20110915 China’s model just doesn’t work

China’s model just doesn’t work

By Sushil Seth

When the US political system was in gridlock over the question of raising the country’s debt limit, China’s official media could not help but lecture Washington over its bad housekeeping.

Xinhua news agency said: “It is time for the naughty boys in Washington to stop chicken games before they cause more damage.”

In another commentary, the agency said: “China has every right now to demand the US address its structural debt problems and ensure the safety of China’s dollar assets.”

Imagine the glee Beijing felt in being able to talk down to the US in its capacity as its principal creditor. It must have waited long for that day, perhaps not wholly believing that day would come.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that China fancies itself as a preferred alternative global model. As the Economist observes, “attempts to apply precepts devised by ancient Chinese philosophers to the modern world are in vogue. One popular revival is the [ancient] notion of tianxia, or ‘all under heaven.’”

Tianxia, according to the Economist, “is widely understood as a unified world dominated by one country (call it the ‘middle kingdom,’ perhaps), to which neighbors and those beyond look for guidance and pay tribute.”

How would this global system work? Apparently, one way is through China’s “benign” authority, drawn from the moral and political example it sets and is accepted by the rest of the world. There is a view in China that the country once enjoyed a moral and political ascendancy that was widely accepted across the globe and that it is now only a question of reviving and reasserting that dominance, but however much China might want to become a new “Middle Kingdom,” it is frankly a pipe dream.

The world has long since moved on from those times — if they ever existed.

Second, any revival of China’s past is in conflict with the narrative of the communist revolution, which was based on a rejection of the past. Indeed, its main premise was that China lost its way because it clung to its past and failed to reinvent itself in the modern world. To argue now that China’s traditional past was right all along and should be re-established as a global order would require a rewriting of its history, which would be a stupendous task — if it could be undertaken at all. In that sort of rewriting, the communist revolution, and the state based on it, would become an aberration, making Beijing’s authoritarian rule even more illegitimate.

Third, to elevate present-day China as a worthy global example, it has to have a certain moral stature and ascendancy, but by no stretch of the imagination is its authoritarian regime a standard-bearer.

The authoritarian oligarchy is afraid of its own shadow. The way it has gone about rounding up dissidents and intellectuals and shutting up social media sites, fearing a possible Arab Spring in China, is an example of its nervousness. The regime seems to be constantly worrying about some social cataclysm overtaking it.

The New York Times, quoting WikiLeaks, said that in 2009, Chinese officials sought the help of the US embassy in Beijing to block Chinese citizens from visiting the Twitter Web site in search of information about pollution readings in Beijing. They feared that the comparison between their lower, sanitized readings and Twitter postings by Americans might lead to “social consequences” — read: social unrest.

Despite China’s impressive economic growth rate, the regime worries — in the words of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) — that its “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated and ultimately unsustainable” growth could create social instability. The regime is right, because unless statistical economic growth is translated into social justice, things could derail and collide like two high-speed trains. Just as the nation hurried to put its high-speed rail system into operation at the expense of the necessary preparatory work and in the midst of an endemic culture of corruption, it has also built its economy on creaky foundations that have not been adequately secured.

These foundations become shakier by the day, with reports of rising unrest and demonstrations in different parts of the country, including the capital.

Rising social unrest has many causes: endemic corruption; the widening urban-rural divide; huge income disparities; the demolition of old urban dwellings to make way for new developments, often without adequate and timely compensation; arbitrary acquisition of rural land for urban and industrial development; choked-up cities and polluted rivers; and a lack or absence of transparency; and an arbitrary justice system are just the tip of the iceberg.

The government takes great care, through its far-reaching security and surveillance apparatus, to ensure that all incidents of social unrest remain localized and do not develop into a wider conflagration, as has happened in the Arab world.

There is no suggestion here the CCP regime and the system underpinning it is about to collapse — though the same could also have been said of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, whose dictators had apparently perfected their respective systems of internal repression over many years yet proved a failure against people power.

The point is that steam is building up within China’s pressure-cooker society and it has to find some outlet, or blow up. One release would be the introduction of political reforms, such as popularly elected representative governments and constitutionally validated political institutions, which would allow people to vent their grievances and frustrations through legal channels.

The problem is that China’s oligarchs fear this might not work in their favor and they would lose their monopoly on power. Their self-serving argument is that Western-style democracy is not suited to China and would lead to social instability and chaos.

However, it is the other way round, because if China’s scattered unrest is not channeled properly through legal and official avenues, it is likely, at some point, to take the form of the Arab Spring. It might not happen now, but unless political reforms are introduced in China soon, it is bound to happen sooner or later, in one form or another.

Sushil Seth is a commentator in Australia.