That’s as good a description of the Peoples Republic of China as I have ever heard, and while the hammer and sickle – symbols of the Communist Party – wave above the nation in the national flag, China is anything but a model of Marxist-Leninist communism. In fact, in many might point to “Communist” China as the new model for centrally-directed capitalism. That said, what contemporary China does represent to most of its people is competent stability, plus a government that makes an orderly transition between dictators every ten years. As Hu Jintao ends his leadership as 2012 fades away, most in China expect stability to continue to reign supreme.
This wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1960s, Mao’s failed “Great Leap Forward” program bankrupted the nation and starved tens of millions of Chinese to death. His gentle removal from power (while still allowing him the title of Chairman) gave rise to his attempt to pull the entire Party hierarchy down – which he believed only he could salvage – from the bottom via his Cultural Revolution. By the time the Cultural Revolution put him back on top, Mao was old and dying. Hua Gofeng was Mao’s successor for about five minutes, before Deng Xiao Ping used his connections with the military to push Hua out of office. And Deng inherited a country that had been decimated by the Cultural Revolution, that was bankrupt again, that had lost a generation that didn’t get a real education as schools and universities were closed.
Chairman Deng struggled to stabilize China, but the nation was still in turmoil in 1989 as the Tiananmen killings remind us. What has happened to China since has been an explosion of growth, economic success on an unprecedented level, based on a very simple unwritten agreement between the Chinese people and their not-really-communist-anymore leadership: we let you govern without protest or attempt to unseat you and you give us stability and continuity. So far, through successive post-Mao administrative dictatorships ranging from Deng through Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, the Chinese government has delivered.
But this year, a fly landed in the soup and began squirming. A British businessman, Neil Heywood, was found murdered in China’s largest city, Chongqing, and the government claimed he had been caught up in an illegal attempt to wiretap top officials. And then a police officer, chief, Wang Lijun, ran to the US Consulate there and tried to defect… he claimed that the death was really a murder, revenge for allegedly having an affair with the local leader’s wife. Bo Xilai (above) was on a fast track to the highest levels of the Communist Party, perhaps even a contender for the top spot. But he ran his fiefdom with a self-centered iron hand, covering up for his playboy son, dispensing favors (with the usual bribes and payoffs expected) and building up quite a financial empire himself, hardly a unique occurrence among the PRC’s political leaders.
Bo’s fall from grace was speedy and magnificent, and his plunge took a great many coattail-hangers-on down with him. “Until now, the downfall of Mr. Bo has been cast largely as a tale of a populist who pursued his own agenda too aggressively for some top leaders in Beijing and was brought down by accusations that his wife had arranged the murder of Neil Heywood, a British consultant, after a business dispute. But the hidden wiretapping, previously alluded to only in internal Communist Party accounts of the scandal, appears to have provided another compelling reason for party leaders to turn on Mr. Bo.
“The story of how China’s president was monitored also shows the level of mistrust among leaders in the one-party state. To maintain control over society, leaders have embraced enhanced surveillance technology. But some have turned it on one another — repeating patterns of intrigue that go back to the beginnings of Communist rule…‘This society has bred mistrust and violence,’ said Roderick MacFarquhar, a historian of Communist China’s elite-level machinations over the past half century. ‘Leaders know you have to watch your back because you never know who will put a knife in it.’” New York Times, April 25th.
Beijing has attempted to contain this incident as just one bad apple, but the central authorities had spent years touting Bo Xilai as this amazing rising star. Recently, however, he opposed the Party’s choice for Hu’s successor, Xi Jinping, and fought the leadership for center stage… and then this little murder thang, that went from the US consulate to the rest of the world like a firestorm. But the real issue here is not one of Bo’s corruptibility; it is about whether or not Beijing can stop this contagion of high level corruption from exploding onto the pages of the global press… and therefore generate the kind of leadership instability that effectively breaches the unwritten bargain between the governed and their government.
With unconfirmed reports that the U.S. embassy in Beijing is harboring a blind dissident, lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who escaped house arrest, the United States seems to have picked this time to press China on it human rights track record. “Even before a blind human rights lawyer slipped away from house arrest in rural China last week, Washington and Beijing were each trying to navigate a turbulent time in their internal politics and their relationship. Now they are trying to avoid their worst diplomatic spat in years… As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top U.S. officials left Washington on [April 30th] for previously scheduled annual talks in Beijing, diplomats from both countries scrambled to find a way to solve Chen's case without undermining efforts to improve economic and security ties.” Los Angeles Times, April 30th.
Also sensing China’s internal political weakness, the US Security and Exchange Commission began to investigate Hollywood, an industry that just got a huge increase in the number of American films that can be imported into China and the terms of their playing out in local theaters. The SEC demanded to see the various Hollywood studios’ records as they might relate to possible violations of our Foreign Corrupt Practices Act… did Hollywood bribe Chinese officials to get this quota change or in any of their other dealings with the PRC. Washington wanted “stuff” to embarrass the Chinese even further, it seemed.
As Rob Cain’s ChinaFilmBiz blog (April 29th) points out: “The SEC’s announcement could hardly have come at a worse time for China’s Communist Party. Already beset with the radioactive political and PR fallout of the sordid Bo Xilai scandal (which includes, by the way, allegations of massive government corruption and bribe-taking), the Party is likely to stonewall the SEC and probably deny, in its usual ham-fisted fashion, that any wrongdoing ever occurs in the People’s Republic of China. That the SEC chose to spring its very public press release during the middle of the Beijing Film Festival, China’s big annual showcase for its film industry, merely added salt to an already festering wound.” The big story might get small again, if they can hold the stories to villainous Bo… but if the bigger story unfolds, China could sink back into the turmoil of old, stalling economic growth, which unfortunately will negatively impact an already impaired global economy.
I’m Peter Dekom, and distant stories from distant shores can sneak up and slam you in the face when you are least expecting it.
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