ANALYSIS/OPINION:
A continuing, often bitter, argument among “China hands” is over where the introduction of elements of market economy and attendant technology would take communism “with Chinese characteristics.”
Just as two decades of remarkable Chinese economic successes have been exaggerated, Pollyannaish speculation has argued that economic development would bring greater freedom. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, now claiming Chinese expertise, maintains that outside pressure cannot modify Beijing’s repression. But he holds out the hope — as do many of his persuasion — that economic progress will eventually bring a free society.
Another school has held that economic development and technology are morally and politically “neutral,” as the successes of both the Nazi and Soviet regimes proved — at least temporarily. (The Nazis used vaunted German chemistry to develop a gas for efficient killing of Jews in the Auschwitz “showers,” while Stalinism sent man into space.)
The Beijing regime’s successes after hundreds of rebellious students and workers were slaughtered at Tiananmen Square in 1989 have added weight to that hypothesis. For example, Internet censorship through the “Great Firewall of China” — using at least 50,000 employees costing initially $800 million, along with “self-censorship,” the threat of imprisonment or worse — has stifled opposition.
But as so often happens, one event, sometimes relatively minor, can swerve history in new directions. We saw that when a Tunisian roadside fruit peddler’s self-immolation set off revolt throughout the Arab world. Surprising most outside observers, Beijing feared contagion from Arab disturbances and launched a crackdown. In 2010, Beijing closed 1.3 million websites — almost halving the number available.
Now comes the mid-July wreck of two new high-speed trains, encapsulating what is happening culturally as well as in the economy and politics.
Having snookered Japanese, French and German train manufacturers into providing technology for their vast high-speed rail network expansion, the Chinese already had tried to export trains. In the complex skein of the globalized economy, there was a short-lived, preposterous proposal to buy Chinese trains for California, to be funded partly by the Obama administration’s stimulus funds.
Foreign companies cried foul, arguing that they were victims of all-too-common Chinese theft of intellectual property. And Japanese manufacturers formally denied responsibility for faulty Chinese manufacture and operation. Bottom line: The largely unexplained accident has dimmed hopes for high-end exports needed to keep China’s boom going, a boom already plagued with rising prices and competition from other low-cost labor producers.
But the train accident unleashed far more complications. By the standards of Chinese disasters, natural and man-made, it was small potatoes: officially 39 dead and 190 injured. Still some of China’s 457 million “netizens” were quick to challenge official explanations that one train had rammed into another that had been immobilized by lightning. That kind of accident, Japanese developers of the first superfast trains were quick to point out, was impossible on their lines, virtually accident-free for three decades. And too many Chinese cellphone cameras recorded the wreck and the government’s efforts to minimize the casualties, to bury wreckage and then — after protests — to uncover the same wreckage!
Quickly, too, bloggers exposed the government’s dismissals of “responsible” railway officials — already facing public accusations of corruption — when a replacement turned out to have been demoted after an earlier wreck. Then there was high comedy with outgoing Prime Minister Wen Jaibao, who styles himself just a fuddy-duddy old Chinese grandfather arriving at disasters to console the mourners. This time he excused himself, ostensibly on doctors’ orders. But netizens quickly dug up video showing him buoyantly healthy, meeting a Japanese trade delegation only a day after the accident.
So loud has been the bloggers’ furor, the official media reluctantly joined in or — as is common in intraparty power struggles — were used in the blame game, on the eve of next year’s planned generational changeover of power. An editorial in People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, called for an end to the country’s blind pursuit of “blood-smeared GDP.” That comes close to the jugular, targeting Beijing’s 2-decades-old economic-political strategy in pursuit of maximum growth to assuage the absence of abandoned communist orthodoxy. What had been a successful strategy to meet demands of an impoverished population is already threatened by cutbacks in its chief motor, unlimited infrastructure expansion, in order to rein in incipient inflation.
The next chapter in China’s 5,000-year history may have begun.
• Sol Sanders, veteran foreign correspondent and analyst, writes weekly on the convergence of international politics, business and economics. He can be reached at solsanders@cox.net.
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