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The Economist
Posted: Tuesday, Feb 23, 2010 at 2032 hrs IST
Updated: Tuesday, Feb 23, 2010 at 2032 hrs IST

“The forces pulling China toward integration and openness are more powerful today than ever before,” said President Bill Clinton in 1999. China then, though battered by the Asian financial crisis, was busy dismantling state-owned enterprises and pushing for admission to the World Trade Organisation. Today, however, those forces look much weaker.

A spate of recent events, from the heavy jail sentences passed on human-rights activists to an undiplomatic obduracy at the climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen last December, invite questions about the thinking of China’s leaders. Has their view of the outside world and dissent at home changed? Or were the forces detected by Clinton and so many others after all not pulling so hard in the direction they were expecting?

The early years of what China calls its “reform and opening” after 1978 were marked by cycles of liberalisation and repression. The turning-points were usually marked by political crisis: dissent on the streets, leadership struggles, or both. Now, however, the only big protest movements are repressed ones among ethnic minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s big cities are hardly roiled by political turmoil. By the time Liu Xiaobo, an academic, was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December, dissident debate surrounding the reform manifesto he had issued a year earlier had long subsided. Yet it was the heaviest-known penalty imposed on any activist for “inciting subversion” since such a crime was written into law in 1997.

China has so far survived the global economic downturn with hardly any of the agitation many once feared it might cause among unemployed workers or jobless university graduates. The economy grew at a very robust-sounding 8.7% last year and is predicted by many to be on course for similar growth in 2010.

Sweeping changes are due in the senior leadership in 2012 and 2013, including the replacement of President Hu Jintao and of the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao. But if a struggle is brewing, signs of it are hard to spot. An unusually high-profile campaign against organised crime by the party chief of Chongqing municipality, Bo Xilai, has raised eyebrows. Some speculate that it is part of a bid by Bo, who is a Politburo member, to whip up popular support for his promotion to the Politburo’s all-powerful Standing Committee in 2012. An online poll by an official website chose Bo as the “most inspiring voice” of 2009.

But Andrew Nathan of Columbia University in New York does...