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2 Smelling salts for China's
Jasmine dream By Peter Lee
China's "Jasmine incident"
suggests new paradigms in the game of
cat-and-mouse between China's security organs and
dissidents.
The government's anxiety over
events in the Arab world and North Africa was on
full display on February 20 as hundreds of police
were dispatched to Beijing's Wangfujing central
shopping street and other sites around China to
counter a "Jasmine" demonstration promoted by the
overseas Chinese dissident website boxun.com.
Known dissidents were
reportedly detained and, in some cases,
brutalized. Boxun was subjected to a distributed
denial of service (DDoS) attack and the
security services anxiously blocked keywords
related to "Jasmine".
The event itself was a
bizarre one-off that many dissidents chose not to
attend, and yielded more onlookers and journalists
than demonstrators.
In an interesting way, the
Chinese government's overreaction - rather than
the actions of the demonstrators - turns out to be
the story.
China Digital Times posted
the account of one blogger in Beijing, Jason Ng:
I was shocked
by how influential the event was; I was pleased
to see the Chinese authorities become the
proverbial ants in the hot wok.
To
be honest, when Shudong posted the call to
protest, I felt absolutely certain that it was a
joke. Even now I still feel like it was a joke.
Not only do I feel this way, but a lot of people
also feel this way.
If the government hadn't
had such a big reaction, I believe that not so
many people would have participated in the
Jasmine revolution.
Unfortunately, for those
who have guilty consciences, at a certain point,
demons can be heard in the sound of the midnight
wind. [1]
With its ceaseless calls for
"stability", China's government has backed itself
into a Confucian corner.
"Instability" - a multipolar
society fueled by access to the Internet - is
becoming a fact of life, the new default setting.
The intrusiveness of the "Great Firewall" and the
security apparatus attempting to impose stability
are threatening to become more prominent irritants
than the dissent they are meant to stifle.
Unless the Chinese government
has enough resources to send police to every
street corner, a goon to every dissident's
household, and a fifty-center to every online
forum whenever an impish website announces a
demonstration, it is going to have to develop new
tools to manage China's political life.
The
most relevant lesson for China from the people's
revolts in the Arab world is that single-party
authoritarianism is increasingly vulnerable. When
only state tools (police, security forces and the
army) and the occasional club-wielding thugs are
available to counter widespread political dissent,
the government quickly finds itself on the wrong
side of the public-relations equation.
China's future may look more
like Russia and Iran's: messy and multi-party.
Both
Russia and Iran have chosen to reconcile
themselves to multi-party politics, if not
democracy. To protect the ruling groups, they have
created, financed and preferentially promoted
through pro-state media and various murky
machinations nationalist political parties that
serve as another weapon against democratic
dissent.
Certainly, Iran sent as
chilling but more effective message for
pro-government parties in the call of the Majlis
(parliament) for the death penalty for key
opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi
Karroubi, than it was for Chinese policemen to put
a rice bag over the head of a dissident, Liu
Shihui, punch him and break his leg. [2]
The
calculation that people will embrace Confucian
authoritarianism looks more and more risky as
domestic and international forces impinge on
China, much as they did the at the first modern
collapse of Confucianism at the fall of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911).
The Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) may find it necessary to become more Taoist
- to react to events rather than pretend to
control them all - and think about replacing its
overseas Confucius Institutes with Laozi
academies.
The question, however, is
whether the CCP dares surrender some of the
perquisites and power that go with being the
"father and mother of the people".
There are indications that
the Chinese government is going to, if anything,
double down on "stability" by perpetuating
single-party rule through the second-generation of
princelings.
If the Chinese leadership
does not draw useful and important lessons from
the total princeling failure in Libya, coming on
the heels of the massive public repudiation of
Hosni Mubarak's son and rumored heir-apparent,
Gamal, then its situation is potentially dire.
Muammar Gaddafi's son, Saif,
had staked out political space for himself as the
sane one in the family: the suit-wearing, London
School of Economics-educated technocrat who would
manage the family business (which his father had
put on a sound geopolitical footing by engineering
an unlikely - and expensive - post-terrorism,
post-weapons of mass destruction, post-Lockerbie
rapprochement with the West) on neo-authoritarian
terms.
But he instantaneously
bankrupted his political capital in a
finger-wagging TV address in support of the
crackdown. Steve Clemons wrote:
What is interesting is that Saif
Gaddafi is no idiot. He has seen for some time
that his father's government was brittle and
fragile - and that a spark could come along and
unleash internal rage against those holding
incumbent power.
Much to the distress and
private anger of Libyan leader Moammer Gaddafi's
chief internal security and military czars, Saif
Gaddafi has led a domestic campaign of
reconciliation and bridge-building with the
Muslim Brotherhood, considered at that time to
be the regime's chief political opponent. At
Saif's urging and with grudging support from his
father, various former leaders of the Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group had been appointed to
various key government and semi-government
positions of responsibility.
When I was
in Libya, three of the LIFG's top tier - the
Emir of the group as well as the head of
planning, and of armaments - were taken off of
death row and released. I was there and met them
and watched the discomfort of the chief of
internal security as this was happening. Saif
was trying to make the police state his father
had built relax its grip and to reconcile with
many of those it feared.
Thus, while I am no fan of
Gaddafi, the full story of the revolution inside
Libya can't be told without understanding that
Saif Gaddafi, a likely successor to his father,
believed in certain kinds of reforms and
inclusion early - but given the tenor, the
arrogance, and distance from reality he
exhibited in his televised comments, he showed
that he doesn't understand the public grievances
driving this revolution.
There is little hope that
any of these regimes in the Middle East really
understand what an inclusive, non-totalitarian
regime would really look like. [3]
The
princeling problem is not a matter of mere
academic interest to China.
The
man widely expected to lead China after Hu Jintao
retires as president, Xi Jinping, is himself a
princeling, the son of Xi Zhongxun, who
implemented the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
(SEZ) reform.
Reuters was granted its own
exclusive trove of 1,000 WikiLeaks cables. Paul
Eckert's February 17 review of the cables
concentrated on the outsized role of princelings
in the CCP elite - and in Xi's mindset.
Relations at
the party's top echelon are "akin to those in
the executive suite of a large corporation, as
determined by the interplay of powerful
interests, or as shaped by competition between
princelings with family ties to party elders and
'shopkeepers' who have risen through the ranks
of the Party," said a cable from July 2009,
citing conversations with a source with family
connections to senior leaders.
Shopkeepers is a derogatory
term the offspring of revolutionary leaders use
to describe those without elite party family
backgrounds, a fellow princeling who befriended
Xi as a teenager told diplomats.
"While my father was
bleeding and dying for China, your father was
selling shoelaces," the friend, who now lives
outside China, quoted one of his peers as
saying.
Retired, and in some cases
active, leaders and their families had taken
firm control of sectors such as electric power,
oil, banking, real estate and precious gems and
they opposed media openness, fearing the
scrutiny this might bring to their activities,
it said.
"The central feature of
leadership politics was the need to protect
oneself and one's family from attack after
leaving office," said the cable.
"Ever since the 1989
Tiananmen protests and the 1991 collapse of the
Soviet Union, a number of party elders have been
pushing to place their progeny atop the party,
believing that only their own offspring can be
trusted to run the party," a diplomat wrote in a
cable after conversations with a party think
tank scholar.
Other informants also insist
that Xi's upbringing among the ruling elite is
the best indicator of his attitudes. "Party
elders were primarily concerned with having
someone 'conservative' like Xi in place who will
not threaten their 'vested interests,'" said the
journalist with family ties to the leadership.
"Our contact is convinced
that Xi has a genuine sense of 'entitlement,'
believing that members of his generation are the
'legitimate heirs' to the evolutionary
achievements of their parents and therefore
'deserve to rule China'," said a long November
2009 cable summarizing two years of
conversations with the friend who was close to
Xi during their youth.[4]
If the
WikiLeaks cables are correct - and there is no
guarantee they are; diplomats are not immune to
alarmism, wishful thinking, the attractions of
delivering opinions their superiors want to hear,
and plain, simple error - the CCP is risking
self-immolation by placing at the apex of power a
mediocre princeling who instinctively understands
the elite's obsession with profit, power, and
protection but little else.
Inevitably, princelings will
serve as the focus of popular resentment in any
Chinese political crisis. People may be willing to
sacrifice individual rights for national
development, but not to perpetuate personal
privilege into the second or third generation. In
such circumstances, Xi Jinping may be more
liability than asset as the face of the party.
What
may save Xi Jinping is an assist from China's
dissidents, whose perceptions of people power and
events in the Middle East seem as mired in
nostalgia for 1989 and recollections of Tiananmen
as the leadership is obsessed with the collapse of
the Soviet Union in 1991.
Many
Chinese dissidents are understandably infatuated
with the spectacle of large crowds in large
squares.
There is also appears to be
an understandable but somewhat more dubious
assumption that the magic process of democracy
will adequately resolve the deeply rooted problems
created or papered-over by decades of
authoritarian rule.
Unfortunately, revolution in
China will probably look very little like the
Velvet revolution in Czechoslovakia - which
inspired the optimistic liberal democratic
aspirations of China's dissident Charter 08 - or
even the Egyptian revolution. It may very well
look a lot like the Soviet collapse of 1991: the
near instantaneous liquidation of the massive
territories and state assets of a multi-national
empire.
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