China today is roiling with turbulent economic and social change. As a result, Chinese politics is transforming as well. The Communist Party (CCP) struggles to maintain its authority in the countryside, where peasants have given up on corrupt officials and seek community in clan organizations and new religions. In the cities, persistent nationwide efforts to establish a formal opposition party have left communist leaders scrambling to shore up their control. Information, once easily monopolized by the state, now flows through cell phones and computer networks, enabling communication and organization among those disaffected with failed Leninism. The territorial integrity of the state is being challenged by the separatist aspirations of Uighurs and Tibetans. At no time in its fifty years of power has the CCP faced such a wide array of potentially disastrous problems.
How the People's Republic of China manages these various perils, and in what condition the country emerges, is a matter of great moment for the world at large. If growing domestic frustration is deflected into a more aggressively nationalistic foreign policy by a desperate CCP, a catalogue of international issues could be adversely affected, from Taiwan to trade balances to thermonuclear weapons. Conversely, the long-standing U.S. policy of engagement looks forward to a gradual transition to capitalism and a subsequent democratization that is expected to moderate Chinese diplomacy. It would seem that, for American policymakers, nationalism is the enemy and capitalism the hero of China's tumultuous reformation.
