The
rise and rise of China's Mr Tears By Maochun Yu
The well-coordinated,
massive relief and propaganda efforts organized by
the central government are called by some
international observers the most pronounced
phenomenon emerging from China's recent natural
devastations.
But the government in
Beijing has always been keen on organizing massive
projects such as the one the world witnessed
following the January snowstorms and now the
Sichuan quake, as Beijing is one of the few
governments in the world that can, and is willing
to, utilize vast human and material resources on
such a scale.
The Chinese Communist
Party's (CCP) ability to mobilize the
entire nation showcase the
efficacy and power of the CCP, which has
maintained a monopoly on national and local
governance and social movement. In fact, in the
annals of the CCP government's mass movements to
mobilize the nation that either caused catastrophe
- such as the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s
that led to the famine killing at least 30 million
Chinese - or alleviate the impacts of natural
disasters, this current national campaign,
officially billed as "Resist the Quake, Redress
the Disaster" (kangzhen jiuzai) movement,
is less intense when compared to the mass relief
and propaganda campaigns of the past.
For
example, the 1975 Yangtze River flood that killed
at least 85,000 people [1], the 1976 Tangshan
earthquake that took at least 242,000 lives [2],
or even the more recent 1998 "Resist the Flood,
Redress the Disaster" campaign of 1998 had relief
and propaganda campaigns on a much larger scale.
This is because the government would very much
like to replace the quake from the people's
conscience with the grand party that is much
higher on the leadership's agenda list: namely,
the 2008 Summer Olympics.
What is
singularly unique, however, is the sudden rise in
popularity of an unlikely star who has quickly
become a national phenomenon arising from the
rubbles of the quake: the boyish-looking
66-year-old Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. Within
hours of the quake, far before the mounting death
toll became apparent and confirmed, Wen flew to
the epicenter to console the quake-ravaged
villagers.
Since day one of the quake, he
has been seen daily in the print and electronic
news outlets across China as the chief coordinator
of relief and propaganda campaign. The crowds in
cities and the countryside across the nation went
wild when they saw on government-controlled TV
stations that Wen refused medical treatment for
bruises caused by a fall in the rubbles of a
collapsed building because there were living souls
still buried under that very building. Internet
users flooded chat rooms with praises for Wen's
moving and consoling gesture toward a group of
crying orphans in a village. To the people of
China, Wen has become known by many as "the
People's Premier" or "Grandpa Wen".
A
consummate bureaucrat and technocrat, Wen was
trained as a geologist in college. He has been a
Communist official since 1965 when he started out
as a minor Party functionary in the geological
survey community in the Northwestern province of
Gansu, where he slowly but steadily rose within
the provincial Party hierarchy.
In the
early 1980s, then CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang
discovered Wen Jiabao and gave him a "helicopter
ride" straight up from the rustic Gansu province
to the Communist Central Committee in Beijing as
the deputy in the Party's Central Office. When Hu
Yaobang was purged in 1987 for failing to
effectively suppress intellectual discontents, Wen
Jiabao survived the purge and went on to serve as
the top assistant to China's next Communist Party
general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, whose tenure
covered the tumultuous 1989 Tiananmen Square
pro-democracy movement.
The most dramatic
moment in Wen's political life came when Zhao
decided to oppose the decision to massacre the
student protesters in Tiananmen Square. When Zhao
showed sympathy for the protesters' cause by
visiting the square personally in an attempt to
persuade the protesters to leave the square and
avoid bloodshed, Wen Jiabao went along. Zhao was
promptly purged and remained under house arrest
for over 15 years until his death in January 2005.
The image of Wen accompanying his agonized
and crying boss in Tiananmen Square before the
infamous massacre would have doomed his political
career under normal circumstances; miraculously,
though, Wen survived once again. He continued to
flourish within the Party central hierarchy and
went on to work as a vice premier under general
secretary Jiang Zemin. In 2003, after Jiang faded,
Hu Jintao became the Communist Party's Fourth
Generation Core Leader as the Party's general
secretary, and Wen Jiabao became the premier of
China and the third-highest ranked Communist Party
official. Wen has held that position ever since.
This career pattern makes Wen Jiabao a
most unique official in China: He is the only
Standing Committee member of the ruling Politburo,
throughout the history of the Communist Party
since its founding in 1921, to have served four
general secretaries: Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang,
Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Two of these four have
been purged and become virtually non-persons in
China's deadly cycles of power struggle.
Wen Jiabao has accomplished this
extraordinary feat primarily by being
non-confrontational, unassuming, conciliatory or,
some may even say, unprincipled.
To be the
ultimate survivor of China's precarious political
game, one has to bend constantly according to the
wind currently blowing. A case in point is how
Wen, just weeks before the Sichuan quake,
condemned the Dalai Lama for his alleged role in
the Tibet riots: "There is ample fact and plenty
of evidence proving this incident was organized,
premeditated, masterminded and incited by the
Dalai clique ... This has all the more revealed
the consistent claims by the Dalai clique that
they pursue not independence, but peaceful
dialogue, are nothing but lies."
Making
hardline remarks such as this requires sacrifice
in independent thinking and political vision. In
fact, since having shown great sympathy toward the
student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989,
Wen has evaded the issue of the Tiananmen Massacre
as if it were a plague and has supported the
Party's decision to quell the demonstration as
necessary.
But the most enduring and
primary public image of Wen in the collective
memory of the nation - perhaps most revealing of
his personality - is that of "Mr Tears", due to
his penchant to cry in the aftermath of human or
natural disasters. He cried during China's January
snowstorms that paralyzed the nation's main
transportation arteries [3]; he cried when
visiting the mine accidents where miners were
trapped and killed; during the current quake
crisis, Wen's most memorable public persona has
been his crying in front of national TV to show
his sympathy and sorrow for the victims.
Thus the issue of the premier's tears has
become a celebrated topic for many in China to
debate, especially on the rapidly growing
bulletins on the Internet [4]. While the majority
of the Internet messages are sympathetic of Wen's
tears, others hold that although a premier's
crying may manifest the ultimate compassion and
sympathy for the ravaged and the downtrodden, it
also indicates a certain sense of helplessness and
feebleness during a time of national crisis when
courage, vision, and resolve, not tears, are more
needed from a national leader [5]. Yet the
sharpest criticism of Wen's tears has been related
to his complete lack of sympathy for the suffering
of Tibetans [6].
In fact, this debate on
the premier's crying should not be a trivial
matter. Its poignancy and enormous political
implications have been closely related to Wen's
former mentor, Zhao Ziyang, the CCP general
secretary who famously cried in Tiananmen Square,
begging the protesters to leave the place that
would soon become an intended killing field. If
Zhao were not indecisive or did not cry in
Tiananmen Square in 1989, or if he instead stood
on top of a tank sympathetic to the pro-democracy
forces - bravely commanding the tremendous force
of the millions yearning for freedom, human
rights, and for a change of the corrupt system,
like Boris Yeltsin in the waning days of the
Soviet Union - China may have already had a bold
and visionary political leader and a brand new
political reality.
But in the final
crucial moments that decided history, Moscow did
not believe in tears, and Beijing did. A great
historic opportunity was lost by Zhao for the
complete lack of a strong and resolute visionary
leader from within the power elite who alone could
command the enormous political and military
resources to change history. And now, as Zhao's
erstwhile protege, Wen continues that legacy [7].
Dissenting voices have emerged on the
Chinese Internet that Wen Jiabao should shed fewer
tears and demonstrate more vision and resolve in
tackling China's more fundamental problems such as
resolutely confronting the CCP's political
albatross known as the Tiananmen Massacre; bravely
facilitating the process of giving up one-party
monopoly on political power and carrying out true
elections nationwide [8].
Unfortunately,
Wen continues to cry to show heart but little
resolve and vision for a politically democratic
China. Many have pointed out in China's online
chat rooms that as China's bureaucrat-in-chief,
Wen cares only to be the consummate manager, not
the resolute leader [9]. The difference between a
manager and a leader is that a manager's primary
concern is how to do things right, but a leader's
is how to do the right things.
Without
advanced leadership qualities, Wen, with superb
managerial skills, could at best yell at
incompetent officials on the phone and hang up on
them threateningly, as broadcast on national TV
during the current Sichuan quake relief campaign
[10], but he will never be able to root out the
ubiquitous patronage network of incompetent
officials everywhere within China's massive
bureaucratic machine and entrenched political
culture.
The real tragedy is that Wen
Jiabao is working diligently to preserve an
obsolete political system that may well only
represent the man's political resolve and vision,
as he recently wrote to the nation that "We must
keep a firm grasp on the basic principles of the
party in the initial stage of socialism, without
wavering, for 100 years."
On this 19th
anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, let us hope
that Wen did not really mean those words, because
another 100 years of socialism will only mean
another 100 years' absence of true democracy in
China.
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