Learning Abroad, Evading at Home

As the New Silk Road exposes China to disruptive influences from many directions, China’s leaders will have to confront the unfinished business of integrating their own society. Divisions inside China are severe and deepening rapidly. They intersect and aggravate one another, producing more and more groups with grievances that cannot be adequately addressed by a single-party state that chokes public debate and outlaws collective action. China has many options for experimenting with inclusive formulas that allow power-sharing without embracing free elections and multiparty pluralism. Since Mao’s death, debates over political reform have started and stalled several times. As those debates resume, China will increasingly see itself as a changed society requiring a more representative government that matches its more prominent position in world affairs. Hong Kong’s semi-democracy is an instructive example of the manipulative strategies that authoritarian rulers might try to emulate on the mainland.