“Ultimately, China will need to embrace some form of a more open and representative government if it is to fully achieve the political and economic benefits to which its people aspire,” Donald Rumsfeld, then the secretary of defense, intoned in 2005. That line might just as easily have come from Nancy Pelosi, Lou Dobbs, or Gary Bauer. Washington Times and New York Times editorial writers alike urge the White House to protest China’s curtailment of press freedoms. The rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has made strange bedfellows.

All of the critics are on to something: Evolution in Chinese respect for human rights will be a bellwether for continued economic development and peaceful foreign policy. It’s true that, even without further liberalization, China could remain a source of cheap labor and even a market for Western retailers for years to come. And, so long as the domestic situation stays stable, an authoritarian China need be no more aggressive abroad than Singapore.

But the PRC ’s economy will not generate innovations that leave the world trailing enviously if the Chinese education system continues to make a priority of indoctrination and to reward loyalty over all else. Curiosity and ingenuity—which may pose a threat to the regime—are critical for cultivating minds capable of framing new questions and solving them. Today’s elites in the Communist Party of China (CPC) remember the role of student agitators in the Tiananmen demonstrations, and Chinese schools grade students on ideological purity and expect them to defer to authority figures. But Chinese officials have also proclaimed innovation to be a national priority, inviting prominent scientists, industry leaders, and management scholars from all over the world to lead seminars on generating new technologies and business processes.

One theme of these foreign visitors is the need for robust intellectual property protection to provide an incentive for innovation. Up to today, Chinese entrepreneurs, and intrepid foreigners seeking to do business or participate in joint ventures, have often lacked recourse to the law, with connections and corruption mostly dictating who wins and who loses in commercial disputes.

China's economy will not generate innovations if the education system continues to make indoctrination a priority. Curiosity and ingenuity, which may pose a threat to the regime, are critical for framing new questions and solving them.

Perhaps most threatening to China’s hopes for continued prosperity and stability are stories of crackdowns on activists who threaten the CPC’s monopoly on power. A Human Rights Watch survey released in January noted that several “high-profile, politically motivated prosecutions of lawyers and journalists in 2006 put an end to any hopes that President Hu Jintao would be a progressive reformer.” The survey concluded that progress toward an impartial legal system was still nonexistent, as censorship and restrictions on media in the PRC have increased. According to Amnesty International figures, China carried out more than six times as many executions as the United States on a per capita basis in 2005.

The view of CPC elites, however, is that human rights advocates are linked to Western capitals or organizations, and religious “rebels” may have ties to Central Asia, India, Korea, or the United States, depending on whether they are Muslim, Tibetan Buddhist, or Christian. Even the disaffection of low-wage laborers and victims of environmental degradation may be traced, whether disingenuously or not, to the presence of foreign corporations on the mainland. Beleaguered officials are more likely to perceive hostility from other states—and impute aggressive intentions to them. Chances of PRC military confrontations rise accordingly.

An economically developed China that does not conform to American standards of respect for individual liberty is becoming a popular alternative model for growth, as Rowan Callick shows in the November/December edition of THE AMERICAN. In fact, some PRC officials complain that the West uses human rights as a club with which to beat developing states like China.

The attitudes of these officials run parallel with the arguments of sympathetic Western scholars like Daniel Bell, a professor of philosophy at Qinghua University in Beijing. Bell’s latest book, Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context, which opens with reflections headed “One Size Doesn’t Fit All” and “The Uniquely Parochial Development of Liberal Democracy,” is a sustained meditation on the theme that expectations of Chinese convergence with Western norms are illegitimate.

The view of CPC elites, however, is that human rights advocates are linked to Western capitals. Even the disaffection of laborers and victims of environmental degradation may be traced to the presence of foreign corporations on the mainland.

A primary consideration is whether Chinese political philosophy or history offers any foundation for the emergence of human rights defined, in the Western way, as a set of nonnegotiable, inalienable entitlements due to every person by virtue of humanity alone. These rights exist in principle across the modern liberal world, and their rise during the Enlightenment owes a great deal to a Judeo-Christian and classical Greek inheritance.

Ancient ideas about the mark of divinity in every man and the right of citizens to participate in politics while enjoying private-property protection provided the backdrop for interactions in medieval and early modern Europe among war-waging monarchs, the lords upon whom they depended for troops, and the clerics responsible for saving the souls of royalty and subjects alike. Modern liberal regimes emerged in the West when subjects finally wrested legislative authority from kings, and rights came to be safeguarded through an independent legal establishment. China has no analogous set of traditions.

China’s rich heritage does offer discussions of the virtue of humaneness (ren) as a standard against which to judge official conduct. The tradition even holds out the figure of the Confucian sage who acted as an arbiter of sovereign authority, proclaiming that the legitimating “Mandate of Heaven” had passed from the ruling house when, thanks to corruption at court, conditions in the countryside degenerated into chaos or a foreign power invaded virtually unopposed.

But Confucian ren emphasizes social virtues like reciprocity, and any call for dynastic transition would have been based on the principle of collective order and communal stability. Nowhere in Chinese history or political thought is there evidence of a challenge mounted on behalf of individuals to the concentration of power. The veto privilege once claimed by Confucian scholars—and theoretically exercised whenever authoritarian rule degenerated past a certain point—never evolved into pressure for limited government.

China’s rich heritage does offer discussions of the virtue of humaneness (ren) as a standard against which to judge official conduct. The tradition even holds out the figure of the Confucian sage who acted as an arbiter of sovereign authority.

Even when Sun Yat-sen emerged in the early 20th century to lead China out of the imperial era and into a period of modernization under a nominally republican regime, his vision of rule was in many ways socialist. Taking the commitment of the American Declaration of Independence to the individual citizen’s right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as an inspiration, Sun proceeded to promulgate “Three Principles of the People” (san min zhu yi). The Chinese answer to the fundamental American rights substitutes “nationalism” for “life;” replaces “liberty” with a reference to executive and legislative, but not judiciary, power; and refers to “health” instead of the pursuit of happiness. There is no assertion that rights are inalienable (cannot be taken away by government), and the individual is replaced by the collective.

What about Singapore as a model: a prosperous state with a tradition of centralized authority? A communal tradition featuring a benevolent despot may work under the intimate conditions afforded by a realm a quarter of the size of Rhode Island with half the population of New York City. But it is China’s vastness that makes a centralized, authoritarian model unfeasible for any extended period. In fact, today’s Chinese elites often invoke the PRC’s extent and diverse population as justification for not institutionalizing individual rights. But this excuse is ironic, given that the diversity of interests created by a nation of 1.3 billion all but guarantees that elites at the center will not satisfy the concerns of the periphery.

Taiwan, another economically developed power that constitutes a potential model for the PRC, shares China’s historical and philosophical inheritance. But Taiwan’s dependence on an American security guarantee in the face of the threat from the mainland created a situation in which pressure from Washington for liberalization in the late 1980s left Taiwanese officials with no choice but to relinquish their monopoly on power and contribute to the construction of a liberal regime. This suggests that traditional norms and modes of authoritarian rule can yield to modern Western human rights–respecting institutions when the state’s existence is at stake. But what if conditions are less dire?

Robert Zoellick, the current World Bank president and former deputy secretary of state, framed the challenge for China as that of becoming a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system, an evolution that would presumably require improvement in Chinese domestic affairs—from reducing pollution to expanding civil liberties—along with an increased commitment to international law, the nonproliferation regime, and other U.S. foreign policy priorities. Some Americans of the “stakeholder” school assert that economic development renders Chinese liberalization and respect for human rights inevitable. James Mann identifies this view as “the soothing scenario” in his new book, The China Fantasy. The logic is that the emergence of a middle class will yield demands for increased political rights, even as China’s integration into the global economy will require improvements in transparency and accounting.

But a case can be made that the beneficiaries of China’s economic growth to date have been confined to—or, in some cases, co-opted into—the class of Chinese communist elites.

As the repression data suggest, one realm in which the growing ranks of state bureaucrats have made their presence felt is the area of Internet censorship. Legions of Chinese officials operate a sophisticated surveillance network that evolves with technology to block access to banned information and prevent dissidents from organizing followers. It is not clear that the expanded ranks of stakeholders within China, meaning all the newly recruited members of the party and state apparatus, have any interest in spreading political rights to the masses of Chinese peasants and workers.

A recent study by Global Demographics Ltd. for JPMorgan showed that disparity in China has reached the point where the average income of a city household is three times that of the average rural household. Within the subset of wealthy urbanites, moreover, resources are further concentrated in relatively few hands.

Among the privileged inhabitants of China’s growing state bureaucracy, institutional interests could be arrayed against liberalization. For instance, authorities within the PRC’s Religious Affairs Bureau may have an incentive to inflate the threat posed by the growing ranks of the faithful in China to justify their own budget increases.

While China’s population is up two and a half times since 1949, membership in Christian churches has risen by a factor of 12, to at least 60 million. Tolerance of churches and mosques today is often seen as evidence of a new respect for human rights. In fact, Beijing has elected to tolerate particular religious bodies, the officially recognized ones, because the regime sees them as a force for stability. Other religious groups are not tolerated. Witness the attacks on Falun Gong and various Christian underground sects that occur almost daily.

Article 1 of the PRC ’s most recent body of legislation on religion states: “These regulations are formulated in accordance with the Constitution and relevant laws for the purposes of ensuring citizens’ freedom of religious belief, maintaining harmony among and between religions, preserving social concord, and regulating the administration of religious affairs” (emphasis added). In other words, tolerance is tethered to harmony—social stability—and practices such as worshiping outside an official church will be regarded as threatening and will invite punishment.

Hu Jintao’s new mantra of “Harmonious Society” (hexie shehui) reflects the concern with social stability. In this vein, it follows Hu’s “Eight Dos and Don’ts” (ba rong ba chi) campaign of 2006 and Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” (sange daibiao), both efforts to rally the population behind state priorities in the face of a growing wealth disparity and an ideological vacuum. Essential to such formulas is the role of the state in setting the terms for interactions in society.

It’s true that the freedom of action of the ordinary Chinese person has increased with rising incomes over the past decade. But we should bear in mind that these liberties either have been dispensed at the pleasure of the party—and therefore could vanish as suddenly as they have materialized—or have been claimed without being granted and will disappear when the regime can muster the strength to suppress them.

Jacqueline A. Newmyer is president and CEO of Long Term Strategy Group LLC, a defense consultancy based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She thanks Jonathan Walton for his advice on this article. 

Image credit: photo by Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images, 2007.