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China's Futures
PRC Elites Debate Economics, Politics, and Foreign Policy
By Daniel C. Lynch STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9437-4
CHAPTER 1
The Pitfalls of Rationalist Predictioneering
SPECULATION CONCERNING THE IMPLICATIONS OF China's rise—both for China itself and the world as a whole—should be understood in the context not only of post–World War II social science debates but also of the deeper historical transformations in European (and eventually global) thought that followed in the wake of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Perhaps the most profound of these transformations, in the estimation of intellectual historian Franklin Baumer, is that human society (or societies) came to be imagined as not merely "being"—in a state of constancy—but instead as "becoming": potentially, though not inevitably, something better. Out of this change, by the mid-twentieth century, a multidisciplinary new social science emerged under the heading of "futures studies," devoted to the systematic analysis of national and global trajectories. Although it would be difficult to pronounce this discipline a success—given the practical impossibility of studying events that have yet to happen—contributors to futures studies debates have, in the process of directly confronting the vexing problems associated with trying to conceptualize national or global trajectories, developed ideas that social scientists, journalists, government officials, and others ruminating about China's future could benefit from considering. By reflecting on the central problématiques debated in futures studies, we in the mainstream social sciences and larger community of people concerned about China's trajectory could enrich our thinking about how best to conceive of China's future.
As with the other social sciences, futures studies grew ultimately out of the mix of Enlightenment philosophy with the real-world—often painful—practical experiences of people living in societies undergoing the wrenching changes associated with industrialization and what was once called "modernization." Psychologist and philosopher Thomas Lombardo, who founded a Center for Future Consciousness in Arizona, reminds us that "not only did the Age of Enlightenment bring with it a positive hope for the future of humanity, it also embraced the principles of science, including scientific determinism, and hence ... the great expositor of the Enlightenment, Condorcet, offers a variety of extrapolative predictions on the future of humanity." Yale University sociologist Wendell Bell concurs on the importance of this revolution in worldview but stresses the structural changes that came to industrializing societies as a result of economic growth and the rise of the modern state:
As the complexity of society increases, or decreases as it sometimes does, so does the potential for an increase in the scope of planning flow and ebb. Collecting taxes, managing estates, irrigating the land, and waging wars require planning ... Yet it was not until the twentieth century that economic and social planning grew into the comprehensive activities that reach into the everyday lives of nearly every individual. It was not until the creation of the modern state that everyday life became so fully under conscious regulation, encouragement, or direct control.
Once the modern state was firmly in place, bureaucrats, politicians, industrialists, intellectuals, and members of the general public could all begin to imagine national leaders using state power to direct their country or even the world as a whole to a perpetually brighter future, realizing both rational Enlightenment objectives as well as some of the more Romantic visions associated with futuristic utopian science fiction, which itself emerged in the nineteenth century. As a result, even in the depths of the Great Depression—and on the eve of a world war—Americans and others could celebrate a quasi-utopian future at the 1939 New York World's Fair:
The theme of the fair was "The World of Tomorrow"; the opening ceremonies were held in a vast enclosure called "The Court of Peace" ... Here, all about one, was the embodiment of the American dream, 1939 model. Bold modern architecture, sometimes severe, sometimes garish, but always devoid of the traditional classical or Gothic decoration, and glowing with color ... Miracles of invention and of industrial efficiency to goggle at ... In this fantastic paradise there were visible no social classes, no civil feuds, no international hates, no hints of grimy days in dreary slums, no depression worries. Here was a dream of wealth, luxury, and lively beauty, with Coca-Cola at every corner and the horns of the busses jauntily playing "The Sidewalks of New York."
Yet World War I; the Depression; the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism; and then World War II all together made clear that the powerful forces unleashed by industrialization, scientific development, and the rise of the modern state could also be put to profoundly destructive uses. This seemed to create the tension in which futures studies came together as a distinctive field in the 1950s. The inevitability of a fabulous, bountiful, and just future promised by some strands of Enlightenment or Romantic thinking now seemed hopelessly naïve, particularly with the advent of nuclear weapons. If there were to be a brighter future—for any single nation or for humanity as a whole—it would have to be built by human beings, and the human track record of recent years did not inspire automatic confidence:
The Western optimistic belief in progress declined [in the years following World War II] and pessimistic and nihilistic philosophies became more popular ... The belief that the future was determined and could scientifically be predicted was rejected by many writers and thinkers ... There were many possible futures rather than one inevitable future. These different futures could be evaluated for desirability ("preferable future"), and which future was actually realized would depend on the choices and actions of humans.
Prior to the 1970s, futures studies in the United States was dominated by Cold War imperatives and often directly financed by the Pentagon and other Washington agencies. The field began to broaden and internationalize starting in the 1960s, in tandem with the general sociocultural ferment throughout the world at that time. A landmark event was the convening in 1967 of the First International Future Research Conference in Oslo, Norway; this was followed by the founding in 1973 of the World Futures Studies Federation in Paris. Yet "the imbalance in futures research ... continued through the 1980s, especially in the case of large-scale, highly organized well-financed research projects where the clients' goals determined the definition of the problem and the focus of research, especially where those goals involved war, counterinsurgency, and Cold War tactics and strategies." Even today, much futures research is conducted in secret or "in-house," financed by governments or corporations. But the overall intellectual endeavor is substantially broader today than ever, and its activities (conferences, publications) span the globe.
In his influential overview of the field, Yale's Wendell Bell identifies "nine major tasks" for futures studies useful to keep in mind when considering Chinese assessments of the People's Republic of China's (PRC's) trajectory: (1) the study of possible futures, (2) the study of probable futures, (3) the study of images of the future, (4) the study of the knowledge foundations of futures studies, (5) the study of the ethical foundations of futures studies, (6) interpreting the past and orientating the present, (7) integrating knowledge and values for designing social action, (8) increasing democratic participation in imaging and designing the future, and (9) communicating and advocating a particular image of the future. This book focuses on Tasks 1, 2, and 3; or more precisely, it pursues Task 3 as a means to answering the questions posed by Tasks 1 and 2: studying images of China's future as articulated by Chinese elites—or, what amounts to the same, these elites' conceptualizations of China's trajectory (what they perceive the actual trajectory to be, in addition to their preferred trajectory) as indicators of what the future may become, or at the very least correctives to some of the unjustifiably overconfident predictions that can be found in certain corners of social science.
Bell makes the critical point that research of this nature requires a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom, where necessary, in ways that will not always be popular: "The exploration of possible futures includes trying to look at the present in new and different ways, often deliberately breaking out of the strait-jacket of conventional, orthodox, or traditional thinking and taking unusual, even unpopular, perspectives." There are many ways in which conventional, orthodox, or traditional thinking potentially straitjackets analysis of China's future, but two stand out:
1. The belief that China's rise will inevitably continue without serious interruption, leading the PRC to become in short order the most powerful country on Earth—either (a) for everyone's benefit, as endlessly increasing prosperity deepens social pluralization and eventually causes democratization; or (b) to the world's detriment, as China remains uncompromisingly authoritarian while—emboldened by increasing wealth and strength—it embarks on a course of predatory expansionism.
2. The sharply contrasting belief that China will inevitably fail, either collapsing into chaos or grinding into a permanent morass of low or zero growth. Chaos would produce all manner of nontraditional security challenges for China's neighbors and global society at large; grinding into a morass (or what Chinese economists call a "middle income trap") might or might not lead China to adopt a more cautious foreign policy; it also might or might not increase the chances of democratization.
This study takes as its starting point the assumption that China's future is ultimately unknowable. But it also acknowledges that some developments are more likely than others and contends that systematic study of elite Chinese depictions of the future (what is likely versus what would be desirable) can help us to sort the more from the less likely trajectories. Elite images can also be deployed as potent tools useful for correcting certain overly confident predictions of China's path offered by Western (and other) social scientists and professional commentators—the countless "predictioneers" who claim in books, blogs, journals, and newspapers to possess a special insight into the future.
APPROACHES TO THE FUTURE I: RATIONALIST PREDICTIONEERING
Not all social scientists and commentators are convinced that elite (or any other) images must be studied systematically to predict or even control the future. One of the most intellectually stimulating (if extreme) books to take this position in recent years is influential political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Predictioneer's Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future, published in 2009. BDM, as he is often known, states straightforwardly in his Introduction that "the principal claim of this book" is that "it is possible for us to anticipate actions, to predict the future, and by looking for ways to change incentives, to engineer the future across a stunning range of considerations that involve human decision making." BDM goes on to claim that "it so happens I have been predicting future events for three decades, often in print before the fact, and mostly getting them right ... According to a declassified CIA assessment, the predictions for which I've been responsible have a 90 percent accuracy rate." BDM assumes that humans and the institutions they create, including states, are rational agents locked into interdependent relationships with other rational agents. By knowing the preferences of these agents and the payoff schedules associated with their various possible moves, action—and therefore the future itself—can be predicted and even manipulated: "In my world, science, not mumbojumbo, is the way to anticipate people's choices and their consequences for altering the future. I use game theory."
The Achilles heel in BDM's position—certainly for anyone trying to wrestle with a problem as complex as China's future—is the question of preferences. BDM writes that politics and other complex social phenomena are all predictable: "All that is needed is a tool—like my model—that takes basic information, evaluates it by assuming everyone does what they think is best for them, and produces reliable assessments of what they will do and why they will do it." But clearly this entails first finding out what everyone thinks is best—factors related to the identity of actors. As Alexander Wendt frames this problem: "Identities refer to who or what actors are. They designate social kinds or states of being. Interests refer to what actors want. They designate motivations that help explain behavior ... Interests presuppose identities because an actor cannot know what it wants until it knows who it is, and since identities have varying degrees of cultural content, so will interests." In BDM's model, preferences are critical, but identities are either held constant, as everyone is assumed to seek maximization of material utility, or else are imputed in a cursory process. BDM trained in graduate school as a South Asianist, and on that basis asserts that he respects and values area and culture expertise: "But I don't think it's the way government or business should organize itself for problem-solving purposes ... Country expertise is no substitute for understanding the principles that govern human decision making, and it should be subordinate to them, working in tandem to provide nuance as we actively seek to engineer a better future."
Such a perspective implies that any halfway decent social scientist should be able rather easily to trace the trajectory of China's rise, by simply (1) imputing the identity of rational utility maximizers to Chinese elites; (2) determining their preference schedules; and (3) mapping out how the elites would then pursue their resulting interests, subject only to the restrictions imposed by the moves of other actors, China's material limitations, and chance events. Other than for purposes of embellishment, it would be a waste of time to research how Chinese elites conceptualize their country's trajectory, because Chinese conceptualizations would be very similar to the conceptualizations of elites in other rising countries facing similar structural conditions. "The principles that govern human decision making" are, according to BDM, universally valid; questions of identity can provide nuance and color to a prediction but are not fundamentally important. "We surely would think it ridiculous if chemists believed that oxygen and hydrogen combine differently in China than they do in the United States," BDM writes, "but for some reason we think it entirely sensible to believe that people make choices based on different principles in Timbuktu than in Tipperary (we might be different from mere particles, but we're not all that different from one another)."
Presumptions such as these are probably what led some Western observers of the past to make dubious or even flat-out wrong (at least as of this writing) predictions concerning China's future, such as that the PRC would inevitably democratize or that it would become a contended global actor working happily together with its East Asian neighbors and the United States to solve world problems peacefully and in accordance with international norms. Of course the beauty of such predictions is that they can never be falsified because predictioneers tend not to specify the time period in which the positive developments must inevitably unfold. Here, though, Bueno de Mesquita is, to his credit, considerably bolder and more intellectually honest. He is willing to go out on a limb with his predictions, and, in so doing, he helpfully (but unintentionally) illustrates the weaknesses inherent in forecasts that ignore, or incautiously impute, actor identity.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from China's Futures by Daniel C. Lynch. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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