Little more than a decade ago, my answer to the question posed by this essay’s title was the year 2015.1 My assessment, published in the Fall
1996 issue of The National Interest, began by observing that all countries (leaving aside states that make nearly all their money from oil
exports) which had attained a Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPpc) of at least US$8,000 per year (as measured by the Purchasing-Power
Parity or PPP standard for the year 1995) stood no worse than Partly Free in the ratings of political rights and civil liberties published annually
by Freedom House (FH).

As China’s economy was growing at a rate that promised to carry it to
a level near or beyond that GDPpc benchmark by 2015, I reasoned that
this, the world’s largest country, was a good bet to move into the Partly
Free category as well. Since then, China has remained deep in Not Free
territory even though its civil-liberties score has improved a bit—from
an absolutely abysmal 7 to a still-sorry 6 on the 7-point FH scale—
while its political-rights score has remained stuck at the worst level.
Yet today, as I survey matters from a point slightly more than midway
between 1996 and 2015, I stand by my main conclusion: China
will in the short term continue to warrant a Not Free classification, but
by 2015 it should edge into the Partly Free category. Indeed, I will go
further and predict that, should China’s economy and the educational
attainments of its population continue to grow as they have in recent
years, the more than one-sixth of the world’s people who live in China
will by 2025 be citizens of a country correctly classed as belonging to
the Free nations of the earth.

In order to flesh out my analysis, I shall examine four questions. The
first asks about the prospects for sustained economic growth. The second
inquires into what recent scholarship tells us about the nexus between
economic development and political freedom. The third estimates
when a relatively free China is likely to emerge. And the fourth
ponders the implications for war and peace that are likely to flow from
this momentous change.
Let us take the question of the economy first. China’s per-capita
growth over the last decade has averaged a highly impressive 8.5 percent
annually (reaching a GDPpc of $6,000 in 2006 international-PPP
dollars).2 Serious challenges lie ahead, yet given China’s competent
economic-policy makers, a supportable projection is an average percapita
growth rate of 7 percent a year, enough to raise GDPpc to $10,000
PPP by 2015. After that, slower workforce expansion (a product of changing
demographics) plus China’s expected approach toward convergence
with the world’s leading developed economies suggest that the growth
rate will climb less steeply. Annual growth of 5 percent in GDPpc starting
in 2015 will bring China to roughly $14,000 PPP (in 2006 dollars)
by 2025, or about where Argentina is today.
Short-term disruptions would do little to disturb this projection. There
was such a hitch after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, but the
growth rate subsequently recovered so robustly that the slow period
was soon offset with no lasting economic effects. The prospect for sustained
growth over at least the next decade appears strong.
Does Prosperity Breed Liberty?
The next question to be explored is the relation between economic
development and democratic freedom. There are three possibilities: 1)
Development might lead to democracy; 2) democracy might foster development;
or 3) there might be a common cause driving both.
My 1996 projection was based on the first direction. This is the hypothesis,
associated with Seymour Martin Lipset, that only a society
with educated, wealthy people can resist the appeal of demagogues.3
Stable democracy presupposes a certain level of accumulated human,
social, and physical capital. A related view is that institutions which
promote limited government (particularly via constraints placed on
executive power) support growth.4
Education promotes growth, and might also independently promote
political pluralization by reducing the costs of political action in support
of relatively democratic regimes.5 Schooling makes democratic revolutions
against dictatorships more probable and successful antidemocratic
coups less probable. After analyzing more than a hundred countries,
Robert J. Barro found that higher incomes and higher levels of
(primary) education predict higher freedoms.6 He also found significant

time lags between the appearance of a factor positive for electoral rights
and its expression in politics. He interpreted such lags as tokens of
inertia in institutions affected by changes in economic and social variables,
and noted that after about two decades “the level of democracy is
nearly fully determined by the economic and social variables.”7 This
observation helps one to understand why a rapidly growing country
such as China has a freedom rating today well below the level that its
current income would predict.
Adam Przeworski and his coauthors also find that levels of economic
development best predict the incidence of various types of political
regimes. To explain this, however, they point to the superior survival
capacity of wealthier democracies rather than to transitions from dictatorship
to democracy at higher levels of wealth. The higher the level of
income that a given country enjoys, these researchers note, the better
are the odds that a democratic regime in that country will endure. They
estimate the probability that a democracy will die in a country where
annual GDPpc is $6,000 (in 2006 PPP dollars) as close to zero. In contrast,
Carles Boix and Susan Stokes attribute transitions to democracy
in wealthier countries to incomes becoming more equally distributed as
development progresses: “[T]he rich find a democratic tax structure to
be less expensive for them as their country gets wealthier and they are
more willing to countenance democratization.”8
The second possibility is realized if the rules of electoral democracy
turn out to be better on average for development than are those of dictatorships.
Democracies tend to foster governmental transparency and the
production of public goods while placing some limits on what rulers
can steal. Yet a democracy with a populist bent can insist on economically
damaging schemes for redistributing income and wealth. Barro
and Prezworski are among those who find that democracy does not lead
directly to higher growth. According to Torsten Persson and Guido
Tabellini, the evidence that democratizations yield economic growth is
weak. They also write that “democracy” is too blunt a concept and that
institutional details matter greatly.9 The theoretical picture remains
unclear and the literature is divided.
The third possibility, that democracy and development have a common
cause, finds support from Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors, who
argue that “though income and democracy are positively correlated,
there is no evidence of a causal effect. Instead . . . historical factors
appear to have shaped the divergent political and economic development
paths of various societies, leading to the positive association between
democracy and economic performance.”10 These scholars see political
and economic development paths as interwoven. Some countries
embarked on development paths associated with democracy and economic
growth, while others followed paths based on dictatorship, repression,
and more limited growth.

Might there be a regional, specifically Sinitic, effect involving the
polities influenced by Chinese civilization? These also include Japan,
the two Koreas, Vietnam, Singapore, and Taiwan. Today they present a
mixed picture. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are rated Free; Singapore
is Partly Free; and North Korea, Vietnam,
and China are Not Free. Nonetheless, the
paths carved out by Japan, South Korea,
and Taiwan show that Western-style democracy
can take root in Sinitic societies.
Education is crucial, and here China
does not impress. In 2000, the country’s
entire over-25 population had only an
average of 5.74 years of schooling (between
all developing countries at 4.89
years and the East Asia and Pacific country
average of 6.50 years).11 Yet large
educational-improvement efforts are underway, especially in rural areas
and the rapidly expanding postsecondary sector. My projection is
that by 2025 the average Chinese person over 25 will have had almost
eight years of formal schooling.
Between 1999 and 2005, postsecondary admissions tripled, reaching
five million during the latter year. Currently China has about twenty
million people with higher degrees; by 2020 there will be more than a
hundred million. Although there are problems of educational quality
and jobs, China’s rising educational indicators bode well for both economic
development and democracy.
What conclusion should we draw from the scholarship so far on democracy
and development? I think it is that growth-friendly policies, if
consistently pursued (historically determined institutions may prevent
this), lead to the accumulation of human and physical capital and the
rise of limited government. Autocratic regimes in economically growing
countries can delay but not ultimately stop this from happening.
China’s so-far slight improvement in the FH rankings has been in the
Civil Liberties category, where it has gone from a 7 (the absolute worst
score) to a 6. Looking behind the FH numbers, we can identify several
factors that have led to a substantial growth in personal liberties and
promise more freedom to come.
The first is that a modern economy is simply not compatible with the
Leninist requirement of comprehensive party and state control over
society. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has faced a hard choice:
Maintain control and risk economic stagnation and political disaffection,
or let go and risk eventually losing dominance. The CCP has chosen
to pull back in several domains. Most notably, it allows markets to
function. It also has accorded certain legal institutions and media outlets
a degree of autonomy. The CCP has become Marxist-Leninist in

name only. In reality, it seeks to rule a system that might be called
party-state capitalism, setting broad rules while leaving much authority
to local Party figures and various private actors. Central authorities can
intervene, but they ration their energies.
One might think that a party which promotes markets, has formally
enrolled “capitalists,” and has allowed the state sector’s share of the
economy to shrink has lost any plausible claim to be called communist
or socialist. Phrases such as “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”
and “democratic socialism” do not disguise the reality of the CCP’s
massive but mostly unacknowledged ideological shift. Not that there is
much nostalgia for socialism—or even a Confucian contempt for profit:
In a 2005 survey of twenty countries, China featured the highest share
of respondents (74 percent) who agreed with the proposition that the
best economic system is “the free-market economy.”12
The regime’s legitimacy seems to rest on three main pillars: 1) It has
brought social order after a century and a half of upheavals;13 2) people’s
incomes are growing rapidly (even if the growth is unevenly distributed);
and 3) Chinese enjoy a sense that the Beijing government is
restoring China to its rightful place of prominence in the world.
Surveys show that confidence in the government is high, and people
seem satisfied with the way that “democracy” is unfolding.14 Yet sources
of discontent such as corruption, environmental damage, and sharp income
inequality remain. In a departure from Chinese tradition, there is
a developing attitude that individuals have rights.
Local elections, along with the aforementioned rise of certain relatively
autonomous legal and media institutions, are helping to expand
personal liberties and may have the potential to transform Chinese
society.
Legal Institutions, Social Groups, and the Media
Legal reform began in 1979 when the CCP under its leader Deng
Xiaoping decided that a modern economy required clear, predictable
rules rather than obscure, arbitrary decisions. Although China remains
a long way from being under the rule of law, the country has made
considerable progress.15 The main questions have to do with the extent
of legal institutions’ de facto independence today and the advances
they might make tomorrow, together with the closely related issue of
which, if any, claims to authority the Party will choose to defend to the
end.
Almost three decades after Deng started the reform process, the National
People’s Congress (NPC) has passed many laws—determined by
the State Council—and established a nationwide judiciary. Laws now
provide for judicial review of the acts of state agents, compensation for
damages from unlawful state actions, protection for people subject to

noncriminal administrative sanctions, and rights to counsel and procedures
for the conduct of criminal trials. Business transactions increasingly
conform to legal rules. Important international commitments flow
from China’s membership in the World Trade Organization.
Many laws are ambiguous and contradictory, giving the Party ample
opportunities to maintain its authority while also allowing changes to
occur. Thus the Organic Law on Villager Committees recognizes the
authority of the elected village head but requires committee conformance
with “state policies” (thereby allowing the local Party secretary to
overrule the locally elected leader). One consequence of these ambiguities
is that local officials often are able to pick or interpret the laws that
they prefer to follow.
With the number of lawyers at 150,000 and climbing, more people
are seeking legal representation. The 4.3 million civil cases that China’s
courts heard in 2004 marked a 30 percent increase over the 1999 figure.
People are suing not only one another but also state officials and
enterprises with links to the Party-state establishment. Such suits can
serve the Party-state’s overall goal of “curbing administrative wrongdoing.”
16
The legal system remains firmly under CCP control. Party members
often determine court decisions, officials press judges to throw out suits
over property rights, and citizens’ legal rights to counsel are ignored
when the Party or local officials have already decided the case. Yet the
system is evolving. The Supreme People’s Court has begun to make
interpretations and decisions—a role contrary to communist dogma. An
anticorruption guideline dating from 2000 requires judges to stand aside
from civil cases if they have taken money or gifts from a litigant. Judges
are also banned from taking lucrative positions at law firms until at
least two years after leaving the bench.
Many shocking abuses of the law occur. Nonetheless, a better-educated
population and a more complex economy demand the rise of improved
legal institutions. Rural unrest and pervasive corruption pressure
leaders to take more steps toward the rule of law even if this means
having to relax the Party’s control over society. Thus developments in
the legal arena, halting though they are, signal something positive about
China’s economic and political future.
Any Leninist regime must be suspicious of organizations—particularly
social organizations cutting across class or regional lines—that it
does not control. So far, the groups most worrisome to the powers that
be have been religious in nature, such as the Falun Gong meditation
movement. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in general have
been proliferating. More than 280,000 were officially registered as of
2005; unofficial estimates put the number of unregistered NGOs as high
as two million. The regime monitors their activities, but accords them
de facto leeway because of the benefits they bring. Many seek improve

ments in health, education, environmental protection, and services for
the disabled, all to the sound of government toleration or even approval.
By contrast, groups that focus on human rights and cultivate
foreign ties have suffered increasing official harassment over the past
two years.
The jailing of journalists, the closing of newspapers, and the censoring
of websites reveal the CCP’s determination to limit information and
the independent organizing that it may spur. Nonetheless, information
access and the ease of communication have both been on the rise. The
media enjoy the freest hand they have had over their own content since
1949.17
The last three decades have seen the appearance of many new magazines
and newspapers as well as talk radio, the Internet, and cell phones.
The media cover a far wider range of topics than earlier, including official
malfeasance and social problems as well as everyday concerns.
More than a hundred million Chinese enjoy Internet access, and 450
million people—more than a third of the population—use cell phones.
The government was able to block news of the Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in late 2002 and early 2003—risking a
global pandemic—but with half a billion text messages now beaming
back and forth daily, the censors’ task is hard and growing harder. What
the regime ought to fear more than the spread of “unpatriotic” messages
is the usefulness of devices such as the cheap, ubiquitous cell phone in
organizing protests, exposing cover-ups, and even exacerbating situations
that sometimes become riotous.
A conflict of goals besets the CCP. It wants economic information to
flow freely, and the media can help to ferret out local corruption. Yet
communications with any political coloration worry the Party greatly.
The imperatives pull in opposite directions, giving rise to cycles of
relaxation (the late 1980s before Tiananmen) and repression (the years
after Tiananmen as well as the period since 2004). Backslidings toward
restriction are almost certainly in store from time to time. Yet the underlying
choice to accept markets is boosting people’s access to information
and their ability to reach each other, even if the right to free speech
has yet to be recognized.
Village Elections Today, Township Elections Tomorrow?
The 1988 Organic Law on Villager Committees required that they
be popularly elected and charged with responsibility and hence authority
in such areas as fiscal management, land allocation, and education.
By the mid-1990s, 90 percent of committee heads held their posts
by virtue of the ballot. The degree to which elections are fair, open,
and competitive varies. Such requirements as direct nomination by
individuals, multiple candidates, secret ballots, public counting of all

votes, immediate announcement of results, and regular recall procedures
are not always followed, and the CCP’s influence can decide
outcomes.
As people come to enjoy more personal freedom, demand a larger say
in matters that touch them directly, and feel fewer inhibitions about
manifesting their discontents, the governance problems facing the CCP
mount. If denied regular ways of dealing with their grievances and desires,
people will increasingly choose irregular ways. The CCP might
decide that the best way to fend off disorder is to empower people more.
Township elections could be next.
The authorities in Beijing keep track of what they call “mass incidents.”
In 1995, about ten thousand were reported; a decade later the
official figure had increased almost ninefold. Grievances are not in short
supply. Although rural incomes have slowly grown, health and educational
services have deteriorated in many places and the income gap
between city and countryside is growing. The urban-rural Gini coefficient
went from 0.28 in 1991 to 0.46 in 2000. (A higher number means
less equal; it is 0.30 on average in Europe and 0.45 in the United States.)
Income differences have also widened within urban areas, symbolized
by reports of (dollar) billionaires.
Although taxes on peasants have been abolished, local officials still
find ways to cheat them, often by colluding with developers to seize
peasant lands with little compensation. With legal channels clogged
and inadequate, mass protests become vehicles for voicing discontent
and seeking change. The police report that many protests have elaborate
organizations, complete with designated leaders, “public spokespersons,”
“activists,” and “underground core groups.” The protesters
typically steer away from anything that looks like a direct challenge to
Party authority, preferring to cite rights listed in party documents, laws,
State Council regulations, and speeches by CCP leaders. Protests also
tend to be carefully limited to local matters.
Informal protocols have evolved. The resisters seek redress by publicizing
local officials’ violations of national laws and norms. Local officials
sometimes ignore the protesters or go through endless procedures
without fixing the problems. If demonstrations persist or get too large,
authorities may call in the police, arrest ringleaders, and then provide
some compensation to the protesters. One scholar claims that “the state
has made a conscious decision not to use its full coercive power to stop
demonstrations. The airing of peasant grievances has become an accepted
part of local politics. Workers and peasants now take to the
streets feeling that it is now within bounds.”18
Here as elsewhere, the government faces cross-pressures. Protests help
to reveal the locations of abusive (and hence trouble-creating) local
officials in need of removal, but an authoritarian party-state can hardly
welcome frequent spontaneous demonstrations. The regime’s solution

so far has been to spend more on infrastructure, pollution control, health
care, and education in rural areas while also campaigning against troublemakers,
with a focus on abusive and corrupt officials. Whether such
efforts will contain the problem, however, remains unclear.
One should not assume that wildcat protests in the countryside mean
the regime is seriously threatened. People know the role of protests—
and of leaders sometimes encouraging them—in their history. Yet while
such unrest is not a sign that the Party is tottering, neither is it a sign of
Party legitimacy.
More wealth means more freedom. People have assets, more choices
among goods, and a greater ability to decide where to work, live, and
travel. Private ownership of housing, automobiles, and businesses is
becoming widespread in China, and many small enterprises have gone
from state to private hands.
Not so long ago, a typical city-dweller depended directly on the state
for schooling, health care, and housing. Reforms reduced these services
but made many more goods available. And there are better jobs. The
labor market is not fully free, and there is unemployment, including
among new university graduates, but one of a citizen’s major life
choices—work—is no longer dictated by government.
A residency permit, long needed to gain access to state-enterprise
jobs as well as housing, education, and various subsidies, is less vital
than before. Economic liberalization, labor surpluses in the modernizing
agricultural sector, and the shrinking of the state sector have led
more than a hundred million people without permits to move to cities.
There they often lack services but stay on anyway, evidently preferring
freer urban air to the straitened life prospects that faced them in the
countryside.
As literacy, urbanization, and mass-media exposure rise, modernizing
societies experience characteristic shifts in values. The grip of tradition
and hierarchy loosens as women begin working outside the home,
the nuclear family replaces the extended one, marriage becomes more
an individual choice than a family decision, and women bear children
later in life. Such changes are occurring in China. Alex Inkeles writes
that although not everything is changing, least of all the Chinese commitment
to filial piety, “[m]any fundamental values are being challenged
and reformulated, basic human relationships are redefined and
reordered, and numerous traditional ways of thinking and behaving are
undergoing a great transformation.”19 Overall, investigators find the
rejection of values that have long been near the core of Chinese culture
to be “nothing short of phenomenal.”20
One interpretation of the above is that civil liberties have outrun
political rights. The state might seek to close this gap by taking away
people’s recently acquired personal liberties, but such a course would
cause so much trouble that officials are unlikely to pursue it. The gap

might also portend coming political instability. Here, what matters is
that coming events not interfere with long-term growth in education
and income. One can, of course, postulate long-lasting political instability,
or slower long-term growth, but my projection assumes that neither
of these will happen.
China’s long-term prospects for
achieving a stable form of liberal-democratic
government will in all likelihood
be best if the liberal part comes first as a
groundwork for the democratic part. For
that groundwork to be securely laid, education
needs to continue spreading and
improving, property rights need to receive
increasing protection, transparent legal
and financial institutions need to grow
along with a robust private sector, personal
liberties need to keep expanding, and income distribution needs to
avoid extremes of inequality. The general idea, as Persson and Tabellini
put it, is that “the sequence of reforms is crucial; countries liberalizing
their economies before extending political rights do better.”21
Former U.S. secretary of state George Schultz once related to me how
Deng Xiaoping addressed the matter in July 1988, when the two men
were discussing Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union: “He’s
got it backwards,” said Deng. “He opened up the political system without
a clue about the economy. The result is chaos. I did it the other way
around, starting in agriculture and small businesses, where opening up
worked, so now I have a demand for more of what succeeds.” When
Schultz asked when political opening would occur, Deng said: “That
will come later and will start small, just as in the economy. You have to
be patient but you have to get the sequence right.”
Scholar He Baogang suggests that the CCP might become the seedbed
of a multiparty system, or at least its functional equivalent.22 The
CCP is home to factions that represent different interests, it holds internal
contests for posts, and it is increasingly eager to monitor its members’
performance, all of which might help to limit its tendencies toward
tyranny and corruption. Taking another tack, Gang Lin argues that democracy
(at least within the Party), rather than arising as a side-effect of
ruling-party splits, could become a tool in the CCP’s campaign to prop
up its own authority.23
How will events unfold? No one can convincingly claim to know.
There are many possible paths—rough, smooth, or in-between—that
can lead to democracy. One way to gauge the route that may lie before
China would be to estimate how freedoms might evolve as the country
works its way through the lag between rapidly changing socioeconomic
realities and the political modes and orders that come under

pressure to keep up despite the drag exerted by the force of institutional
inertia.
Robert J. Barro’s model generates quantitative predictions for electoral
rights (corresponding to FH’s “Political Rghts” category). He found
that the level of democracy, so measured, that is present in a given
earlier period allows one to forecast the level of democracy found in a
later period, albeit with decreasing certainty as the interval between
periods widens. Barro also found several social variables to be predictors
of democracy. These rising (in the case of China) variables include
GDPpc and the educational level of the populace. Another positive
predictor of democracy is a shrinking gap between the proportions of
males and females who have been to primary school. Thus the extent of
democracy in a country converges gradually toward a (moving) target
determined by the social variables.
On a scale of zero to a hundred, entering my predicted social inputs
(economic and educational inputs plus others) yields the predictions
about electoral rights shown in the Table above for successive five-year
periods to 2025. For 2010, China is still Not Free but by 2015 it edges
into the Partly Free category and gets into the Free one by 2025. Evidence
from around the world suggests that over almost two decades, a
well-educated people whose average income is rising toward a figure of
perhaps $14,000 (PPP) by 2025 will almost certainly see its freedoms—
including its electoral freedoms—expand. In 2005, every country in the
world (oil states excepted) with GDPpc topping $8,000 (PPP) was at
least Partly Free; indeed, all ranked as Free except the tiny island citystate
of Singapore.24
And yet—several things could go wrong. I have mentioned some of
them.25 The Barro parameters are based on the experiences of many
countries and China is but one. In any case, I do not argue that China
will ever be a Sweden or New Zealand; its democracy will probably
have some “Chinese characteristics.” Nearby there is Taiwan, whose
democratization took almost forty years to complete beginning with
local elections in the early 1950s; counting the same number of years
from China’s 1988 Organic Law on Villager Committees yields about
2025. The technocratic authoritarianism of Singapore offers a model
that some CCP leaders must prefer to Taiwan’s. Or Chinese politicians

might come up with a novel political arrangement that falls short of true
liberal democracy but nonetheless offers the Chinese people more liberty
and a bigger say in how they are ruled than they currently enjoy.
Implications for Peace
I observed in 1996 that a democratic China in a region with many
democracies would be good for peace because democracies do not fight
each other (which does not imply that democracies are inherently peaceable).
Yet all is not necessarily well. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder
find that countries making the transition from authoritarian to democratic
governance are more likely to start foreign broils than are consolidated
democracies because internal contests for power can cause a
faction to identify, or to conjure up, a foreign enemy as a means of
rallying mass support.26 Mansfield and Snyder hold that this is most
likely where elections are held in countries with a weak sense of nationhood,
a shaky rule of law, feeble bureaucracies, poor civilian control of
the military, a winner-take-all attitude among contending parties, and
few safeguards for press freedom. This leads them to recommend that,
where possible, elections should come on the heels and not ahead of
institution-building, with a competent central government and legal
system needed most urgently of all.
If these premises are correct, China’s prospects are not bad. The Chinese
today possess a strong sense of nationhood, a legal system that is
moving in the right direction, a military that seems firmly under civilian
control, increased professionalism in many organizations, and nothing
like the shadow of “premature” elections on the horizon. Other
positives for peace are China’s high trade-to-GDP ratio and membership
in several international organizations.
On the negative side, the country’s experience with competing political
parties was brief and long ago, and it turned out poorly. Corruption
is pervasive, and the Communist Party shows no sign of a being
ready to put up with having to run against anyone, much less lose to
them. Most worrisome of all is the flashpoint for nationalist conflagration
that sits just off China’s coast on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.
To Beijing, Taiwan is but a renegade province, and the use of force
against it would count not as a foreign war but as a domestic police
action. If the disaster of an armed conflict between Beijing and Taipei
(whose supporters are Japan and the United States) can be averted long
enough for the mainland to become a democracy, the prospect of a
peaceful solution will gather strength. Indeed, a more democratic mainland
China is probably necessary for a peaceful resolution of this dispute.
Yet a power struggle within China that drove some faction or
factions to rouse popular nationalist sentiment could be one way in

which rising political pluralism might lead to big trouble. Another way
would be for Taiwan to declare itself an independent country.
Should the hazards that come with transition be skirted, the democratic-
peace thesis leads to a prediction that relations between China on
the one hand and Japan and the United States on the other will remain
pacific. Nonetheless, China’s burgeoning economic and military clout
will have consequences. In twenty years, the PRC’s annual defense budget
might exceed $200 billion, and its military forces will have hightechnology
weapons. Its power will cause many small states to align
themselves with Beijing like iron filings near a powerful magnet. There
would remain the chance that China could use force against
nondemocracies, but a China that navigates the transition to democracy
without taking up the sword should on the whole improve the prospects
for peace in the region and beyond.
Returning to the four questions posed at the beginning of this essay:
1) The economy looks likely to stay on a high growth path, albeit slowing
as China’s demography changes and its economy’s performance
converges on that of the world leaders. It is not immune to serious disruption.
2) Seymour Martin Lipset’s hypothesis that development leads
to freedoms is better supported than any current rival explanation. 3)
By 2015, there is a good chance that China will have made its way into
Freedom House’s middling or Partly Free group, with a ranking as Free
following by 2025. 4) Although the period of transition to free government
could hold dangers, a democratic China will be a China that is less
likely to fight with its democratic neighbors.
Sometimes events move fast. As late as the mid-1980s, few even
among the experts anticipated that the Soviet Union would soon be
gone. I am not suggesting that the CCP will be gone in one or two
decades, but I do think that if it survives, it will be because it has learned
to adapt and adjust to a much transformed—meaning a much freer—
political landscape.

by Henry S. Rowen

Henry S. Rowen is director emeritus of the Asia-Pacific Research Center
at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and professor
emeritus in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford
University. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution on War,
Revolution, and Peace.