HONG KONG - If you believe
China's state media, the 10-year reign of
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, soon
to come to an end, has produced a "golden decade"
of rapid economic growth and social stability as
the nation took its rightful place, front and
center, on the international stage. Theirs is a
legacy of peace, harmony and prosperity.
If you believe the
ever-growing group of Chinese critics in exile,
however, this has been a lost decade of rampant
corruption, political stagnation and backsliding
on human rights. Good riddance to the
foot-dragging, ineffectual Hu-Wen partnership!
Paradoxically, both parties
are right - although the utopian language chosen
by state media, as usual, only serves to
undermine the proffered kudos
for the outgoing regime. Nevertheless, Hu and Wen
do deserve credit for turning China into the
world's second-largest economy and for keeping
that economic engine churning even through the
global financial meltdown of 2008.
Breakneck economic growth
under the Hu-Wen administration has seen tens of
millions of people climb out of poverty faster
than at any other time in human history. When Hu
and Wen took office in 2002, annual per capita
income in China stood at US$800; it is now more
than $4,000.
China is also now the world's
biggest exporter of goods, produces and sells more
automobiles than any other country, and boasts the
most elaborate high-speed rail system on the
planet. All of this happened while Hu and Wen were
packing away foreign reserves in excess of $3.2
trillion, far more than any other nation.
Let's not forget China's
three-week-long international coming-out party
four years ago: by most accounts, the 2008 Summer
Olympic Games, hosted by Beijing, were a stunning
success symbolizing China's meteoric rise as an
emerging superpower. Also in 2008, truly a golden
year for China's leaders, a Chinese astronaut
performed a spacewalk.
More
recently, the country has launched its first
aircraft carrier and challenged US influence in
the Asia-Pacific region while at the same time
boasting that no bombs have been dropped nor
missiles or shots fired during China's peaceful
rise.
As Hu, 69, and Wen, 70, head
into the 18th Communist Party Congress - expected
to be held next month - that will select a fifth
generation of Chinese leaders to replace them,
there is indeed a lot to be proud of. The Chinese
economic miracle continued under their watch as
Beijing further burnished its status
internationally.
The problem is, that's only
half the story - the "golden" half that state
media are so fond of trumpeting. There has also
been a dark side to the Hu-Wen years and, in the
end, scintillating economic figures aside, the
pair may have left the country worse off than they
found it.
Some critics even argue that
Hu and Wen don't deserve credit for the blistering
economic gains of the last decade because the
reforms that spurred those gains were implemented
by their predecessors - former president Jiang
Zemin and premier Zhu Rongji. The 10 years under
Jiang and Zhu were the real golden years,
according to this school of thought, and Hu and
Wen have come along to cherry-pick the credit.
True
enough, Hu and Wen were beneficiaries of the
far-sighted polices of the previous
administration. Zhu, in particular, was a
transformational figure in turning China toward
market-based economic reforms and also a
remarkable statesman possessing the kind of
intellect and aplomb not seen in Beijing since the
days of Zhou Enlai.
But it would be churlish and
unfair to give Hu and Wen no credit for the
tremendous economic accomplishments of their era.
If they are going to take credit for their
achievements, however, then they must also accept
blame for their failures - and there have been
many.
As China's economic growth
soared over the past decade, its wealth gap
widened to what economists see as a potentially
dangerous tipping point. China may be the country
with the fastest growing millionaires' club, but
it is also a nation in which nearly 30% of a
population of 1.3 billion lives on less than $2 a
day.
China's rural-urban income
divide is particularly worrisome. Official
figures, which undoubtedly underestimate the
seriousness of the problem, show that people in
the countryside earn only one-third as much as
their urban counterparts.
Furthermore, these figures
reveal that the top 10% of the country's earners
are raking in 23 times more income than the lowest
10%, helping to explain why China's Gini
coefficient - a widely used measure of income
inequality developed by sociologist Corrado Gini -
has risen to nearly 0.5 on a scale ranging from
nought to 1 while Hu and Wen have been in power.
Economists regard any measure
above 0.4 as an alarm bell for potential social
unrest, incidents of which have been rife in China
over the last decade, if also often brutally
suppressed by security forces across the nation -
and this naked brutality amounts to another black
stain on the Hu-Wen years.
An
administration that, as it began, inspired great
hopes for political reform and a more open and
transparent government will end with a record of
iron-fisted repression - of dissident political
voices, of angry citizens who have been cheated
out of their land by corrupt local officials and
of any other person or group deemed a threat to
one-party authoritarian rule.
Of
course, the biggest international embarrassment
for Hu and Wen came in 2010, when Liu Xiaobo, a
scholar and human-rights activist currently
serving an 11-year jail sentence for subversion,
was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. During the
powerful award ceremony in Oslo, an empty chair
symbolized the absent Liu as Norwegian film legend
Liv Ullmann read some of his most famous words: "I
have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police
who have monitored, arrested and interrogated me,
the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges
who sentence me, are my enemies."
The
prisoner's magnanimity toward his persecutors
stood in stark contrast to Beijing's angry
denunciation of his award as "a desecration of the
Peace Prize" and, by ceremony's end, one empty
chair on a stage in Oslo had come to stand not
just for Liu but also for all of the thousands of
lesser-known activists wasting away in Chinese
prisons.
In apparent response, Wen -
who managed to create a far more humane and
likeable public image than Hu, a stiff and stoical
technocrat - repeatedly spoke out about bringing
greater democracy and respect for human rights to
China, but the premier was either insincere or
powerless to put his words into action.
Despite Wen's occasional
pronouncements, political reform was negligible
during his time in office and human-rights
violations a matter of grisly routine.
The
last decade was also characterized by a steady
stream of anti-corruption rhetoric - coming both
from Hu and Wen. Yet the Communist Party of China
- the world's largest political party, with over
80 million members - is among the most corrupt
organizations on earth, and it only became more so
under Hu and Wen.
It is fitting that the Hu-Wen
era should end in the mighty wake of one of the
biggest corruption scandals in the 63-year history
of the People's Republic of China. This sordid
saga resulted in the spectacular downfall of
powerful former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai, who
stands accused of "serious disciplinary
violations" - party code for official malfeasance.
Bo, a charismatic populist
who had hoped to parlay his successful anti-crime
campaign in Chongqing into a seat on the
all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee at the
upcoming party congress, was removed from his
Chongqing post last March and, soon thereafter,
suspended from the ruling Politburo. Bo's wife, Gu
Kailai, received a suspended death sentence last
month after she was convicted of murdering British
businessman Neil Heywood in November 2011.
Bo’s
right-hand man in Chongqing - former police chief
Wang Lijun - was tried in Chengdu on Tuesday for
his alleged part in a failed plot to cover up of
Heywood’s murder and for his later attempt to
defect at the US consulate in Chengdu. A verdict
is expected soon.
The fate of Bo, who hasn't
been seen since he was purged six months ago, is
also expected to be decided ahead of the party
congress so as not to cast a pall over this
once-a-decade changing of the guard.
Both
Hu and Wen always regarded Bo as a threat, and his
dramatic undoing likely stems more from nasty
party in-fighting than from the millions of
dollars he is alleged to have parked in foreign
bank accounts or from the murder of Heywood, in
association with which his name was never even
mentioned during his wife's perfunctory one-day
trial.
Who knows what really
happened in Bo's case, which the party is now
anxious to sweep under the historical rug so that
the new leadership team can have a fresh start
when they are formally installed in March.
Current Vice Premier Li
Keqiang, 57, is expected to take over from Wen,
and Vice President Xi Jinping, 59, is Hu's likely
successor.
In another reminder of how slow
the Communist Party is to change, however, this
month Xi inexplicably disappeared from public life
for two weeks, finally turning up for a minor
event at China Agricultural University on Saturday
morning after missing high-profile appointments
with the likes of US Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton and Danish Prime Minister Helle
Thorning-Schmidt.
As Internet rumors spread that
Xi had suffered a stroke, heart attack or worse,
China's leadership and media maintained a strict
silence, as it sometimes does on matters related
to the health of high officials, as a raft of
questions from foreign media about Xi's condition
was pointedly ignored.
It
is simply incredible that, in 2012, the man who is
almost certainly to be selected as China's next
president in a month's time can disappear entirely
for 14 days without any official explanation.
Anonymous sources were quoted in a number of media
outlets as saying the vice president had suffered
a back injury while swimming, but that's not good
enough in the 21st century in a country with more
than 500,000 million Internet users who love to
gossip and an army of official censors who are
increasingly unable to stop them.
China's political culture
needs to change - and not in any small way. It is
hopelessly anachronistic and corrupt to the core.
For the country truly to experience a golden age,
its politics need to transform over the next 30
years as profoundly as its economy did over the
past three decades. Otherwise, China's success
story will be gilded at best.
Kent
Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer.
He can be reached at kewing56@gmail.com Follow him
on Twitter: @KentEwing1
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