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[Orisons]

Rage at an elite that has stolen China's soul
Behind the current wave of nationalistic fervour is ordinary Chinese people's anger at a cynical and corrupt regime

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o Lin Chun
o guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 September 2012 19.35 BST
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Demonstrators outside the Japanese embassy in Beijing as the row over the Senkaku islands, known as Diaoyu in China, escalates. Photograph: David Gray/Reuters

The 36th anniversary of Mao's death, a little over a week ago, was met by official silence – but spontaneous commemorations across China, including a long queue outside the Mao Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square.

The next day, Wen Jiabao, the premier, spoke at a ceremony to unveil statues of Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic, and Chen Yi, who took over as foreign minister from Zhou. He said: "Old China was totally humiliated, its territories were fragmented … The older generation of revolutionaries like Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yi founded the People's Republic and ended a hundred years of humiliation in our recent national history, laying the foundation of new China's foreign relations.

We must for ever remember their magnificent achievements, and study, carry on and develop their intellectual and spiritual qualities".

The day after that speech the Japanese government signed a deal to begin to "nationalise" the Senkaku islands, known as Diaoyu in China. The Chinese government strongly objected, and sent surveillance ships to the disputed waters. Popular feelings also ran high: anti-Japan demonstrations have spread across China, including Hong Kong. Taiwan's veteran "defending Diaoyu movement" has been boosted by implicit official support. Larger mass rallies could occur on Tuesday, the anniversary of the 1931 Japanese invasion in northern China.

However, interpreting Wen's words and the mass protests in China's streets as simply nationalistic would miss the point. Rather, as the leaders well know, accumulated social discontent with a regime seen by many as externally weak and internally corrupt has found expression in maritime disputes between China and its neighbours.

Some of the signs used in the anti-Japan demonstrations address domestic policies: there were even a few forbidden ones, with reference to the crushed Chongqing model. Many protesters carry Mao's portrait. Voices from the top and bottom of Chinese society have coincided here to call for a return to common sense.

Wen, by reputation the most "liberal" among the party's political factions, was speaking about the need to honour modern China's roots in the epic liberation struggle of the Chinese people. In the eyes of ordinary Chinese, the People's Republic has moved far from its founding promises of popular power and wellbeing, "rising" through hyper-growth, frenzied urbanisation and single-minded global integration, with grave moral, social and environmental costs: losing its soul by abandoning invaluable elements in its revolutionary and socialist legacies.

Continuities and ruptures are both evident in a comparison of the Maoist and post-Mao eras. Deng Xiaoping, who belonged to the first communist generation, led China's market transition immediately after the cultural revolution. The 1980s saw general living standards rise and 400 million peasants lifted out of poverty. Despite such pragmatic slogans as "getting rich first", Deng warned against the danger of income polarisation: "If we allow the millionaires to emerge one day, our reform project would fail."

Edited by Orisons, 19 September 2012 - 09:57 PM.

[Orisons]

Yet, by a powerful market logic, and in the absence of determined political intervention, China did produce millionaires and later even billionaires. It became one of the world's most unequal societies. Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, handpicked by Deng as successive party general secretaries, loyally carried out the Dengist programme of "reform and opening". They did not survive the events around the upheavals in Tiananmen Square in 1989. However, many subsequent policies, such as the integration of coastal China into the global economy and export-led growth, were set in motion.

Instead of tackling the urgent problems of corruption and rising social insecurity that contributed to the Tiananmen upheavals, the Jiang Zemin-Zhu Rongji leadership selected by Deng radicalised an initially socialist reform of self-adjustment. After the post-1992 resumption of "development as the absolute principle" (Deng), they pushed for industrial privatisation, introduced stock and real estate markets, and negotiated China's accession into the World Trade Organisation with excessive concessions.

Jiang also paved the way for the Communist party to change colour. As 40 million urban workers were laid off and rural communal management collapsed, the second reform phase turned out to be an all-out neo-liberal adventure.

Since then the astonishing wealth and lifestyles of some cadres and families have been exposed: officials keeping overseas bank accounts, or fleeing the country with bags of cash, fuelled popular indignation and political cynicism.
It was hoped that Hu Jintao, the president, and Wen – appointed with Deng's approval – would clean up the mess.

They proposed a "scientific conception of development" and a platform of people-first social policies, removing agricultural taxes and school fees for compulsory education, and working on rebuilding public medicine and social security. However, they also forced property laws on the legislature to legitimise privatisation, and stuck to a GDP-centered strategy.

China is trapped in the developmentalist predicament of exploitative cheap labour, undue energy consumption, heavy pollution and foreign trade dependency. With excess surplus capital, China's outgoing investments have also run into difficulties and tensions abroad.

During Hu and Wen's tenure – like that of their reformist predecessors – market supremacy has relied on state sponsorship or imposition, at times violently. Senseless commercialisation in Tibet and Xinjiang, with intended and unintended social, cultural and demographic consequences, caused deadly clashes.

With hopes for the third "reform decade" dashed, China's vulnerable feel the pain: the land-losing peasants; the struggling migrants and the children and elderly and sick people they left behind; and, in the end, angry strikers, petitioners and protesters. As the economy falls into a slump, the government seems to have followed every step of recent World Bank recommendations. In this month's Apec summit, Hu reaffirmed China's commitment to further trade and financial liberalisation.

China's post-Deng power transitions have so far been largely smooth. The processes have been modernised, with more extensive voting opportunities and consultation. The leaders at all levels have become younger and better educated, but the system still hinders able, independent candidates, and tends to promote the mediocre and obedient.

Due to the fall of Bo Xilai in the Chongqing crisis, we already know that there will be no seamless power transition this year. The unexplained absence of Xi Jinping only added to the uncertainty. The total secrecy of politics at the top hurts the system itself by showing its lack of self-confidence and a deep distrust of citizens. This will have to be addressed by the new leaders.

As things stand, it is difficult to anticipate any decisive change in China's political economy. Yet there are multiple factors at work: the logic of the market and the logic of bureaucracy – but ultimately also the logic of politics. Xi and Li Keqiang, the assigned premier, have been appointed through rounds of internal elections and negotiations.
They should be aware of popular demands, and social movements, and become committed to political transparency and, indeed, democracy.

And we may also expect them to tackle corruption, so as to rescue the regime for their own survival. They could begin with publicising the earnings and family incomes of national leaders and highly placed officials. They need also to revert to the minimal communist ethic of serving the people.

Lenin's famous thesis that revolution occurs when the rulers and the ruled both cannot continue might be revised for the Chinese situation: once both the left and right cannot tolerate the existing order, a fresh leadership is offered the golden opportunity of remedy so as to avert another revolution. This must and can be done democratically, if they can read the popular mandate carefully and start anew.

[Orisons]

However when I attempted to post a response [below] to this article, the Guardian.co.uk COMMENTS message board not only refused to post my response, they also blocked/banned me [for the third time] from posting ANYTHING to their website highlighting exactly what RHETORICAL GARBAGE the alleged freedom of the press/expression etc in the UK and the rest of the West is.

Is this young woman [Lin Chun who wrote this article] truly as naïve a she comes across in that which other elite on the planet is responsible for the health, wealth and stability of over 1200 million people [achieving a growing fiscal surplus in stark contrast to the USA’s ongoing failure to anywhere near equably distribute wealth to only 300 million people while generating the biggest fiscal deficits since records began], whose demise due to chaotic famines was predicted with barely disguised enthusiasm by the Malthusian devotees at the 500 million people mark?

How many Guardian readers are aware of the FACT that the British East India Company managed to get Parliamentary backing/the UK to declare WAR on China in the 19th century for preventing British traders from continuing to sell the opium they had grown in India, in China, turning millions of Chinese people into junkies, and having won that war they subsequently carried on ‘drug dealing’ in gold from Hong Kong [which is why in 1995 Hong Kong’s gold bullion reserves totalled £39 billion (by the handover in 1997 this total was probably £40) in comparison to China’s £8 billion at the time]?

The fact that the Chinese monarchy had not industrialised the country meant that the West in general, the British in particular were able to dictate to this now very obviously WEAK Chinese administration, weren’t they, which is what created the power vacuum that the communist Chinese led by Mao filled?

China’s inability to defend itself from the industrialized might of Japan [who slaughtered 11 million Chinese in the early 1930's through to WWII a crime THEY still don’t publicly acknowledge despite having paid $50 billion in reparations] further highlighted China’s victim in waiting status which the Communist regime very astutely dealt with [with some assistance from the USSR] by frustrating the West’s neo-colonial incursions in Asia initially in Korea and later in Indo-China, by aiding the consistently stroppy Vietnamese in eventually driving the USA/West out of the region.

Hasn’t the so public extermination of Muamar Gaddafi and his regime last year underlined just how necessary it was for both China and India to go to the so ludicrous expense of acquiring the BIG STICK/Nuclear weapons as without them while inhabiting a country with any natural resources at all, aren’t you in fact a VICTIM IN WAITING, who wont have to wait long [to be attacked by petulant bullies with delusions of cerebral grandeur]?

I’m not surprised about the growing wealth of the Chinese elite which would be even worse but for the fact that they’ve retained state ownership of their Banks as the Chinese have utilised Hong Kong’s financial model as a template [because it works] for their huge cities on the mainland where their attempts at state communism had only created stagnation as opposed to growth, but isn’t riding/controlling the monetary wild stallion bound to be very very challenging?

This woman’s blatant naïveté is a far from subtle attempt by her Western controllers to derail/cause the chaos they would love to see in China [Tiananmen square didn’t work out either, despite forcing the regime to exterminate some of their brightest youth] because with their current cash surplus the Chinese truly don’t have to militarily invade the countries [especially in Africa where in return for building the infrastructure Colonialism didn’t provide they are raping the whole continent] laden with the natural resources China so desperately needs to continue its so rapid development, they can and are just buying them, which is what is really upsetting the Banksters and other parasitic monetary middlemen who are being very efficiently sidelined by this so very intelligent strategy aren’t they, hence all their sulking and plotting.

Isn't ANYONE who genuinely believes they are not programmed
graphically illustrating that their programming is COMPLETE?

Edited by Orisons, 19 September 2012 - 10:15 PM.