China turns the screws for 'stability' at all costs
As 1998 draws to a close, China has clearly launched a crackdown on dissent. The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin examines some of the trends behind the repression and queries whether it will serve the Chinese Communist Party's aim of sustaining stability in 1999.
HONG KONG (JP): As Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov suggested a strategic triangle between India, China and Russia in Delhi last week, and as China bluntly rejected that idea, at least one Indian leader should have reminded Primakov that Russia and India are, after all, both democracies.
The reminder would have been appropriate and not just because Primakov sometimes seems nostalgic for the failed Soviet past. China has ended 1998 by giving a very pointed reminder of its own: For the foreseeable future, the People's Republic will remain a controlled and repressive communist state.
Put another way, it does not look like being a very happy New Year for any Chinese patriot who believes that China is old enough and wise enough to remain stable amid freedom of expression and freedom of the press.
For anyone who believes that continually suppressing dissent is simply not in the interests of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and for all Chinese, communists and noncommunists alike, who yearn for the arrival of a thoroughly modern China which the whole world respects -- well, it does not look being a wonderful 1999 for them, either.
Last week, the embryonic China Democracy Party (CDP) was told in clear and unmistakable terms that organized opposition to the CCP will not be tolerated.
Three of the founding members of the CDP were charged and heavily sentenced to a total of 36 years imprisonment for "inciting the overthrow of state power". Another dissident, who briefly tried to organize laid-off workers earlier in the year, was detained in July but has only now been sentenced to 10 years in jail.
Equally significant, as the New Year approaches, throughout China, editors and publishers, artists and journalists, film directors and television producers, writers and singers -- even those developing software for computers -- were clearly warned that they must not do anything which might lead to the overthrow of state power, or which might endanger state security or social order.
Living in Indonesia under conditions of restored freedom, it is probably hard to imagine the psychologically deadening effect of the latest catch-all edicts from Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership compound in Beijing.
A nation already inured to indirect references to political reality, and a populace already intimidated by the continuously firm smack of hard-line totalitarian government will be even less likely to speak out concerning the many vexed problems besetting China's economic development. The policy of the powers-that-be is unmistakable: The regime has also set its face against meaningful political reform.
Additionally, the Chinese leadership is so worried about the political situation that it is postponing economic reforms, and sustaining welfare economics which it cannot afford. All these moves seem certain given the increased political hazards in the medium term.
Too easily and too naively, analysts of Chinese affairs have been talking about the new "Beijing Spring" which was supposed to be evolving this year. But there was none of the spontaneity and forthright controversy that characterized the real Beijing Spring 20 years ago, in 1978.
This year's so-called Beijing Spring was altogether too constrained, too limited to a relatively small circle, to really deserve the spring-like simile. The so-called spring seemed to be an exercise in people seeing just how much they might get away with. Now they have their answer: very little.
Should there be any doubt on this, the whole crackdown has been justified by the top two Chinese leaders.
Former premier Li Peng led off a couple of weeks ago with a strong attack on Western-style democracy in a Western newspaper, and President Jiang Zemin has now embellished Li's sentiments in two major speeches, in which the key motif has been the CCP's dedication to maintain stability at all costs.
"Any destabilizing factor which crops up should be resolutely nipped in the bud," President Jiang told an audience of police and judicial officials, as he urged them to show no mercy in stamping out threats to the nation.
Since the security apparatus has never shown any signs of developing a gentle touch, the puzzle remains why the Chinese communists have set about this crackdown with such verbal and administrative vigor.
No major threat to the regime is visible, even though the lagging economy is multiplying the popular discontents.
The CDP is far too small a reality to represent a real danger -- and the CDP leaders, who are now imprisoned, in any case recognized the primacy of the CCP in Chinese politics. Similarly, the numbers of Chinese dissidents are too small and already too constrained to be able to mount any serious challenge to the communist government.
Much more likely, the very absence of free discussion within China plus the logic of closed bureaucratic politics within the vast security apparatus together mean that the CCP is jousting with excessive fears and shadows of its own making. As in the former Soviet Union, so in China today, the relatively few dissidents may loom as a far greater threat than they actually are.
To be sure, since the economy is almost certainly not growing as fast as is claimed by the use of China's questionable statistics, there are some huge problems associated with failed or failing state-owned enterprises, and the large numbers of workers in the cities, who are losing their jobs as a consequence.
But ironically, the current crackdown could have the effect of making an eruption of popular anger more, rather than less, likely. Under the Jiang-Li factional control, China lacks a political leadership which can see clearly that it can only gain, in terms of stability, if the people's frustrations are more freely expressed and are no longer bottled up, just waiting to explode.
Instead, Jiang and Li clearly define stability in terms of ever tighter administrative and police control. Yet it is easy to see one particular reason why the Chinese authorities are very worried about preserving stability right now. As President Jiang put it, "Nineteen ninety-nine will be an important year in the history of our party and national development. The significance of continuing our work to maintain social order cannot be underestimated."
Jiang cited only two reasons for concern -- the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic and the return of Macau after some 442 years of Portuguese colonial rule. But the problem is more acute than that.
China almost has a tradition of anniversaries highlighting unrest, and this coming year, 1999, will focus the 10th anniversary of the 1989 Beijing Massacre, the 20th anniversary of the crushing of Beijing's 1978 to 1979 Democracy Wall, the 30th anniversary of the 1969 Sino-Soviet border war, the 40th anniversary of the 1959 revolt in Tibet, the 50th anniversary of the 1949 communist revolution in China and, above all, perhaps, the 80th anniversary of the May 4 Movement in 1919, that magical tumultuous moment in China when nationalism and democracy both seemed imperative.
Whether the current crackdown will defuse these potential time bombs remains to be seen, but for the moment, it leaves China- watchers reflecting on what does, or does not, undermine the security of the state.
No country, not even China, can afford to squander and abuse the courage and the determination which many Chinese dissidents often demonstrate, by their willingness to risk long prison terms.
The current communist leadership forgets that there is nothing so subversive, nothing so likely to overthrow a system as the sullen silence, the dearth of imagination, the lack of innovation and the bitter frustrations which sustained repression, combined with the absence of a meaningful degree of political freedom, always breeds, in any country.