The current exhibition at the British Museum, The First Emperor, is a tribute to the man who ordered the building of that huge monument to himself, the tomb of the Terracotta Warriors. The focus of the exhibition is a small selection of artefacts from the tomb, including a number of statues of the warriors themselves. It is a blockbuster exhibition which attempts to match the scale and ambition of its subject.
A short film which precedes the main part of the exhibition shows how Emperor Qin managed to conquer and unite what is now the territory of China. At the end of the film we see the map rapidly turning crimson and the word ‘Qin’ appearing on the map. ‘Qin’, we learn, gave origin to the western word China to denote what was called in Chinese the Middle Kingdom – or the centre of the world.
The exhibition was partly criticised in the Guardian for offering an uncritical and revisionist account of the achievements of a man who history has generally remembered as a brutal tyrant who ‘massacred prisoners, burned books and slaughtered scholars’. The words ‘cruel’ and ‘brutal’ are absent from the exhibition. The key message of the exhibition, signalled clearly in that introductory film, is one that the Emperor himself would have been happy with: He was on a celestially-inspired mission to unite ‘All-under-Heaven’ and so to bring China into existence. The existence of China is, therefore, no historical accident: It was written in the stars.
However, historians have on the whole ceased to regard all human history of the great achievements of supreme individuals equipped with armies and visions of a future world reshaped according to their ambitions. Also, it would, or at least should, be very hard in 2007 for any serious thinking person to sustain the belief that nations and states have a historical mission to exist, that they are the result of destiny and not of chance.
We learn very little in the exhibition about the lives of those who actually built the tomb. There are some references to convicts being used, to the huge numbers of slaves whose lives were sacrificed to its construction. But the overall message is that this was the work of a visionary, an emperor creating a coherent and sovreign empire which has survived intact up to the present day.
One key theme or, I would argue, purpose of the exhibition is that of continuity. Qin established the systems of weights and currency and was also largely responsible for establishment of the writing system, as well as beginning the building of the Great Wall. This grants legitimacy to the subsequent rulers of China: a series of dynasties have maintained China’s unity and preserved and guarded its treasures. The rulers of this empire have now generously allowed those who cannot visit the Middle Kingdom to enjoy at first hand a glimpse of its profoundly rich and mysterious cultural legacy.
The way in which China chooses at different times to regard its previous rulers is very instructive. This is particularly true of representations on TV (1). According to the Asia Times:
‘It has been a tradition in China, both under the communists and long before, to criticize Chinese leaders indirectly but deftly by comparing them to misguided, wicked or weak emperors, ignoring the welfare of the people, or by comparing them to the wise and benevolent rulers of the past. Chinese readers - and today's television viewers - are savvy enough to read between the propagandists' lines and understand 2,000-year-old contrived allusions to current politics.’
The Chinese people, then, understand the significance of the different dynasties. Some of them represent more insular styles of rule, some more outgoing, some more brutal and legalistic, some wiser and more benign. Visitors to this exhibition are left to make their own connections between the great rulers of the past of the great rulers of the present.
The current Chinese emperors, then, are laying claim to a heritage which goes back way before 1949, when Chairman Mao told the Chinese people to stand up. Mao was a great admirer of Emperor Qin, by the way, allegedly claiming . It is claiming a inheritance which goes back 2,000 years, and which is ultimately divinely derived. What we are being shown in this exhibition are some of the more treasured family heirlooms.
So what is the problem? Every nation and state in the world seeks to demonstrate that its existence is the inevitable product of all earlier stages of history, and to this end adapts, adopts, invents and constructs myths, legends, historical figures and movements, not to mention pre-existing monuments, in order to prove its rightful legacy. ‘China’ is no more or less artificial an entity than any other nation.
China as a country, if not a nation, has, in broad terms, been around for a very long time. But my question is: How much legitimacy are we prepared to concede the Chinese Government? It consists of an unelected oligarchy of bureaucrats who govern by means of repression and corruption. The subjects of the Chinese Communist Party regime enjoy little in the way of human and democratic rights. It is the world's largest dictatorship, and its claims to legitimate authority are contested, or at least questioned by a large proportion of the world's population, including in China itself.
Would the British Museum, and by extension the British state, be prepared to host a similar exhibition on behalf of the Government of Burma? Or North Korea? (2)
In the exhibition bookshop you can buy a seemingly fairly random selection of things related to China. One thing that may be useful to anyone vaguely interested in Chinese history is a book giving a broad outline and a timeline of Chinese history for children. The book makes a brief reference to the Cultural Revolution, a period when a previous generation of Communist Party leaders ransacked their own country and tried as hard as they could to destroy the country's cultural legacy: it was reportedly only through the direct intervention of Zhou Enlai that such crucial sites as the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace in Lhasa and even the site of Terracotta Warriors were saved. It would be strange, to say the least, if a brief guide to Russian or German history made such scant reference to the Stalin and Hitler eras. There is no mention of the single most prominent recent event in Chinese history in the eyes of the world, the events of June 4 1989, when the previous generation of leaders again murdered thousands in a desperate attempt to hold on to the reins of power, an event which the current leadership refuses to acknowledge on any level.
The culmination of the book's timeline and, presumably the mental timeline of the exhibition's visitors, is, inevitably, summer 2008, when the Chinese capital will host the Olympic Games. This is a key moment for the Chinese Government, a coming-out ball which will confirm beyond any doubt that China is, despite its continuing refusal to grant basic democratic and human rights to its population, a nation whose sovreignty and authority is beyond question (3). It will be a coronation ceremony for the emperors of New China.
This seems to be an apt term for what has previously been known as the People's Republic; given that the only two pillars of CCP ideology for the last number of years has been nationalism and 'we can make you rich!'; a name change, beloved of despots in desperate need of a fresh new image, seems well overdue. The PR in China could stay, of course, but with a different meaning, and given the success of our own beloved former leader in rebranding his party with the facile addition of the word 'New', it seems entirely appropriate for the CCP's attempt to remake itself for internal and international consumption. 'Xin Zhonghuo', anyone?! (4)
The message of the Olympics is, to borrow a phrase: China's Coming Home. And just as the slaves dedicated themselves selflessly to building the stunning monument to vanity that is the tomb of Emperor Qin, the Chinese people are wholeheartedly and voluntarily putting themselves hard to work. A recent Guardian special collected some very revealing comments regarding the importance that a lot of people give to the Olympics, and the effect a successful games will have on 'national pride': '"I don't have any religious or political convictions. So you can say that the Olympics is my main belief," says primary school teacher Zhou Chenguang. According to the taxi driver Xia Shishan: 'We will finish top of the medal table. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil.'' In Beijing projects are being completed at a furious pace and on a meglomaniac scale in the attempt to turn the host city into a place suitable for international visitors such as sports people, journalists and tourists, even if in the process making it into a city which will be pretty much unaffordable to the people who acually live there (4).
The current exhibition at the British Museum is a PR coup for the Chinese Government, and simultaneously an advert for the much greater showcase event next summer. It can to some extent be regarded as propaganda, rather than history.
Of course, a great deal can happen between now and June 2008, and a great deal could happen during the games themselves. What will happen if the very tight control that the authorities are trying to exercise over the event doesn't work? What if there are protests? What are the Falun Gong capable of? And how will the world react?
1 - The Qin dynasty was very positively portrayed in the 2005 film hero, regarded by some viewers as an outright piece of CCP propaganda. See also http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1312773,00.html.
2 - Unfortunately I didn't see the Ancient Persia exhibition two years ago, so have little idea of how that may have related to the question of Modern Iran, beyond what I managed to glean from various websites. There is obviously a significant contrast between the Forgotten Empire, which no clear connection with the present, and the First Emperor, which implies continuity. According to the New York Times, the exhibition 'give ancient Persia its proper place -- between Assyria and Babylon on the one hand and Greece and Rome on the other -- in the chronology of early civilizations. In that sense, ''Forgotten Empire'' is also highly topical...John Curtis, the show's curator and keeper of the museum's ancient Near East department, added in a statement: ''It may also be important at this time of difficult East-West relations to remind people in the West of the remarkable cultural legacy of a country like Iran.'' '. Personally I find such aims perfectly laudable, but whatever the stated aims of the exhibition under discussion here they are not nearly as commendable. Plus, Iran is actually, strictly speaking, a democratic country...
3 - This contrasts with the status of little Taiwan, officially known as the Repuplic of China, which will once again compete under the name of Chinese Taipei, owing to the demands of the Chinese in Beijing. See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2174496,00.html.
4 - I'd love to read an analysis of how Beijing's rebranding of China as a dynamic forward-thinking business-friendly place matches Blair's project to ditch the Labour Party's ideological and historical baggage in the mid-nineties. I remember reading some time ago that one of the many foreign politicians to lecture the Chinese leadership in the 1990s was Peter Mandelson.
5 - Obviously East London is now starting to go through the same process. See http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article555.html.
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Another profoundly idiotic, craven and predictable article by Martin Jacques in the Guardian about the inevitable and glorious rise of China gave birth to an interesting thought.
In contrast to five years ago, the likely identity of the next superpower has become crystal clear. It is no longer just a possibility that it will be China; on the contrary, the probability is extremely high, if not yet a racing certainty. Nor does the timescale of this change have us peering into the distant future as it did five years ago. China is already beginning to acquire some of the interests and motivations of a superpower, and even a little of the demeanour. Beijing feels like a parallel universe to the US, and certainly Europe. There is an expansive mood about the place. China is growing in self-confidence by the day.
And with good reason. There is no sign of China's economic growth abating, and it is this that lies behind its growing confidence. The massive contrasts between China and the US, both socially and economically, are enjoined in the argument over America's trade deficit with the China. The latter is deeply aware that its future prospects depend on the continuation of its economic growth and this remains its priority. But no longer to the exclusion of all else: China is beginning to widen its range of concerns and interests.
So far so predictable: China is growing at an exponential rate and is beginning to challenge the global power of the US. My idea concerns this parallel between Chinese and American power, but at the level of culture.
It's clear that the US as a global cultural superpower foments opposition to itself by crushing or buying off any attempts at cultural independence, so that you increasingly see the same films advertised at the same time in the centres of cities all around the globe, for example, and so many people's free time is spent watching films from Blockbuster video, not to mention eating at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart and so on. This makes the United States a very obvious target for anger against injustice and inequality.
China, on the other hand, has almost no cultural influence on this level, give or take the occasional martial arts epic, which is itself effectively a product of the Hollywood system. There are no global Chinese music stars, and very few if any recent global household names in any field. There is, thankfully, no global Chinese equivalent to McDonalds or Pizza Hut; in fact, the brands most beloved of young Chinese people seem to be American or European ones - NBA, KFC, the Champions' League etc. Aside from a few satellite Chinese speaking parts of the world, China has little or virtually no cultural influence to match its growing economic clout.
Doesn't this mean, then, that its increasing international economic power will attract less notice and therefore less opposition? I'm thinking in terms of other developing countries, specifically Africa, the Middle East and South America, where the locally damaging effects of China's involvement are becoming more and more unavoidable (I wrote about some aspects of this here), as well as the catastrophic effects on the environment if every Chinese peasant did ever get to live the Chinese Dream. What China lacks, though, is anything like the very clear focus for opprobrium that US cultural products and brands represent.( Read more... )
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A couple of things I've written here about China find an echo in a recent Guardian article about China's successive hostings of the Miss World contest (it seems that, like the Eurovision Song Contest, no other country would touch it with a chopstick):
For a regime keen to publicise its economic success and internationalist credentials at home and abroad, the month-long beauty-fest is propaganda gold dust. Miss World may not yet have her own float in the National Day parade in Tiananmen Square; but in a country where media content still falls under governmental control, the heavy coverage that the contest receives sends a powerful signal that the senior cadres feel the contest serves their ends.
Domestic TV coverage has a clearly defined political function. In general, the Chinese media like to broadcast footage of resident westerners going about their daily lives. Inevitably the subject is shown praising China - and if, like last year's Miss USA Nancy Randall, they do so in endearingly elementary Chinese, all the better. This kind of material has a significance over and above the feelgood factor; it underlines the success of recent liberalising policies.
Meanwhile on an international level the Miss World contest allows a carefully constructed Chinese message to be broadcast to an audience of two billion across the globe. Over the past 10 years the Chinese have worked hard to dispel once ubiquitous images of China, the bicycling factory state, and glamorous events like Miss World are a tonic. Not only that - the contest sends a strong message to the world about China's changing values and internationalisation, that the days of the Red Guards are over. "This sort of programming helps build an international image that is unthreatening and somehow reassuring," says Crane. "After all, beauty pageants were once considered as American as apple pie."
Unfortunately, what these witless and seemingly profoundly vapid Communist Party dullards, whose apparent ambition is to transform China into somewhere as bland and unthreatening as a Disney theme park, are incapable of realising is that it also portrays China as a country which is utterly, utterly naff.
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I haven't got anything useful to add to the debate about the attack on the democracy activist Lu Banglie, and I am not one to blow my own trumpet, but reading this article from Running Dog put me in mind of what I said a few months ago about attempts to 'reform' the CCP:
"Throughout the country party officials and to a certain extent ordinary Party members are allowed to run amok: charging peasants illegal taxes, running up restaurant bills for thousands of dollars, stuffing their pockets with public cash, paying thugs to beat villagers off their own land, building up huge unpayable debts with banks, everywhere doing favours for people they like and making life difficult or impossible for those who they don't. And doing all this with relative impunity - who is going to stand in their way? Other Party members?
It is only a tiny amount of cases of corruption that we ever get to hear about. As far as I can see, corruption and abuse is the rule and not the exception. My second analogy, then, is the Mafia.
In the Godfather Part 2 Michael Corleone is young, idealistic and determined not to follow the example of his father. He is going to clean up his family businesses and make them respectable. So what happens? I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it is the Mafia we are talking about here after all. How can you reform an organisation that is based on criminal corruption, on the systematic hoarding and abuse of power? Maybe we can conclude that what Michael wants doesn't really change, but as a leading member of the organisation he has a crucial job to do: Protect the Family."
As well as Asiapundit's post, I though that Rebecca MacKinnon's challenge to Chinese bloggers was right on the money:
"At the same time, I hope this question of a foreign correspondent's responsibility will not become a convenient way of distracting people from the core issue: one of human rights and the suppression of a democracy movement in Taishi.
Will Chinese netizens be successfully manipulated into foreigner-bashing as an acceptable alternative to communist party-bashing?"
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I'm not usually a huge fan of Xinran, but this is a great article from today's Guardian, about a kid's game involving a Chinese bank note:
"You have been moulded by the western media, which has hardly any positive press about China and the Chinese. You often go back to China, so tell me why Mao's picture still hangs on the walls of so many people's houses, shops and offices. You think it is because the Chinese government orders them to display them, or because those people have never heard western views? Or do you think they don't know that Mao did terrible things to his people and how much he damaged his country? Be honest to our history, Xinran. I know your family has lost people under Mao's cruel policies, I know your parents were sent to prison for years and you suffered in the Cultural Revolution as an orphan.
"I am sorry to remind you of your unhappy memories. But don't look down on what Mao did for Chinese national pride, and for those poor parents in the early 1950s. I feel it is unfair to Mao."
I stopped her. "What about the millions of Chinese who died under his rule, because of his policies, in the 50s and 60s?"
"If westerners still believe their God is just after he flooded the world for his own purpose, or George Bush could invade Iraq with growing numbers of deaths for his campaign for moral good, why shouldn't Chinese believe in Mao, who did lots of positive things for the Chinese but also lost lives for his own mission for good?"
For me this seems to neatly sum up two widely held beliefs in China: that all westerners are christians who unquestioningly accept the decisions of their leaders, and that Chairman Mao should be regarded as a kind of god!
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Is there anyone alive today who still sees China as a grey, hostile country, closed off to the rest of the world, where everyone sports Chairman Mao hats and rides bicycles while chanting passages from the Little Red Book? Certainly anyone who has visited the country in the last 20 or so years is genuinely surprised by the size and number of the skyscrapers, the traffic jams and the brand-new shopping centres selling the same fashions as in the West.
The Chinese are proud of their new country, and pleased that people come to visit and see the results of the changes for themselves. Foreigners visiting or living in China are encouraged to spread the word, to use the benefit of their broadmindedness and wisdom to impart the truth to others abroad who 'don't understand' how much things have changed. And the authorities also see their own job as 'educating' foreigners about the new China. According to Sun Jiazheng, the head of the Ministry of Culture:
(We) have many foreign friends, including some ambassadors. They have special opinions about China because they are knowledgeable about our country and are very friendly to us. I often travel abroad, and I make self-criticisms when I come back ... sometimes I find foreign countries know so little about China. As a minister in charge of cultural exchange, I feel that I have not done a good job in introducing modern China to the world. Our foreign guests here (on the CCTV discussion show Dianhua) are all experts on China's issues or know a lot about our country, but most foreigners are not like them, and know little about China. Take our trip to Germany for example: When we asked a taxi driver about his impression of China, he said it was a country with a vast area. Then he added that he did not know much and the country seemed quite mysterious to him. Changing the Subject: How the Chinese Government Controls Television, Ann Condi
Apart from the example of the German taxi driver, what does not 'understanding' China mean? According to the Government, many people happily expose their own ignorance, not by talking about Mao hats or little red books, but those other tired items of former importance so beloved of foreigners - Tibet, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square, and Human Rights.
When the Government talks of the importance of educating the world about China, it's not just pride in the new shopping centres full of consumer goods. What it is, is code: what they really want is for the debate about China's past, present and future to be on China's (meaning the Government's) terms.
My students, as I had expected, were evidently taught to be very suspicious about any less-than-positive information regarding China. But what is interesting is that they weren't taught to see it as 'imperialist lies', but rather as the result of a misunderstanding. Put in these terms, of course, it sounds generous, tolerant and forgiving; but what is actually happening is that the authorities are exploiting the goodwill and naivity of the young in order to encourage them to automatically reject anything that contradicts what the Party tells them. Both Chinese youth and foreigners resident in China are encouraged to talk about the occupation of Tibet as an issue too difficult to discuss. The Cultural Revolution is sold as a terrible period in the past with no bearing on the country's present. Human Rights is a confusing issue because, as we all know, 'all countries have problems' (China now goes as far as to produce a regular report on Human Rights in the US, just to emphasise what a complex issue it really is). Democracy as practiced in the West is perhaps not appropriate for China...and so on.
It's true that many of these issues have complicated aspects to them. But the Party line is that any conclusions reached about them which does not show the Party in a flattering light are based on a false or superficial understanding - so the Government tells China's young people and 'foreign friends' that they have a special duty to tell others the 'truth' - ie. that these things are just too complicated to discuss.
It is of course flattering to be told that you have a 'special understanding' of an issue which your peers lack. Foreign politicians seem to fall for the CCP's rhetoric just as foreign teachers do. One foreign ESL teacher gave the following formula for avoiding controversy in the classroom:
Tibet ("I've heard a lot of contradictory information about that place, let's talk about something else.")
Tiananmen ("I wasn't there, let's talk about something else.")
Taiwan ("I am certain that the people of Taiwan and the Mainland can work out this issue in a peaceful way, let's talk about something else.")
Religion ("People have so many strange and wonderful superstitions, let's talk about something else.")
The 'superiority' of western democracy ("Every country has its problems, let's talk about something else.")
But it seems to me that if we agree to conclude, whether in class or in public, that these topics are not up for discussion for whatever reason, just as the Party insists they are beyond the understanding of ordinary Chinese, we end up conceding a huge amount of ground to the CCP.
Surely it is better for foreign teachers, instead of saying 'it's too complicated' or 'both sides have their arguments', to respond with the basic truth: "One of the conditions of my being here is that I'm not allowed to talk about those subjects".
Of course there are some subjects that the Government does permit, although not encourage, discussion over: the economy, the environment and corruption. I think this shows that they are, at least for the moment, confident of being able to control the debate over those issues, acknowledging them as problems and promoting the idea that they are doing everything they can about them. Sometimes this can lead to bizarre admissions: a university professor interviewed during the BBC's China Week of documentaries claimed that the Government had simply never considered that economic inequality might result from the policy of economic liberalism.
On other issues - alternative political organisations, the legitimacy of the CCP's rule, the status of Taiwan and Tibet - debate will remain completely proscribed and penalised, as they know that to even acknowledge them as issues would jeopardise their very existence.
Another irritating and troubling aspect of the Government's propaganda regarding free information about China, is the argument that any criticism is due to jealousy of China's economic success. This trite argument unfortunately seems to appeal to the young. It is, needless to say, a contemptuous way to deal with genuine concerns about social injustice and human rights, and about the sustainability of the economic model they have adopted.
The authorities have so far been extremely adept at dealing with the Internet Generation. Throughout all my time in the country, despite all the restrictions and without using proxy servers, I was able to find pretty much all the information about Tiananmen Square, Tibet, the recent riots etc etc etc that I was looking for. But when I told my students about the Guardian's special week of articles on China, despite the fact that they had never heard of the Guardian before, and although the Guardian site is not in any way blocked in China, none of them was prepared to take a look. Of course they claimed that they would find the language too daunting, but I think that this was a pretty poor excuse for an excuse. I think that one reason is that they are genuinely apprehensive of the possible consequences of being seen to visit a non-Chinese website. But I think the main reason is that they feel they might encounter information which contradicts what the Party has told them about China; and if they do, they will have to take the time and effort to systematically disregard each and every word of it.
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In honour of my 30th post, and my upcoming 30-somethingth birthday, here is a 3-part recording of interviews with my 1st year university students about questions such as: Who was China's greatest leader, Which Chinese people are most famous around the world, and Which events in recent Chinese history are best known in other countries.
Unfortunately due to general ineptitude on my part and poor equipment (see above) the sound quality is not fantastic. It sounds like I was shouting the questions, but I don't think I was.
Part a: The students talk about Zhao Ziyang, once they've got over my mangling of his name; their admiration for Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao; along with some terrible editing and spectacular coughing.
Part b: The Liberation of China; the death of Zhou Enlai; Deng Xiao Ping in Hawaii; and how to say pretty much anything in Japanese.
Part c: What happened if Deng Xiao Ping walked round your house; and how long it will be before China has a female leader.
***** UPDATE *****
After problems with the site they were being hosted on, I've moved them back to yousendit.com, which is only good for a limited amount of downloads, so if that runs out email me and I'll repost them as soon as I can.
Just in case the original links are working (it seems to be a question of browser compatability), the original links (unlimited downloads) are here: Part a, Part b and Part c.
Apologies for all the messin' around.
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Recently, during a class discussion about acceptable questions to ask a recent acquaintance, I asked my students if it was okay to ask a relative stranger if they were a member of the Communist Party. I expected them to answer, as I think most Westerners would do, that it was not okay, because discussing politics in this way might lead to unwanted disagreement. The consensus was, however, that it might be okay if you needed something done and the person concerned might be able to help you.
What, then, is the Chinese Communist Party? It is certainly Chinese, but there are very few people who would these days characterise its politics as related to the theories of Karl Marx or the efforts of the Bolsheviks to establish a classless society in anything other than a purely rhetorical sense.
But is it, in fact, a political party? Not in the sense that it competes on an ideological battleground with other political forces. The Communist Party is supposed to be an all-encompassing organisation that renders other points of view obsolete. In practice, of course, instead of encompassing other points of view it ferociously silences them. The right of political debate is restricted solely to proven Party members.
More recently some of those Party members have been more vociferous about the kind of society they want to create. Known as the New Left, they look to a more social democratic model, influenced as far as I can tell by European societies which in the post-war period established a social pact between the trade unions, the Government and the employers. This social pact enabled Germany and Scandinavian societies to develop sustainably and to provide an enviable social safety net for their citizens.
Could such a model be applied in China? Well, I think it does need to be remembered that the social pact which apparently functioned so well in those societies from which China's New Left are so keen to draw inspiration, was itself the product of struggle; the development of social welfare systems and the inclusion of trade unions in social bargaining was not something freely granted from above, but was based on a recognition of their very real and proven power in relatively free societies. However, could the Chinese Communist Party begin to make serious adjustments and reforms which at least ameliorated the worst effects of rampant capitalism on people's lives and provided some kind of social safety net for those most in need?
This is a hugely complex issue which I think will come to dominate international debate about China in the coming years. According to an optimistic point of view, as expressed by one of the discussion panel members on this BBC radio programme, what China wants and needs to do is to copy the example of the Labour Party in Britain, with the added difficulty of doing so while remaining in power.
To start with, I think that the example of the British Labour Party is hugely misleading. Firstly, because the project of reforming the Labour Party was carried out by the pro-market leadership in opposition to the wishes of a very large proportion of the more left-wing socially concious Party members. In the case of China, it is the left-wing party members who are the advocates of change against the wishes of the dominant right-wing pro-market Party leadership.
Another problem with the analogy is that, although superficially attractive, it ignores the recent history of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has been making a rightward-bound ideological journey more or less ever since the early nineteen-sixties, when in the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward a certain amount of market reforms were introduced as a precursor to the start of the abandonment of Communist ideology by Deng Xiao Ping in the late nineteen-seventies. This was of course following the outburst of out-and-out autocracy of Mao's 'Great Purge'. Over ten years ago the disavowal of the wish for an equitable society was formalised by Jiang Zemin, who in his bizarrely-named 'Three Represents' theory welcomed back into the party all those people - 'rightists', capitalists and so on - who had been persecuted throughout the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
However, the journey the CCP has been taking has nothing to do with an increasing sense of social justice; quite the opposite, in fact. What it says clearly is: "If you can't beat them, join them". Now when the CCP is so keen to welcome representatives of the Guomindang to China, it seems that there is very little to distinguish the two in political terms.
So can the Chinese Communist Party reform itself into a Social Democratic Party with Chinese Characteristics? As I say, it's a huge area of debate and I think the arguments will run and run, but I just want to draw two brief analogies.
The first is the Catholic Church, which in the nineteen-sixties attempted through the Vatican II doctrine to get rid of some of it's more backward thinking on social issues. I think that at the time a lot of Catholic clergy took heart from the changes that were made, and it led directly to what we call 'Liberation Theology', the promotion of social as well as heavenly justice.
So what happened? Now we have a church which seems to be more reactionary than ever, promoting the development of AIDS throughout the second and third world, arrogantly refusing to deal with the firestorm of paedophile allegations which threaten to drive more and more moderate Catholics away from the church, and whose congregations are now asked to worship an ex-Nazi Pope, as if to emphasise that there is nothing worldly about his power and that he cannot be challenged by mere mortals. So what happened?
I think the main reason has to do with power. The Catholic Church is driven first and foremost by the need to protect its own existence. Its authority derives from core beliefs which are reactionary and superstitious, and to suggest that they can be adapted to suit social realities is I think to call into question that authority. A Catholic church genuinely and actively committed to challenging poverty and injustice would be unable to sustain its own power and wealth.
As I said at the start, my students don't seem to really regard the Chinese Communist Party as a political party as we might understand it, but as an organisation of power, privilege and prestige. Throughout the country party officials and to a certain extent ordinary Party members are allowed to run amok: charging peasants illegal taxes, running up restaurant bills for thousands of dollars, stuffing their pockets with public cash, paying thugs to beat villagers off their own land, building up huge unpayable debts with banks, everywhere doing favours for people they like and making life difficult or impossible for those who they don't. And doing all this with relative impunity - who is going to stand in their way? Other Party members?
It is only a tiny amount of cases of corruption that we ever get to hear about. As far as I can see, corruption and abuse is the rule and not the exception. My second analogy, then, is the Mafia.
In the Godfather Part 2 Michael Corleone is young, idealistic and determined not to follow the example of his father. He is going to clean up his family businesses and make them respectable. So what happens? I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but it is the Mafia we are talking about here after all. How can you reform an organisation that is based on criminal corruption, on the systematic hoarding and abuse of power? Maybe we can conclude that what Michael wants doesn't really change, but as a leading member of the organisation he has a crucial job to do: Protect the Family.
I don't think that China's New Left are in any way insincere about their project of bringing social justice to China. But I think they're misguided and possibly naive about the organisation they are members of. Unfortunately I think their efforts only go to provide window dressing for the Party leadership - it enables them to say 'Look! We have open debate inside the Party! No need for dissidents! Don't you see how wrong Wei Jingsheng and all those other foreign agents were? China is marching straight down the road to democracy all by itself and we don't need any advice or criticism from outside!'
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Several of my students don't know or have already forgotten who Zhao Ziyang was. But they have all heard of Da Shan. Da Shan is 'China's favourite foreigner', renowned in every corner of the Middle Kingdom for his dashing good looks and his complete mastery of the Mandarin Chinese of Beijing. He arrived here from Canada in 1988, and since then, according to his very informative webs...excuse me just a moment, one of the students has a question.
Yes, you there, you had a question?
"Yes, sir."
Don't call me sir. My name's Richard. What's your name again?
"Jamily, sir. Er, Mr. Richard."
Jamily? Your name is Jamily?!? What's your question, Jamily?
"Well, sir, it's just that...I was thinking about that story you made us read, sir, Mr. Richard. The one about the picture. By that guy, er, Oswald Wo-'
Oscar Wilde, Jamily. What about it?
"What, sir?"
Don't say 'what, sir?' It's ... oh it doesn't matter. What's your point, Jamily?
"Well, I was thinking, because, you know, Da Shan came to China in 1988, sir, and that other guy, the one you asked about yesterday? I did some research, and I found out that he was locked up under house arrest, sir, Mr.Richard, in 1989, so I thought-"
Are you suggesting that Zhao Ziyang was like the picture in the attic, while Da Shan is like the-
"Yes, sir, exactly, Mr. Richard, sir! And Da Shan is like the guy who couldn't, I mean doesn't, get any uglier!"
That's bollocks, Jamily.
"Thank you, sir"
No, I mean it's preposterous. It's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life.
"But sir, just think how much better things would have been! And just imagine all the wonderful things he could have done on behalf of other gay people in Ch-"
Jamily, I never said that Zhao Ziyang was gay!
"Well, sir, maybe just a little bit bi-"
Jamily! This is just too silly for words. Sit Down! Stop calling me Sir!
And change your name!
"Sorry, Mr. Richard, sir."
Right, sorry about that, now where were we? Ah yes, the blog. According to Da Shan's very informative website...
Just a moment. I need to think.
You know, maybe that kid Jamily - Jamily! - has a point.
It does kind of all make sense.
In fact the more I think about it...
Right! I've thought about it.
It's time for the Chinese people to stand up once again!
Down With The Da Shan Dynasty!!!
It's time to establish a People's Republic of China!
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It's a truism about certain people that they would have been 'the greatest leader we never had'. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but then I'd probably disagree with most of them anyway. It's obvious to most people who don't think that evolution is 'the stupidest thing I ever heard' that Al Gore would have been a preferable President to George W. Bush, but that's partly because more people voted for him. In British terms, it's clear to me that instead of that succession of toddlers, nobodies and ghouls who have fronted the Conservative Party in the last few years, Michael Portillo would make a much more charismatic and convincing leader, but for obvious reasons I'm not about to write to the Daily Mail and tell them so - besides which, something tells me that I wouldn't get much of a hearing. I just hope that his sexual orientation causes him just as much pleasure and relief as it causes us.
It’s unlikely that if Michael Portillo had ever met Zhao Ziyang that they would have found they had very much in common. As far as I know, the reason for Zhao no longer being the Chinese leader by June 1989 had nothing to do with being gay, although of course he might have been, in which case spending the last fifteen or so years of his life under house arrest can't have done wonders for his sex life. I don’t know what Zhao’s English was like, and I’d be very surprised if Michael Portillo could communicate in Chinese; Zhao was also a dedicated leading member of the Communist Party. Why, then, did he spend the last fifteen years of his life under lock and key? According to Wikipedia:
Zhao was a solid believer in the party, but he defined socialism much differently than party conservatives. Zhao called political reform "the biggest test facing socialism." He believed economic progress was inextricably linked to democratisation. As early as 1986, Zhao became the first high-ranking Chinese leader to call for change, by offering a choice of election candidates from the village level all the way up to membership in the Central Committee.
He was known in the west for two things, one of which was when in May 1989 he went down to Tiananmen Square to talk to the students, listen to their demands and try to persuade them to leave peacefully. During the subsequent crackdown he was at first sidetracked and then purged, disappearing suddenly and completely from public life. Think of it as kidnapping, if you like. The other major event was in February this year, when his death sparked panic in the Chinese authorities. They tried to control every aspect of his funeral and of every word of the coverage of his death in the media, and only just a few weeks ago arrested a Strait Times journalist who was trying to get his hands on a copy of his memoirs.
What is it about his memoirs and his memory that the Government is so nervous about? A recent article shed some light on the issue:
Crackdown on China's little-read book
3 June 2005
A SECRET manuscript Beijing is desperately trying to stop from being published outlines purged leader Zhao Ziyang's plea for China to abandon one-party rule and follow the path of democracy.
It also airs Mr Zhao's opinion the government blundered in its crackdown on the 1989 democracy protests that led to hundreds, if not thousands, of citizens being killed, the author says.
The sensitive manuscript is now at the centre of the arrest of Hong Kong-based Singapore Straits Times reporter Ching Cheong. He was detained while trying to obtain a copy of the manuscript that has yet to make its way out of mainland China. China on Tuesday said Mr Ching was arrested for spying and had confessed.
Its authorities have pressured author Zong Fengming, an old friend of Mr Zhao's, not to publish the book.
The 85-year-old, who compiled the manuscript from conversations he had with Mr Zhao while he was under house arrest, said what makes it so threatening to Beijing is the late Mr Zhao's belief China must have democracy in order to prosper, and economic reforms are simply not enough.
"He said China's development must be on the path of democracy and rule of law. If not, China will be a corrupt society," Mr Zong said.
Reporting of Zhao's death was limited to a terse few paragraphs in the state-controlled media as part of an official campaign to erase his memory.
Mr Zong believes the government fears if a book about Mr Zhao's views is published overseas and copies find their way to China, it could have a detrimental effect on the communist regime, making Mr Zhao a hero even in death.
Mr Zhao's views run contrary to the path China's leaders are taking. The Chinese leadership is intent on maintaining one-party rule and quashing dissent or freedom of expression.
It seems to me that if, following the death of Hu Yaobang, there was a candidate for China's Gorbachev it was Zhao. Maybe if he had stepped into that hypothetical power vacuum in mid-1989, there would have been no crackdown, no unleashing of all the forces of political repression, no increase in political indoctrination for the young, no attempt to rehabilitate that monster Chairman Mao, and maybe the Chinese would have been allowed to freely use the internet to develop deeper and more open relationships with the rest of the world. Maybe China would have seen the flowering of a free press, and maybe there would have been some form of development of alternative political parties and perhaps even multi-party elections. Of course it is also possible that a China suddenly impatient for change would have pushed him aside in favour of an outsider, someone more radical and not connected with the Party machine.
Obviously there is a possibility that the hardliners would have fought back and tried to regain power. It happened in 1991 with Gorbachev. But maybe, just like in 1991, the world would have seen this old guard for what they really were - old men whose time had passed, isolated and powerless, railing against a world that had left them behind.
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Although I am by nature a lazy thinker, I do try and bear in mind when thinking about things like the events of 1989 that oversimplistic analysis will lead me straight to the wrong conclusions. Furthermore, comparisons, says the old adage, are odious, especially, as the Chinese Government is always so keen to point out, when they concern China and the West. I am also no expert on recent Chinese history. There are almost certainly people reading this who know a thousand times more about these things than I do, and I would be grateful if they would step in and correct me if I get too carried away.
China and Eastern Europe are a long way away from one another, and the prevailing circumstances in 1989 were different in all sorts of ways. This is why the Chinese Communist Party survived not just the turn of the decade but also into the new millennium, while the Communist Parties of Eastern Europe simply disappeared. Here I want to concentrate on those different circumstances:
1. The economy. Although China was still in the process of recovering from complete devastation, the economy was growing, and on the whole people were enjoying an improving standard of living. There were problems with inflation, huge disparities of wealth and low wages throughout the country, but the country was not on its last legs like the countries of the soon-to-be-former Eastern Bloc.
2. The political situation. I think generally people were happy that their leaders were heading in the right direction, albeit perhaps too slowly. People were enjoying more freedom than they had experienced within living memory, given that most of the adult population had experienced at least part of the Cultural Revolution.
As far as I can see, the demonstrations in 1987 and 1989 expressed a growing political confidence which derived from ten years of liberalisation. People were making demands of the system - greater freedom of speech, an end to corruption, better and more responsible government - but I don't think they wanted to see an end to Party rule. The demonstrations were quite different from the ones we don't see reported in the state media today, which tend to be localised reactions to individual cases of corruption and injustice. This is one of the things that I'm completely happy to admit being mistaken about.
3. Lack of political leadership. Jung Chang refers in her new book to the Cultural Revolution as the 'Great Purge'. Successive generations of potential dissidents had been massacred, driven to suicide, locked away or forced to leave the country. The person who was perhaps China's best hope of a Václav Havel, Wei Jingsheng, was part of the Beijing Wall group of dissidents and was locked up in 1979 for 14 years. There was, therefore, no previous generation of rebels from whose mistakes the protestors could learn.
Students groups obviously played a role in the building of the demonstrations, but they certainly didn't constitute a 'government-in-waiting'.
The leader who most resembled a Chinese Gorbachev, Hu Yaobang, had been sacked by Deng Xiaoping in 1987 for being too liberal, and it was his death two years later that was the initial pretext for the build-up of protestors around the square in April 1989. They were of course other reformists high up in the party, but it seems that around this time they did not have the upper hand.
4. Lack of foreign media influence. The state media was very tightly controlled, and the only alternative, the broadcasts of the BBC and other media news organisations, could only be listened to by the tiny proportion of the population who could understand English.
These were I think some of the most important differences between the situation in China and in the countries of Eastern Europe in 1989. However, this set of circumstances did not have to inevitably lead to the events that followed - the Massacre and the unleashing of political repression. It might be interesting, just now we're here, to speculate about how, given the circumstances above, things might have turned out differently.
Let's just say that, instead of giving the order to physically clear the square at all costs, the leadership had dithered. Maybe nobody wanted to be responsible for taking such a momentous decision. Or maybe, having received the order to attack, the army chiefs had not felt comfortable with the situation, and refused to do so. Or even if, and this is probably stretching it quite a bit, the soldiers of the 27th Army had refused to open fire. The leadership would have faced a crisis, and maybe, sensing that the Government didn't know what to do, the protests would have kept on growing throughout the country. The eyes of the world would have been focussed on Beijing, through the lenses of the new global 24-hour news gathering organisations. Protests were growing throughout Eastern Europe too; could the line of dominos reach China? Maybe heads would have rolled in Beijing, people resigning and being forced to resign, nobody sure what to do in this unique situation, nobody wanting to be remembered as the leader who stood in Beijing 40 years on and told the growing mass of Chinese people to sit down again. Maybe the drama would have unfolded with a gradual hollowing-out of the centre of power as the leadership tossed the poisoned chalice of leadership back and forth.
In many accounts written by people who defend the use of force to clear the square, one factor is all important. With the approach of that 40 year anniversary, a special guest was expected, and the Chinese could not be seen to lose face in such a dramatic fashion. Mikhail Gorbachev had recently stood with the East German leadership at their 40th anniversary parade. He had told them what they least wanted to hear, that 'die Wende' had passed:
Mikhail Gorbachev stood next to Honecker, but he looked uncomfortable among the much older Germans. He had come to tell them it was over, to convince the leadership to adopt his reformist policies. He had spoken openly about the danger of not ‘responding to reality’. He pointedly told the Politbüro that ‘life punishes those who come too late’. Honecker and Mielke ignored him, just as they ignored the crowds when they chanted, ‘Gorby, help us! Gorby, help us!’
If Gorbachev had arrived in Beijing in the midst of this crisis armed with the same advice, how would he have been received? Perhaps the hardliners like Li Peng would have chosen to ignore him, in the same way that Honecker and Mielke chose to take no notice. But maybe at this stage he wouldn't have been dealing with the hardliners. Would there have been anyone among the leadership of the Communist Party who might have been prepared to listen, who might have seen a potential way out of the deadlock? Another Chinese Gorbachev, if you like?
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Obviously it's a mistake to see the post-war pre-1989 Eastern European countries as one huge homogenous monolith governed by Moscow, but each of the Eastern Bloc states did either collapse or rapidly wither away during the historically brief period from 1989 onwards. The events in each country had certain basic things in common.
1. The economies were in tatters. Call it soviet-style communism, state capitalism or whatever you like, but by the late 1980s it had ruined the economic life of the countries.
2. The Communist Party leadership was ideologically bankrupt. They could no longer claim to be marching towards freedom, equality and prosperity for all. The 40 years of spying on each other and political repression was enough proof for the citizens that they were not really marching in any direction at all.
3. People could see and hear for themselves, on foreign TV stations and on radio drifting in from abroad, that things in neither the west nor their own countries were as the leaders told them they were. Furthermore, they could keep up to date with events in Russia and in their comrade nations, and know that changes were taking place and that their own leaders were starting to panic.
4. In most countries, there was an organised opposition. It may have been in prison or in exile, but it existed and it was clear that its ambition was to take power away from the Party.
5. In a lot of countries, the organised oppostion was led by a very clear figurehead. Probably ten years before, neither the leader of Solidarity Lech Walesa nor the intellectual dissident Vaclav Havel would have imagined that they would one day become President. But as events moved on it must have become clear that the people flooding into the streets and squares saw them as leaders. Hence it is very easy to look back now and see them as Presidents-in-Waiting.
6. According to one account I once heard (repeated here), the KGB had a decisive influence on events. They had allegedly decided to oversee the removal from power of the first generation of Eastern Bloc leaders, and settled on street demonstrations as a means of achieving this. Things subsequently got out of hand - I'd imagine that Vladimir Putin was not well pleased.
Then there was the domino effect, and the most significant factor here must have been the USSR itself. Change in Russia, as we all know, was not led from below but from above. Mikhail Gorbachev was, like De Klerk in apartheid South Africa, an insider who wanted to essentially preserve the system, but realised that it would have to change if it was to survive:
The Party, which I had joined, itself badly needed to be reformed and reoriented toward democracy. And through this, the country could begin to gain some freedom. That came later, but it all started with the desire to do something and show initiative. That was what led many good people to join the Komsomol (Communist Youth League) and the Party.
At a certain point, though, the momentum for fundamental change had built up to such an extent that 'die Wende' was reached. There was no turning back.
So when in August 1991 some Communist Party hardliners briefly kidnapped Gorbachev in an abortive coup attempt, the world saw them for what they really were: desperate old men whose time had passed. Not only were they no longer at the wheel of the ship of state - they had been thrown overboard.
Incidentally, the fact that the ex-head of the KGB is firmly entrenched as leader of the Great Bear tells us a lot, I think, about the difference between overthrowing a totalitarian state through popular uprising, and waiting on the leadership to quietly reform it and their own positions, powers and privileges out of existence.
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The Chinese are not known for giving a straight answer to a difficult question. Partly this is to do with saving face; maybe it is a national trait, but maybe they learnt it from their leaders.
In a fascinating account of a visit to the recording of a CCTV talk show, Ann Condi makes the following point:
There is a very basic aspect of the Sino-foreign media dialogue that is so obvious that it is seldom commented on. It involves a common dynamic in human interactions where hypocrisy, deception, and issues of “saving face” intersect. It is this: If I find myself in disagreement with another person about something, and yet I sincerely believe in the correctness of my own position, I will seek to highlight our differences and show decisively why my position is sound and that of the other person is flawed. If, on the other hand, I am painfully aware that the other person has a point, and I am in the wrong, I will change the subject.
The strategy of the Chinese government is to change the subject. When complaints are lodged about the imprisoning of dissidents, the Chinese do not forthrightly proclaim "Indeed, we do put them in prison. We are justified in doing so. They are a threat to our security." Instead they change the subject to "No country should interfere in the internal affairs of another country." When America attacks China’s human rights record, the Chinese do not say "You are mistaken about our human rights problem, and here’s why." Rather, they change the subject: "What about your human rights problem?"
Where the question of democracy is concerned, it's very easy for them to muddy the waters. Is democracy right for China? If so, what kind of democracy? And most importantly, whose kind of democracy? I think by posing this question they are exploiting a sore point in the West at the moment, and maybe taking advantage of a basic schism in how we regard our own societies.
Oddly enough, this is not the case in China itself. Recently in class we were doing a quiz about life in Britain, and one of the questions was about the voting age. Most of them knew it was 18 - the same, they said, as in China. It turns out that they all believe that they live in a democratic country, where at the age of 18 they get to participate in elections, which are held at regular intervals. If anyone who's not a member of the CCP could explain this to me, I'd be very grateful.
As I say, in Europe and the US many people are not so confident about the democratic credentials of their own societies. Despite the massive opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their subsequent occupation, both went ahead regardless. People are understandably uncertain about the whole question of the West imposing democracy on other, poorer, countries, and about the legitimacy of the resulting political systems. As is, presumably, Hamid Karzai, whose recent request to the Americans that they give his Government some information about the military operations they are carrying out in his country was roundly turned down. Not to mention the 99% of Iraqis in the survey quoted by Noam Chomsky who do not believe that the Americans are in their country to bring democracy.
Back home, a lot of Americans' confidence in their political system took quite a blow after the 2000 election farce, when the Supreme Court imposed the losing candidate as President. And despair really set in last year, when all the efforts to elect absolutely anybody not quite as dangerous as Bush came to nothing. In addition, the EU is currently in crisis because when people were given a chance to have a say in the future of their continent, they irresponsibly made what we're repeatedly told was the Wrong Choice. After all, everyone within the political system in Europe agrees with the consensus over the need to make constant cutbacks because of the pressing demands of the Brave New World - anyone who questions this is torn to pieces and ridiculed in the press (George Galloway) or explicitly told, in the case of the French voters, that they don't understand the future.
So does the West really believe in giving people a genuine democratic choice? If not, who are we to lecture the Chinese, who after all have had 5,000 years of history to learn from?
Well, the choice between the Republicans and the Democrats is not the widest choice in the world, it's true. However, what people in the United States and many other countries do enjoy is democratic rights. And in the US they are under attack - laws on censorship, gay rights, positive discrimination and equality legislation, to name but a few, are in the sights of the group of fanatical bigots in the US administration, and absolutely must be defended.
But neither can we allow George W. Bush to define what we mean by democracy. He seems to believe in top-down democracy, with a small ruling elite managing the country on behalf of large commercial interests. In theory he believes that these large commercial interests best represent the core interests of citizens, although in reality it's hard to see how anyone could sincerely defend this point of view.
I and many others believe in a grassroots participative democracy in which instantly recallable delegates are elected locally into positions which do not give them access to special privileges, and in which all major decisions are preceded by an extensive and open debate and then resolved through the active participation of ordinary citizens through voting.
This is my own democratic ideal. I don't believe that this kind of democracy is likely to break out anywhere in the world any time soon, and least of all in China. Amongst the people I've had contact with over the last few months, multi-party democracy has never been mentioned. At the top end of society, nobody is keen to be seen as China's Gorbachev, and the man least likely to is Hu Jintao, who recently announced that he wants China to closer resemble North Korea in political terms.
Nevertheless I don't think China will continue in this direction for too long. Essentially I believe in what Jung Chang says at the end of 600 harrowing and bloody pages of recent Chinese history - that the momentum of liberalisation is unstoppable. Just as China will not attack Taiwan because of the mutual commercial interests, I think that some distant day there will be on offer some form of democracy, acceptable both to foreign corporations and to the most advanced sections of the CCP. In the same way, I think that one day much sooner we will see news items on the first McDonalds to open in Pyongyang, followed by the first Subway and the first Blockbuster video, until it starts to resemble every other city in the world, as the IMF and the World Bank send in legions of foreign companies to grab anything that isn't nailed down...I could easily be completely wrong about both of these things, though, and one thing we do not have democratic control over is our environment, and that may start to finally give way before either Kim Il Jong or the CCP does. Certainly in the case of North Korea, economic change will arrive much, much quicker than any moves towards political openness.
(However, before I get too pessimistic about the direction the whole world is heading in, there is always the encouraging example of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivian peasants - I'd encourage anyone interested to take the time to listen to the interview with the American investigative reporter Greg Palast on this edition of the Democracy Now! radio show. In fact the whole show is a fascinating listen – towards the end there is a lengthy and very disturbing interview with a former CIA ‘Economic Hit Man’.)
In the meantime, then, there is the entirely unresolved question of democratic rights in China. To me it is indisputable that those democratic demands raised, possibly naively and with not much understanding of the costs they would entail, in Tiananmen Square in 1989 relate to real inalienable democratic rights that are currently enjoyed by real people all over the world, and which do not exist in China. The most important of those right now is the right to a genuinely independent free press. Only in this way can the Chinese people learn from the mistakes of the past and learn from them who not to trust.
Is it ethnocentric and culturally insensitive to demand a free press? Only if we believe that countries such as China, Zimbabwe, Burma and North Korea have some deep cultural connection which means that their people, unlike ourselves, must be permanently kept in the dark about what has happened, what is happening and what could happen in their own and in other countries.
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How many Chinese people does it take to change a lightbulb? Well, if their Government has anything to do with it, it could be quite a few. The other day in the small supermarket in Dalian's state-run Friendship Store, I counted 50 uniformed staff. If I look out of my window I can see two elderly men sweeping the dust up and down the same bit of the same road. And it's also not unusual to find three people staffing a small public bathroom in a public park.
It's not just public places, though. An average large-sized restaurant typically has up to four women stationed permanently at the door to squawk welcomes and goodbyes at the diners. Big hotels have, in addition to a couple of porters and bell-boys, someone whose job seems to be to 'help' people use the revolving doors, which creates obvious difficulties for anyone wanting to get in or out.
Neither is it just Chinese-run businesses. The German-owned wholesaler Metro has literally dozens and dozens of floor staff standing around looking very very bored, while the lucky ones get to whizz around in forklift trucks. They also employ one poor guy to stamp your recept immediately after the checkout staff have given it to you.
I don't know how the system works. Maybe businesses of a certain size are obliged to employ a certain ratio of people. But the smell from the average Chinese public toilet is enough to tell you that employing all these staff does not result in higher efficiency and a better service - quite the opposite, in fact.
In the supermarket, for example, there are often three or four people in the aisle pointing things out to you and encouraging you to buy them instead of whatever you've chosen. However, if you try to find out what the difference is, they can only claim that it is 'better'. They don't know why. It's the same if you try and buy a DVD player, or anything related to your computer. I find that I know more about it than they do. And I've been convinced many times that I would do a better job of driving a taxi or a bus than the person employed to do so, despite the fact that I've only ever had one driving lesson in my life, and that was a disaster. Even more worrying is coming across articles like this. There is a strong sense that any given person doing any given job in China only has a limited understanding of what they're supposed to be doing.
Why is this so? I don't believe any racist nonsense about how the Chinese are any more or less inventive or incompetent than anyone else. My own pet theory is this: After Mao and his henchmen and women had driven anyone with any expertise to madness or suicide, or just plain beaten them to death, there wasn't that much know-how and learning to go around amongst such a rapidly growing population - and the tradition of passing expertise and wisdom on to future generations had itself received quite a beating.
You can see this clearly in the realms of cultural 'products' - although China is the 'factory of the world', what cultural exports has it produced in the last few years, apart from those tourist-friendly films celebrating China's glorious past?
Another enduring legacy of that time is that people don't seem inclined to challenge anyone in a position of responsibility, even if it's obvious that they don't know what they're doing. Maybe this is an ongoing reaction to a time when nobody's position was secure, apart obviously from that of the Great Helmsman. The Government soon recovered its authority, and people nowadays tend to regard any form of authority with craven face-saving respect.
So, the Government is desperate to keep people busy, to give them a stake in China's future and make them believe in the Chinese dream. At least, that's the charitable point of view. However, in China today those who aren't lucky enough to find jobs in foreign-owned factories producing inferior-quality goods for export, or unfortunate enough to labour day and night building the unaffordable apartment blocks and hotels that crowd out the skyline of China's cities, are paid subsistence wages to perform utterly meaningless tasks.
Whatever about Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, I'm sure this wasn't what Marx and Engels had in mind. And Margaret Thatcher would sleep even less at night at the thought of a public toilet staffed by three salaried employees!
As we all know, low wages are the reason for China's economic 'miracle'. And those low wages are the subject of a very interesting article by Andy Xie (it's the second article on the page), in which he points out that in other fast-developing economies in the past (he talks mostly about South Korea) there was a point at which a labour shortage developed, and wages had to rise.
The crucial point about China, though, is its size. China is starting to run out of land and natural resources - hence the drive to send migrant labourers to Africa to work in Chinese-owned factories. But it will be a very long time before it runs out of peasants prepared to work for very low wages in unskilled jobs. This means that wages will not rise in a country where the supply of labour is basically unlimited and workers are prevented from making demands.
What this means for China, I think, is two things. One is that those new apartment blocks will not rise in price as expected, and there will be some sort of crisis when speculators realise this and stop investing. I think this will lead to big problems for Chinese banks. Andy Xie puts it better than I can:
The fact that Chinese workers benefit little from their productivity gains has profound implications for China’s property market and commodity prices. Property values tend to rise in line with labor income in the long term. Property speculators assume that China’s economic growth will deliver rapid wage growth, and, hence, that they are just front-running Chinese workers in pushing up the prices first, i.e., Chinese workers will buy from them at higher prices with their higher wages in the future. I believe this is an illusion.
The second thing is at some point there will be social unrest related to the failure of wages to keep up with commodity prices. Andy Xie again:
The prices that China can afford depend on wage levels more than the overall size of the economy. The Chinese economy has been expanding rapidly on employment rather than wage growth. In the end, the burden for bearing the costs of raw materials comes down to the income of each consumer. Chinese consumers are just not becoming rich fast enough to catch up with the rapid increase in commodity prices.
But I also believe that all of this has dramatic implications not just for China. China is the 'factory of the world' - as we can see right now with the worldwide crisis in the textile industry, companies from other countries will continue to face stiffer and stiffer competition from Chinese exports. And who is going to pay? I think Andy Xie may have just hit the nail on the head with his final point:
In summary, the global financial markets are speculating in China-related assets, in the belief that Chinese prices will rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD prices are more likely to fall towards Chinese levels.
My own point is this: I don't think that it's just commodity prices that are going to fall across the world. Chinese wages are not going to rise to OECD levels. I believe that OECD wages are going to fall torwards Chinese levels.
You know, from a certain perspective, I think that might just be what Globalisation is all about.
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Also on the theme of the Christian right in China, someone reminded me of the role that Christian fundamentalists say China will play in their forthcoming apocalypse. They apparently believe that the rise of China is a clear sign that we are "nearing midnight", and that China's need for oil will soon push it into conflict with Israel, triggering the coming of their lord and the smiting of the godless. They also get very excited at any agreements between China and the EU (the rebirth of the Roman Empire), which they see as somehow connected to the Beast, as is Russia of course. I'd love to know how these Jesus freaks sell that to their potential converts!
You can read about it on sites like this:
Even newspapers in China now predict a war with the United States. China cannot match (yet) the U.S. in modern weapons and technology. For example, the U.S. has 18 times as many nuclear missiles. What China has many more times of is men. According to Revelation 9:14-16, an army of 200 million soldiers will cross the Euphrates from the East to fight at the battle of Armageddon.
According to Revelation 16:12, this gigantic army will belong to the "kings of the east" and advance over a prepared way. The way has been prepared. On April 20,2001, on a CNBC news program, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times international news analyst, stated that the real danger with which the United States will have to contend with in the future is China making an alliance with the nations of the East, which was now in progress.
Poking around in these dark corners of the Interweb is very entertaining as long as you try and forget that George W. Bush's administration takes a lot of this nonsense seriously, and may have it in mind as they provoke chaos and rebellion across the Middle East.
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Yesterday I mentioned that all churches in China have to recognise the ultimate authority of the Communist Party in order to practice here. Well, it's not quite as simple as that:
1. Christian believers must fervently love the People's Republic of China, support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the Peoples Government, uphold the unification of the motherland and the harmony among ethnic groups, and work steadfastly on the road of socialism.
2. Christian believers must strictly abide by all the laws, regulations, and policies of the Communist Party and the State, and strive to be patriotic and law abiding citizens.
3. Christian believers must actively work to increase the material wealth and cultivate the spiritual morals of the socialist civilization. They must comply with the government's labor codes and strive to contribute to the development of the "Four Modernizations." When scheduled religious activities are in conflict with production and work schedules, the economic activities must take priority.
4. A permit must be obtained from the county Religious Affairs Bureau in order to establish religious meeting points. No unauthorized meeting points are allowed.
5. Christian believers must actively cooperate with the government to carry out thoroughly the Party's religious policies to the letter. They shall not persuade and force others to believe in Christianity. They shall not brainwash teenagers under 18 with religious beliefs. They shall not bring children to religious activities.
6. One should see a doctor for medication when sick. Christian believers must not resort to prayer alone for healing so as not to endanger people's health and lives.
7. Christian believers shall not preach their religion outside the church buildings and specific places which have been designated for religious activities. They shall not preach itinerantly. They shall not receive self proclaimed evangelists into their homes, churches, or meeting points.
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While he was still President, Jiang Zemin was allegedly asked at a dinner party what fundamental change he would like to see happen in China. His response was that he would like to see China become a Christian country.
He's not isolated in this. Some of the leading creatures at the top of the CCP have apparently concluded from their studies of developed countries that the key to their success was the role of Christian beliefs. I don't think they're being inconsistent in this, given that there isn't really anything to Party ideology any more apart from nationalism, the need for an authoritarian state and letting the free market take over all aspects of economic life. In fact, I think it's better to think of the CCP as the Chinese Nationalist Party (國民党!) these days. And I think it's precisely this vacuum of ideas that makes young people in particular so vulnerable to right-wing fundamentalist groups like this who dispatch every year more and more young people to China to preach the holy word - under the guise of teaching english.
I came across this fascinating and timely article about missionary groups using ESL as a means of harvesting converts around the world. Unfortunately as it's a PDF I can't copy and post much of it here, but I'd encourage anyone remotely interested in either ESL or the evil influence of these bible bashing nutters to read the whole article, long as it is:
According to a report by missionaries recently returned from China, they are planning to return soon: 'We will teach English to Chinese students between the ages of 10 and 18 for six weeks in July and August.' On their last visit, they tell us, 'over 350 students heard the Gospel' and the principal of the school admired their dedication even though, as he explained, 'I don't understand what they were talking about but I knew it was something very deep and very special.'
It is something I find extremely worrying, not to say depressing. I've heard that in some cases in China the religious organisations offer to pay half the salaries of these 'teachers'. We have at least one of them here - I have seen the person concerned heading into class with a big thick 'Rapture'-type book. I've heard about Chinese students being baptised by foreign teachers in the bathtub of their apartments. Sometimes one of my students proclaims in class that they're a Christian - I just ignore it and move very swiftly on. Tragically though, because the students have so few reference points to help them understand Western life in any depth (hence the appalling and maddening assumption that I am a Christian), I think they actually see it as pretty 'cool'.
Personally the whole thing makes my blood boil.
This is not a general diatribe against teachers who happen to consider themselves Christians - you really need to follow the above link to know what I'm talking about. As it makes clear, what the organisations concerned are proselytising is the complete opposite of Liberation Theology. The article gives some example sentences which one English teaching missionary group encourages their staff to use in the classroom:
Right: Man has a right to punish his children when they behave poorly.
Struggle: I'm struggling to finish this work soon.
Boss: The boss is good. He treats us well and pays us a good wage.
No problem for them that all churches in China are obliged to accept the authority of the Communist Party before they can go about their work. And the Communist Party leadership are fully aware that what right-wing Christian ideology has to say about the world constitutes very little threat to their own power, so they at least tolerate it, and I suspect increasingly encourage it. What is being preached, after all, is submission - submission to whatever forms of authority exist, be it a husband (we call it the missionary position for a good reason!), a corrupt government or an intolerant and ignorant God. In much the same way, in fact, as the world's financial institutions force obedience to the law of the market on the world's poorest countries:
While on the one hand preaching a strong line in neoliberal politics, many evangelical organisations preach an equally strong line on political aquiescence. The Christan Television (online, 2002) warns us to 'Stop the Revolution' because 'one day Jesus will return and overthrow all who remain rebellious to this rule.' Stopping rebellion allows former sinners to find 'true freedom'. This doctrine emphasises aquiescence not only to the authority of God but also to the authority of government.
With tragic irony, these Christian churches are preaching this nonsense under the guise of giving people what has become one of the most empowering tools these days, the ability to communicate in English.
At least in China, I'd question the depth of conviction of any recent converts to Christianity. According to Paul Theroux's book, it's very common for 'religious' Chinese people to bet on several horses at the same time. Just because someone says they're a Christian doesn't mean that they don't believe in Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Falun Gong and maybe the Party too!
However, this is not just happening in Chinese universities, but all over the world. There needs to be a movement throughout ESL to expose and challenge these people. They are exploiting the needs of the poor in order to push their twisted, bigoted ideology. They really do qualify as 'foreign devils'!
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I've noticed an increasing and worrying tendency to refer to the Massacre, even in the international press, as the 'Tiananmen Square Incident'. In fact, a friend's Chinese teacher referred to it once as the Tiananmen Square Accident, and then tried to defend her choice of word! The actual 'Tiananmen Incident' took place in 1976. What took place was also a massacre, and certainly not an 'incident', whatever that means:
Things became rowdy, and inside the Great Hall of the People China's rulers were alarmed. After consultation with Mao, it was decided to use force to clear the square. Mao authorized the use of force but not guns.
That evening when only a few thousand protesters remained they were driven from the square by militia armed with clubs. Four thousand were arrested. Sixty were dragged into the Great Hall of the People, beheaded and later shipped to Shanghai and secretly cremated.
It's at best misleading to use this phrase to refer to the events of 1989, and at worst it plays right into the hands of the Chinese authorities in their attempts to have the massacre recorded in the history books of the world as something much more neutral and ambiguous than pure cold-blooded butchery of their own people.
I think this may have something to do with increasing Chinese Government influence in debates concerning human rights in China, and when it occurs I think it needs to be confronted and the fact that it was a massacre must be insisted on at all costs.
The saddest thing about all this is that the average Chinese student, despite seeming to spend every available minute online, probably has about as much awareness of the Tiananmen Square Massacre as the average British student has of the Tiananmen Incident. How foreigners can choose to go on living here year after year in the full knowledge of the extent of their students' ignorance is truly beyond my understanding.
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It seems to me that if you seriously want to understand the mentality of Chinese people today, you have to consider the impact of the events of June 1989. The protests were not isolated but were part of a general push for democracy in the late nineteen-eighties. This is abundantly clear if you read any books which cover the period - at the moment I'm reading 'Riding the Iron Rooster' by Paul Theroux, his account of a year spent travelling around the country. It was published in 1988, and in the book in conversation after conversation people express their shame and disgust at the Cultural Revolution, their rejection of Mao as someone who made nothing but mistakes and as someone who they recognise to have been essentially cracked after 1956, and their wish for more political freedom. He visits Mao's home village, a site of pilgramage 10 years before, and finds it completely deserted.
He talks about the massive protests which took place all over the country in 1987, involving both students and workers demanding greater political freedom: press freedom, electoral reform, a multiparty system, official permission to demonstrate and, perhaps more importantly, their right to have their protests reported in the press; and social freedom - the students' demands included sexual freedom (in 2005 it is still illegal to 'cohabit') and better food in the canteens. At one point there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people on the streets of Shanghai, and similar protests in other cities. The person scapegoated and purged in the wake of these protests was Hu Yaobang, whose death was the initial impetus for the buildup in Tianamen Square in April 1989. There also followed a general campaign against the effects of 'borgeouis liberalism', especially amongst the young.
We all know what came of that - if anyone needs reminding they only need to take the time to read the report which the Guardian fortunately keeps posted on it's Special Report on China page here. As I say, it was not an isolated event. The ongoing impact has involved a partial rehabilitation of Mao's reputation, a refusal to confront the consequences of the Cultual Revolution and what I consider to be a general intellectual impoverishment, contrasted with the real intellectual awakening of the nineteen-eighties which is evident in Paul Theroux's book and also in Ma Jian's 'Red Dust', which is the story of a Beijing writer and painter travelling the country in the mid-80s, on the run from the authorities visiting his friends and witnessing the changes taking place. His friends also paint, write and talk about the recent past and about the possibility of living in a freer society.
I can only compare that with the conversations I've had over the last ten months, obviously especially with young people, in which political change has not been any kind of issue for them.
The authorities after 1989 took the decision that they would systematically crush any sign of independent thinking amongst young people. In order to achieve this they increased military-style discipline in universities, increased political (read nationalistic) education for university and school students and removed from campuses any places where students or teachers would be able to gather and discuss their lives. This over the last few years has happily coincided with a general improvement of the standard of living, along with certain projects of national prestige which are used to bolster young people's sense of national pride and attachment to the state.
Just as important in my opinion has been the growing availability of mobile phones and the internet. Chinese students see themselves primarily as consumers, just as connected to and engaged with the outside world as young people in Japan or the USA. In reality they are disconnected from the society that they live in, atomized, disregarding of any notion of solidarity or democracy. What it will now take to shake them out of this stupor and make them think about what is going on around them I do not know. They really don't seem to know or in fact care that the internet they see is filtered and a pale imitation of what the rest of the world uses. I've tried asking them what they would do if the government banned mobile phones, but it's a bit too abstract as that clearly is not about to happen.
This, on the other hand, is fantastic news.
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But this one had nothing to do with Japan. Not wanting to sound hysterical, but it needs to be clearly said that they are only going to be able to keep the lid on this situation for a very short time. Something big is going to happen soon which will make this whole anti-Japanese thing look fairly trivial.
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Does anyone remember Gary North? In 1999 I was a regular visitor to his site, which hosted thousands of links to articles presenting entirely plausible scenarios of global financial catastrophe at the end of the year. Embarrassing to admit now, of course, but I was actually quite frightened.
All the more chastening, in fact, to find out soon after that Gary North was a bit of a nutter. Actually, he was a fully-fledged hysterical fundamentalist lunatic who had already, in the early eighties, but without the benefit of the internet, happily predicted that AIDS would lead to a decimation of the decadent human species. He was a full-time doom-mongerer, with his own silly agenda.
These days I'm much more careful about believing predictions when I don't know who's making them and why, particularly when I come across them on the internet.
Now, Gordon C. Chang is a writer on Chinese affairs, and from what I know of him he's been in a good position to make predictions about the future of the Chinese economy. His book, which I don't think is on general sale in the People's Republic, but which you can read an extract from here, is a very detailed account of what exactly is rotten about China's economic miracle, and he provides a number of possible scenarios, all entirely plausible, for how things could go horribly wrong for the Chinese government in the not too distant future.
It's obviously something he feels very deeply about. In fact, it is this which puts me of the book, which often reads like a rant. The individual stories he tells tend to get lost in the general sweep of his argument, making it compelling to read in short bursts, but over 200 pages he often comes across like somebody with a vendetta.
Could he be another Gary North? His name is not one that crops up much in the increasing amount of articles equally sceptical about the sustainability of the economic miracle, unlike that of Jasper Becker, whose book The Chinese I unfortunately won't have the chance to read more of until I leave the country for good - hooray! - in the summer, but who turns up in this excellent BBC radio documentary.
Now I think I agree with a lot of what Chang says. My feelings cloud the issue, however - I'd love to see the C C P humiliated and overthrown, although I know that whatever challenges may emerge may not necessarily be to my liking. The general feeling, for example, that the Government is insufficiently anti-Japanese
(there is an eye-witness account of yesterday's Beijing demonstration here) could be the spark for a firestorm of grievances against corruption, unemployment and economic inequality
But ultimately I'm not best placed or qualified to say. I only read what I choose to read and believe what I choose to believe. However, I do live in China and I do reflect on what I see around me. From this local point of view, then, and given that I don't speak much Chinese and I miss most of what goes on around me, does all this apparent growth and prosperity look sustainable? Can the momentum be maintained, or is it heading like Chang says for an inevitable collapse?
Since in our college of 16,000 students there is nowhere to go and socialise, I spend a certain amount of time in the gym. I've been going for about three or four months now. I had to change gyms because the better equipped gym at the neighbouring University ceased to be better equipped when some of the machines stopped working. A week or so went by and when they weren't fixed I had to switch to the gym on our campus.
At first this was much better. After 6 months in China I'm getting used to the same song being repeated at great volume for hours on end, and over time I persuaded the staff that it was better to close the doors on very cold days. The staff seemed quite friendly, given that they have what is in China considered a dream job, namely sitting around slurping noodles and sending text messages. The most important thing was that the machines worked.
All good things end eventually. When I asked when the machine would be fixed, the answer was 'bu yi ding'. I asked someone what that meant. It means 'not necessarily'.
I switched to another machine, which seemed at least to be hurting adjacent bits of my arms and shoulders. Truth be told I'm not much more of an expert on body-building than on the Chinese economy, but it was fine for two days. Then it broke. I asked again about the chances of it being fixed any time soon, and this time I was pleased that I understood the answer. Bu yi ding.
Armed with this new bit of vocabulary things are becoming clearer. Now when the state-of-the-art DVD PC facilities stop working, I know there's no point asking if they'll be fixed and if we'll be able to use the classroom again. And the smell that comes out of the bathrooms and fills the corridors of the school's brand new buildings, will anything be done about that? Bu yi ding.
It's a simple question of maintenance. Because nobody knows what to do when these new fangled machines and these shiny new buildings get broken, damaged or worn, the authorities do all they can to prevent this happening. In the brand new language labs the students have to put little blue cloth slippers from a cardboard box by the door over their shoes so the floor doesn't get damaged. In the 12-storey main building, it's not possible to take the lift to or from the 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th floors in case it breaks down. As for the toilets, the solution is to leave all the doors and windows wide open at all times, which has the added advantage of affording the curious students even more access to the habits of Westerners than they get at the average English Corner.
As I said, I'm no 'China hand' or expert. I know what I see and I try not to generalise too much or let my opinions shade my judgments. But if the different parts of the economy are managed in a similar way to our college, the Government will have, in fact probably is having huge problems maintaining the appearance of economic momentum.
Do I think they'll be able to continue making the economy grow without risking surplus production, over-investment and economic collapse, and without provoking massive social unrest in the not too distant future?
Bu yi ding.
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