How stable is China?

By S.P.SETH

One thing noticeable about China these days is the cockiness and arrogance of its rulers. It is reflected both at home and abroad.

In the latter case, there is a new sense of entitlement about China’s central place in global affairs.

And when President Barack Obama spent three days in China, more than any of the countries that he visited in his recent Asian tour, it simply reassured Beijing about China’s manifest destiny as the new Middle Kingdom.

In China’s relationship with the outside world, this arrogance is reflected at several levels.

At one level, a deep-rooted sense of historical humiliation of European and Japanese occupation in the past creates an exaggerated sense of nationalism.

And it requires constant reassurance of China’s new perceived great power status and a compulsion to reassert its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

For instance, it is constantly evoked in relation to Taiwan, with China prepared to use coercive diplomacy with other countries to assert its position.

Beijing also uses coercive diplomacy to prevent other countries from having any kinds of dealings with the Dalai Lama, and Rabiya Kadeer, the leader of the Uighur community in exile.

In the case of Tibet and Xinjiang, even though these regions are already part of China and are recognized as such by most of the world, Beijing still remains paranoid.

As an example, the revived tensions on India-China border recently were, in large part, due to New Delhi’s refusal to bow to pressure from Beijing to not allow the Dalai Lama to visit Tawang, a town on India-China border and the centre of a major monastry of Tibetan Buddhism.

In the same way, China-Australia relations recently reached a crisis point when Canberra granted a visa to Rebiya Kadeer, the Uighur leader, to attend the premier of a documentary about her life at the Melbourne Film Festival.

What it means is China’s enhanced new world status is becoming a dangerous mix of national pride and paranoia.

An example is a series of recent naval incidents in South China Sea with the Chinese ships harrassing the US navy. Vice Admiral John Bird, commander of the Seventh Fleet, recently told the Sydney Morning Herald that the jostling of a US ship in March by Chinese vessels had been followed by other lesser incidents.

He said, “I would like to believe China learnt from that but, to be truthful, at any time they could do that again…”

He added, “They have made it clear they consider the South China Sea to be more or less theirs.”

It is not difficult to see that such brinkmanship can get out of hand.

At the domestic level too, there is a sense of entitlement that the people should be grateful to the Communist Party for having done such a wonderful job of economic growth and national glory.

Therefore, whenever there is some resistance to and criticism of the Party’s policies and authoritarian ways, China’s oligarchy is increasingly reacting with even greater intolerance and repression.

When Hu Jintao became President, there was some expectation of political liberalism, at least within the CPC. But that has been dashed.

For instance, after some semblance of activity among a handful of human rights lawyers, most of them “are either in jail or have had their licenses removed”, according to Mo Shao-ping, one of the activist lawyers.

Professor Fan Yafeng, another defender of human rights, has been sacked from China’s Academy of Social Sciences. He believes that, “The Government has given up all political reforms. Their only aim is to protect their own interests.”

In his view, China is closer to its “crisis point” than many people believe.

The government is targeting any group that has the potential of emerging as an organized opposition to its authoritarian rule.

A case in point is the crackdown on informal church groups, “house churches”, which operate outside official control.

China’s Christian population is estimated now at about 130 million people, and the government keeps a tight control over the church organizations.

But “house churches” have resisted government control, thus inviting persecution with eviction from their buildings and detention and imprisonment of some of their leaders.

The government obviously sees them as a serious threat with their capacity to mobilize support inside and outside the country.

The mushrooming of ‘black jails’ to detain people petitioning the central authorities against injustice at local levels, is another example of increasing repression.

According to the Human Rights Watch report, An Alleyway in Hell, “…provincial and municipal level officials have developed an extrajudicial system to intercept, abduct, and detain petitioners in black jails.”

It adds, “Their emergence since 2003 constitutes one of the most serious and widespread uses of extra-legal detention in China’s recent history.”

It is difficult to believe that the central leadership is not aware of such illegal activities. Indeed, this looks like outsourcing the dirty work of official agencies.

The government is so much obsessed with managing the country’s image that it simply refuses to see how bad things are.

Wherever one looks, the situation has the makings of a serious social crisis. For instance, the abduction of children doesn’t seem to grab the attention of the authorities, the way it should in any civilized society.

The unemployment is ever rising; another twenty million added with the closure of many factories making goods for export.

Which puts further strain on an already depressed rural economy, as most of these unemployed were rural migrants working in urban industrial economy.

China’s economic stimulus package might show healthy economic growth with inflated stock market indicators and property valuation, but they are not doing much, if anything, to stimulate employment.

The social services sectors like health, education, and welfare are starved of funds.

The stimulus package seems intended as a stopgap arrangement, awaiting the revival of the export sector.

And that might not happen, at least not for some years, because the United States has serious debt problems.

Commenting on the wastefulness of some of the stimulant money, Zhang Xin, an investment executive, points out that “…in Pudong [Shanghai’s business district], vacancy rates are as high as 50 per cent and they are still building new skyscrapers.”

Such wasteful spending on construction projects, and to fuel stock market frenzy, is contributing further to corruption, which is already a national disease.

Even the much hyped-up talk of a significant decline in poverty in China has to be approached with caution, when 800 million farmers are not part of the urban industrial economy.

According to Irene Khan of the Amnesty International, the case for China’s alleviation of poverty is overblown.

At the same time, China’s industrial and business sector is controlled by party apparatchik in cahoots with their favored industrial and business barons.

Therefore, the general image of a prosperous China requires some serious questioning.

The country, under its communist rulers, is a robber-baron economy working for the powerful operating in a moral vacuum.

As Xu Zhiyong, an activist, has reportedly said, “…If China reaches crisis point… it will be because of the accumulated rage from social injustices.”

And this rage is frequently expressed through demonstrations, protests and anger in different parts of the country.

Admittedly, it is not an organized nationwide movement yet. This is because the government maintains a tight surveillance mechanism with exemplary punishments for those stepping out of line.

Most people have a sense of where the line is. For instance, any advocacy of democracy, and questioning of the CPC’s monopoly power, can be dangerous, and even traitorous, because the Party and the Nation are synonymous.

That is where the danger is. Because, any build up of social rage can easily be channeled into national hysteria over some perceived slight and/or humiliation of China’s national pride; leading to an international crisis or worse.

However, there is a danger here for the Party too. Because the same organized hysteria is also capable of being visited on the CPC, if it fails to live up to China’s imagined place in the world.

What it means is that in the next decade or so, China’s rulers will need to perform some magical feat of maintaining social stability by channeling people’s rage into chauvinist pride.

It will be a delicate operation, with unpredictable results for China internally and for the world.