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SINOROVING
The emperor's new
clothes
By Pepe Escobar
PART 1: The Great Wall of
Shopping
PART 2: Selling China to the
World
PART 3: The hottest label: China
chic
PART 4: Tiananmen peasant time
bomb
PART 5: Guangdong, unstoppable world's
factory
PART 6: Never mind the party, let's
party!
BEIJING - The National
People's Congress - "the highest organ of state
power" according to China's constitution -
convenes the third session of its 10th edition
next month. With its 3,000-odd delegates the NPC,
theoretically based on popular sovereignty, may be
only an instrument to legitimize one-party rule.
Anyway, the whole world will be examining every
word and gesture to assess how China is imposing
the rule of law, fighting economic inequality and
following the new party slogans, "sustainable
development" and "people-based governance".
In December, President Hu Jintao went to
Macau to celebrate the fifth year of the
territory's handover from Portugal. In Macau and
Hong Kong this was interpreted as a dress
rehearsal to highlight Hu's overwhelming dominance
of domestic policy ahead of the NPC session. As
China enters the Year of the Rooster, Hu seems
more than ever to be a tiger - not a dark horse,
according to Beijing rumor. One thing is certain:
he definitely won't be a Mandarin-dubbed Mikhail
Gorbachev.
European diplomats in Beijing
agree that Hu has wholly asserted his authority
over the third generation's Jiang Zemin (former
party chief, president and military commander) in
the Politburo Standing Committee (although five of
the nine men in dark suits are Jiang's allies). Hu
has ordered a crackdown against any kind of
dissent by public intellectuals, democracy, labor
and rural rights activists, and 'Net surfers; and
with the publication of the 85-page 2004 Defense
White Paper - which calls for a non-nuclear China
but warns that the military tolerates "no
separatists" (a message to Taiwan) - he has the
military on his side. As Chen Zhou, a researcher
at the Chinese Academy of Military Sciences,
highlights, "this is the first time the Defense
White Paper has clearly expressed our security
concerns, demonstrating the new leadership's
collective strategic judgment". "Fighting
separatism" - meaning independence movements in
Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang - is the first priority
of the first order of priorities.
Hu
are you, Hu Jintao?
Those who knew
something about the man could have seen it coming
- the dark horse turning into a tiger. The
inestimable Disidai, the book on the fourth
generation published in 2002 under the pseudonym
Zong Hairen, defines composed, controlled and
consensus-prone Hu as the "consummate Chinese
communist organization man". His mentor was Gansu
province Communist Party secretary Song Ping, a
very conservative economic planner. Career-wise
though, Hu's record as party secretary both in
Guizhou and then in Tibet is alarmingly mediocre -
especially in Tibet.
In January 1989, the
Panchen Lama (considered by many the No 2 figure
in Tibetan Buddhism after the Dalai Lama) died.
Lhasa was in turmoil for the next two months. Hu
had just been transferred, and knew nothing about
Tibetan culture and politics, not to mention his
lack of local connections. In early March that
year, the local-government chairman - who was
subordinated to Hu - declared martial law,
following a strict order from Beijing. Little did
anybody know that the same would happen in
Tiananmen Square two and a half months later.
Hu's views on Tibet say a lot about the
man. He is basically waiting for the Dalai Lama to
die so Beijing can deal with a more pliable leader
(as for Xinjiang, he favors even more repression:
"We can realize political stability, economic
prosperity and long-term social order ... only if
we take hold of this 'ox's nose'"). The five stars
in the Chinese flag are said to represent the Han,
Manchu, Hui, Tibetan and Uighur ethnic groups, but
the unabashed ethnocentrism of the Han in power
means that real independence for Tibet and
Xinjiang is anathema.
Hu's mediocre record
in Tibet is a direct consequence of his spending
at least five months a year in Beijing, networking
with his mentor Song Ping. His excuse was that his
body was not strong enough to stand the altitude
and the harsh climate. But the networking paid off
handsomely, because in 1992 Hu, thanks to Ping,
made it to the Politburo Standing Committee. From
then on, he was always very clever - always
projecting an image of being patient and modest,
and never making enemies. He always deferred to
Jiang Zemin - until he rose to power.
Compare this to Premier Wen Jiabao. Wen
was Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang's right-hand man
during the Tiananmen pro-democracy demonstrations
in 1989. Zhao, as we know, was purged for his
"serious mistakes". But Wen was "rectified"
because he engaged in prolonged self-criticism; he
later became an expert in economics, the sure-fire
way to advance one's career in the booming Jiang
Zemin era. Today, Wen may not be as protected as
Hu because the vice premiers breathing down his
neck are staunch Jiang allies: Executive Vice
Premier Huang Ju (in charge of fiscal and
financial issues), and Zeng Peiyan (in charge of
state investments in industry and infrastructure).
This means they will do their utmost to protect
large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), state banks
and industrial ministries from any streamlining.
But the crucial point is that Hu and Wen converge
on the essential: the party must concentrate on
ideological and political training and promote
cadres who are as ideologically "pure" as they are
technically competent.
The Little Helmsman
Deng Xiaoping coined the immortal slogan "to get
rich is glorious". Jiang Zemin coined his "Three
Represents" (the party has to appeal not only to
peasants and workers, but to the middle class). Hu
has no ideology - yet, apart from extreme loyalty
to the party, and doing anything to protect its
hegemony. But diplomats in Beijing hint that he
may be on to something. In 2000, Hu ran Jiang's
Three Represents campaign - which in essence
called for a more "bourgeois" party. He may be
undoing it now with his emphasis on "people-based
governance".
How the party pulled it
off
Confucian scholars in classical China,
when they had to answer a very difficult question,
always had an exit strategy: que yi, which
means "leaving the question answerless".
Que yi may apply to the question of
where does the party go now. After conversations
with a number of intellectuals, who must remain
anonymous, one learns that que yi certainly
does not apply to how the party steered China from
"de-Maoization" toward modernization.
The
key is that Chinese communism incarnates a
revolutionary nationalism. That's how the party
has managed to mobilize the whole Chinese nation.
In its Little Helmsman-propelled modernization
drive, the party made sure that hundreds of
millions of peasants remained neutral - and
additionally gave the party the number of
policemen necessary to the repression apparatus.
Then the party won - or won again - the millions
of urban workers who started to profit from the
economic reforms. The party even managed to seduce
some intellectuals. Finally, the new middle
class/new bourgeoisie was integrated politically.
The Chinese may not love the Communist Party - in
essence a giant, secretive organization of 65
million members, but its social base is immense,
including everyone from village leaders, factory
managers, newspaper editors and university
professors to all kinds of bureaucrats in charge
of actually running the country.
Now
Deng's new model has reached a crossroads - where
mind-boggling social dynamism meets social
fragmentation and political impasse. Diplomats in
Beijing marvel at how the party has been able so
far to master all the unpredictable and even
volcanic consequences of the reforms. As one of
them puts it, "they know they could not exercise
total control anymore - ideological, economic and
social control. So the totalitarian logic is gone.
What remains is the grand design. They may not
control the details, but they do control the big
picture, and the means to implement their vision.
They retain the absolute monopoly of repression
mechanisms."
Even positioned to "control
the big picture", the party must anyway fight
overlapping battles: more and more corruption and
abuse of power; the crisis of SOEs; extremely
tense labor disputes; rising crime rates; more and
more transport and industrial accidents; more and
more gangs trafficking in the black economy; the
devastation of the environment. The common
criticism is always the same, expressed either by
a young media professional in Guangzhou or a
businessman in Shanghai: "They have a lot of power
but they accept very little responsibility."
The challenges
The party is
certainly aware of mounting criticism - and
intellectuals inside the system are doing their
best to identify the problems and prescribe
solutions. For example, such people as Li Peilin,
deputy director of the Institute of Sociology at
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), are
convinced that "high-speed economic growth in
China" (a staggering 9.5% in 2004) can be
maintained "for years to come". Li has identified
seven social trends in China in 2005:
1) The
economy will continue to develop at high
speed.
2) After three years in the World Trade
Organization, Chinese banks and the auto industry
will face most of the new challenges.
3) Faster
urbanization: the key, says Li, is "turning
farmers into city residents", although he does not
recommend how.
4) The aging problem: for the
moment there are 130 million Chinese aged 60 or
above; only 25% of the labor force is
insured.
5) Labor tensions.
6) Increase in
education costs.
7) What Li defines as "greater
difference in inter-generational value", or the
frugal old guard contrasted with the credit
consumption of new generations.
A CASS
blue paper, "The Analysis and Forecast on the
Social Situation of China", goes even further than
Li, examining seven "special realities" -
different from other developing countries' -
necessary for China to solve its "social
contradictions":
1) Urbanization must be
encouraged: China "should strive to transfer
another more than 100 million surplus laborers
from rural areas in the coming 15 years".
2)
Attention to income inequality: China should
"carry out scientific control over income
redistribution by the means of finance, taxation
and welfare".
3) Better education as the best
way to "turn a big country with a large population
into a big country with human resources, which is
an important link for maintaining economic growth
in high speed".
4) A better social-security
system.
5) Poverty reduction: "Poverty-reducing
project should be carried out with integrating
investment resources in rural areas in the 11th
Five-Year Plan (2006-2010) and a basic frame for
rural social security should be formed".
6)
Tackling corruption "by improving a socialist
democratic system" and "improving technical levels
in social management".
7) "China should keep a
cool head and deal with international relations
well, especially the international relations
between big powers."
After their annual
planning session last September, the fourth
generation acknowledged in public that the "life
and death of the party" depend on "improving
governance" - which means fighting corruption
among party officials. But the problem is the
system itself. If you are a Chinese farmer or a
worker, the only way to complain about an abuse is
to resort to the old imperial system of petitions
and appeals. According to a new survey by another
CASS sociologist, Yu Jianrong, petitions to the
central government increase about 50%
year-on-year, but only one-200th of 1% of the
people who use the system say it really works.
Intellectual deprivation
Hu's
recent crackdown on public intellectuals,
extensively documented by Asia Times Online's
Chinese writers, is intimately connected to the
party's obsession, after Zhao Ziyang's death, to
squash any possibility of popular, democratic
demonstrations.
For millennia, the role of
critical intellectuals in China has been to
enlighten the ruler. Now, under "market
socialism", they may be a dying breed. Many have
decided to follow James Joyce's motto - silence,
exile, cunning. This more than suits the party,
which is very comfortable with the emergence of an
uncritical middle class that may in the future
make dumbed-down choices and believe, just as in
the United State, that they are living in a
democracy. Anyway, the party line is that China
already has a "democracy with socialist
characteristics" and people largely support the
party; moreover, there would be no need for
elections because the peasant masses.
European diplomats in Beijing confirm that
the fourth generation is positively alarmed by the
possibility of a democratic domino effect across
Eurasia after the (orange) Ukrainian and (velvet)
Georgian "revolutions". No wonder: Kyrgyzstan,
which borders China, may be the next in line. The
Central Asian republics are members of the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is led by
China and Russia: the main item in the SCO's
agenda is to fight Islamic terrorism. Now we see
the possibility of a democratic virus - not
Islamic terrorism - "infecting" western China
(Xinjiang) from Central Asia. It's all there in a
now-famous editorial in the People's Daily early
last month warning that "hostile forces have not
abandoned their conspiracy and tactics to
Westernize China and to divide up the country".
The party sees it as another Washington
plot. Thus Hu's crackdown against public
intellectuals, writers and journalists will remain
in effect. This means, among other things, that
the Chinese blogosphere will not shake up the
party's foundations any time soon - as most 'Net
surfers admit in private. The fourth generation is
confident that the security agencies can threaten,
jail or exile anyone who even implicitly campaigns
against the party. And to a large extent because
of the Great Firewall of China, urban media
professionals confirm that the majority of the
voices in Chinese forums and chat rooms are
fiercely nationalistic - more anti-American, more
anti-Japanese and more war-against-Taiwan than the
party itself.
Rabbits, horses, tigers,
dragons
Manchu master toymaker Tang
Qi-liang is a Beijing treasure. He's still selling
his beautiful clay and paper toys in a small shop
on Imperial College Street, near the Confucius
temple. A crowd favorite is Lord Hare, a rabbit
demigod who lived with Chang'e, the goddess of the
moon, and was sent by the goddess, riding a tiger,
to deliver medicine to citizens of Beijing victims
of a great plague. Lord Hare looks like a really
pissed-off rabbit on top of a pissed-off tiger.
But looks are deceiving: he's an agent of Good.
Hu Jintao may look like a (dark) horse of
democracy when he's in fact a crouching tiger.
There's hardly any evidence that a hidden dragon -
like the members of the house of flying daggers
who defied the last days of the Tang Dynasty, the
theme of a splendid Zhang Yimou film - will appear
to confront him. The only possible contender from
the inside is Zeng Qinghong, the No 5 in the
Politburo Standing Committee. According to Beijing
insiders, he would reverse the official
condemnation of Tiananmen as a
"counterrevolutionary rebellion"; he would allow
elections at the county level; and he would even
allow independent political parties and
non-censored media. Zeng is the man to watch. Few,
though, bet on a palace coup with Zeng replacing
Hu.
The consensus in Beijing is that Hu
believes China is too complex and turbulent to be
governed by democracy. He believes China needs
strong leadership to conduct both domestic
development and foreign policy. He believes China
still needs an emperor - not a Gorbachev. So the
emperor will remain fully clothed in his
made-in-China dark suit.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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