The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives

by Zbigniew Brzeziński

The second reason for cautious skepticism regarding the widespread prognoses of China’s emergence during the next quarter of a century as a dominating power in global affairs is, indeed, the future of China’s politics. The dynamic character of China’s nonstatist economic transformation, including its social openness to the rest of the world, is not mutually compatible in the long run with a relatively closed and bureaucratically rigid Communist dictatorship. The proclaimed communism of that dictatorship is progressively less a matter of ideological commitment and more a matter of bureaucratic vested interest. The Chinese political elite remains organized as a self-contained, rigid, disciplined, and monopolistically intolerant hierarchy, still ritualistically proclaiming its fidelity to a dogma that is said to justify its power but that the same elite is no longer implementing socially. At some point, these two dimensions of life will collide head-on, unless Chinese politics begin to adapt gradually to the social imperatives of China’s economics.