Muddles in Middle Kingdom

24 July 2020

Rise to Modernity of The Middle Kingdom:
If one looks at China, the image is dazzling. The rise of the Middle Kingdom from its inward insulation and medieval mentality has been nothing short of miraculous. It appears that Communism with Chinese Characteristics has done the trick for a country which few believed would be able to break ranks from the poor and middle income groups of populous and less prosperous countries the way China has done. In 1997 when Hong Kong was handed over to China by the UK, it was a significant 30% of the Chinese GDP, and today Hong Kong is less productive than hinterland Chongqing, not to mention Shenzhen, Wuhan and nowhere near Shanghai. In perhaps the easiest way to recall, China has managed to overwhelm the world by her Growth Rate, which is driven entirely by market forces of the whole world, while she retained her Communist Party rule.

One of the main drivers of growth, is not the factories that produce everything for the global demand, but the brick and mortar construction activity inside China. The biggest bet the Chinese have made, since they decided to not mind the colour of the cat as long as it caught mice, was infrastructure. To some extent, when you see cities imitating the architecture and lay out of European retreats and towns springing up, you know, that some of it is overkill. No one who has been even to Harbin, which is north of Beijing and tucked near the Russian border as capital of Heilongjiang province, writes back without a sense of awe, about the architectural splendour of the Chinese, which can be contrasted with that city’s older Russian architecture ( which is a mix of Turkic-Mongol and Gregorian).

Of course, if you follow handles like @CarlZha https://twitter.com/CarlZha an ethnic Chinese American now settled in Bali, the visual tours of interior provinces like Zhejiang, his hometown Haining could give venice a run for its canals and architectural landscape, Guizhou in South West could give Himalayan resorts and even New Zealand a run for its mountain-scapes, waterfalls, for its presentation of natural beauty, and yet, one cannot come away from these short films and drone shots with a feeling of eeriness because you never find people in them. Remembering that China is the World’s most populous country is so difficult when you are on the Twitter Time Line of Mr Zha. If you see some of the comments on his TL you can notice an occasional use of the word- ‘over development’ used by other handles with Chinese sounding surnames. On Google and on any social media platform there are perhaps more such handles and walls like Mr Zha’s. Is he a ‘propagandist’ or simply an overzealous nostalgic ethnic Chinese who showcases his native country? Remember the movie Avatar? Pandora is set in a real Chinese nature preserve called Zhangjaijie, in Hunan. So there is no denying that CCP has managed to preserve and showcase the natural beauty of China even as it created these great cities with sky scrapers and magnetic levitation hyper trains to connect them. Yet a question always haunts the observer, ‘Is this for real?’ So is this the cost the Chinese have paid for their evident lack of freedom?

China has severe constraints as she performs the task of getting people out of poverty by 2020 a goal of the Party that will complete a centenary of its inception next year! China is a country that owes 50% of her GDP as Debt while perversely she holds the highest amount of US Treasury bonds of over a trillion $ in debt and competes alternately with Japan for this spot dependent on the extent to which she short sells from time to time. https://www.forbes.com/sites/leonlabrecque/2019/09/04/are-u-s-treasuries-an-assassins-mace-or-chinas-trump-card-weaponizing-treasuries-in-a-trade-war/#3fa02dd11d88In Global Financial Centres list, in the top dozen there are equal number of Chinese cities as there are American excluding Hong Kong, with Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai figuring in it. (India has three is the top 100 with Mumbai at 45, New Delhi at 69 and GIFT City Gujarat at 82.)

So when there is so much material prosperity, in China, is the social and communal life of the Chinese as compact as the CCP would like. For some time now the CCP top leadership had been seized of a vacuum in mindspace and they reintroduced Chairman Mao’s Thought brought out as the Little Red Book containing 267 aphorisms from modern China’s founder. This has been now replaced by Xi Thought which is Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristic For a New Era, which is on the face a spin off from the ‘Deng Xiaoping Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, and its embrace by the CCP in 2017 shows the desperate need for a narrative newness to the regime as China grows, and Chinese people now encounter new anxieties and challenges in their daily lives in a modern age with hi tech environment including social media and other internet of things available to them, with a bamboo curtain shielding them from a wider world.

Flirtation with Cultural Roots:
China did briefly flirt with its own cultural and religious roots when Li Hongzhi was allowed to start Falun Gong( Dharma Chakra in Chinese) which is based on the ancient Chinese discipline of Qigong, with the difference that it offered a path to ‘Salvation’ for believers which other groups based in this breathing and postured exercise regimen! This was 1992. https://amp.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/09/05/what-is-falun-gong?__twitter_impression=trueA critical time when Soviet Union was on its upheaval following Perestroika and Glasnost under Michael Gorbachev, splintering into individual countries all around the Chinese borders, with protests, rebellions and discord- a natural chaos when a central order collapses and allows individual expression. It took more than two decades for Russia to thereafter find her feet and manage to quell rebellions in Ossetia, Chechnya with a plan, when President Yeltsin first appointed Mr Putin as Prime Minister. So when Falun Gong was initially even embraced by the CCP, making for a spectacle of public parks and playgrounds full of Falun practitioners with Master Li acquiring quite the cult status in China. By 1996 the CCP developed cold feet with the idea gaining ground that Li was competing with Party leaders for loyalty and spreading disaffection amongst the Chinese people. This phase was one of the most exciting, and as a younger analyst then, I even wrote a paper on how China could embrace the Glasnost of the Russians, and switch from Communist to democratic rule on its own. One hypothetical was the effect Falun Gong would have over Manchus, Tibetans, Uighurs and Islanders to sort of allow a loose confederation of states of the manner the Russians were proposing to have with former Soviet Republics. I even conceived of the triumphant return of The Dalai Lama from Dharmasthala to Lhasa’s Potola Palace! May be many apparatchiks of the CCP too had similar fears, so first the sales of the ‘Zhuan Falun’ was stopped, then when in protest in April 1999 10000 volunteers gathered outside the Zhongnanhai which is the CCP Headquarters in Beijing, the daggers were out in the open! President Jiang Zemin declared that he would eradicate the ‘evil cult’ which was being spoken of as a suicidal sect driving volunteers to their deaths and dangerous in State controlled media. An office was set up “Office 610” whose sole purpose was to exterminate the Falun Gong and the sect was now illegal in China. So after brutally suppressing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the brief flirtation with spiritually was to be abandoned by the CCP. It is a matter of great significance that even 20 years later, Falun Gong remains in the news, with arrests, detentions and allegations of harvest of organs from its members without their consent by Chinese establishment! ( In this area, of forcible organ harvesting, China is not the pioneer, Israel did it with Palestinian Arabs who were protestors,or members of non terrorist parts of Hamas or PLO) Master Li lives in USA, he continues to address his followers in Mainland China through events organised in USA, he has characterised the CCP as a Evil Party, placing a religious context to Chinese people who believe in their ancestral faiths and offering them a reason for their experiencing a dissatisfaction with the CCP. Falun Gong is the first mainstream Chinese movement that taught modern Chinese people to think of China and CCP as separate entities!

Political Movement of De-registration from CCP:
The next phase of the Chinese political renaissance is one that is happening from 2004 in a Gandhian sort of scheme. Just as the Mahatma burned papers of resident permits in Natal in South Africa as part of his first Satyagraha, Chinese are performing a withdrawal from their affiliation to the CCP. Many commentators feel that this new Tuidang- https://twitter.com/tuidangmovementmeaning withdrawal, is just an offshoot of the Falun Gong. Yet as an analyst I feel that this is much more nuanced and has roots not just in Chinese disaffection with CCP, but also in encouragement from Taiwan and US based Chinese expatriates. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lech-walesa-former-polish-president-says-chinas-tuidang-movement-is-historys-tsunami-300099362.htmlIncidentally a US based Newspaper in Chinese language Dajiyuan registered as The Epoch Times in USA, first espoused the cause of Tuidang by writing Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party rule in China. However, if you thought that it was a dissident movement and democratic movement, it is not. It is based on Confucian thought, it has set out on the premise that by placing the 9 areas of concern through commentaries and by opening up CCP membership through a campaign to disassociate from it, the CCP would be encouraged to reform and govern China with more Chinese Confucian values than Communist authoritarianism. If you can understand this way, none of the 100s of dissidents against the regime were inspired by Tuidang, including Nobel Laureates Liu Xiaobo, who died on 3rd July 2017 and Gao Xingjian who is under surveillance and detention from time to time. On the contrary, the Democracy Party of China was founded by Xie Wanjun and Qin Yongmin which is a regrouping of dissidents on original Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, a decade later, which though banned continues to organise protests from time to time using Chinese Weibo and Wechat apps! Dissidents who escaped from China to Taiwan and Thailand (Jiang Yefei) were deported back, whereas those who escaped to Australia(Yuan Hongbing) or even deported to USA fared better. Yet, the ones not in Chinese prisons are those with little clout inside China. New Citizens movement is a civil rights movement within China demanding a more inclusive constitution, through an Open Constitution Initiative. It was promoted in 2012 by Xu Zhiyong a civil rights lawyer.

State of Dissent in China:

Chinese microblogging sites are not without dissent, for example Li Hai, Shi Yao are bloggers and poets who used Yahoo platform and whose detention was aided by technical assistance provided by Yahoo Inc! A prominent blogging couple who are in house arrest since 2007 are Zeng Jinyan and Hu Jia. It is surprising how Google, Apple, Yahoo and other Tech giants who operate in China all aid the Chinese authorities in tracking down bloggers and handles publishing content that is controversial or critical of the CCP regime, while enjoying huge subsidies and DARPA patronage from USA. ( In India too all these US firms including Microsoft are known to disclose private information and take action on handles that are critical of the state or central government and most of the times without due process like the recent Twitter suspension of the account of Mr Aakar Patel who is associated with Amnesty International.)

Within the CCP in all probability reformist credentials are the quickest way to be labeled corrupt or heretical and downsized or thrown into prison. Despite all of President Xi’s professed Anti Corruption drives, the corruption of Communist Party apparatchiks is rampant. Many of them are vulnerable since they offshore in USA or Australia or UK, and foreign currency outflows from China are significant which are in the category of ‘non Chinese Foreign Direct investment’.

So China appears like a monolith from afar, but even a cursory look like this one can throw up so many fissures and fractures. Will China implode? Or would she reform from within? The key would be her ambitious One China policy, which needs to grab Taiwan to fulfil that ambition! It is a military mission for which China wants a Transformation of her military a target set for 2030, which is by when the Chinese would have three navies each with 2 Air craft carrier groups, with PLA restructuring complete with units redesigned as Combat Teams with highly mechanised infantry, independent Artillery and tactical rocketry, communications and logistics capability including heliborne troops capable of reconnaissance and surprise and immense firepower from their gunships. If the World were to decouple from China by then, then there could be a chance for Chinese to decouple from their CCP and the design of militarily attaining One China could be thwarted!