Nothing lasts forever, not even the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it will

Nothing lasts forever, not even the Chinese Communist Party. Whether it will perish in a few years, or last for decades to come, there are a series of worrying indicators. Beijing has been slow to implement reforms that will orient the economy on a sustainable path. President Xi Jinping is knee-deep in an anti-corruption campaign against senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members unprecedented in its reach and scope in modern China, raising concerns about the party’s ability to police itself. Meanwhile, outside the corridors of power, China’s increasingly sophisticated populace is concerned with pollution, freedom of speech, and the country’s relationship with its neighbors, especially Japan. It’s impossible to predict the future, of course, and the CCP overcame greater challenges following Mao’s death in 1976 and after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. But six months shy of the Communist Party’s 65th anniversary of ruling China, it’s worth emphasizing that the party and China are not the same thing — China predates the party, and will outlast it.

Russia’s Communist Party, which molded the Soviet Union into its own image and dominated it from the union’s 1922 formation to its 1991 dissolution, offers the best cautionary tale for the party. But in looking for ways to forestall the inevitable, the party may want to also study the experience of a government further afield: that of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, commonly known by its Spanish initials as PRI, which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. Mexico under the PRI was not only the longest running one-party state of the 20th century, the PRI also fared well after losing power. Today, the Russian Communist Party is in shambles; its saints and leaders — Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev — have been disgraced. The PRI elite, on the other hand, faced relatively little backlash after they lost power in 2000. And in a relatively free and far election, Mexicans voted the PRI back into power in 2012 — an ideal consolation prize for a party that formerly monopolized power.

While the CCP and PRI structurally and ideologically are very different, the experiences they fostered, and the situations they find themselves in, have some striking similarities. The USSR on the eve of its collapse was an empire, overextended from an arms race with the United States and reeling from a 10-year quagmire in Afghanistan. Poverty was rampant, international travel was restricted, and Moscow’s autarkic economy meant domestic products were shoddy and foreign goods were scarce. By contrast, Mexico and China were (and are) healthily integrated into global markets. Mexico’s economy in the decade leading up to the PRI’s fall from power, despite an economic crisis in the mid-1990s, kept expanding healthily, as China’s continues to do. While much of the Soviet Union’s leadership in the 1970s and 1980s was stunningly incompetent, China today and Mexico under the PRI were ruled by competent technocrats. (In 1990, Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa called Mexico a “perfect dictatorship” — faint praise that could be applied to China as well.)

Beijing’s mostly measured authoritarianism after the death of Mao in 1976 is more similar to Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s than the brutal repression that characterized most of the Soviet Union’s history. And a corruption crackdown in the 1990s against Raul Salinas, whose brother Carlos had just stepped down from the presidency, exposed the breathtaking corruption and the splintering of the Mexican elite — not unlike the current corruption scandal involving former security czar Zhou Yongkang, which may do the same thing for China.

http://theweek.com/article/index/260335/why-chinas-communist-party-is-headed-for-collapse