Excuse me for thinking about this, but just how long do we really expect China to remain stable?

There's been a couple of good blogs recently about China's growth - about whether it is sustainable and what problems or events could stop it. Sheetal Guliani had a good piece at the 2Point6Billion site questioning whether China's growth model can survive. Chris Devonshire-Ellis at China-Briefing Dot Com looked at the same issues and asked the question, "Has China's economic development hit a glass ceiling?" And Shantanu Bhagwat published a blog post at Global-Themes Dot Com about a talk by Professor Wing Thye Woo, a member of the faculty of Economics at the University of California Davis, on "The Real Challenges to China's Continued High Growth."

At the root of all the discussion, Dr. Woo sees three things that could bring China's economic growth to a screeching halt. Breakdown of infrastructure and environmental or ecological resources issues were two of the three. After all, you can't make steel without raw materials (the environmental issue) and you can't make steel if you can't get the raw materials to a steel mill (infrastructure). The remaining issue? Social disorder. And that gave me cause for pause...

Very few of my friends or day-to-day co-workers are at all familiar with the Tiaping Rebellion. That shows the myopia of history in Western countries. The bloodiest war in human history was WWII. Second place? Not WWI. Not the US Civil War. Not the Napoleonic War or the Vietnam War or Seven Years War or the Thirty Years War or even the Hundred Years War (which was really 116 years long). The second bloodiest war in human history was probably the Tiaping Rebellion in China from 1851 to 1865. About 50 million people died in that war.

China has been stable, more or less, since the Cultural Revolution ended and the Gang of Four was put down in 1976. That's about 30 years. The Beijing Spring of 1977 set a tone. We've had the rise of Deng Xiaopeng and the implementations of the Four Modernizations. Life's been good.

Sure, they had Tiananmen Square; but we had Kent State. How is that different? (Don't answer that.)

When you look back at China's history, China is unstable socially and politically maybe as much as it is stable. The Cultural Revolution lasted a decade. Before that, the Great Leap Forward (1957) and the famine of the Sparrow Campaign in 1958 brought minor chaos to China. There was the invasion of Tibet in 1951, the Korean War in 1950 and that long three-way struggle between the Nationalist Kuomintang, the Communists, and the Japanese from 1931-1949. Before that the Warlord's Era (from 1911-1930), the downfall of the Qing Dynasty, and the early years of the Republic of China all meant that not much of the 20th Century in China was really stable.

If we go back to the 19th Century there was the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the coup of the Dowager Empress 1898, the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95, the two Opium Wars 1839-42, 1856-60, and the previously mentioned Taiping Rebellion (1851-1865) along with the several smaller rebellions (Miao, Muslim, Nien, Panthay) that followed it until 1873. Not to mention the bubonic plague pandemic of 1855.

China saw over 80 years of relative stability from 1755 to1839.

Has China changed? Qualitatively changed? If I was a historian I'd ask when we can expect China's next social meltdown. Maybe the move from feudalism to nation-state, from isolation to the international stage, has really changed life in rural Sichuan and Guangxi.

I'm pretty dog gone sure that China (as we know it) will still be there when I wake up tomorrow. I'm almost as sure that it will still be there next year. Will it be there when I retire in 2025 (or so)? Will it look the same? For those who aren't sure I'd ask this: heck, how will America look then? Maybe we are still in the first half of another 80 year lull in China's social psychosis.

China has been around for four thousand years. Trade with China (and the investment that follows that idea) has been around since before Marco Polo. Beyond that is speculation, but the speculation is fun...