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2 Smelling salts for China's
Jasmine dream By Peter Lee
Scenarios include secession by
Tibet (not just the autonomous region but also
large swaths of majority-Tibetan territories in
Sichuan, Qinghai and Gansu) and the establishment
of a pro-Western/pro-Indian government in Lhasa;
nationalist agitation if not independence in
Xinjiang; a spasm of aggrieved hypernationalist
sentiment, and vigorous competition by candidate
strongmen in the ranks of the party, the security
apparatus, and the military for the levers of
power and profit as the economy lurches into
crisis.
More problematically, the
Egypt experience has elicited another iteration of
idealistic Chinese paeans to the selfless national
love displayed by the armed forces, which will
wield decisive force
during a period of crisis and
transition. Liberal blogger Great River wrote:
The new element
of the Egyptian incident is that it told the
world: the organs of the state belong to the
nation, and the nation belongs to the people.
Therefore, national organs must respond to the
call of the people and not oppose the people.
This is an obvious fact in democratic societies,
but has not been endorsed by some autocratic
societies. In these countries the army and the
police are used routinely to suppress opposition
and dissent.
This time the Egyptian army
heeded the call of the people and stood on the
correct side of history. This is an act of great
significance, indicating to militaries in
similar countries to keep in good order and not
act as the henchmen of the tyrants. I dare to
predict that if, in the future the circumstances
of 20 years ago are repeated, no strongman would
dare give the order to fire and the army would
not lightly obey. Whoever gives the order to
fire, the army would turn its weapons around and
settle accounts! [5]
This is an
interesting but ahistorical expression of
optimism, given what actually happened in
Tiananmen and fact that the overall political and
economic success of the KMT (Whampoa Academy and
Northern Expedition) and, subsequently, the CCP
("power comes from the barrel of a gun") were
defined by their development and deployment of
independent military power when "people power" -
political action and mass agitation - were by
themselves ineffectual.
As
for Egypt, it is an awkward fact that Egypt is, at
least for now, under the rule of a military junta
and not governed by its increasingly fractious
collection of people power advocates. In fact,
activists have been obliged to return to Tahrir
Square in an effort to advance their agendas
against the resistance of the military.
Therefore, it might be
posited that militaries are not instinctively or
reliably pro-democratic and their definition of
what constitutes patriotic action is often a
matter of institutional convenience.
Indeed, the armed forces,
when freed from party or state control, may end up
supporting whatever opportunistic faction pleases
them, instead of "the nation" and "the people".
As an object lesson as to how
armed forces actually behave during the collapse
of a communist empire, we can turn to Boris
Yeltsin's career, courtesy of Wikipedia:
On 18 August
1991, a coup against Gorbachev was launched by
the government members opposed to perestroika.
Gorbachev was held in Crimea while Yeltsin raced
to the White House of Russia (residence of the
Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR) in Moscow to defy
the coup. The White House was surrounded by the
military but the troops defected in the face of
mass popular demonstrations. Yeltsin responded
to the coup by making a memorable speech from
the turret of a tank. By 21 August most of the
coup leaders had fled Moscow and Gorbachev was
"rescued" from Crimea and then returned to
Moscow. Yeltsin was subsequently hailed by his
supporters around the world for rallying mass
opposition to the coup.
So far so
good.
But two years
later, the scene was rather different, when
parliamentary opposition to Yeltsin's efforts to
expand presidential power led to a
constitutional crisis and the designation of a
second, competing president of the Russian
Federation by the parliament:
Yeltsin claimed that by
dissolving the Russian parliament in September
1993 he was clearing the tracks for a rapid
transition to a functioning market economy. With
this pledge, he received strong backing from the
leading powers of the West. Yeltsin also sparked
popular unrest with his dissolution of a
parliament increasingly opposed to his
neoliberal economic reforms.
Tens of thousands of
Russians marched in the streets of Moscow
seeking to bolster the parliamentary cause. The
demonstrators were protesting against the
deteriorating living conditions. Since 1989, the
GDP had been declining, corruption was rampant,
violent crime was skyrocketing, medical services
were collapsing and life expectancy falling.
Yeltsin was also increasingly getting the blame.
The pro-parliamentary faction was in
the majority on the streets of Moscow. As for the
army, the flattery, handholding, and a commitment
to risk avoidance seems to have been at least as
important as heeding the popular will:
Between October
2-4, the position of the army was the deciding
factor. The military equivocated for several
hours about how to respond to Yeltsin's call for
action.
Rutskoy [the president
selected by parliament], as a former general,
appealed to some of his ex-colleagues. After
all, many officers and especially rank-and-file
soldiers had little sympathy for Yeltsin. But
the supporters of the parliament did not send
any emissaries to the barracks to recruit
lower-ranking officer corps, making the fatal
mistake of attempting to deliberate only among
high-ranking military officials who already had
close ties to parliamentary leaders. In the end,
a prevailing bulk of the generals did not want
to take their chances with a Rutskoy-Khasbulatov
regime. Some generals had stated their intention
to back the parliament, but at the last moment
moved over to Yeltsin's side. [6]
A
left-wing dissident, Boris Kargalitsky - who was
imprisoned by the USSR for two years and also
detained and beaten by Yeltsin's forces - provides
an account of the army's antagonistic interactions
with people power in the Russian capital in 1993:
On September
21, when Yeltsin declared the Parliament
disbanded, the resistance proved unexpectedly
strong. For almost two weeks, the deputies who
refused to leave remained besieged in the White
House - without electricity or fuel, surrounded
by barbed wire and troops. Thousands of people
rallied at the Parliament building. The police
and the troops beat and dispersed them, but they
still came back. It seemed that something
previously unseen in Russia might come true: the
law would prevail over force, and civil
disobedience would make the troops retreat.
However, this was not to be.
On
October 3, government forces opened fire on the
demonstrators at the Moscow mayor's office and
provoked an armed clash. Hundreds of people were
killed and wounded. Tanks fired point-blank at
the Parliament building. At the Ostankino
television studio, 3,000 unarmed activists and
some twenty or thirty armed defenders of the
Parliament were met by the special unit Vityaz
(Knight), fifteen armored personnel carriers,
and several hundred armed policemen and
soldiers. As soon as the crowd rushed into the
building, the government units took their
positions and opened fire.
The assault on the White
House began early in the morning of October 4,
when armored personnel carriers opened fire on
the crowd assembled at the Parliament. The
shelling, from cannons and large-caliber machine
guns, continued for several hours. While
hundreds of unarmed people hid from fire in the
Parliament basement, more and more
reinforcements kept arriving. Blazes started on
the upper floors. The library, archive, and
computer center were burning. How many people
perished there will never be known.
Despite the intensive
shelling, several thousand people tried to break
through into the White House. They were held
back by machine-gun fire. Soon, soldiers began
plundering all the stores around the White
House. Government forces constantly shot at
nearby residential buildings. One apartment
house caught fire, but the troops did not allow
firefighters in until half of it had burned
down. [7]
Wikipedia continues:
Crushing the
"second October Revolution," which, as
mentioned, saw the deadliest street fighting in
Moscow since 1917, cost hundreds of lives.
Police said, on October 8, that 187 had died in
the conflict and 437 had been wounded.
Unofficial sources named much higher numbers: up
to 2,000 dead.
Yeltsin was backed by the
military only grudgingly, and at the eleventh
hour. The instruments of coercion gained the
most, and they would expect Yeltsin to reward
them in the future. A paradigmatic example of
this was General Pavel Grachev, who had
demonstrated his loyalty during this crisis.
Grachev became a key political
figure, despite many years of charges that he was
linked to corruption within the Russian military.
Grachev presided over the disastrous first Chechen
War as Yeltsin's Minister of Defense. In addition
to military incompetence, he was known as "Pashka
Mercedes" for his alleged corruption. (Dmitry
Kholodov , a journalist who penned a devastating
expose of Grachev, was killed in 1994 by a
booby-trapped suitcase).
The
crushing of the parliamentary opposition in 1993
with the assistance of the army is considered to
be a key milestone in the emasculation of the
legislature and the transformation of Russia into
a "superpresidential" system in which power -
including control of the military - is
concentrated in the executive branch.
Yeltsin allowed the military
to slip the party leash and assume a political
role. Unsurprisingly, the military exploited the
latitude it was given with little regard for the
sensibilities of democracy activists. In 2006,
Zoltan Barany of the University of Texas
concluded:
Yeltsin
acquiesced to the officer corps' political role,
permitted the evolution of a legal framework
that, in fact, legitimated that role, and-as
long as the top brass did not encroach upon
presidential prerogatives-allowed them to run
the armed forces as they saw fit. As a result,
the generals succeeded in circumventing the
radical defense reform Russia had needed and
developed a culture of corruption and abuse of
power unprecedented in Soviet-Russian history.
[8]
The Russian executive branch has
been called a "militocracy" because it is
permeated by ex-military, state security, and
internal security officers. Is it a democracy?
Barany wrote:
Contemporary
Russia is certainly not a democracy, unless one
uses that term so generously as to apply to
virtually all states that hold elections no
matter how skewed and inconsequential they might
be.
This is the system that evolved
out of the intersection - actually the collision -
of military power and people power in the
post-communist period in Russia.
Something to think about as
elites and dissidents pursue diverging fantasies
of authoritarianism and democracy inside China.
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