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mark mackinnon

An employee counts Yuan banknotes at a Bank Of China branch in Hefei, Anhui province April 6, 2010.STRINGER SHANGHAI/Reuters

"Okay, then," my friend began, leaning over a table cluttered with food and drink. "What would you do instead? How would you rule a country of 1.3 billion people?"

My British colleague and I were enjoying a rare day of clear skies in Beijing, on the patio of one of the Chinese capital's many Russian restaurants. We had been discussing a three-week train journey I took around the Middle Kingdom earlier this year – after which I wrote an article arguing that the Communist Party desperately needed to reform, or soon face the anger of its people – when he hit me with his difficult-to-answer question.

The Communist Party of China, despite its many failings, has for the past two decades presided over a period of unparalleled improvement in the lives of the people it governs. Chinese citizens may have no say in how they're ruled, they may be furious over official corruption and a judicial system wildly tilted in favour of the wealthy and powerful, but they are also – almost to a person – demonstrably better off than they were in 1990. Many young Chinese are a whole lifestyle more affluent than their parents.

As they say in American politics, it's the economy, stupid. And, while ruling with an iron fist – squelching freedom of thought and speech and tolerating almost no dissent while maintaining the same tight grip on key parts of the economy – the Communist Party of 2013 has a track record that most Western politicians would be delighted to run for re-election on.

Would China have become the "factory of the world" if workers here had been allowed to freely organize? Of course not. Had labour standards been made part of the criteria for joining the World Trade Organization (which Beijing became a member of in 2001), we would be living in a very different economic world. Maybe countries like Canada would still make things.

But the international business community couldn't resist the lure of that big Chinese market. As the people who go to Davos for the World Economic Forum every year had hoped, pushing the nastiness of Tiananmen Square off the agenda and focusing on trade provided a source of cheap labour. More slowly, a growing market of middle class consumers has begun to emerge, spurring hopes around the world that millions of better-off Chinese will start buying enough to pull the rest of the global economy out of its persistent funk. If not for the lure of China's market, the Communist Party likely would have stayed in the same penalty box that Myanmar's military rulers (who fired on their own student protesters just 10 months before the Tiananmen Square crackdown) never escaped until they began to hold elections and cede power. If Myanmar had 1.3 billion citizens, Aung San Suu Kyi might have been conveniently forgotten in the name of trade. If there were only 42 million Chinese, Ms. Suu Kyi's fellow Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo might be on track for the presidency, instead of still sitting in jail.

A free economy did not mean free people

The Davos crowd proved right about China's rising tide lifting a lot of ships. But they have, thus far, proven very wrong about a liberalized market economy leading inexorably towards a liberalized political scene.

The Communist Party and its cronies are richer and more powerful than they were in 1990, perhaps than at any time since 1949. A big reason is that the party, which now has more than 85 million members, has fewer enemies than at any time in its history.

Jiang Zemin, the man who took the reins after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, remains, at age 87, perhaps the most powerful man in China. He was ridiculed in some quarters when he introduced his key theory, the "Three Represents," in 2000, towards the end of his 13 years as General Secretary.

Compared to Mao's revolutionary rhetoric and Deng Xiaoping's breakthrough economic reforms, Mr. Jiang's great treatise was hard for most Chinese to understand. But what Mr. Jiang did by praising "advanced productive forces" was add private business and entrepreneurs to the list of those the Communist Party should strive to serve.

Mr. Jiang grasped the mortal threat posed to the party by a free market economy ruled over by a clutch of bureaucrats, so he expanded the number of people who had a stake in the Communist Party's ongoing rule in China. He green-lighted the growth of a class of superrich – not unlike Russia's Kremlin-friendly oligarchs – who would owe their wealth and power to the party, and who could thus be counted on to support it. Jiang recognized that too few people sat atop an angry pyramid, and lifted a powerful group – who might otherwise have been the party's most powerful opponents – up to share more fully in the spoils.

It was brilliant. In one stroke, Jiang remade the Communist Party from a revolutionary movement into the Establishment Party. Gone was Mao's dream of a classless society, back was a society where the rich ruled and paid the poor just enough to get by and not ask questions. In the process, Jiang made himself the Communist Party's kingmaker, remaining the (sometimes resented) éminence grise through Hu Jintao's decade in power and into Xi Jinping's.

The empire known as China

So what would I do differently? Not much, if I had to rule China as it is, a developing country of 1.3 billion people.

The People's Republic of China is a success, if you accept the premise of my friend's question: that this is and must be a single, united country.

But my travels – in coastal Guangdong, with its Hong Kong TV stations and persistent use of the Cantonese language, in southern Yunnan, with its 25 recognized minority groups, many of whom have closer bonds to Vietnam and Laos than to Beijing and Shanghai, plus among the country's angry Tibetans, Mongolians and Uighurs – have taught me that China, like the Soviet Union before it, is an empire, one quite like the colonial powers the Communist Party once swore to fight.

An empire cannot give the peoples it has subjugated a voice. Democracy meant the end of Britain in India, Russia in Eastern Europe, the United States in Iraq.

Democracy would unquestionably mean the end of Beijing's rule over Tibet and Xinjiang. Eventually, the mammoth we call China might Balkanize even further. Very few people, inside or outside China, want to see that happen.

And so, no. I see no better way to rule the 1.3 billion people who currently live within the borders of the People's Republic. In fact, you have to admire the relatively decent job Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping and their cadres have done in managing this massive chunk of the world since the debacle of 1989.

In fact, if you like China whole, you should cut the authoritarians some slack. If the People's Republic were to ease up on its controls over the Internet, to pick one small step many are anxious to see Mr. Xi take, you would see an almost instantaneous explosion of Tibetan and Uighur nationalism, calls for the province of Inner Mongolia to join with the Mongolia that declared independence in 1924, and a discussion of why languages like Cantonese, Mongolian and Manchu are so thoroughly repressed. The question comes fast – as it did when Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost loosed Moscow's controls over the Soviet Union in the late 1980s – is China one country, or several?

Jiang Zemin's stroke of genius – bringing China's new oligarchs into the Communist Party's tent – also gave the international business community an awkward (from an ideological point of view) stake in the success and survival of the Han Empire. Business loves stability. What Western company wouldn't be a little worried about its supply lines if, for instance, Chinese workers collectively went into the streets tomorrow to confront their government instead of going to their factories to make the goods we consume?

In search of the anti-Mao

So we're left with the Communist Party and its stop-and-go efforts to reform just enough to appease the masses while making it clear that the basic tenets of the People's Republic – one-party rule over the awkward hybrid known as "socialism with Chinese characteristics" – are not up for debate.

China's leaders are known to obsessively study the example of their one-time socialist ally, the Soviet Union, and why it broke up. Mr. Gorbachev gets much of the blame here, for having reformed too much, too fast, setting in motion forces he couldn't control.

But China – in Deng Xiaoping – has arguably already had its Gorbachev. Mr. Deng set China on the course for becoming a market economy (albeit one with a heavy state hand in it). He also, in 1989, set the ground rules for the quarter century since: Chinese are free to do what they want, as long as they don't challenge the Party and its right to rule.

What China hasn't had yet is a Nikita Khrushchev figure, a leader brave enough to condemn Mao and the evil he did, the way Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin and his crimes more than five decades ago. Mao's embalmed corpse still lies on Tiananmen Square, his portrait still hangs over the entrance to the Forbidden City, his face is on every yuan the state prints.

During my travels, which included a stop in Liangjiahe, the village in rural Shaanxi province where Xi Jinping was himself exiled during the Cultural Revolution, I found reasons to hope that Mr. Xi – once a victim of the Party he now leads – would be the one to relax the Communist Party's tight grip on history, perhaps allowing Chinese to talk openly about the millions who died needlessly under Mao. Doing so would start a conversation that might just change China forever.

But six months on, there's no sign of the Xi Jinping I thought I glimpsed. Perhaps he's waiting, as a source of mine believes, until his second five-year term as president – when he will be surrounded by a new Politburo, one perhaps freer from the influence of Mr. Jiang. Or perhaps he looks north to Russia, an empire that crumbled, an economy that can't compete with China's, and sees a nightmare that must be avoided at all costs.

Mao's right-hand man, Zhou Enlai, famously told Richard Nixon in the 1970s that it was "too early to say" whether the French Revolution of 1789 had succeeded.

I've come up with my own oblique answer for those who ask me what I think the future holds for post-Mao China: The Soviet Union, I find myself repeating, was born in 1917 and died in 1991 – at the young age of 74. During those seven and a half decades, there were times when many in the West believed Moscow was doing a better job of managing its affairs than the parliamentary democracies in Washington, London, Paris and Ottawa.

The People's Republic of China had a birthday earlier this month. For all its tortured history, there were just 64 candles on the cake, and plenty of bridges to cross before it reaches the stability its leaders desperately crave but have never achieved.

We're a decade away from seeing if the system built by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Xi Jinping has any more staying power than the one created by Vladimir Lenin, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In other words, it's too early to say.

Mark MacKinnon has just completed five years as the Globe and Mail's Beijing Bureau Chief. He is currently the Globe's international-affairs correspondent, based in London.

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