[MUSIC] Now we come to scenario number three, the collapse of the CCP and let me say, before I go into this in any great detail, I want to say that I'm not advocating the collapse of the CCP. I don't actually think that it's extremely likely to happen, but it is something that as a social scientist, I need to think about and need to get you to think about as to what would be the kinds of events, the kinds of problems that could bring about this collapse. Because in some ways, we will find that the CCP with its authoritarian resilience has been trying to find ways to avoid this. Now again, in defense of the decision to discuss the potential collapse of the CCP. It's very important to remember that President Xi himself believes that without this major and consistent attack on corruption, the CCP itself will collapse. That's part of the mandate that he was given from the party leaders to prevent this from happening. So clearly, they are worried about it. So there is the potential out there for this to happen. Now the Western observers have different explanations about why they think that the system could collapse. One of the earliest people to talk about collapse was a guy named Gordon Chang. Back in the 1990s when there was a huge debt crisis in the banking sector, he wrote a book called The Coming Collapse of China. Seized halt to inner-party democracy. Hu Jintao begun a campaign, a program of inner-party democracy and we see now that C has really slowed that down. David Chanbo believes that that is a source, a major source of the future, decline or he sees the ongoing decline of the party. Rod McFarker at Harvard, he believes that the anti-corruption crises or the anti-corruption campaign will create it's own crises for Xi and that people will get tired of the anti-corruption campaign and will push him out. And Pay Min Sin believes that the alienation of a leaks in society due to continued repression will eventually lead to the collapse of the system. Andy Walder at Stanford really believes that the Soviet Union collapsed, because the communist party waited too long for reform. It wasn't just Gorbachev, but you had had 20 years under Brezhnev who had resisted reform really from 1964 to 1984 for and this had created all kinds of stagnation and a kind of bureaucratic death of the party. When Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the party was already long on the way to collapse. Another thing that Walder had pointed out was that the USSR overinvested in the military economy and that that led to a collapse. So some people may want to look at how much China is now spending on its military, but I would believe that the percentage is actually much smaller than what we saw in the Soviet Union. But there are people who make a living and do research about analyzing state fragility. So there is this group, they put out the Fragile States Index and you can find it online and in 2014 using 75 variables, they ranked China as 68th of 178 states, which means that there are 110 states less fragile than China. So China is more fragile than the mean of all these states and it placed China in what it called a high warning category. That doesn't mean it's about to collapse, but it's a warning, you need to be careful. And right below, the very high warning level. So there are more unstable categories than this, but actually are three levels and those are three levels of alert. So China, in fact is in the fifth category moving down towards more stable systems. But the professor who ran this program at least 10 years ago, I found a quote from him where he said that in China state failure was a remote possibility at present. But gradual transition to democracy necessary to safeguard long-term stability. Needs to do that at the moment I don't think there will be a collapse of the government, but there is a sense of fragility during this transition. It could go either way. Now part of the problem from my perspective is that China should be moving forward in some kind of political reform, so as to avoid these kinds of mass protests. And so potentially, seize decision to reject political reform could in fact, increase unrest even though he believes that political reform is what did Gorbachev in. The alternative possibility is that without some political reform, the party will not survive. And my own view is that the total absence of any mechanism for citizens to resolve their grievances against state officials means continued, if not increasing levels of social unrest. For example, petitions were a traditional form of political activism or seeking redress in traditional China. They're also a modern form of political expressions and many thousands of people go to Beijing each year to protest. But many of those people are now arrested and sent home or brought home back to their village and put in through their town put into what's called a black jail. Now Hu Jintao contributed to this problem, because in 2009 in his big concern about stability in China, he decided to include the number of petitioners that made it to Beijing as an indicator of poor local leadership. So he created a strong incentive for the local leaders to suppress the petitions. And unfortunately, if you look at seize political reform program at the third plenum, the petition system is the only real political reform strategy that he offers to the political system and to the citizens of China. And yet, we know that this system is very unsuccessful.
