Forecasting China’s Future
If there is one lesson the world has learned about the People’s Republic of China since 1976 when Mao Zedong died, it is that predicting where the country is going is a treacherous business. A former diplomat serving at a western embassy in Beijing at the time told me many years later that their advice sent back to home base was that the radical Gang of Four would cling on to power, China’s move leftwards would continue, and that there was no sign it was about to relinquish revolutionary struggles.
We now know that this was to prove spectacularly wrong. Within a matter of weeks, the Gang of Four were felled. Within two years, the Reform and Opening Up process was happening. Observers and commentators on China have to live with the fact that not a single western economist or expert publicly foresaw the direction China was about to take in eschewing most of the Maoist political and economic legacy.
Roger Irvine brings to this much needed overview of contemplating China’s future before it happened by (mostly) western based experts on the country a former government analyst’s clarity and fair mindedness. There are plenty of opportunities as he moves through different areas from politics to society to economics to hold up the bold pronouncements of individuals against issues which subsequently happened to prove their prognostications were wide of the mark. But as he wisely asserts in his introduction, we have to admit that for one very good reason, trying to speak about future events is supremely difficult - that reason is the very obvious one that they have yet to happen!
Even so, for the most dramatic predictors of gloom it is hard not to feel their most eloquent and powerful condemnation comes through their own words. Irvine spends some paragraphs looking at one of the most committed serial forecasters of China’s imminent collapse, American writer Gordon Chang. Throughout the 2000s, Chang issues powerfully confident declarations that China was about to implode, but each time the country only seemed to enter periods of even more energetic growth and success. Chang’s last valiant lapidary statement that China was doomed was in 2012 when he stated everything for the place would be over by 2013. 2013 has come and gone. And so has Chang’s prediction.
Faced with this record of widespread misreadings and failures, the natural question to ask is why so much time and effort is spent trying to predict the Chinese future in the first place. Irvine does address this question by making clear that in fact it would be extremely strange not to at least try to have some rough idea of where China might be heading, so central is its importance now to global issues, from climate change to sustainable growth and geopolitical stability. However imprecise and difficult, there is a natural impulse and often a necessity to have some ideas about what might lie down the corner for this `global country’ whose impact is now almost everywhere. The issue is how we get better at doing this. His most sobering point is that while there have been cases of fairly accurate predictions, usually through aggregating a number of different viewpoints and ideas (the principle of `the wisdom of crowds’), for individual analysts, the record has been largely a negative one. Hard as it is to look at evidence so dispassionately presented, China experts are, at least on China’s future, very poor performers. As a professional group, we really need to up our game here.
Not that experts have adopted a monolithic viewpoint. They divide roughly between what Irvine labels the `bold and the cautious.’ And the scenarios they see down the track are either for collapse or dominance. On the whole, those who have resisted these dramatic extremes have stood to be proven right. Perhaps the most impressive case of this was from the year 1976 noted above, when at least one Embassy in Beijing did make the right call. The serving Australian ambassador in that year in China, Stephen Fitzgerald, did speculate that economic changes were in the air, and looking at the parlous state of the country’s finance and industry, that there had to be radical change. Fitzgerald, appointed by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from academia, proved that sometimes making diplomatic appointments from non-diplomatic backgrounds delivers gold. He should be given wider recognition for making one of the boldest calls in recent history and, to an extraordinary extent, getting it right.
Predictors have been influenced by their passions as much as by dispassionate observations of trends and phenomena. Irvine notes that after the 1989 Tiananmen Square event which caused international revulsion and condemnation, China experts became semi-splenetic in their warnings that the country had come to the end of the road and now was going to be buried in protests and instability. This too proved wide of the mark. Once more, surprise was delivered through the octogenarian paramount leader Deng during his 1992 Southern Tour which relaunched the reform process.
While most China experts that Irvine looks at in his chapter on political issues did tend to sway towards caution, the record of their predictions on economic matters is one of almost complete disarray. Irvine quotes the very fine American based economist originally from China, Yasheng Huang, earlier in the book, who had complained about the most dystopic sinological futurologists being `long on hype and short on facts’. With the economy, Irvine shows this to have been complicated by the fact that economic issues are at least furnished with more quantifiable data from which, presumably, trends can be captured and extrapolated. It is almost comical how divergent the predictions in this area have proven to be, whilst on the surface at least they look so much more predictable. Irvine’s chapter reinforces the point that economy is most definitely not a science, but an art, with all the uncertainty that implies.
In his concluding chapter, Irvine makes two valid points. The first is that, based on the evidence very expertly and concisely summarised in this overview, there is an urgent need for better predictive models. This level of failure, shown by forecasts starkly held against what actually transpired and the widespread differences, would be intolerable in most other professional fields. His second is that in predicting the future, we are, to some extent, trying to make what we say happen. Once more there are sobering conclusions to draw from this, because China experts have, to a large extent, proved not only that they lack predictive models to work on, but that their predictions, once issued, had almost no influence on how events unfolded. We should be grateful for Irvine’s book gently, but forcefully, making these failures so evident, and allowing for at least some attempt to rectify them.
Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute and Professor of Chinese Studies at King's College, London (Kerry.brown01@gmail.com)
Citation: Brown, K. 2016. Review of Irvine, R. 2015. Forecasting China’s Future: Dominance or Collapse?, posted on New Asia Books on 22 Feb 2016; newbooks.asia/review/forecasting-china's-future