OPINION:
The greatest strategic challenge posed by China may not be what happens if the Chinese Communist Party succeeds, but what happens if it suddenly fails.
For decades, Western policy has been almost entirely devoted to managing the CCP as a permanent feature of international life: deterring its military aggression, countering its economic coercion, protecting technology, defending Taiwan and competing with Beijing for global influence.
Far less attention has been paid to a different possibility: the sudden collapse of communist rule itself.
That is a dangerous failure of imagination.
History repeatedly demonstrates that seemingly permanent dictatorships can disappear with astonishing speed. In 1989, six communist governments in Eastern Europe fell within months. The Berlin Wall, perhaps the most imposing physical symbol of the Cold War, fell almost overnight. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself vanished.
As the Hudson Institute report “China after Communism: Preparing for a Post-CCP China” argues, the People’s Republic of China has survived many crises, but the sudden collapse of the world’s longest-ruling communist dictatorship and second-largest economy is hardly inconceivable.
The international consequences would be enormous.
China is not merely another authoritarian country. It possesses nuclear weapons, the world’s largest standing military by personnel, enormous security and intelligence organizations, advanced biological laboratories, vast state enterprises, major financial institutions and supply chains embedded throughout the world economy.
The collapse of central authority could therefore create simultaneous military, financial, humanitarian, political and proliferation crises.
Who controls the nuclear arsenal? Who commands the People’s Liberation Army? What becomes of the People’s Armed Police, the militia, the Ministry of State Security and the vast domestic surveillance apparatus? Who secures dangerous biological facilities? Who prevents provincial military commanders or security chiefs from becoming warlords? What happens to the renminbi, China’s banks, sovereign obligations, state enterprises, foreign reserves and trillions of dollars of domestic assets?
Then come the political questions. What happens in Tibet and Xinjiang — ethnic vengeance or immediate declaration of independence? What becomes of Hong Kong? How should a new government deal with Taiwan? What to do with the 100 million CCP members? How should the crimes of the Mao-to-Xi era — Tiananmen, religious persecution, mass surveillance, forced labor and other abuses — be investigated without turning justice into vengeance?
These are not theoretical questions to be answered after the collapse. After the collapse may already be too late.
The central lesson of 20th-century regime transitions is that preparation matters.
Central and Eastern Europe offer important examples — and important contrasts. Poland entered its decisive transition with something Russia conspicuously lacked: an organized civil society capable of becoming an alternative center of political legitimacy. Solidarity had spent years building networks of intellectuals, workers, economists, lawyers, clergy and political activists.
By 1989, serious debates were already taking place among Solidarity-associated economists about monetary stabilization, ownership, markets and the transition to a market economy. The eventual Balcerowicz reforms were extraordinarily rapid and painful, but they emerged within a political transition possessing organized opposition, popular legitimacy and an increasingly clear institutional destination.
Czechoslovakia possessed Charter 77 and a network of dissidents who had spent years thinking about human rights, political responsibility, historical truth and the moral foundations of government. When communist authority collapsed, those networks supplied Vaclav Havel and the Civic Forum with experienced people, trusted relationships and political legitimacy.
East Germany similarly developed civic movements, and once the regime began to disintegrate, opposition groups and the crumbling party structure together created a Central Round Table that immediately addressed free elections, the dissolution of the secret police apparatus, democratic transformation and even the drafting of a new constitution. Its first meeting, on Dec. 7, 1989, established, among other subcommittees, a working group to begin drafting a new constitution.
The lesson is not that these transitions were painless. They were not. The lesson is that successful post-totalitarian reconstruction requires institutions, people, principles and plans ready before the political vacuum becomes catastrophic.
Russia demonstrates the alternative. The Soviet state collapsed before Russia had developed comparable democratic institutions, an independent civil society capable of governing, a broadly legitimate system for privatizing state property or a durable constitutional consensus.
Economic transformation consequently became entangled with political improvisation, oligarchic acquisition of public wealth, institutional weakness and eventually nationalist authoritarianism. Russian President Vladimir Putin did not restore Soviet communism; he exploited the institutional wreckage left by its collapse.
Ukraine likewise inherited many Soviet structures: networks of corruption, oligarchic power and weak institutions. It spent decades struggling to build a more accountable democratic state. These experiences should warn us against assuming that removing a dictatorship automatically produces democracy.
China would present these problems on a vastly greater scale.
The Hudson report, therefore, correctly treats post-CCP planning as a matter of strategic prudence. It examines securing dangerous facilities, stabilizing the financial system, privatizing state assets, restructuring the PLA and security services, protecting vulnerable populations, opening secret-police archives, establishing truth-and-reconciliation mechanisms, and eventually convening a constitutional process.
America has a special responsibility — and a unique capacity — to prepare.
The U.S. has repeatedly demonstrated that defeating or surviving a dictatorship is only half the strategic task. After 1945, America did not simply celebrate the destruction of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and go home.
Along with its allies and the peoples of those countries, it helped demilitarize former enemies, rebuild institutions, revive economies, establish constitutional government and transform two militaristic dictatorships into prosperous democracies, ultimately becoming close American allies.
In Japan, the occupation explicitly pursued demilitarization and democratization, helping establish the postwar constitutional order. With those historical precedents in mind, the U.S. should begin that planning now — not to dictate China’s future or impose an American government on the Chinese people. China’s future belongs to the Chinese people.
Still, America, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, Australia, South Korea, India and other democracies have an enormous interest in preventing the collapse of communist rule from producing civil war, nuclear proliferation, economic catastrophe, ethnic violence or another dictatorship.
Washington should establish a permanent interagency planning mechanism for a post-CCP contingency and begin working quietly with allies, Chinese democrats, economists, constitutional scholars, dissidents, religious leaders, overseas Chinese communities and specialists in transitional justice.
The Hudson report recommends in-advance American planning and an interagency task force rather than assuming another relatively peaceful 1989 will simply happen by itself.
Plans should exist for securing strategic weapons, stabilizing financial markets, maintaining essential services, protecting archives, preventing mass reprisals, dismantling political police organizations, separating the military from the CCP, establishing legitimate privatization procedures, recovering stolen public assets, creating truth-and-reconciliation mechanisms and helping Chinese citizens construct a constitutional order.
The report correctly emphasizes that economic privatization without democratic legitimacy risks becoming little more than the transfer of national wealth to politically connected elites.
The objective should not be an American-designed China. It should be to give the Chinese people the greatest possible opportunity to build their own free, peaceful, constitutional China.
The West spent 40 years preparing to defeat Soviet communism but remarkably little time preparing for the morning after it disappeared. We were fortunate that much of Central Europe had prepared itself.
We should not depend on such good fortune again. The CCP may survive for decades, or it may collapse with the breathtaking speed of the communist regimes of 1989. We cannot know when, but history gives us no excuse for being surprised twice.
Readying for China after communism is not a regime-change policy. It is insurance against the most consequential political contingency of the 21st century.
• Miles Yu is the director of the China Center at the Hudson Institute. His “Red Horizon” column appears every other Tuesday in The Washington Times. He can be reached at mmilesyu@gmail.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.