ANALYSIS:Embracing globalism, the communist regime has remoulded itself in a powerful comeback, writes MARTIN HALA
IN THE 20 years since Tiananmen, China has risen from the ashes by engaging the West economically and by manufacturing domestic, “patriotic” consent. Yet these achievements may not be enough to make it immune to history.
In the summer of 1989, I travelled from Prague to Warsaw at the invitation of a group of young Polish intellectuals who were bringing in unofficial, “citizen” observers from the more repressive communist countries to witness the first (semi-) free elections in the Soviet bloc.
One of the enduring memories from that trip was the outrage and universal condemnation of the bloody crackdown half a planet away in Beijing. There were posters everywhere with photocopied covers from western magazines lambasting Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng as the “butchers of Beijing”. There were vigils, lectures and debates, T-shirts, leaflets, booklets and badges. Having survived the 1981 army crackdown on Solidarnosc, the Poles felt natural empathy for the victims of what must have looked to them like a historical throwback to the darker times of their own struggles.
Not long after my return, the rest of eastern Europe went the Polish way, one by one in quick succession. Meanwhile, the world watched in disbelief as the Chinese government launched reprisals against those who dared to speak out during the short-lived spring in Beijing. People on the government blacklist who managed to escape were received as heroes in Hong Kong and the West. Chinese students and scholars at foreign universities bombarded their home country with faxed anti-government messages. Several political organisations were formed by Chinese exiles in Europe and the US in the anticipation of imminent regime change in China.
Twenty years on, international perception of China has changed beyond recognition. The shadow of Tiananmen still lingers, but the world has meanwhile grown captivated by a different image of China: that of the “rising dragon”, a superpower in the making that has been transforming itself and everything around at break-neck speed.
Gone is the pariah status. Beijing is wooed from all sides for its economic power and geopolitical influence. Western politicians avoid the few surviving dissidents like the plague, instead falling over one another to meet the very comrades once lambasted as “butchers”. Some proclaim “strategic partnerships” with China, which sadly tend to fall apart faster than you can say “boycott Carrefour”. The Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 1989, finds himself shunned by anybody of official rank, while president Hu Jintao, who in 1989 declared martial law in Lhasa, hobnobs with the world’s political elites.
Even more strikingly, the attitudes of many common folk in China have changed sharply over the past 20 years. There is, to be sure, a lot of seething discontent just below the surface, and often above – China registers tens of thousands of spontaneous protests every year against local-level corruption and abuse of power. But surprisingly large numbers of seemingly ordinary citizens also stand ready to come out in support of the central government, especially when issues of China’s national pride and prestige are perceived to be at stake. Chinese students abroad no longer fax subversive messages back home; they are more likely to go on cyber-hunts for “anti-China elements” and “traitors”.
Clearly, a significant shift has occurred. The communist regime not only refused to follow its Soviet-bloc cousins to the dustbin of history, but fashioned a powerful comeback. The China that looked so similar to eastern Europe in 1989 pupated for a while, and then hatched a strange new hybrid, sometimes dubbed “the China model”. No longer a pariah, it now flashes its own “soft power” at home and abroad.
In retrospect, the single most important element that has saved the nominally communist regime in China and brought it to the centre stage of today’s world is globalisation. There may be tens of millions of individual losers, but as a country, China has benefited immensely from globalisation by employing its main structural advantage, the seemingly endless pool of cheap labour controlled tightly in an authoritarian system. In the new economic order after the end of the cold war, China provided a low-cost manufacturing base for global companies on such a scale, and integrated its own economy with that of the West, and especially that of the US, to such a degree, that there evolved a virtual symbiosis for which Niall Ferguson coined the term “Chimerica”. This economic symbiosis, where China did the manufacturing and America the consuming, helped Beijing to shake off the political stigma of 1989. It earned China new recognition epitomised in the debates around the so-called “most favoured nation” status during the Clinton era. Economic realities finally persuaded Washington, and by extension most western governments, to give up any pretence at trying to improve China’s human rights.
Economic integration of China into the world, whether you call it globalisation or Chimerica, had profound implications for domestic politics as well. It helped the Communist Party find new legitimacy for itself after the debacle of 1989, and it also thoroughly transformed Chinese society, giving rise to new groups and classes, as well as creating new fault lines for potential conflict. Above all, it gave Chinese society a new purpose, best expressed in the popular slogan “To get rich is glorious” (coined already in the 1980s). The downside was summarised in another popular slogan of the time, “Some will get rich first”, but after decades of subsistence egalitarianism, the Chinese were ready to accept a considerable degree of inequality, if only given a statistical chance to get ahead.
If migrant workers supplying the cheap labour are the losers of this system, the winner is the urban middle class. In fact, much of the urban middle class appears to have been co-opted into the system from which they benefit so handsomely. They have become the government’s main ally in manufacturing the new patriotic consensus that rationalises one-party rule, and provides the ideological basis for social consent within an authoritarian system. According to this new middle-class nationalist narrative, China needs the Communist Party’s uncontested and unchallenged rule to guide it in its economic and geopolitical rise against threats and plots by the hostile West, which seeks to block China’s global ascendancy by whatever means available.
Criticism of China’s human rights record is just one such evil ploy to derail China’s progress. So is the promotion of democracy, which would only threaten China’s unity and make the country weaker, an easy prey for western “hegemonism”.
Most visible and vocal among the self-styled new “patriots” are the so-called “angry youth”, or Fenqing, a distinct subsection of urban middle-class youth. The Fenqing are typically under 20 and seething with rage at what they perceive as the slights China receives from the West. This they are ready to vent on the internet, or through direct action, such as boycotting (or more precisely, picketing) Carrefour or other more or less randomly picked western companies. Their rants on the internet have been compared to the fanaticism of the Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.
As teenagers, the Fenqing remember neither Tiananmen nor the lively debates of the 1980s. They are a product of the post-1992 urban boom and the ideological manipulation of “guided public opinion”. They are also the first generation of children born under the “one-child policy” introduced in the 1980s. These overindulged “little emperors” are reported to have a heightened sense of self-importance and entitlement.
Their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have rather different historical memories and a more sour experience of the party. It seems that apart from the geographical divide between coastal cities and rural backwaters, there has also evolved a generational gap in China’s perception of itself and the world. In the manipulated environment that amplifies conformity and suppresses dissent, we are only led to hear the “guided public opinion”. The other side of the ideological divide, the less-than-patriotic universal aspirations of more mature citizens, tend to be obscured by censorship and propaganda. But they are always out there, side by side with the officially promoted gung-ho “patriotism”.
Arguably the most articulated expression of this liberal counter-current has been formulated in the “Charter 08” released by a diverse group of Chinese citizens last December. The Chinese charter refers directly to the Czechoslovak “Charter 77”, widely believed to have contributed to the eventual democratic changes in Czechoslovakia, if not all of eastern Europe, in 1989. There have been lively discussions on Chinese internet sites about the significance and potential of Charter 08, as well as about perceived similarities and differences between pre-1989 Czechoslovakia and eastern Europe on one side, and today’s China on the other. There have been arguments and counter-arguments. The situation can be summarised in the words of the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi: “If you look at things from the point of difference, they seem diverse; from the point of semblance, they look alike.”
From the point of difference, China is light years away from eastern Europe before 1989. It has managed to escape communism’s reverse domino effect by redefining itself, embracing market economy and positioning itself as one of the main players in the globalised economy. It has managed to manipulate domestic public opinion and co-opt segments of the society that have benefited from China’s entry into globalisation. For many, Chinese society today is far freer than eastern Europe under communism, in that they can travel, accumulate wealth and generally enjoy an everyday lifestyle not so different from the West.
But then there is the point of semblance. Politically, China remains a one-party dictatorship quite like the eastern Europe of yesteryear. The regime has worked to boost its legitimacy, yet it remains skin-deep. The very fact there emerged a petition like Charter 08 inspired by the old dissident movement in eastern Europe, and that it attracted thousands of signatures and engendered spirited discussions on the internet and elsewhere, seems to suggest there persist some fundamentals that China never managed to transcend in its post-Tiananmen transformation.
And it may get worse. The global economic crisis threatens the “Chimeric” economic model that helped Chinese communism survive into the post-communist era. For good or for ill, China will need to readjust its economic model. While that might actually help to correct some of the existing imbalances, it will destabilise the status quo. The privileged will become less so, and the balance of power and political allegiances may shift. Will China be able to absorb the change and redefine itself once again without political upheaval?
The tensions might once again test the unity of China’s leadership. In a one-party regime, a split at the top opens a chasm at the bottom. Behind the facade of self-confidence, harmony and stability, the ghost of 1989 still haunts a regime that was hoping to erase and transcend it.
Martin Hala is a sinologist based in Prague who has worked for several media-assistance organisations in Europe and Asia. A longer version of this article will appear in Eurozine (www.eurozine.com) on June 4th