by Claude Arpi
This was 60 years ago, a full circle in the Chinese calendar. Li Zhisui, Mao Zedong’s private physician was a privileged man. On October 1, 1949, he was allowed to stand on the rostrum of Tiananmen Square to attend the ceremonies of the foundation of the People’s Republic of China.
It was a ‘crisp, clear, and chilly day that makes autumn in Beijing the most magnificent season’ recalled the doctor. Li described the moment the Great Helmsman appeared on the stage: “Mao was a truly magnetic force. Mao’s voice was soft, almost lilting, and the effect of his speech was riveting. ‘The Chinese people have stood up’, he proclaimed, and the crowd went wild, thundering in applause, shouting over and over, ‘Long Live the People’s Republic of China!’ I was so full of joy my heart nearly burst out of my throat, and tears welled up in my eyes. I was so proud of China, so full of hope, so happy.”
Sixty years later, China has become a power to reckon with. Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have pronounced the famous sentence: “When China awakes, the world will tremble” China being fully awake today, the world has begun trembling. Certain aspects of the Middle Kingdom’s rise to a superpower are indeed scary.
This nationalism has been exacerbated by the economic rise of China and the success of the Beijing Olympics Games. For the past 60 years, the People’s Republic of China has failed to introduce a modern system of governance. Though the word people’s is recurrent in all state institutions in China, since 1949 the nation is run by a single party. Ordinary people have no say in state affairs.
National People’s Congress chairman Wu Bangguo recently declared that China will ‘never go down the devious path’ of ‘western institutions’. Whether Beijing agrees to it or not, human rights, basic personal laws or universal suffrage are today values accepted by all non-rogue nations.
Today, when intellectuals speak up, they are immediately arrested. In 2008, hundreds of writers, intellectuals and professors who signed a manifesto called Charter ’08 (asking the CCP leadership to allow the people of China to enjoy civil rights enshrined in United Nations covenants), were harassed, some even jailed. Liu Xiaobo, the leader of the Charter ’08 movement has himself been incarcerated. As long as this issue is not tackled, China cannot rise to the top. In such cases, it appears that it is the communist leadership which is trembling.
Another issue that makes Beijing tremble is the ‘unrest in nationalities areas’. In March/April 2008, the Tibetan Autonomous Region as well as the Tibetan inhabitants regions of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunnan witnessed the worst unrest and riots in 50 years.
In July 2009, it was the turn of Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to be in the news. Violence erupted, resulting in at least 200 people dead and some 1,000 wounded. A parallel with Tibet was immediately made. As on the Roof of the World, tensions have not been a new phenomenon in a Muslim province, which has been flooded by millions of Han settlers over the past decades.
The regime in Beijing seems incapable of striking the right note. A report prepared by a group of Chinese lawyers, the Beijing Gongmeng Consulting on the 2008 riots in Tibet is an eye-opener. The lawyers point out ‘major errors in government policy’ after the March–April 2008 protests. One was encouragement of racist sentiment towards Tibetans: “The excessive response of the government all over Tibet was to regard every tree and blade of grass as a potential enemy soldier.”
For the past 50 years the CCP has been unable to deal with these problems; for example, the negotiations with a good-willed Dalai Lama have never even taken off. The Chinese leadership is so nervous that they barred foreigners from travelling to Tibet until the end of the 60th anniversary celebrations. AFP reported that an official of the Lhasa Tourism Bureau explained: “Passes for foreign travellers to enter Tibet will be suspended from September 24 to October 8.”
Li Datong, a former reporter from China Youth Daily recently told the German daily Handelsblatt that the authorities are even afraid to speak about the Berlin Wall which fell 20 years ago; he said that it could be: “causing people to associate anything in their minds… The fall of the Berlin Wall associates with the collapse of the regime.” The journalist-turned dissident added: “China is experiencing a credibility crisis, the likes of which has never been seen before …People no longer believe what the government says.”
The leadership seems caught in a vicious circle, the more they act tough, the more they loose their credibility. Willy Lam of the Jamestown Foundation in an essay entitled China’s Quasi-Superpower Diplomacy: Prospects And Pitfalls, affirmed: “The CCP leadership’s refusal to give up Maoist norms such as the ‘party’s absolute leadership over the armed forces’ …has dented the global appeal of the China model — and detracted from the viability of Beijing’s quasi-superpower diplomacy.”
One could ask: where is the enemy for Beijing? The Economic Times in London answers that it is India: “Curiously, the enemy most often spoken of is India. The censors permit alarmingly frank discussion on the Internet of the merits of a war against India to secure the Tibetan plateau.” The ET quotes an unnamed contributor: “Help the Maoists take over power in India to pay them back for hosting the Dalai Lama”. It is strange, India till recently was considered as a ‘paper tiger’.
Perhaps more alarming for Beijing, are the dissensions inside the politburo. It has recently been reported that Xi Jinping, the Chinese vice-president was not elevated as expected to the all-powerful Central Military Commission.
Why? Nobody knows. Glasnost (transparency) has never been the forte of the Middle Kingdom. ‘Transparency’ has not permeated as yet the opaque leadership of the CCP. The Chinese heir-apparent is the son of Xi Zhongxun, one of the senior-most leaders of the First Generation of the CCP. Very close to the late Panchen Lama, Old Xi wrote the official report on the famous 70,000 character petition from the Panchen Lama to premier Zhou Enlai. In 1962, he fell out of favour; he was accused of disloyalty to Mao. Was he not tough enough with the Tibetan people? Who knows? During the next 60 years, China has a lot of progress to make in these fields and many others.
[OPINION-DISCLAIMER]
