20110302 Can China contain People Power?

Can China contain People Power?

By Sushil Seth

The People Power that has overthrown regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and continues to create tremors elsewhere in the Middle East has spawned debate about its ripple effect on China.

In Australia two prominent Sydney Morning Herald journalists hold different views, not about the repressive nature of the system in China, but about its ability to prevent a popular upsurge.

International editor Peter Hartcher is inclined to think that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), at the very least, is worried and nervous about the revolutionary upsurge in the Middle East and its possible impact on China.

Otherwise, it wouldn’t be putting in place filtering and censoring processes on the Internet to deny access to its people about developments in Egypt and the “Jasmine Revolution” in Tunisia.

However, Internet censorship has its limitations as resourceful activists can breach them.

Already, there are calls on Web sites — many of which reportedly originate overseas and are run by exiled Chinese activists — for Chinese people to band together for demonstrations in major Chinese cities “to seek freedom, democracy and political reform to end ‘one-party rule.’”

The Chinese government is already rounding up activists and dissidents to minimize the danger. Hartcher quotes a Twitter message from Ai Weiwei (艾未未), a prominent human rights activist: “It only took 18 days for the collapse of a military regime [in Egypt] which was in power for 30 years and looked harmonious and stable.”

In a separate opinion piece in the same newspaper, John Garnaut offered a different take on this. He wrote that a people’s uprising in China (like in Egypt) is “a practical impossibility [because] ... the Chinese Communist Party is a more professional and well-resourced dictatorship.”

That means that China’s oligarchs are doing a “better” job of policing people and creating fear among them.

To say that a dictatorship is more secure because it is more repressive is to turn logic on its head.

Any regime that seeks security through a repressive system, better resourced or not, is living on borrowed time.

Ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had nearly perfected instruments of state repression, as evidenced by the 90 percent-plus results in elections in his favor.

Still a spark from a relatively small Tunisia brought down the whole house.

Of course, China has done well with its economic growth, while Egypt remained a basket case. However, China is experiencing serious problems with its economy, like inflation, unsustainable high growth rates, disproportionate dependence on exports, sectoral imbalances, an emerging asset bubble and bad loans.

China needs to grow at a relatively higher rate just to keep up with unemployment in the country. If that can’t be sustained, growing unemployment will accentuate social discord.

Besides, economic growth by itself doesn’t create legitimacy and harmony, as the 90,000 “mass incidents” of unrest in 2009 showed.

In a recent speech, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) acknowledged the growing social unrest in China and called on the party and the government “to strengthen and improve a mechanism for safeguarding the rights and interests of the people.”

With the growing chasm between urban and rural areas and the huge income gap, China is developing into a very unequal society. This situation is further compounded by widespread corruption and nepotism. The “princelings” — the children of party leaders — have their snouts in regional and national cookie jars.

In this sense, the situation in China looks very much like the Middle East, where corruption and nepotism have been rife for as long as one can remember.

The spontaneous eruption of People Power in Egypt and elsewhere also showed how shallow and shaky are the foundations of dictatorships — in the way the long ruling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt were overthrown once people were able to shake off their fear of these unpopular and illegitimate rulers.

Another striking commonality between the Middle Eastern and Chinese situation is a total absence of any moral foundation and vision for their societies.

For instance, ever since Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) sanctified greed as his country’s guiding philosophy when he opened up the economy in the 1980s, the country has been bereft of any moral vision and ideological underpinning. A country like China, with its long tradition of family and clan connections and Confucian ideology found itself in a moral and ideological vacuum.

Its most telling manifestation is the rootless existence of migrant workers from rural areas in urban centers. Back home in their villages, they lived as part of a living organism of familiar social connections and traditions. In the cities, working on constructions sites and in factories, they are an amorphous lot just working to eke out an income — however paltry or uncertain. On top of this, they are also blamed and get into trouble with the police for the rising tide of crime in urban centers.

Even among the urbanites, people are living in a world of dog eat dog. There is no discernible higher purpose in life except to become rich in all sorts of questionable and immoral ways, but not everyone has the connections to do that. As result, the gap between those with connections and others (which is the majority of the people) without them, keep widening to the frustration of people at the antics of the rich and powerful, a sure recipe for any kind of revolution.

It might take time, or might happen sooner rather than later, but the ground is ripe for a spark to kindle a mighty fire to engulf China’s rulers. The coercive state apparatus is no insurance against the people’s anger when it wells up, as the Middle Eastern dictators are finding out to their cost.

The popular upsurge in Arab countries doesn’t mean that it will follow the same pattern in China. Even in the Middle East, the local conditions differ in some important ways among different countries and the cost in lives in some will be heavier than in others to achieve liberation from their rulers.

The important thing is that the spontaneous rise of People Power there is becoming a metaphor for getting rid of decaying and decadent regimes that have long since outlived their expiry dates.

Another important feature is that the popular upsurge in the Middle East is showing the world that people do not have to live in perpetual fear of their rulers’ coercive power. If they can overcome their fear, they can also overthrow their oligarchs.

There is a strong message in this for the CCP — that is, unless the regime loosens its control and shares power and prosperity with its people, it might become history like Mubarak and his ruling party in Egypt.

Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.