On the day of new announcements about the ongoing travails of "the Michaels" at the hands of the Chinese government, I've been reading a new book called China Coup: The Great Leap to Freedom by Roger Garside -- recommended to me by John Fraser's recent review in the Literary Review of Canada. Garside, once a British diplomat in China, argues that Xi Jinpeng's extremism since taking sole control of the Chinese government in 2013 is actually weakening China rather than strengthening it -- and that Xi's Politburo rivals must know it by now.
Garside argues that Xi is likely to removed by an internal coup in the near future. He goes on to argue that the only possible next step for the coup makers is to add political freedom to the economic freedom that has transformed China in recent decades. In effect: can Xi's tenure in office outlast the tenure in prison of Michael Spavror and Michael Kovrig?
It's a short book. Between opening and closing chapters that imagine dramatically how a coup would be triggered and how it would work out, Garside sets out all the reasons to think it might be likely. Not least important: the frequency with which masses of Chinese (sometimes with support from within the Communist Party), have, given any opportunity, stood up for freedom of speech and political rights.
Garside is a little too positive for my taste about the social value of capital markets and the wisdom of the Trump administration's China policies. More importantly, he's too blithe about the likelihood of his coup leading to the triumph of constitutional democracy in China.
But I remember a Soviet dissident named Amalri Amalrik who published a book in 1970 called Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? -- and was out by less than a decade. Things are only impossible until they become inevitable.
