Could China become another Egypt?

By S.P.SETH

The People’s Power that has overthrown regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and continues to create tremors elsewhere in the Middle East, is creating a debate of sorts about its ripple effect on China.

Here in Australia two prominent Sydney Morning Herald journalists hold different views, not about the repressive nature of the system in China but about its efficacy to prevent a popular upsurge.

Its international editor, Peter Hartcher, is inclined to think that the CPC, at the very least, is worried and nervous about the revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East and its possible impact on China.

Otherwise, they wouldn’t be putting in place filtering and censoring processes on the Internet to deny access to its people about developments in Egypt, and the “jasmine” revolution in Tunisia.

But the Internet censorship has its limitations as resourceful activists can breach them.

Already, there are calls on websites, many of which reportedly originating overseas and run by exiled Chinese activists, calling on the Chinese people to band together for demonstrations in major Chinese cities “to seek freedom, democracy and political reform to end ‘one party rule’ ”.

The Chinese government is already busy rounding up activists and dissidents to minimize the danger.

Hartcher quotes from a Twitter message from Ai Weiwei, a prominent human rights activist, “It only took 18 days for the collapse of a military regime [in Egypt] which was in power for 30 years and looked harmonious and stable.”

Ai added, “This thing [the Chinese government] that has been in place for 60 years may take several months.”

In a separate opinion piece in the same newspaper, John Garnaut has a different take on this.

He opines that a people’s uprising in China (like in Egypt) is “a practical impossibility [because]…the Chinese Communist Party is a more professional and well-resourced dictatorship.”

Which means that China’s oligarchs are doing a ‘better’ job of policing people and creating fear among them.

To say that a dictatorship is more secure because it is more repressive is to put logic on its head.

Any regime that seeks security through a repressive system, better resourced or not, is living on borrowed times.

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had nearly perfected instruments of state repression, testified by 90 per cent plus results in elections.

Still a spark from a relatively small Tunisia brought down the whole house.

Of course, China has done well with its economic growth, while Egypt remained a basket case.

But China is experiencing serious problems with its economy, like inflation, unsustainability of continuing high growth rates, disproportionate dependence on export sector, sectoral imbalances, emerging bubble, especially in real estate and stock markets, and bad bank loans.

China needs to grow at a relatively higher rate just to keep up with unemployment in the country. If that can’t be sustained, growing unemployment will accentuate social discord.

Besides, economic growth by itself doesn’t create legitimacy and harmony, as evident from 90,000 “mass incidents” of unrest in 2009.

In a recent speech, President Hu Jintao himself reportedly acknowledged growing social unrest in China, and called on the Party and the government “to strengthen and improve a mechanism for safeguarding the rights and interests of the people.”

With growing chasm between urban and rural areas and huge gap in people’s incomes, China is developing into a very unequal society.

The situation is further compounded with widespread corruption and nepotism.

The “princelings”, (the children of party leaders) have their snouts in regional and national cookie jars.

In this sense, the situation in China looks very much like in Middle East where corruption and nepotism have been so rife for as long as one can remember.

The spontaneous eruption of People’s Power in Egypt and elsewhere also showed how shallow and shaky are the foundations of dictatorships; in the way the long ruling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were overthrown once people were able to shake off their fear of these unpopular and illegitimate rulers.

Another striking commonality between the Middle Eastern and Chinese situation is a total absence of any moral foundation and vision for their societies.

For instance, ever since Deng Xiaoping sanctified greed as his country’s guiding philosophy, when he opened up the economy in the eighties, the country is bereft of any moral vision and ideological underpinning.

A country like China, with its long tradition of family and clan connections and Confucian ideology found itself in a moral and ideological vacuum.

Its most telling manifestation is the rootless existence of the migrant workers from rural areas into urban centers. Back home in their villages, they lived as part of a living organism of familiar social connections and traditions.

In the cities, working on constructions sites and in factories, they are an amorphous lot just living to eke out an income---however paltry or uncertain.

On top of it, they are also blamed, and get into trouble with the police, for the rising tide of crimes in the urban centers.

Even among the urbanites, people are living in a world of dog eat dog.

In other words, there is no discernible higher purpose in life except to become rich in all sorts of questionable and immoral ways.

And not everyone has the connections to do that. As result, the gap between those with connections and others (which is the majority of the people) without it, keep widening to the annoyance and frustration of people at the antics of the rich and powerful, a sure recipe for any kind of revolution.

It might take time, or might happen sooner rather than later, but the ground is ripe for a spark to kindle a mighty fire to engulf China’s rulers.

The coercive state apparatus is no insurance against the people’s anger when it wells up, as the Middle Eastern dictators are finding out to their cost.

The popular upsurge in Arab countries doesn’t mean that it will follow the same pattern in China.

Even in the Middle East, the local conditions differ in some important ways among different countries and the cost in lives in some will be heavier than in others to achieve liberation from their rulers.

The important thing is that the spontaneous rise of People’s Power there is becoming a metaphor for getting rid of decaying and decadent regimes that have long since outlived their expiry dates.

Another important feature is that the popular upsurge in Middle East is showing the world that people do not have to live in perpetual fear of their rulers’ coercive state power.

And if they can overcome their fear, they can also overthrow their oligarchs.

There is a strong message in this for CPC. Which is that unless the regime loosens its control and share power and prosperity with its people, it might become history like Hosni Mubarak and his ruling party in Egypt.