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Soldiers on Tiananmen Square by jck_photos, on Flickr
With the news out of Bahrain and Libya tonight thoughts of which oppressive regime might fall next focus on the Middle East (since no matter what the Wisconsin government is not going to fall) will it be Jordan? Or perhaps Yemen? But maybe the next real hot spot might be even further to the East, as in the giant nation of China.
China is a rather different situation than the Middle East autocracies. While they are in no way a free society, the levers of control are very different in the semi-communist nation. While Egypt did try the crude step of turning off the internet, too late as it turns out, the Chinese have always been very concerned about the power of information and its free flow in the 1.3 billion citizen nation.
They have long put strong and on-going censorship on the intent in China, up to and including putting the strong arm on companies like Google and Twitter. This puts them way ahead of the older autocrats of the Middle East who did not really comprehend the “Google” and the “Twitter”.
That said there are a lot of problems in China that lend themselves to a popular upraising. As the economic strings have been loosened the rampant corruption of the Communist Party has again and again been shown. Even though they crack down on reporting such instances it gets harder and harder to make the “few bad apples” argument as corruption affects everything from school construction to licenses to build factories to failing to investigate child abduction (a huge and growing problem in China).
This combined with the capability of micro blogging sites and the fact of two successful popular uprisings and two more up in the air a this time has made some Chinese activist begin to talk about their own “Jasmine Revolution”. Naturally this has the authorities in China concerned.
They have censored any post on the internet containing the words Jasmine Revolution (so this post won’t be showing up on Chinese web-crawlers) and have change cell phone service so that no multiple person texts can be sent.
The Chinese government has also been cracking down on pro-democracy activists in the last few days with several being placed under house arrest and two disappearing all together. . . .
It was the security forces that broke the Tiananmen Square protests twenty years ago. It seems that the Chinese government learned a lesson from those protests and does not intend to let the start, so they don’t have to bring in the Army to very visibly put them down. This government is more savvy than its predecessor. They remember the years of bad press they got from Tiananmen Square and would rather stop such things in their tracks now.
But for all the cracking down on and swarming of potential protest sites, the Chinese government is worried, just as all the autocrats are worried. From the New York Times article:
In a sign of the ruling Communist Party’s growing anxiety, President Hu Jintao summoned top leaders to a special “study session” on Saturday and urged them to address festering social problems before they became threats to stability.
“The overall requirements for enhancing and innovating social management are to stimulate vitality in the society and increase harmonious elements to the greatest extent, while reducing inharmonious factors to the minimum,” he told the gathering, according to Xinhua, the official news agency.
That is a little muddy to be sure, but the basic point is that they know that there are social problems that the Communist Party has not only failed to address they have failed to acknowledge. Just as Hosni Mubarak promised reforms to try to placate his own protesters Hu Jintao is looking around and feeling that things must change faster if they are to head off the same fate.
This is a very tricky path for Hu to walk, as the other major Communist country that tried to loosen state control of the economy collapsed and was replaced. What is different here is the Soviet Union had two years of double digit contraction in their economy before they collapsed. China has a white hot economy right now, but that may be a bigger problem.
As income inequality runs up against mine collapses and horrible working conditions in the factories across China the people are starting to wonder if there might not be a better way for them all to gain some benefits from this massive economic expansion. And if there is some group better than the Communist Party to be the shepherd of that change.
I can’t say if this will lead to a popular uprising. Such things are very hard to predict, and in China with its massive and organized state security services it is hard to say if it would take off or be able to be sustained. Revolution is always a tricky thing. We have been happy to see the success in Egypt and Tunisia, but the blood on the streets in Libya and Bahrain show the other way that revolution can go. The next few days will probably tell the tale in China.
To me it is hard to say if it would be worth the try in China. I don’t live there and it is not my place to tell them to do it or not to do it. What I hope for tonight is that all the people of the world who wish to have real say in who governs them get it. It is only hope but behind that hope is the commitment to support those who do risk their lives, fortunes and sacred honor for the kind of freedoms we enjoy without a second thought.
What’s on your minds tonight Firedogs? The floor is yours.
6 Comments
The palpable fear radiating from the CCP bigs is nothing new. A confident, strong government wouldn’t worry about controlling communication or going to great lengths against a group like the Falun Gong, who are little more than a fuzzy spiritualist group, the way the CCP does. Well run successful governments don’t need enormous internal security forces or giant internet firewalls. I trust their judgement. Everything they do reeks of insecurity and fear, there must be a reason for it. I don’t think it’s a question of “if” but only “when” unless the CCP can make an orderly transition to a pluralistic democracy before the “when” happens. And I can’t see them having the wisdom or patriotism to do that as it would mean relinquishing power and wealth.
It’s probably helpful to know that when a web site is censored, the term used it that it is “harmonized” — suddenly the quote above makes more sense.
It’s also helpful to know that Chinese lends itself to a level of play on words completely incomprehensible to English speakers, to the point that what we would call a pun is more like what a Chinese speaker would think of as a layered metaphor that just is an ambiguous artifact of the language, and occurs as nuance constantly in everyday speech. In political speech, it often occurs at a frequency of more than once per word.
Much as I am a fan of democracy and free societies, civil unrest in China makes me nervous as a cat. As the sharp and well experienced Rebecca McKinnon (former Beijing bureau chief for CNN, journo professor in Hong Kong, and former board member of The Tor Project among other interesting hobbies) tweeted last week regarding unrest in China (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Whoops! There goes the economy.”
She doesn’t mean China’s economy. She means everyone’s. China is not as uniform in culture as Egypt, say. Under the best of conditions and the worst of governments, you might consider China as a whole to be impossible to rule. China is twice as impossible to rule under the strains of rapid economic and social change that have been stretching her like a string of catgut. As the tone gets higher, China has been, gradually, equalizing its internal reality with the global reality — it is moving toward becoming a global country integrated with global culture, from a position not quite as insulated as North Korea not so many years ago.
When Galileo was condemned by the Catholics, it wasn’t because they thought he was wrong in his science; it was because they thought that what might seem like a (dare I say) unharmonized axiomatic dissonance with accepted cosmology (as taught by the church) might lead to a break in faith with the social contract (faith in the church leadership) which could lead to social chaos.
“They thought the Copernicus system defended by Galileo with such vehemence endangered the faith of simple people and that it was their obligation to prevent it from being taught,” is the modern Catholic apology and apologia. (Artigas/Sanchez de Tocha)
The Catholics tried to manage the flow of scientific and international information as the west hurled itself from medieval to renaissance culture, from the “old world” to the age of discovery, and tried to buffer the blows of change as it careened toward the enlightenment period — it was like a cultural singularity spread across time and space through a slower world.
China is hurtling, but from this side of the inflection point, we don’t know toward what singularity, what renaissance or dark age. China is so big and so pivotal to the world economy and well-being right now. Regardless of our politics, we should be hoping beyond hope that they experience evolution, and not a totally disruptive revolution, as they work out their growing pains.
I did listen to a commentary about China recently that pointed out that that economy can’t make it by selling to the majority of its own consumers, as they make about $3 a day and can’t afford what they make.
I’d question that. China runs two seperate economies, internal and export, with a firewall between them. China does consume the products of it’s internal economy as well as any unsold excess from it’s export manufacturers. And they have a high savings rate to boot.
It’s hard to equate US wages with wages in China because the cost of living differs greatly. A $90 polo shirt might only cost $5 in China. A reasonably fancy $40 meal might only cost $4 in China. And there’s healthcare…
James Galbraith’s article on the Chinese economy gives a decent sampling of exactly how different the Chinese economy really is:
http://motherjones.com/politics/2005/09/dragon-tales
The bottom line is that life in China has improved drastically over the last 20 years. So I suspect that the PTB in China will have a pretty strong chance of weathering the storm.
It’s true that they have significant problems in the area’s of political liberties and the environment. But then again, who doesn’t? For example, the US jails 5 or 6 times a larger percentage of it’s population than China.
The problem for the PRC is that expectations have risen in tandem with the standard of living and the pace of growth is unsustainable. What happens when the modern Chinese economy hits its inevitable first bust cycle and the people feel powerless to influence policy?
Reliable data for China is scarce but it appears likely that China is near or perhaps even at or past the Lewis Turning Point where labor surpluses are the dominant driver of manufacturing costs. Manufacturing capacity driven by low labor costs is already leaking out of China to countries like Vietnam and India.