Ian Bremmer chooses to call it the J Curve, but to visualise its contours imagine instead a Nike swoosh. On the vertical axis is the measure of a nation’s stability, and on the horizontal axis is its openness. In a new book — The J Curve: A New Way to Understand Why Nations Rise and Fall — he applies the J Curve to societies in the throes of change.

Bremmer, who heads the Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, and teaches at Columbia University, considers 12 countries, and finds that the J Curve throws up the most intriguing questions when applied to China.

The J Curve essentially maps a country’s transition from closedness to openness. There are two types of stability, says Bremmer: one that accrues because a country is closed, and the other precisely because it is open. “Yet,” he writes, “for a country that is ‘stable because it’s closed’ to become a country that is ‘stable because it’s open,’ it must go through a transitional period of dangerous instability.”

This phase instability can come unforeseen — a natural catastrophe, act of terror, famine, or political unrest because people have managed to communicate between themselves sufficiently in order to dodge official censors. To regain stability, the leadership would have two options: to manage instability and the transition to openness on the right side of the curve, or to quickly revert to that old stability born of closedness on the left side of the curve.

This explains why the swoosh has a more gradual arc on the right: “The left side of the curve is much steeper because a little consolidation and control can provide a lot of stability. It’s more efficient to reestablish order by declaring martial law than by passing legislation that promotes freedom of the press.” But, of course: “In any left-side-of-the-curve state, it is easier to close a country than to open it. But once mature political institutions are fully constructed and embraced by a nation’s people, they are a lot more durable and do far more to protect the viability of the state than any police state tactic can.”

Bremmer draws foreign policy tips from the J Curve: “The developed world should neither shelter nor militarily destabilize authoritarian regimes — unless those regimes represent an imminent threat to the national security of other states. Developed states should instead work to create conditions most favorable for a closed regime’s safe passage through the least stable segment of the J Curve — however and whenever the slide toward instability comes. And developed states should minimize the risk these states pose the rest of the world as their transition toward modernity begins.”

So, where does this place China, with its capitalist economic orientation and its Communist Party rule? “Is it too economically open for the left side? Or is it too politically closed for the right?”

Opinion is divided. On Chinese new year — that is, within a span of 24 hours — in February 2005, for instance, 11 billion text messages were sent within the country. By the end of 2005 China was estimated to have 120 million internet users, and now 350 million Chinese own mobile phones.

And with the process of economic reform, first started in the late 1970s, China has become integrated in the global economy. For instance, between 1978 and 2004, $563.8 billion worth of foreign direct investment flowed into China. This is, concedes Bremmer, more than 10 times the total FDI that came into Japan between 1945 and 2000. Also, foreign funded enterprises produced 55 per cent of Chinese exports in 2003, a percentage far in excess of that in the Asian tigers. Also, now foreign-owned firms account for two-thirds of new FDI in China. According to Bremmer, the CCP “believes its political capital is replenished by rising Chinese living standards”. And with those standards intimately connected to FDI, the Party accepts “an extraordinary level of foreign influence in the establishment and enforcement of its economic rules of the road”.

With such levels of connectivity and economic integration, a country cannot be on the left, closed side of the curve, can it?

Bremmer demurs: “The (CCP) refuses to tolerate political dissent and has resisted virtually any meaningful political reform. The party makes its political and economic decisions in secret. It views China’s citizens — particularly its ethnic and religious minorities — as risks to be managed rather than as political contributors to China’s development.” As evidence, he cites Beijing’s total control on the media and other forms of communication (for instance, the Great Wall, whereby consumers’ internet usage is strictly monitored), suppression of spiritual organisations like the Falun Dafa, its attempts to limit news of epidemics like SARS, its policies in Xinjian Province, and rural unrest.

What the Communist Party would like to do is move from the left-side stability to right-side stability without the pain of the dip in the middle. For instance, he says Chinese leaders now speak less of “rapid growth” and tend to dwell on “harmonious, coordinated, sustainable development”. Watch China, at stake is much more than the simple — at times, even simplistic — hypothesis of the J Curve.