CHINA: The instability of Chinese society is one of the strongest arguments the Communist Party has for maintaining political control, writes Fintan O'Toole in Beijing.
"We are Marxists after all", a middle-ranking Chinese official reminded me.
His remark was not, as it might seem, a conservative statement about the impossibility of political change. He meant, in fact, the precise opposite.
One of the fundamental tenets of Marxism, a philosophy in which China's ruling class is still well-versed, is that political systems are shaped by economic forces.
Marxism would predict that the revolution in the Chinese economy over the last 20 years must lead to a fundamental alteration in the political system. Privately, no Communist Party member I spoke to did not agree with this proposition. But nor did any of them feel confident about saying how and when it will happen.
The late 1980s in China seemed to fulfil Marxist predictions precisely, with mass demands for change following very closely on the heels of economic reform.
Not the least of the horrors of the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests, however, is that it worked.
Seventeen years on, there is no significant organised opposition movement in China. Political conversations, even in private, are marked by caution, and criticism is couched as a complaint against this or that policy, rather than against the system as a whole.
The crackdown was successful because the protest movement, though large, was not coherent (while students were protesting for democracy, workers were often protesting against the effects of economic reform), because international outrage was limited by the prospect of profit in trade with China and because the Communist Party deftly moved ahead with its programme of economic liberalisation.
Growing prosperity and the increase in personal (as opposed to political) freedoms, provided an alternative kind of change. It has been enough, so far, to keep the lid on political opposition.
But for how long? To say that there is no organised opposition in China proper (the western regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, with their ethnic and religious distinctiveness, are a different matter) is not to say that China is politically placid.
On the contrary, according to official sources, "public order disturbances" - mass protests against the seizure of peasants' land for development projects, the loss of jobs and subsidies in factory closures, depredations by corrupt officials, or soil and water pollution - have increased by nearly 50 per cent in the past two years, from 58,000 incidents in 2003 to 87,000 in 2005.
They have also grown in size and intensity: in the first half of last year alone, there were 17 protests involving more than 10,000 people each, during which 1,740 people were injured and 102 killed.
This paradox - no opposition but a rising tide of protest - is, for the authorities, a little eerie. Unrest bubbles up in unpredictable places.
Each individual incident can be contained through a mixture of repression and concession, and precisely because they are spontaneous reactions to local injustices, the protests do not amount to a sustained challenge to the authority of the Communist Party.
But the government's fear is that the individual grievances might somehow cohere. That fear is sustained and deepened by an awareness that the Communist Party's greatest vulnerability is not external but internal.
Corruption is the enemy within and it is so corrosive of the party's authority that it dominated the speeches from the top table at this year's big set-piece celebrations of the anniversaries of the foundation of the Communist Party and of the Long March.
Corruption haunts the Chinese leadership not just because it makes ordinary people cynical about the party's claims to act in the best interests of society, but because the only real solutions to it are radical ones.
Corruption takes hold when the political system is not transparent and when leaders are not accountable for their actions.
But transparency and accountability require an active, engaged and empowered citizenry - in other words, a democratic culture.
And the economy may require the same thing. China's more thoughtful leaders know that the old model of economic reform, in which China became a source of cheap labour for the mass production of relatively unsophisticated products, has run its course.
It can't produce the kind of income to which Chinese people increasingly aspire and it can't produce the surpluses to fund a welfare system for a population that will reach 1.5 billion around 2030.
The shift to a more high-tech, high-skilled economy, however, demands the creation of an innovative, well-educated workforce. That is ultimately incompatible with a tightly controlled, highly-censored society.
Paradoxically, however, the very instability of Chinese society is one of the strongest arguments that the Communist Party has for political stability and continuity.
China is urbanising at a pace never before experienced in human history: 200 million people (that's two-thirds of the entire population of the US) have been added to China's cities in the last decade.
Those cities often resemble gigantic building sites. For all its ancient culture, China is in many ways the newest, rawest place on earth. Yet as well as absorbing all of this change, it also has to deal, in a time-frame of no more than two decades, with epic challenges: averting environmental catastrophe, absorbing tens of millions of rural migrants every year, constructing basic infrastructure like sewerage on a mind-boggling scale, establishing a welfare state almost from scratch.
Some analysts, more or less gleefully, expect these pressures to lead to the imminent implosion of the Chinese system.
In 2001, Gordon Chang, in his book The Coming Collapse of China, argued that it would take place by the end of this decade, and he recently renewed the prediction, arguing that "too much is happening too quickly for any government to hold on".
Yet it is not at all obvious that such a collapse would be a good outcome for China or the world. If it created the kind of vacuum that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, it could shift China, not into a great new progressive era, but back towards a more isolationist brand of authoritarianism.
With the stakes so high, the next few years could be crucial. Chinese people have learned patience, and from what I've gathered in conversation with very different levels of society, most would be happy with a clearly articulated programme of gradual change.
If the current campaign against corruption were to be followed by its logical next steps - the establishment of an independent and transparent justice system and the phased enhancement of local democracy - the process of building a civic culture could begin. If, on the other hand, the state keeps postponing the change that it knows to be necessary, it will lose control of a society in which change is unstoppable.
Tomorrow: How a changing China changes the world