HONG KONG - Last week presented a puzzle of irreconcilable images and memories
in this city. With all the photos and television footage of the devastating May
12 Sichuan earthquake still seared in everyone's consciousness, along comes the
annual June 4 commemoration for those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Square
crackdown, a different kind of death and destruction still largely
unacknowledged by Beijing.
As the Olympic torch relay continues to wend its way toward the capital for the
August 8 opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Games, candles held by
thousands of demonstrators lit up the night at Hong Kong's Victoria Park in
memory of the pro-democracy advocates who lost their lives on that dark day in
Chinese history. The same People's Liberation Army that has been pulling the
dead, trapped and injured from the rubble in Sichuan for nearly a month rolled
over youthful demonstrators with tanks 19 years ago. Which image should we
concentrate on as we consider China's future?
The answer, of course, is both. The unprecedented openness and transparency
with which the central government has reacted to the Sichuan quake has
deservedly won admiration around the world. The immediate response to the
catastrophe was rapid, compassionate and remarkably open to public scrutiny. In
other words, it was everything the international community has come not to
expect from Beijing, which has well-earned reputation for secrecy, repression
and truth-defying propaganda.
The shock of the magnitude-8 quake has many China watchers wondering whether
the Chinese leadership has undergone its own earth-shaking shift, finally
realizing the value of an unfettered media and an open and transparent
government in the wake of a disaster that, at last count, had left 69,146
people dead, 17,516 missing and 374,072 injured. Jarring as those figures may
be - and laudable as the central government's response has been to date - don't
count on any big, long-term changes in governance from Beijing. There is,
however, cause enough for hope.
After all, dealing with a natural disaster is fundamentally different from
dealing with a political one - as different as Mother Nature and Deng Xiaoping,
the paramount leader of China who in 1989 ordered the Tiananmen crackdown. When
it's Mother Nature against the people, of course, the government must offer a
magnanimous hand to the people. But when the people turn against their
government, Chinese leaders have shown that, like Mother Nature, they also have
a nasty, vengeful side. Tiananmen is the most grotesque example of this in
recent history; but much smaller, less widely reported but still vicious
crackdowns have continued regularly over the past 19 years, including during
the current leadership of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.
The victims could be protesting farmers upset that their land has been stolen
by corrupt local officials to fuel the country's relentless commercial boom.
They could be the grieving families of miners who have died in China's
notoriously unsafe collieries. They could be AIDS activists like Hu Jia, who
was jailed for telling the truth about the disease in his country. They could
be journalists like Ching Cheong, released in February after spending nearly
three years in prison under the false charge of espionage. There has been
plenty of death, injury and false imprisonment in China since 1989, and also
plenty of silence in the official media about these myriad injustices.
Has the Sichuan quake changed all that? The pessimistic view is that Beijing is
using the humanitarian disaster as a symbol of its new openness and will play
that cheerful tune through the Olympics, after which it will be back to
business as usual. Optimists, admittedly fewer, think that China has taken a
big step towards an open, civil society, and that the staging of the Olympics
will be another giant step: After that, there can be no turning back.
But, in this case, it might be better to adopt the pragmatist's wait-and-see
perspective, and there are some key stories to wait and see about. First, there
is Tibet, and the pessimists are definitely winning on this one. Nearly three
months after the first riots broke out there, foreign journalists remain banned
from the autonomous region. Hong Kong and Taiwanese reporters were recently
given a four-day tour of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, however, and even that
officially monitored journalistic junket turned up stories that clashed with
the central government's one-sided portrayal of what happened.
Yes, it appears, the rioting was organized and brutal, as Beijing claimed. But
eyewitness accounts reported in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post also point
to an ensuing bloody crackdown, with one eyewitness describing soldiers opening
up on Tibetan rioters with machine guns.
Meanwhile, Beijing has agreed to meetings with envoys of the Dalai Lama - who
has repeatedly renounced violence, supported the Beijing Olympics and stated
that he does not seek an independent Tibet - while continuing to vilify him and
his "Dalai clique" in state media. It may be too much to expect Beijing to
reach an accommodation with the Dalai Lama on the status of Tibet, but it would
be nice to see the vilification campaign stop.
The Dalai Lama is not responsible for the riots, and the relentless attacks on
him are not just unfair; they also further alienate the very Tibetans whose
hearts and minds Beijing is trying to win. If more unrest in Tibet is to be
avoided, greater openness and accommodation are essential; otherwise, tensions
in the region are doomed to boil over again. But, while the path to peace in
Tibet is clearly marked, the leadership nevertheless appears blind to it.
Last week, for example, the official Xinhua News Agency once again blamed the
"Dalai clique" for acts of violence in Tibet. The agency reported the arrests
in April of 16 people, most of them Tibetan Buddhist monks, accused of three
bombings, saying the Dalai Lama and his followers had incited the monks to
carry out copycat bombings of those that rocked Lhasa during the March 14
riots. The report offered no proof of the involvement of the Dalai Lama. There
was also no explanation of why nearly a month had passed before the arrests
were announced.
Besides Tibet, two other important stories to watch while gauging Beijing's
newly discovered bent for openness and transparency are closely tied to the
disaster in Sichuan. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has
launched a probe into the disproportionately large number of schoolchildren who
were killed when their schools collapsed on them while other nearby buildings
withstood the shock of the quake. If shoddy construction was involved,
officials have vowed to punish those responsible.
Angry, grieving parents who have lost children are screaming for justice, but
an honest and full investigation could lead to high places in Communist Party
officialdom in the province. Its seems likely that so-called "tofu"
construction was commonplace in the building of schools and that private
contractors colluded with government officials to skimp on essential materials
such as steel and concrete and pocket the savings. If these corrupt officials
are truly brought to book for their malfeasance, that would be a major
breakthrough in the country's battle against graft. But beware the scapegoat:
this investigation could turn out like a lot of others - punishing a few for
the widespread practice of many.
The same is true of the central government's pledge that all local and foreign
donations to quake victims, which have surpassed 40 billion yuan (US$5.8
billion), will be strictly accounted for. This promise comes after numerous
reports on the Internet of donated goods intended for quake victims winding up
on sale in shops or in the possession of people not affected by the quake.
Venal officials are allegedly selling items such as tents and rice by the
truckload. If this is true, how many of these culprits, the latest symbols of
China's endemic corruption, will pay for their crimes?
Finally, of course, there are the Olympic Games and the 30,000 foreign
reporters who will descend on the country to cover not just the athletes but
also anything else of interest they can find. They will want to interview
ordinary citizens and ask Chinese leaders tough questions about corruption and
democratic reform. They have been promised great freedom. Let's see if Beijing
can deliver on that promise.
In the end, however, it will not be until the grand Olympic stage is packed
away and the eyes of the world have turned elsewhere that any clear sense of
China's future as a budding civil society will become clear.
Kent Ewing is a teacher and writer at Hong Kong International School. He
can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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