People's Republic of China at 50: More missed opportunities

Beneath the veneer of public rejoicing at the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, there are deep feelings of disappointment at the nation's lack of political progress. The Jakarta Post's Asia correspondent Harvey Stockwin analyses how the Chinese leadership has accentuated these feelings in the run-up to the anniversary.

HONG KONG (JP): The Chinese people has been through too much, suffered too much, to be able to easily reduplicate the same happy optimism of 50 years ago. In Beijing particularly, but also all over China, there are still the lingering bitter memories of that time 10 years and four months ago when millions of Chinese did indeed stand up -- and were then mowed down for doing so.

In 1949, it was possible to happily anticipate that a grinding brutal civil war, so costly in terms of human lives destroyed or disrupted, was at last coming to an end. In 1999, by contrast, it is not a happy sign that the incessant drumbeat of official propaganda on the subject of Taiwan not merely reminds that the civil war is still not yet over, but also could yet be ruinously renewed, one of these days.

The great surge of optimistic yearning which accompanied the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was too quickly dissipated. In part, the political story of the first 50 years of the PRC is a story of missed opportunities. Sadly, and ironically, this has also been the prevailing political pattern in the run-up to Oct. 1, 1999.

Too often, in 1998-1999. the powers-that-be have acted in such a way as to remind the Chinese people of the negative past --- rather than beckoning them onwards towards the broad sunlit uplands of a brighter future.

So, instead of finding a way to utilize or co-opt, for China's greater benefit, the idealism, the courage and the tenacity of the very small number of dissidents who are backing the China Democracy Party, the leadership of China has opted, once again, for outright suppression, thereby allowing those on the political scene who pursue opportunism and greed more room for maneuver. Arrests have continued right up to the anniversary.

Instead of making the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region a model for some modest democratic experimentation within One China, the leadership does not oppose -- perhaps actively encourages --- a situation wherein Hong Kong now has even less democratic substance than the meager amount left behind by the British.

Even more worrying, instead of coming to terms with the political reality that a vast nation like China inevitably must have within it a great diversity of interests and opinions, the Chinese leadership not merely seeks to eliminate all such dissent within China, but also refuses to hear even those moderate voices within Hong Kong who wish to express a different point of view. Beijing has resorted instead to the dubious subterfuge of not allowing such moderate voices to even enter mainland China.

Instead of indicating the self-confidence that should have accrued after 50 years in power, these attitudes suggest a fear bordering on paranoia. So when 10,000 members of the Falun Dafa organization, espousing the Falun Gong version of qigong, (a Chinese system of self-improvement exercises), suddenly but quietly demonstrated last April outside Zhongnanhai -- admittedly without the public security forces providing the communist leadership with any advance warning -- there was a panic reaction.

Instead of quietly adjusting to the Falun Dafa's ostensibly modest request to be an officially recognized organization, an old-style political campaign was launched attempting both to eliminate Falun Dafa, and to expunge Falun Gong teaching from the memory of those mainly elderly Chinese who find it a comfort.

Every day for the best part of two months, the campaign used the full weight of the Chinese media to denounce the sect. Show trials of Falun Dafa leaders are likely after the 50th anniversary is over. The whole process has reminded many Chinese of what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) should want them to forget -- the aberration of the 1066-1976 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

But then, instead of recognizing that, in order to progress, China must be able to freely assess where it has been, the CCP leadership has ordered China's media not to compare Mao Zedong with Deng Xiaoping. The reasoning is obvious. Criticism of one may lead to criticism of the other. And criticism, in the CCP's view, is bad. The party can do no wrong.

As a result of these and other tendencies, China seems stuck in a vicious circle of counter-productive political folly -- the antithesis of the political modernity to which Chinese reformers have aspired.

The vicious circle goes something like this.

Because there can be only one political party, all dissenting views must be suppressed.

Because all dissent must be suppressed, so free thinking must be avoided or limited.

Since free thinking must be avoided, the press and television must be strictly controlled, and, as much as possible, books too.

Since media control is essential, a single political viewpoint is imperative.

Since a single viewpoint is required, there cannot be any political reform.

Since there cannot be any political reform there can only be one political party. Since there can only be one political party -- and off China goes, stuck in the vicious circle, its body politic confined within an anti-modern political straight jacket.

Of course this is a simplification. But the far greater simplification is the nonsequitur argument used to justify the strait jacket: since any dissent equals chaos, therefore China will only avoid chaos if it eradicates all dissent.

Of course many Chinese, including many Chinese communists, can clearly see the folly of being caught in the vicious circle and the strait jacket. But whether their reformist views are sufficiently expressed, let alone heard, is a very much in doubt. It has been often suggested that China has succeeded where Russia failed, that Russia paid a high price for putting too much stress on political reform and too little attention, early on, to economic reform.

Now China is clearly in danger of making the opposite mistake: the leadership appears to be hoping that a very modest degree of economic reform is sufficient, while real political reform can be indefinitely postponed, amidst a wholly synthetic political uniformity.

As the PRC starts its second half-century it seems all set for more heavy-handed governance, and a very bumpy ride.