Lack of vision could lead China to the brink

By Sushil P. Seth

SEOUL: The Chinese Communist Party appears jaded and lacking in direction and vision as it approaches its 80th anniversary in July. It is true that China is now a powerful state with a large economy. But there is still a certain tentativeness about it. And the most important reason is that China lacks a self-sustaining institutional system. In other words, the state and the ruling party are indistinguishable. Therefore, if the Communist Party were to implode or be overtaken by a popular uprising, there would be no institutional (political) successor to it.

Being a political dictatorship, China's political rulers have chosen to govern the country through regimentation, repression, terror and, if all else fails, through sheer brutal force. Its examples are myriad, dating back to the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. To cite but a few: the elimination of owner farmers and landlords in the 1950s, the 1957 purges of intellectuals, the 1958 Great Leap Forward leading to mass famine with starvation deaths alone estimated at up to 36 million people and the terrible chaos of the Great Cultural Revolution.

More recently, there was the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of the students seeking democratic reforms to make the system accountable and fair. The recently published Tiananmen Papers reveal the lack (if not the absence of) any coherent institutional framework for consultation and decision-making to manage and channel such popular anger. We have the image of a bunch of old men worried about the gathering dark clouds, with Deng Xiaoping expressing their collective fear. He reportedly said, "If things continue like this, we could even end up under house arrest." Which led them to use military force to crush the unarmed and peaceful demonstrators on June 4, 1989.

Currently, it is the Falungong that is giving them nightmares. They have sought to damn the movement by exploiting the recent immolation and deaths of some of its members at Tiananmen Square. The Falungong, though, claims that it was a set up by the Chinese authorities to discredit its popularity. Whatever the truth, the fact remains that Falungong is the only group, since the Communists came to power in 1949, who are managing to stage regular protests to defy the omnipresence and omnipotence of a brutal state apparatus.

Today's Communist China, in its ruling structure, has the same sort of rigidity that plagued the Kuomintang. This is not to suggest that the Falungong is about to overthrow the Communists. In any case, they are not fighting for political power. But by protesting so openly in Tiananmen Square (the symbol of Communist power) and elsewhere, Falungong is setting a dangerous precedent that is not lost on China's Communist rulers.

Even though much is made of China's undeniable economic growth, its social and cultural costs are not highlighted. Take, for instance, the massive corruption underpinning the system. Now and then, the government gives the impression of dealing with it in a big way, but its roots are deep involving even top functionaries. As an example, Li Peng's children are said to be involved in some shady deals or with perpetrators of such deals.

And there are reports of other "princelings" (children of top leaders), making the most of their parental connections.

Even though China's economy has grown, it is overwhelmingly benefiting the party and bureaucratic hacks in cahoots with a new entrepreneurial class -- the two together constituting the New Class, as Milovan Djilas put it in another context. The political and social base of this new class, in terms of China's large population, is very small. And it is also largely urban based. What it means is that there is not only a deep class divide (poor/rich) in China, but that a widening urban/rural divide compounds it.

For instance, there is a floating rural population estimated at 150 million or more (increasing at the rate of 10 to 15 million people a year) searching for jobs in urban areas. And these people are not even entitled to some basic benefits available to their city cousins because they are not supposed to be there in the first place.

At the same time, these floating rural people are living in social and cultural alienation away from their homes and families. The economic dispossession (from rural farms), coupled with social and cultural alienation, is a recipe for disaster. Add to it the urban unemployed from restructuring of state enterprises and the new pool of workers seeking jobs all the time, you have a situation waiting to explode.

It doesn't mean that a social explosion is about to occur any time soon. China is an old civilization and people's threshold of pain and suffering is quite high. But, historically, whenever it has reached a saturation point, it resulted in an explosion of utmost intensity. When that level will be reached under the current regime is anybody's guess. But it is bound to happen sooner or later.

The writer is a free-lance journalist living in Australia.

-- The Korea Herald/Asia News Network