The Paper Dragon: Why China Will Fail

A s a saying often attributed to Lenin has it, “there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” This was one of those weeks. A sleeping giant that has lain dormant in China since early June of 1989 reawakened: mass protests.

The People’s Republic is undoubtedly a police state, but minor acts of civil disobedience aren’t particularly out of the ordinary. What makes these antigovernment demonstrations so remarkable is that they are widespread, occurring in over 20 cities across the country, with students, workers, farmers, and professionals alike taking to the streets to voice their discontent with the regime’s draconian “zero Covid” policies — though the government seems to be reasserting control for now. These defiant dissenters put their lives in jeopardy. In many places, protesters held up blank sheets of paper. One protester said they “represent everything we want to say but cannot.”

As it happens, paper has a long history in China. The material was first developed by Cai Lun, a second-century eunuch in the court of the Eastern Han dynasty, who used pulp from tree bark and other materials to make thin paper sheets. Much like its foremost invention, China itself has always been vulnerable to being torn. With a precarious geography that has it encircled by potential enemies, including the American allies of the First Island Chain, its existence has never been assured. Indeed, a Chinese state stretching from the interior highlands of the Tibetan plateau to the Yellow Sea is a relatively novel concept. China’s regional influence has waxed and waned over the centuries, as the country was in some eras composed of petty warring fiefdoms and in others unified under the yoke of a powerful ruler armed with the Mandate of Heaven.

Today, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) operates as though possessing this divine right. For years, it was seen as a given that its grip on power would persist. With its monopoly on public discourse, information Great Firewall, and dystopian social-credit system, it seemed as if the CCP would continue to occupy the commanding heights of Chinese social and political life ad infinitum. China’s steady rise on the world stage since Deng Xiaoping’s and Jiang Zemin’s economic-liberalization reforms, and its ascension to the World Trade Organization, reinforced this perspective. But the events of the last week suggest that the time has come for a reexamination of Chinese hegemonic inevitability. 

For starters, China is staring down a predicament of its own making. Perhaps the most insidious of its challenges is the demographic crisis caused by its disastrous former one-child policy. While China has since increased the number of children a couple can have — first to two children, and then three — it was too little too late. The original policy created a time bomb.

For a country to sustain its population, it needs a fertility rate of 2.1 children per couple. China’s is now 1.6 if you buy the government’s infamously unreliable statistics. Moreover, anti-natalist policies have also induced a shortfall of females, known as the “missing women” phenomenon: Couples, knowing they could have only one child, chose to abort daughters so they could try for a son. Adult men have been left with few options for marriage, and there won’t be nearly enough people in their prime years to support pensioners and sustain the high levels of economic growth the Chinese state has come to depend on. Modern China’s bargain — economic prosperity to counter the suppression of individual freedoms — will no longer hold.

China’s second crumbling pillar is its housing market. Since the 1997 Asian financial crisis and subsequent economic reforms, the country’s investors have poured money into housing, seeing it as a safe alternative to China’s notoriously volatile stock exchanges and low-return bonds. Homeownership has also become a commodity that Chinese men can use to win over a mate in the highly competitive marriage marketplace. And with a demographic crisis mounting, this has all the signs of a speculative bubble.

A collapse of the Chinese housing market isn’t necessarily imminent. China does have strict purchasing requirements. Indeed, experts have foretold a collapse on the horizon for years, and it has not materialized yet. But when it finally busts, the consequences will be far more extensive than in the U.S. circa 2008. Economists estimate that the actual estate-related share of China’s GDP is close to 30 percent. 

The third critical problem is China’s water shortage. China has always had water problems. In Mao’s day, it had too much of it. To demonstrate the CCP’s mastery of nature, it performed hydrological feats, completing massive structures such as the Three Gorges Dam. But in an ironic twist of fate, as climate change contributes to diminishing sources of freshwater and navigable rivers, these same megaprojects have precipitated a water-shortage crisis, especially in the arid north. The party’s solution thus far has been “build more.” It has constructed thousands of miles of canals and aqueducts to bring water to the most parched parts of the country. But China can’t engineer its way out of this problem. Years of environmental degradation, a common feature of communist societies, has taken its toll, and the situation will only worsen as the country fails to reduce its emissions.

The last significant problem China faces is itself. Its authoritarian political model is simply unsustainable. Try as they might, using the most sophisticated and, regrettably, often U.S.-made technology, CCP apparatchiks cannot hold back the deluge of information from a fifth of humanity forever. Take the World Cup, for example. Television broadcasts from Doha showing fans maskless and unafraid only helped fuel domestic discontent over Covid policies. Xi Jinping’s autocratic leadership style also lends itself to miscalculation. Under Xi, China has been transformed into a giant cult of personality on par with Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Xi’s predicament with zero Covid today boils down to this: If he ends all the tyrannical mitigation measures, millions could die because China never achieved herd immunity and the Chinese must rely on their own, less effective non-mRNA-based vaccines. If the lockdown orders are lifted, and this transpires, Xi will no longer be able to legitimate his rule as superior to the decadence of the West. But the longer zero Covid continues, the bigger the opposition he will face and the more he’ll have to use force to quell dissent — and that’s always a political risk, irrespective of the moral considerations.

Well aware of the path taken by Soviet leadership that led to the collapse of the USSR, Xi has long sought to avoid anything resembling glasnost or perestroika, and even undid many of the positive “socialist market economy” reforms of his predecessors. Xi aims to revive a Chinese political order that existed before the Cultural Revolution. Ironically, in trying so hard to be the anti-Gorbachev, he has inadvertently revealed the fragility of his position.

The United States has work to do to ensure that China won’t surpass us in power exerted on the world stage. But today’s protests in China reveal its weaknesses, born of wishful thinking and hubris. The question is not if this paper dragon will be shredded, but when.