Comparative transitology had its heyday in the 1990s, when intense discussions focused on the specificity of a historically unprecedented sweeping transition to a market economy and democracy from an economy based on state planning and a totalitarian political system. It was fashionable then to compare the success of gradual market transformations in the People’s Republic of China and the failures of Russian reforms that had started off in the spirit of Eastern European “shock therapies.”

As the turn of the new century approached, the problems of transition withdrew backstage in the wake of an outpouring of numerous new problems. The situation with the countries in transition became quite clear as well. Central and Eastern European countries that closely followed economic recommendations from the ‘Washington Consensus’ and attuned themselves to Western partners in politics scored big successes, while Russia, with its inconsistent reforms and nostalgia for past glory, did not. At the same time, China continued to move along the path it had chosen at the end of the 1970s, by opening its economy broader and broader to the West.

Now the topic of transition is making a comeback, although in a different aspect, as Western political scientists with a conservative tint are showing a growing tendency toward drawing a line between so-called ‘liberal’ and ‘authoritarian’ capitalism. Adherents of this theory claim that China and Russia embody the latter tendency, which defies the cornerstones of Western civilization.

So what actually happened? China’s steady rise got a hitherto unforeseen addition in the form of Russia’s rapid growth that was supported by an unprecedented hike in world energy prices. The visibly increasing political and economic potential of these two countries sent a reminder to Western analysts that Beijing and Moscow insist on a sovereign choice of paths for development and consider a subjugated status unacceptable.

Both powers renounced the Soviet-style system of economic planning and put themselves on the path of a market economy, while the same process in other post-Communist states had an obvious and uncontestable external guide. The prospect of joining European-Atlantic institutions was the main lever of influence there, and integration into Western economies implied the inevitable assimilation of democratic values and compliance with military security standards.

Russia and China have vehemently rejected this model of external “management by objectives.” They have been quite successful in effectuating a “transition without a destination” or, in other words, a type of transformation that does not envision a merger with already existing organizations on terms set forth by the latter. This phenomenon has put up a serious challenge to contemporary political scientists, and although the concept of the “end of history” – that underlay the developed world’s politics after the Cold War – has already revealed its flawed nature, no new concept capable of explaining the ongoing processes has surfaced to date.

ENDLESS HISTORY

As the Communist camp in Europe collapsed in 1989, Francis Fukuyama’s postulation about “the end of history” – represented by an eventual victory of economic and political liberalism in the minds of the people – looked quite convincing.

Fukuyama forecast, for instance, that pro-democracy manifestations in China would inescapably grow into a movement to change the political system. “Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared,” he claimed, adding that: “The new China far more resembles Gaullist France than pre-World War I Germany.” As for the children of the Chinese elite who studied abroad, they would not let China remain the only Asian country untouched by the democratic process after they returned home.

However, the Chinese Communist Party clamped down on anti-government demonstrations on Tiananmen Square in June 1989; but it learned a lesson from the bloody drama at the same time. The rather ephemeral union of workers, peasants and soldiers was replaced with a genuine and unbreakable bloc of the political, business and intellectual elites, which gets plausible benefits from the existing system and has a paramount interest in preserving it.

Fukuyama dismissed as nonsensical the supposition that once Russia shook off its Communist ideology, the country would start developing right from the spot where it had been left by the tsars before the Bolshevik revolution. He thought it unimaginable that Moscow, which had grasped fashionable ideas in the economy at the end of the 1980s and kept speaking about “common human values,” might return to a foreign policy that the Europeans had shelved as obsolete several decades prior to that.

Yet just a few fragments of the broken-up empire moved “to the other side of history” after the Soviet Union’s disintegration, as there was a chance for a full merger with the West. As soon as Russia started emerging from the disarray of the 1990s, one could see clearly that it would remain for a long time – or maybe forever – on “this side” of the threshold of the “common European home” (at least in the way that it is being viewed today). The problem is more profound than the huge difficulties with matching the criteria for accession to Greater Europe and the huge resistance on the part of new recruits who bear grudges against Moscow because of their socialist past. Russia does not conceal its lack of willingness to integrate into Europe. It is regaining confidence in its own strength and would like to get back the positions lost during its geopolitical and economic decay. Russia views itself as an independent political and economic player. The West has obviously lost both tough levers of influencing Moscow – above all, financing and loans – and soft levers in the form of ideas and promulgated objectives.

Robert Kagan, a U.S. neo-conservative ideologist, wrote in The Washington Post in April 2006 that the struggle between liberalism and autocracies, which began in the 18th century, is entering a new round, since the great autocratic powers of Russia and China are rebuffing liberalization with increasing strength. They have replaced the free world’s former opponents – the petty Middle Eastern dictatorships, which were targeted by the “Bush doctrine.”

In subsequent publications, Kagan sought to prove that the struggle between liberalism and absolutism along the line dividing tradition and modernity – like Islamic fundamentalism and the West – is receding into the background, while the battle of ideas between the great powers is moving center stage. This is because the main threat comes from leaders in Beijing and Moscow. They are confident that autocracy is better than democracy, since strong state power creates chances for stability and for the country to flourish. Kagan aired the conviction that the U.S. must redouble its efforts to promote democracy on a global scale to counter the global alliance of autocracies that was being formed.

Israeli scholar Azar Gat voiced a similar idea in the Foreign Affairs journal, where he pointed out the rise of “authoritarian capitalist great powers.” “The end of the end of history” lays the grounds for giving up the view of Islamic fundamentalism as the most serious threat, since it does not presuppose as much a viable alternative to liberal values as the Chinese-Russian tandem does. A similar thesis underpins the theoretic preamble of the Freedom House report Countries at the Crossroads 2007, dedicated to the “ambitions and limits of the 21st century authoritarian model.”

The conclusion that China and Russia pose a greater danger than Al Qaida seems absurd, but the emergence of this scheme is easy to explain. Today’s world has become too complicated to understand, while identifying a worthy ideological enemy allows the West to map out a new line for a global standoff, a far simpler and more comprehensible one than the struggle with the shapeless threat of international terrorism.

The West’s inability to integrate the largest countries – Russia and China – became evident by the middle of the current decade. A growing zeal to substantiate the new ideological confrontation – the general contours of which might replicate the systemic standoff of the 1940s through the 1980s – has bluntly shown that the much-desired new world order has not come into being.

TO INTEGRATE OR TO DESTROY?

The desire by both Russia and China to have an impact on the world system has a duplicate nature. On the one hand, the two countries want to conserve the old institutions and to prevent their complete invalidation in order to maintain their international influence. Both countries defend the Westphalian understanding of state sovereignty and the UN’s leading role in international affairs. On the other hand, they continue to search for new mechanisms, which they would profit from, and give up the ones that they do not find advantageous. This mostly concerns Russia.

Moscow is building up the conviction that the global situation does not meet its interests, does not facilitate the strengthening of stability and requires changes because of the risks of generating conflicts. China’s foreign policy talk spins around assurances of respect for the existing world order, since involvement in economic globalization has brought significant dividends to Beijing. Chinese propaganda puts special emphasis on two “unprecedented” phenomena mentioned at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007: “The world today is undergoing extensive and profound changes, and contemporary China is going through a wide ranging and deep-going transformation. This brings us unprecedented opportunities as well as unprecedented challenges, with the former outweighing the latter.”

China is optimistic about assessing general global tendencies – the influence of developing countries is growing; the tendency toward multipolarity is irreversible; and the global balance of forces promotes stability. This situation prompts China to engage in a gradual democratic reform of the status quo instead of challenging it. “This will give China the international peaceful image of a responsible big country, not a rebel,” says Dr Guan Li, deputy director of the International Strategy Institute of the CPC Party School.

Discussions about China’s place in the world evolve around the thesis that the country will ascend without conflict to the ranks of global leaders. Zhao Qinghai, a researcher at the Chinese Institute of International Studies, recalls that historically, some big countries have used military methods in the process of their rise in order to gain new markets and resources. By challenging the effective international order, they inflicted numerous woes on themselves and the world likewise. Today’s China displays a readiness to take account of the errors made by others.

Dr Wang Jisi, an authoritative expert on foreign policy from Beijing University’s School of International Studies, suggests that as it senses its new strength, China is easily overcoming the mentality of a vulnerable and weak state, which had formed through “one hundred years of humiliation” and by recollections of isolation in the initial phase of the Cold War. China may outdo the U.S. and Japan, but it will have many more problems in the field of sustained development, the researcher says. To cushion these problems, Beijing will have to reject the U.S. model of excessive consumption and adopt the Japanese style built on economy, restraining demands, limitations on resources, and preserving the environment.

Along with this, China will apply efforts to avert the damaging impact that the “hegemony and policy of force” – so baldly seen in aggressive actions by NATO and the U.S. in the former Yugoslavia and Iraq – may wield as regards the beneficial tendencies in the development of world order. Some political experts indicate that China has no plans for gaining successes through support of U.S. hegemony. Assistant Professor Wang Yiwei, from the Center for American Studies at Fudan University, believes that the world tolerates American domination, but with increasing strain and this domination will not go on endlessly. The rise of BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) shows “that the world is not a circle stringed on the Western axis.” The economic weakening of the U.S., “which today eats up tomorrow’s grains,” is becoming more and more noticeable. Wang Yiwei believes that the Americans’ “preventive strikes and unilateralism anger others. The U.S. has destroyed the traditional world order and this turns anti-American sentiment into a global feature.”

However, these words of condemnation are followed up with the conclusion that “China’s swelling power should not destroy the current world order or challenge U.S. hegemony.” Beijing must learn the ways to “avoid the risks that the U.S. hegemony carries with it, limit off elements of uncertainty that it (the hegemony) brings about, as well as adjust oneself to the existing world system, living in it and seeking points of contact in Sino-American relations.” China must neither help nor counteract U.S. domination, proceeding from the assumption that “no one will want to become a new pylon for the hegemony of the U.S.” Cooperation and the setting up of new rules of the game in conditions of globalization will produce a situation where “the genuine interests and tensions come into balance and harmonious American-Chinese relations take shape eventually.” Wang Yiwei believes that “the real challenge is to tap a new order in the world in the course of complex multilateral and bilateral games amid the continuously decreasing hegemony of the U.S.”

China is still trying to identify the best way to conduct itself in the international arena. Dr Zhu Feng of Beijing University’s School of International Studies singles out two concurrent tendencies in this search. The “activists” believe that China must expand its international influence and thus create extra opportunities for economic development and national revival. In the opposing camp the “passivists” espouse Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of “concealing the opportunities.” They call for “keeping one’s head down” so that others will not get the impression of ‘expansionist policies’ under any circumstances.

These two opposing tendencies have synthesized China’s intensifying attempts to build up the resource of ‘soft power’ as an instrument to enhance its international influence and to set up an external environment conducive to internal development. Beijing has focused its efforts on the promotion of attractive slogans of a “harmonious world” and “joint flourishing,” as well as on forming the country’s favorable image through the promotion of Chinese culture.

The accentuated peacefulness of this rhetoric may look even more attractive for the West against the background of tough and compelling statements coming from Russia. China is making a gradual and smooth transition from “passivity” to a new “activism” typical of a new great power, while Russia withdrew from its post-Soviet geopolitical coma so sharply and explosively that it frightened many foreign observers. Moscow’s hectic activity has not brought any immediate results so far and has complicated external conditions for the country’s development in many cases. This is exactly what Beijing is trying to avoid.

WHY IS RUSSIA NOT CHINA?

Would it be worthwhile then for Russia to follow China’s example and behave as quietly and modestly? This is hardly possible due to considerable differences in the initial positions of the two countries.

First, Moscow really has something to lose in the sphere of external security. Beijing was on the outskirts of global politics during the Cold War. It did not sign any strategic agreements with the West based on the principles of parity and equitability. The decay of the former bipolar system of security did not deal a blow to China’s military or political prestige. This is something you would not say about Russia, which is experiencing continuously growing problems as it tries to interact with the West on an equal footing.

Second, China does not suffer from a Cold War loser complex, since it was an ally of the West in the final phases of that conflict. In 1973, Mao Zedong made an offer to Japan, the Western Europeans and the U.S. to set up an alliance against the Soviet Union. This was an important psychological event. China sided with the future winners until 1989, when the West introduced sanctions against China in the wake of the Tiananmen Square events.

Third, the current state of affairs brought the most advantages to the Chinese and no damage, while the Russian political elite’s vision of the Soviet Union’s disintegration as a universal tragedy has had an impact on its foreign policy. Also, China did not lose any of its territory. Moreover, Hong Kong and Macao reverted to Chinese rule in the 1990s. The re-delimitation of state borders with former Soviet republics left Beijing with some territorial gains as well.

Fourth, Russia and China have different forms of interrelations with the West. China is more included in the world economy and trade as an assembly workshop for multinational corporations, and the foreign markets where it sells mass consumption products and purchases raw materials and sophisticated equipment have a much greater importance for it. This furnishes the Chinese elite with maneuvering skills within the existing rules (in the World Trade Organization, in the first place) and with enacting international norms against the protective actions of its partners.

Low-priced – and thus competitive – Chinese products run into restrictions on the markets of Western countries concerned about the growing trade deficit as China does not need so many Western goods at home. Its partners introduce trade restrictions in response and Beijing gets nervous because of this. Yet it does not have any other way out except for negotiations, a search for mutual concessions and identification of new markets in the Third World. As a result, this creates an environment that is competitive and works toward compromises in China’s relations with Europe and the U.S.

Russia sells energy resources and raw materials and it does not have stimuli of that kind. It resolves litigious issues on the basis of a balance of forces or by political maneuvering. Since Moscow and the European Union are tied together through a Soviet-era network of pipelines, they need each other objectively – and they are developing a more and more overt disliking for each other, fearing the pressures and blackmail that both of them have up their sleeves. The problems of economic relations are traditionally settled with the aid of big political “dealings,” which laid the groundwork for real integration at the end of the 1960s, but the miring of yet another “big deal,” which would take cooperation in the energy sector to a new level – a swap of energy assets that Moscow proposed to the EU in the middle of this decade – has spoiled this atmosphere of relations.

One more reason why China is not so upset with the West is that it did not live through the shock that Russia experienced when naïve illusions regarding the “Western model” and the “European Home” gave way to disenchantment and repulsion. Meanwhile, as long as China’s economic might grows, its political leaders are convinced that the national model of development is successful. It is noteworthy in this light that the Chinese Communist Party amended its Constitution at the 17th Congress and removed a provision on the need to “assimilate and exploit the achievements of all other cultures, including all the advanced modes of operation and methods of management of developed countries in the West that embody the laws governing modern socialized production.” The fact unambiguously shows that the Chinese need other nations’ experience increasingly less.

The Chinese party leadership has again turned to the slogan of “emancipating the mind,” which Deng Xiaoping used while launching reforms. This emancipation helped China to get rid of the dogmas of Soviet-style economic planning in the early 1980s. Now this slogan mostly targets those who long for the old type of socialism, but Chinese experts point out its alternative use, saying that it is time to shake off the shackles of “superstitious worshipping of the West.”

China’s reorientation toward the West was motivated by the pragmatic purposes of modernization. Now Beijing realizes in an increasing way that the broad presence of Western corporations in the country has failed to thrust it to the technological level of advanced nations. The technological gap is not getting narrower, as Western manufacturers are not interested in this. To achieve a breakthrough, Beijing has set itself a task of creating the country’s own innovative system.

Today’s Russia is often recommended that it set sail toward a rapprochement with the West for the sake of obtaining advanced technologies. It is believed that the replication of the West’s innovative mechanism, which has not been adjusted to function in conditions of political control, will automatically make Russia switch to the track of democratic development. The problem is that this does not matter for a country living off its natural resources. As for the diversification of the Russian economy and the rise of independent competitive industries in it, this prospect barely matches the interests of Western producers.

China’s experience shows that hope for getting novel technologies can peg a country to the West, but only temporarily. The willingness of China and Russia to be included in global research and technology will scarcely give the U.S. and Europe reliable levers of influencing the policy of the two countries – first of all due to the reluctance of Western countries to share their top-notch technology know-how with others.

IMAGE AS A THREAT

Although one can refer equally to both Russia and China as reviving great powers, Beijing puts much more effort in displaying its fruitful right-mindedness to the world community. When Hu Jintao was just beginning his tour of duty, two remarkable attempts were made to explain the Chinese path. Both aimed to break up the abundant Western stereotypes, and both ended in a failure.

As part of the first attempt, Chinese experts formulated the Peaceful Rise concept that described the country’s gradual movement along the road to power without aggression or colonial methods. The Chinese leadership thought at some point in 2004 that this postulation might ward off the ‘Chinese threat theories’ and calm down the international community. But in reality it only fuelled the concerns of foreigners – they would pick out ‘rise’ and ignore the epithet preceding it. Official Beijing dropped the slogan immediately and reverted to Deng Xiaoping’s commandment for “peace and development.”

In the same year, a book called The Beijing Consensus by Joshua Cooper Ramo was published in London. The author claimed in it that “[…] China’s rise is already reshaping the international order by introducing a new physics of development and power.” This is how the ‘Beijing Consensus’ takes shape by mapping out the path for developing countries that want “[…] to fit into the international order in a way that allows them to be truly independent, to protect their way of life and political choices in a world with a single massively powerful center of gravity” – the U.S.

Ramo said that the ‘Beijing Consensus’ was to replace the highly discredited ‘Washington Consensus,’ the recipes of which “[…] left a trail of destroyed economies and bad feelings around the globe.” He described China’s approach to development as boiling down to a desire to ensure a fair, peaceful and high-quality growth and to combine the social and economic transformation. The vague theorems of the Beijing Consensus formulated by Ramo accentuate the value of innovations and are aimed at “chaos management” through improvements in the quality of life, attainment of stability and equality in the process of development. They also presuppose the use of “[…] leverage to move big, hegemonistic powers that may be tempted to tread on your toes.”

The Beijing Consensus has a marked shortage of detailed elaboration and universalism. Innovations and “chaos management” are possible only in stable countries with efficient institutions of power. A still smaller number of parties to international relations have the potential to deter the onslaught on the part of “big, hegemonistic powers.” Nonetheless, Ramo makes claims about “the intellectual charisma of the Beijing Consensus,” whose novel ideas “[…] are rippling around the world, enhancing China’s power even as they provide other nations with ideas for their own development.” He also characterized the Beijing Consensus as a source of hope for countries seeking to defend their sovereignty and which are apprehensive of excessive dependence on developed nations.

Ramo’s theory produced an enthusiastic response in China, but the Chinese did not add it to their arsenals. Chinese economic experts indicated that the flaws of the neo-liberal reform model did not at all mean that the Beijing Consensus – provided it really existed – might aspire to the role of a new universal concept.

The story had a different side, too, as the effort to formulate an alternative to the Washington Consensus once again put the West on alert. For instance, U.S. political scholar Joseph S. Nye wrote on this: “In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the so-called ‘Beijing Consensus’ on authoritarian government plus a market economy has become more popular than the previously dominant ‘Washington Consensus’ of market economics with democratic government.” He drew the conclusion, however, that the features making the Beijing Consensus attractive in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian developing countries undermine China’s ‘soft power’ in the West.

Joshua Ramo pinpointed this sensitive issue in his new book Brand China (2007). “China’s greatest strategic threat today is its national image,” he wrote. This is an unusual situation for “this famously inward-looking nation.” A reassuring image may help China avoid the costs inherent in the solution of international conflicts and incite optimism in business partners. On the contrary, a dissuading image complicates conflict resolution and stands in the way of economic development.

However, Beijing “has let its ‘image sovereignty’ slip out of its control.” Now the debates on the problem unfold outside the country and without its participation. Ramo gives credit to Den Xiaoping, who decided that China would follow its authentic course, and thus there was no need to care about what other countries would say or do, yet he remarks that outlooks of this kind partly bred the current problems with the image. Globalization has brought tremendous economic success to China, but it has also created more and more problems with the practice of ignoring what other countries think about China.

Ramo suggests that a new brand of the ‘Chinese Dream’ should be generated on the basis of new opportunities and creative endeavors. He recommends enticing foreigners with the prospect of a billion Chinese who have a chance to form an individual identity and to decide on their own life independently. As a starting point he takes the American Dream, which meant liberty, no aristocracy and an opportunity to translate all endeavors into life. “That 1920s intellectual adventurism is something you’ll find today all across China,” Ramo says.

Dr Zhang Weiwei from Geneva University’s Modern Asia Research Center admits the changes that have taken place in the psychology of the Chinese during the years of reform. “Every cell in a rank-and-file man has been braced, as everyone wants to develop, to earn money, to materialize their potential, and society is full of vibrant strength and opportunities,” he writes. This does resemble the American Dream at first sight, but its materialization proceeds in the conditions of a one-party political system – and add to this the influences of traditional Chinese culture that did not emphasize either liberalism or individualism.

THE RISKS OF OVERSIMPLIFICATIONS

Western quarters become more irritated with the realization that they do not have anything to motivate the trajectory of liberal development for large countries that stay outside Western alliances. China has a much tighter connection with the liberal economic order than Russia, but Beijing rejects calls to liberalize its internal political system in much harsher tones than Moscow does.

Viewed at the level of slogans, both countries are united by the willingness to become strong, affluent and respected in the world community, yet the West considers their resolve to attain all this by walking along their own paths as a menace. Meanwhile, there is still no answer as to whether or not “transition without a destination” can take Moscow and Beijing to a political and economic success.

The prospects for giving shape to a theoretically grounded and practically tested model of development that would offer an alternative to the Western one are even more obscure. Both opposing blocs had a standard universal model of a social and economic system to be shown to the opponent during the Cold War. Only the West has it now, while neither China nor Russia have any plans for imposing half-baked precepts on the West in the vein of the ‘Beijing Consensus’ or ‘sovereign democracy.’ Chinese historical sages believed that “the principle is one but it has many manifestations.” Hence today, too, political leaders in both countries quite willingly discuss the diversity of ‘sovereign’ or ‘specifically national’ ways of moving toward the good old “universal values of democracy.”

A formal Sino-Russian “anti-democratic alliance” is a sheer myth. The creation of a direct opposite to NATO or the European Union under the guidance of Moscow and Beijing and on the grounds of shared “authoritarian values” will slash the much-desired freedom of political maneuvering for both countries. In addition, maintaining the viability of such a bloc – which the Western “democratic coalition” will spare no effort to exhaust and split – may turn into a highly costly adventure. And as for the reserve of accumulated power and the ability to mobilize foreign allies, China and Russia lose heavily to the Western alliance.

There is an impression that the attack on “authoritarian capitalism” points not only at the swelling potential of the two countries, but also at the West’s reclining confidence in its own strength. An attempt to find an answer to the question about the role that Moscow and Beijing play in international development in the ideological sphere makes the perception of events simpler and squeezes it into prefabricated schemes. An examination of global problems in the democracy/non-democracy format may create an illusion of orderliness in the adversely directed processes. But the start of a systemic confrontation, unable to solve any pressing problem in the modern world, may be the price to pay for that seeming simplicity.