At the time of the Tiananmen revolt (1989), the survival of China’s regime, and for that matter of the ruling Communist Party of China, was anything but certain. The population was fed up with the privations and hardships it had experienced under Mao Zedong’s reign. Inspired by revolts in the Communist-led countries of Eastern Europe, Chinese were taking in the streets to request a regime change with the hope of seeing their aspirations of prosperity, well-being and freedom come true.
The regime managed to prevail by resorting to a twofold strategy: it brutally repressed the street protests and simultaneously accelerated the implementation of a comprehensive set of market-oriented economic reforms designed by the Communist leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping.
Those reforms are at the origin of China’s impressive economic performance and of the ensuing improvement in the standard of living of large swaths of the population. The dictatorial nature of the regime has remained intact, but the population’s resolve to rebel and face repression has diminished as living conditions have improved.
How long the Communist Party’s survival strategy will prevail is a matter of speculation and debate among political and economic analysts. The country’s economic performance is giving signs of fatigue, a phenomenon that shakes the central government’s ability to continue to meet people’s expectations. Be that as it may, the model has enabled the regime to stay alive and comfortable for longer than what many pundits had anticipated.
China’s twofold strategy could arguably have inspired Venezuela’s embattled President Nicolas Maduro, whose increasingly dictatorial regime is grappling with a freefall economy.
Indeed, Venezuela has suffered enormously from the chaotic management introduced in 1999 by Hugo Chavez and subsequently pursued by his heir-designate Nicolas Maduro. Massive expropriations, counterproductive price and foreign-exchange controls, criminalization of private initiative, and other standard components of the socialist toolkit have led to a dramatic contraction of the economy (30 percent since 2013), ever more acute shortages of foodstuffs, medicines, and other essential goods, and rampant inflation. Malnutrition is on the rise and, after receding in the first years of Chavismo, poverty rates have lately risen to pre-Chavez levels.
Small wonder that Venezuelans are in a Tiananmen mood. They are taking to the streets in their masses practically every day to request free general elections. Opinion polls indicate that 70 percent of the population wishes President Maduro to leave at the soonest possible moment.
Like China’s Communists at the time of Tiananmen, government forces have been squashing street demonstrations in a brutal and murderous manner. Over the last few weeks, dozens of protesters have lost their lives, hundreds have been injured, and more than 2,000 have been arrested and in many cases tortured. Opposition leaders, for their part, have been sent to jail, placed under house arrest, or deprived of their right to participate in future elections and even to travel abroad.
Unlike China’s Communists, however, the regime in Caracas stubbornly sticks to failed anti-market economic policies. Every now and then, Venezuela’s president changes his economic minister and the head of the central bank or modifies the bureaucratic mechanisms of price and foreign-exchange controls as well as the ways of distributing essential goods not found in the market. Yet he abstains from doing the one thing that could provide some breath to the country’s collapsing economy, namely introducing a China-style pro-market reform.
What President Maduro is offering Venezuelans is less bread and more blood. This has led foreign-policy analyst David Grantham, writing in the Townhall website, to detect an analogy between the tack taken by Venezuela’s Maduro and that of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.
The problem with such a course of action is that, if only for reasons of geography, Venezuela is no Syria. Al-Assad has managed to surmount protests and insurgency and stay in power thanks to the critical military and diplomatic help provided by two powerful neighbors: Russia and Iran. In contrast, none of Venezuela’s neighbors seems to be willing or able to come to the rescue of President Maduro -- and Russia and Iran are too far away from Venezuela to help Caracas militarily the way they have al-Assad. Moreover, President Maduro is already under a sort of diplomatic quarantine at the regional level, and continuing repression is bound to aggravate his case.
Why, then, has Maduro taken such a suicidal path?
Much has to do with incompetence. Himself a former bus driver, with some courses in agitprop taken in the schools and agencies of communist Cuba as his sole intellectual background, Venezuela’s current leader has little idea of how an economy works. What is more, one could hardly find someone with a proper training in economics among those who assist him in formulating and implementing the country’s economic policy.
Acute as it is, economic incompetence does not explain, by itself, the economic mess in which Venezuela finds itself today. The political risks of overhauling the management of the economy can hardly be overestimated.
Indeed, Maduro has given most of the country’s key economic posts to both high-ranking military officers and key leaders of the Chavista movement with no economics background whatsoever. The reason behind that move seems to be none other than to buy their loyalty: in a country submitted to insane price and foreign-exchange controls as is Venezuela, the scope for government figures to derive a personal profit from bribery and trafficking is immense. According to retired General Cliver Alcala (a critic of the regime), food has become a better business than drugs.
Needless to say, those involved in corruptive practices are not keen on letting market-oriented reforms interfere with and dismantle their juicy sources of personal wealth.
What is more, should high-ranking army and party leaders finally realize that power will slide out of their hands if pro-market reforms are not carried out, they may as well reach the conclusion that it would be politically more profitable for them to overthrow Maduro and present him and his inner circle as the sole culprits of the nation’s ills and violations of human rights. They could then offer or accept free elections in exchange for some penal impunity.
This alternative is all the more plausible as Venezuela’s opposition is preparing a transition plan that provides for some kind of amnesty for members of the regime who decide to defect (provided they are not personally involved in human-rights crimes).
For all these reasons, the more likely scenario is either a Soviet-style collapse, as pointed out by Anders Aslund writing in Foreign Policy; or, what is more frightening for Maduro, a palace coup of unpredictable consequences (think of Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu).
Sooner rather than later, Maduro might bitterly regret not having had the wisdom, ability and will to follow the path set by the Communist Party of China.
