China as an alternative global model

By S.P.SETH

When the United States’ political system was in gridlock over the question of raising the country’s debt limit, China’s official media couldn’t help lecturing Washington over its bad housekeeping.

Its news-agency, Xinhua, said, “It is time for the naughty boys in Washington to stop chicken games before they cause more damages.” In another commentary, the agency said that, “China has every right now to demand the US to address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets.”

Well, imagine China’s glee in being able to talk down to the United States in its capacity as its principal creditor. China must have waited long for this day, not believing that the day will ever come.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that China fancies itself as a preferred alternative global model. As the Economist observes, “So attempts to apply precepts devised by ancient Chinese philosophers to the modern world are in vogue. One popular revival is the [ancient] notion of tianxia, or ‘all under heaven.’”

“ Tianxia”, according to the Economist, “is widely understood as a unified world dominated by one country (call it the ‘middle kingdom’, perhaps), to which neighbors and those beyond look for guidance and pay tribute.”

How will this global system work? Apparently, one way is China’s ‘benign’ authority drawn from its moral and political example, and accepted by the rest of the world. There is a view in China that it once enjoyed such moral and political ascendancy widely accepted by rest of the world around it. And it is only a question of reviving and reasserting that dominance.

However much China might want a new Middle Kingdom, it is frankly a pipedream. First, the world has long since moved on from those times, if they ever existed as postulated by a new crop of Chinese scholars.

Second: any revival of China’s past brings it into conflict with the narrative of the country’s communist revolution that was based on rejection of the past. Indeed, its main premise was that China lost its way because it clung to its past and failed to reinvent itself in the modern world. That was said to explain its subjugation by the West and Japan.

And now to argue that China’s traditional past was right all along and should be re-established as a global order will need re-writing its history. That will be a stupendous task, if it could be undertaken at all. In that sort of re-writing, the communist revolution, and the state based on it, will become an aberration, making the country’s communist rule even more illegitimate.

Third: to elevate present-day China into a worthy global example, it has to have a certain moral stature and ascendancy. And, by no stretch of imagination, its communist regime is a standard bearer.

The country’s communist oligarchy is afraid of its own shadow. The way it has gone about rounding up dissidents and intellectuals and shutting up social media sites, fearing a possible onset of Arab Spring in China, is an example of its nervousness. The regime seems to be all the time worrying about some social cataclysm overtaking it.

For instance, according to the New York Times (quoting WikiLeaks), Chinese officials in 2009 sought the help of US embassy in Beijing to block Chinese citizens from visiting the Twitter website with postings of accurate pollution readings in the capital.

They feared that the comparison between their lower and sanitized readings and the Twitter postings by Americans might lead to “social consequences”—read social unrest.

Despite China’s impressive economic growth rate, the regime worries that its “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable” growth could create social instability.

And they are right because unless statistical economic growth is translated into social justice for all, there is every reason that things could derail and collide as badly as happened recently between its two high-speed trains. Like the hurry in putting together the high-speed rail system into operation without the necessary preparatory work and in the midst of an endemic culture of corruption, the country’s entire economy is built on such creaky foundations that have not been adequately secured.

And these are becoming shakier by the day with reports of rising unrest and demonstrations in different parts of the country, including the capital.

There are many examples of social unrest arising from endemic corruption, widening urban-rural divide, huge income disparities, demolition of old urban dwellings to make way for new, often without adequate and timely compensation, arbitrary acquisition of rural land for urban and industrial development, iniquitous and arbitrary local levies in rural areas. choking cities and polluted rivers, lack or absence of transparency, an arbitrary justice system and the list goes on.

The government takes great care, through its wide network of security and surveillance system, that all the incidents of social unrest remain local and do not develop into a wider conflagration, as has happened in the Arab world.

There is no suggestion here that the Chinese regime, and the system underpinning it, is about to collapse, though the same could also have been said of the Tunisian and Egyptian dictators who had apparently perfected their respective systems of internal repression over many years. But when the time came, it wasn’t much use against people power.

The point to make here is that with all the steam building up within China’s pressure-cooker society, it has to find some outlet before being blown up. The one way to release is by introducing political reforms, such as popularly elected representative governments at all levels and constitutionally validated political institutions, so that people can vent their grievances and frustrations through legal channels.

The problem is that China’s communist oligarchs fear that this might not work in their favor, and they will lose their monopoly on power. Their self-serving argument is that the Western-style democracy is not suited to China and will lead to social instability and chaos.

Rather, it is the other way around. Because, if China’s scattered unrest here and there is not channeled properly through legal avenues, this is likely, at some point, to take the form of the Arab Spring now pervading in the Middle East with China’s communist rulers gone with it. It might not happen now but unless political reforms are introduced in China soon, it is bound to happen sooner or later in some form or the other.