earlier, the fifth straight month of decline. That was the longest streak of monthly declines since 2009, when the financial crisis caused multinationals to slow overseas investment. China doesn’t depend on money from abroad, but it does require the technology and know-how that foreign multinationals bring.