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Like a giddy debutante ball, the Olympic Games mark China's long-delayed coming out into Global Society. At once a moment of international recognition where China can display its modernity and maturity, 2008 will be the symbolic event when the humiliations of 19th-century Western tutelage, the slaughter of millions by the Japanese, the Cold War isolation of China from the non-Communist world, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the bloody pavements of Tiananmen Square, will all be forgotten in a blaze of national glory and international acclamation. The world's eyes will be on Beijing, and neither China nor the rest of the world will be the same again. Or that ostensibly is the hope of China's leaders and the aspiration of its people.
In the aftermath of the catastrophic Sichuan earthquake, there will be considerable international sympathy for China, perhaps defusing some of the criticism that built in the months leading up to the games, as the Olympic torchbearers ran gauntlets of foreign protesters. But which China will follow the Beijing Olympics? The hot China of spectacular economic growth or virulent anti-Japanese demonstrations? The warm China of pandas and cultural exchanges? The cool China of military build-up and hard-headed Communist Party rule? Or the cold China of Tiananmen Square and support for the genocidal Sudanese government?
Answers to these questions diverge sharply. Three significant books display strikingly incompatible interpretations of China's present and prognostications about its future. From their respective angles of orientations, these China-hands position themselves along a rough continuum from bright optimism to dark skepticism. In so doing, they effectively caution that this vast and exceedingly diverse country belies any naïve characterizations or glossy snapshots. They also exemplify how easy it is to allow faulty methodology and incomplete theory to produce flawed historical extrapolations.
Certain facts about China are unassailable. Over thirty years China has sustained annual economic growth of around 8-10 percent, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, become the world's industrial factory, enacted hundreds of new laws, moved from a command economy to a predominantly private market, graduated from amongst the poorest countries in the world to a mid-level developing country, risen from a country of bicycles to only the third nation in history to put a man in space. China now pronounces itself committed to the rule of law and to a "peaceful rise." The China of Mao jackets and Little Red Books is a distant memory, displaced by ubiquitous Western fashions and technology of every kind. By any standard these are extraordinary accomplishments.
For Randall Peerenboom, an authority on China's legal system, the straight line of rising economic growth will likely continue at a gallop towards full modernization. China's rise offers a paradigm of development, emulating the East Asia Model (EAM) that he finds in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. "I argue," Peerenboom says, "that China is now following the same general path—modified slightly in light of the realities of the 21st century—of other East Asian countries that have achieved sustained economic growth, established rule of law, and usually developed constitutional democracies, albeit not necessarily liberal democracies."
Peerenboom celebrates each of China's "four main pillars of modernity," as he styles them. The economic pillar surely merits applause. Few countries have managed to compress so much growth in a scant three decades. To achieve this feat, China's leaders have prioritized economic growth and taken a pragmatic rather than ideological path to reforms. As a tradeoff, however, they have postponed democracy, settled for a "thin" rule of law, delayed constraining constitutionalism, and left to the future possible civil and political rights. This is the EAM, says Peerenboom, that distinguishes the Asian Tigers from the relative sluggards: Thailand, the Philippines, Cambodia, and India.
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