Making predictions about the oncoming year is second only to making crappy best-in-year lists when it comes to New Years blogging activities. With the economy the way it is, predictions about China’s 2009 are generally downbeat, and range from predicted economic dissatisfaction to complete overthrow of the government.

Or particular interest is this article, regarding Charter 08 (a topic that got this website blocked in China once already and may yet do so again). Daniel Drezner (a Tufts professor) discusses the document (and the official response to it) and then poses this question to readers:

Is 2009 the year that China’s government collapses? Or is it just another year in which there will be a crackdown of a mass uprising? Because those may be the only two options.

Personally, I tend to agree with this response. The age of “Mass Incidents” on the scale of Tiananmen 1989 is over, I think. Although protests occur every day in China, as the above blog points out, most of those protests are over local issues, and often they appeal to the national government for help.

Furthermore, the impact of Charter 08 within China, as far as I can tell, would be difficult to understate. I haven’t heard anyone talk about it; when I mentioned it to some friends they hadn’t heard of it, but brushed it off as the sort of thing that happens frequently and means essentially nothing. Mutant Palm’s blogger wrote “Charter ‘08 arguably has had a more significant impact on readers of the New York Review of Books than it has on China,” and I suspect he’s right.

In short, I don’t see the government being overthrown OR cracking down on a “mass incident” like Tiananmen. While it is an interesting year for anniversaries (the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen, the 30th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan Uprising, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the PRC), I think we’ll see a bunch of parades, and not much else. Here’s something I wrote for a paper at Brown about a year ago; interestingly I think it’s fairly apt here:

Although one can never rule out the possibility of a an uprising—after all, few predicted the students in 1989 would take such dramatic action—it seems likely that for the foreseeable future, China is in an age of bottom-up transformation, where social change is affected through the effective resolution of specific local or individual issues rather than by making broad appeals to implement policies uniformly across the vast nation. This shift in focus in undoubtedly part of Tiananmen’s legacy, and it remains to be seen whether the deaths of students and workers may have paved the way for a more effective mode of changing China. The current regime has made it clear that they consider popular nationalist collectivist approaches a threat to their own sovereignty and national stability. Whether the smaller local protest movements that occur in the thousands every year in China will succeed in affecting lasting change remains to be seen.