On the cusp of China's reinvention

IN PRETTY MUCH every Chinese city, from Tibet to the Pacific Ocean, you will find two buildings that are the same everywhere. One is a big, severe and imposing Communist Party headquarters. The other is a strange pastiche of Las Vegas, classical Greece and drug-dealer's villa. It is topped by a garish red sign, often in neon, spelling out the letters KTV. They stand, not for some arm of the party or the state, but for Karaoke Television, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

Inside, parties of better-off Chinese people will be gathered in individual rooms with leather-panelled walls, marble floors and ample sofas. Pretty girls will bring them plates of cold food and bottles of beer. The huge karaoke machines will be cranked up and people will warble their way through The Beatles or Whitney Houston, Abba or Celine Dion. For a while, you could believe that you are in Japan rather than in China, and that there is nothing here that would be fundamentally out of place among the comfortable classes in any capitalist society.

And then, as the evening is drawing to a close, and inhibitions are low, someone will search though the programmes on the karaoke machine and find the one they want. The images on screen will no longer be the consumerist fantasies of love and success. The sounds will no longer be the lush lullabies of western consumerism. Mao-suited peasants will be running up hilltops in massed formations, waving red flags and pointing at the rising sun in the east. Synchronised chorus lines will be singing of the Long March and the glories of electrification. Middle-aged businessmen will be singing along lustily to the propaganda songs of their youth, like lapsed Irish Catholics bellowing out Faith of Our Fathersin the drunken early hours.

The lives they are living and the setting they are in may be the antithesis of the ideology of the Chinese revolution that culminated in the declaration of the Peoples’ Republic 60 years ago this week, but it would be a mistake to believe that that ideology means nothing today. China may have one foot in 21st century global modernity, but the other is still in the world created by Mao Zedong and his comrades.

Asked about the historical consequences of the French Revolution of 1789, the Mao-era Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai famously replied that it was “too soon to tell”. The same can be said of the Chinese revolution of 1949. Its short-term consequences were dramatically obvious. There was a massive redistribution of land to the poorer peasants who formed the core of the population. There was a successful reassertion, for the first time in a century, of Chinese sovereignty, including the vast western provinces of Tibet and Xinjiang. There were the murderous famines unleashed by Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward to industrialisation; the chaos and cruelty of the Cultural Revolution and the establishment of a vast system of labour camps, all of which cost tens of millions of lives.

Yet, for all the drama and horror of these events, the ultimate significance of the Chinese revolution can be judged only by the success or failure of its long-term aim. Nothing can ever be placed in the scales with the sheer weight of human suffering under Mao, except perhaps the remembrance that it was the culmination of a terrible period of brutalising civil wars and a Japanese invasion whose depravity was of staggering proportions. But the strange fact remains that China, after all that agony and inhumanity, still has a decent chance of pulling off one of the great achievements of human history: the lifting of more than a billion people out of poverty.

In some respects, the dramatic disruptions that accompanied and flowed from the revolution of 1949 serve to mask a deeper continuity. It is not for nothing that Mao declared the Peoples’ Republic from the same Tiananmen Gate at which the proclamations of the Chinese emperors were promulgated.

Historically, more people have lived for a longer time under a central government in China than anywhere else on earth. And that government, whether imperial, republican or communist, has always faced the same fundamental dilemma: an awful lot of people having to survive on a relatively small amount of land. China may look huge on the map, but so much of it is mountain and desert that the pressure on productive areas is enormous. Today, China has seven per cent of the world’s arable land and 20 per cent of the world’s population. For anyone ruling China, the first question has always been how to keep the huge mass of people fed and stable.

THE MAOIST ANSWERto that question was forced collectivisation, radical egalitarianism and the maintenance of conformity by repression. The problem with this strategy, apart from its terrible cost in human lives, was that it is not very good for development. China couldn't get richer unless it could release vast numbers of peasants from the countryside, allowing others to rise above subsistence levels. This in turn required a rapid development of cities and the industries to make them viable. But these big shifts of population were not easily compatible with order and control. In 1976, when Mao died, 83 per cent of the population was still rural.

Today, just 56 per cent of the population is rural, and it is likely that sometime over the next decade China will become a majority urban society.

This represents one of the greatest migrations in human history. Tens of millions of people are leaving the countryside for the cities every year, drawn by the reality that the earnings of urban workers are now three times those of their rural counterparts. There are about 200 million internal migrants in China. And this whole process creates enormous and unrelenting strains: jobs have to be found for the migrants and the remaining peasantry (still a vast swathe of humanity) has to be kept reasonably content in spite of the fact that it is being left behind economically. The growth in rural incomes has been relatively slow in recent years and the current Communist Party leadership is well aware that the biggest threat to stability lies, as it has done for millennia, in a discontented peasantry.

THE ARCHITECTof Chinese modernisation, Deng Xiaoping, compared the whole process to that of walking across a rushing stream while feeling your way for the hidden stepping stones. At the moment, China is still very much in mid-stream. And this is why talk of a coming "Chinese century" may be somewhat premature.

China’s achievements are undoubtedly formidable. The economy has grown by roughly 10 per cent a year over the past 25 years. About 500 million people have already been lifted out of poverty. The purchasing power of the Chinese economy will surpass that of the US sometime between 2012 and 2015. In the current global financial crisis, most of the money that western governments and banks are borrowing is Chinese. A survey among the great and the good at the Davos forum this year showed that more than 70 per cent expect Asia, led by China, to be the most influential region of the global economy by 2020.

But the Chinese Communist Party has still to cope with massive challenges.

Even while it is trying to juggle the epoch-making transition from a rural subsistence economy to an urban and industrial one, the ground is shifting beneath its feet.

There are problems of demographics: the number of elderly people in China will reach 400 million by the middle of the century and by 2020, there will also be around 30 million more men than women – a potential source of social tension.

The environmental challenge is almost overwhelming. Official figures show that in some areas the cost of environmental damage actually outweighs economic growth. Those growth rates look rather less impressive when it is recalled that environmental damage in the country as a whole is costing 10 per cent of GDP a year. Scarce resources such as water are being depleted at an alarming rate. Unless China can manage a rapid green revolution that is as dramatic as the political one of 1949, it will not be able to sustain itself.

The environmental problem is linked to another huge weakness: corruption.

It has been estimated that the direct cost of corruption in China is 3 per cent of GDP a year, which makes it higher than the government’s entire spending on education. To this economic cost has to be added the environmental and political damage. It is impossible to apply the increasingly serious environmental laws when corrupt officials take backhanders to allow them to be broken. And the widespread perception of corruption feeds into both active unrest (contrary to perception, there are about 25,000 mass protests in China every year) and cynicism about the Communist Party’s claims to idealistic patriotism.

This, in turn, points to the biggest challenge of all. Corruption can’t be stamped out without accountability. And accountability can’t be established without at least some of the features of a democracy: a free press, genuine local elections in which corrupt officials can be turfed out and independent courts.

The Communist Party worries that any real opening up of the political system will lead to dissent and instability that could bring the whole complex process of modernisation to a halt. Yet it also knows that without that opening, the consequences of unaccountable and corrupt power could be even worse.

If the Party is to survive another 60 years it will be because it has managed an astonishing transition to some kind of democracy and in the process become almost unrecognisable.