What Is Happening In China?
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Posed at this time, the question is enormous. Washington is singularly ill-prepared to address it, for what is happening, bluntly speaking, is that the interlocking set of hopes and assumptions about China that for thirty years have ruled policy, is being tested as never before and may not survive.
To begin with our chief interlocutor in China, President Hu Jintao. He made his reputation by brutally crushing protests in Tibet in 1989, probably the reason Deng Xiaoping chose him to succeed Jiang Zemin in the top job. Now he and his proteges from his Tibet clique are facing the challenge of their lifetimes. They have rivals. Not everyone in China, even in the Chinese leadership, will approve of the measures that Hu has taken, any more than they did of Deng’s crushing of the democracy movement in 1989. So depending upon how things go, Hu’s leadership could be in jeopardy along with the careers of his close colleagues.
In China, a struggle over leadership always brings problems, even when it is purely personal and does not involve large issues and policy choices. This is the case not least for countries dealing with China. Washington, for example, has gone to great lengths to win the good will of Mr. Hu. Success has been limited, however, and now Hu himself may be in danger.
Hu must be counting on a quick, clean kill of the Tibetan unrest, one in which order and an appearance of normality is quickly restored, so that western leaders, such as President Bush who has yet to say anything about the rather grave situation, will be able to pretend nothing has happened, and opposition forces do not have the time to get organized. Already, however, such an outcome looks well-nigh impossible.
A fine essay by Michael Sheridan in the London Times captures the way in which that which Beijing fears most is coming to pass. Writing from Chengdu, the province that neighbors Tibet and is home to a large Tibetan population, he describes how:
“For all its overwhelming force in the lonely mountain passes, where military convoys toil towards the clouds, or in the dark alleys of Chengdu’s Tibetan quarter, where soldiers stand watch, the sour tang of a debacle for China is in the air.
“Despite 20 years of iron-fisted security, huge investments and mass migration since the last Tibetan uprising, the roof of the world once again looks like a hostile place to most Chinese.
“The uneasy sense of psychological defeat emerged from interviews with Chinese citizens and soldiers in Sichuan province, a vast region that includes a swathe of the Tibetan plateau, over the past week.
“Almost without exception, people said they had lost faith in government propaganda and feared that Tibetans would turn to violence against China.
“I believe they can never win their independence, because no big country backs them and they have no army,” said a shop owner, “and I believe we cannot win their hearts.”[1]
A good week into the uprising, Tibet is still closed to journalists, foreigners, and most Chinese. This can mean only one thing: that the situation is far from being under control. Tibet at 471,000 square miles is more than twice the size of France. Its terrain is forbidding. Only Tibetans are at home there: they know the mountains, the icy paths to India, the hideaways, and so forth. Chinese are obvious simply by their different physical appearance. Nor are tanks, armored personnel carriers, and tens of thousands of troops likely to be of much use. For one thing, the Tibetans do not gather in fixed places to demonstrate, where they are easily shot or arrested. For another, China does not want to present an obviously occupied Tibet to the world in five months’ time. The Tibetans have learned to form and melt away. Indeed, Chinese officials are complaining that they have learned “guerilla tactics” of creating a disturbance in one place in order to divert attention from an action elsewhere.[2]
On Sunday 23 March Chinese media began complaining that the Turkic Uighurs of occupied East Turkestan (known as Xinjiang 新疆 “new dominion” in Chinese) were also threatening Beijing’s control. The history of the Muslim struggle for freedom from Chinese domination is well known. But I have seen no specific reports of unrest in that area coinciding with that in Tibet. The alarm in the Chinese press suggests something is going on, however, and that can only make matters worse for the Communist Party.[3]
The opportunity to nip things in the bud and get back to the Olympic count-down seems thus to have passed. Instead, Chinese and world public opinion leaders are beginning to speak out. Some thirty leading Chinese intellectuals have signed an open letter calling for talks with the Dalai Lama. The mothers of children killed at Tiananmen have done the same thing.[4] European leaders are making tentative steps in the same direction.[5] Nancy Pelosi has saved the honor of the United States with a forthright condemnation of China’s repression in Tibet. “Bush Silent, But Others Speak Out on Tibet” is the New York Times headline.[6]
Telling is China’s response to such criticism. The reasonable, national-interest minded, responsible international stakeholder Chinese leaders seem to have disappeared. Instead we have old time communist vitriol, vilifying the Dalai Lama as a wolf in monk’s clothing, along with attempts to blame him, foreigners, anybody and anything but Chinese policy, for the current situation. More than a little xenophobia is found in these rants. If you surf the net looking for postings by Chinese, you will be appalled by the harsh, ignorant,and violent attacks on the West, the Tibetans, and everything associated with them.[7]
China’s media are spinning the protests as unprovoked attacks by Tibetans on innocent Chinese--and personally, of course, Chinese shopkeepers are innocent. One particularly gruesome shot has a Tibetan brandishing an ugly knife against Chinese. Chinese-sourced reports suggest that the “Tibetan” was in fact a Chinese secret policeman who shed his Tibetan garb and put on his uniform again after the photos were made.[8]
Finally, the Chinese have announced that live broadcasts will not be permitted from Tiananmen Square during the Olympics in August, which indicates that they lack confidence that they will be able to control even the central square in their capital city in five months time. NBC, which had been planning to host the “Today Show” is out many millions of dollars as are other broadcasters. Advertisers are also finding their costly sponsorships turning into public relations albatrosses.[9]
Add this up and what do you have? Most likely, an unresolved situation over roughly a million square miles of the western People’s Republic of China; increasing condemnation from public opinion world wide and inside China; less and less room for maneuver even for those Western governments, like that of the United States, that have pinned much of their foreign policy on continuing Chinese success.
We can expect the Olympic Torch to be escorted by riot police. And the Olympics, if and when they occur, will be at best tense and scripted, without joy or excitement -- a debacle from Beijing’s point of view.
This is not the end of it. For the past few years Washington has ever more publicly been criticizing Taiwan for its increasingly robust assertion of its independence and democracy. We have condemned this, from the Secretary of State level down, putting a lot of personal blame on Taiwan’s elected president Chen Shuibian, who has become a true bete noir in Washington.
Now, however, the Kuomintang presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou, clearly Washington’s favorite, has won an overwhelming victory in the presidential election in Taiwan. President Bush has already congratulated him, suggesting that cross-straits relations may now improve.[10]
Washington may have misjudged Ma. Having just won a massive mandate in a popular election, he has no need to negotiate with China or seek her approval. He seems, furthermore, to be genuinely concerned with human rights and with his country’s security. Therefore he has set as a precondition to any talks with China the dismantling of the more than one thousand missiles China currently has aimed at Taiwan.[11] China seems unlikely ever to do this. In the past we have blamed Taiwan for failed talks. Are we now going to blame China for the missiles--not hitherto a major talking point for American diplomats--or Ma for being unreasonable in asking that the gun be removed from his head before he talks? Likewise, Ma has suggested that Taiwan may boycott the Olympics unless repression ceases. This is very different to Mr. Bush’s current plan to attend the important “sporting event” regardless.[12]
Ma may well prove more difficult for the United States and China to handle because he will be doing much of what both claim to wish for. China, however, has no desire to make an actual fair peace with Taiwan any more than with Tibet--which is why even when the Dalai Lama has met their preconditions for talks they refuse to talk to him. I suspect that if Ma proves feisty, his only choice if he wants to keep the respect of his fellow citizens who elected him and his party in power, China will begin to attack him, blacken his reputation, etc.--and when that happens, what does Washington do?
Taiwan, however, is a longer term issue, The Chinese media are characterizing the trouble with Tibet as a “life or death struggle.”[13] The words seem hysterical, but for a communist dictatorship, they are also correct. Unless the Hu administration can somehow wave a magic wand and make things go back to the way they were a few weeks ago, we may expect a spring of increasing tension, mounting criticism abroad, and--encouraged by the patent ineffectiveness of the Beijing government--dissent at home. Separate grievances will converge. World public opinion will change. Options will narrow. Positions will harden.
The Dalai Lama will continue to travel and be received by heads of state. Anti-Chinese demonstrators will dog the Torch and the run up to the Olympics, Resourceful reporters will gradually fill us in on what has really been going on during the news blackout, and quite likely some stomach-turning film of atrocities will find its way to the internet. Questions will be asked in Congress, in Parliaments, in editorials and in press conferences. Standard flannel about engaging China will no longer do the trick.
For the China we imagine we are engaging does not really exist. To be sure, China has grown a great deal since Mao’s death in 1976. Cities like Shanghai are full of gleaming skyscrapers, designer shop windows, and a new rich class of beautiful people.
The conviction became widespread that China was changing; driven by economics, she was becoming freer, more tolerant, reformed.
But has China ever held even an imperfect election? The answer is no, though Egypt has. Does China permit opposition parties, even under close scrutiny, as does even Zimbabwe? No. Does China have a judiciary as independent as Pakistan’s? Absolutely not. Is speech and the press as free in China as in Russia or Iran? No. Where is torture more cruel ? Drapchi prison in Lhasa or Guantanamo? Answer, Drapchi by miles. And what about economics? Does China have a fully convertible currency, like the ruble or the Kazakh tenge? Astonishingly, the answer is no.
The skeleton and sinews of China are still made of steel. They are the tanks and troop carriers everywhere on the streets. The system remains as centralized, dictatorial, and unresponsive to popular opinion and grievance as any in the world. And as ready to attempt to crush, brutally, what it does not like. Who can doubt these facts after what we have seen in the last two weeks?
Time will be required for the unwelcome truth to permeate the foreign policy establishment, and even more time for world governments to adjust their policies to deal with reality. The Olympic debacle is steadily breaking the enchantment that has long surrounded China and looks set to start that process of facing facts.
Appearances suggest that none of this is being considered very seriously yet in Washington or anywhere else. Ironically, only China understands the seriousness of the threat--but the language it uses to express its justifiable worry is so propagandistic as not to be taken literally by foreign readers. Our leaders, moreover, are accustomed to confident, reasonable talking Chinese--not the “men of Qi who worry about the sky falling”--as in the proverb.
If all of this was going to be resolved in a way favorable to China and the Olympics, the resolution would already have come. But it has not. Instead, China has thrown tens of thousands of troops into her western occupied territories, hoping to manifest her irresistible power--not yet, it seems, to any effect. Not surprisingly, for if the iron fist was the solution to Tibet, it would have succeeded twenty or thirty years ago, for that is how long it has been applied.
What follows, then, looks to be a true period of strain, conflict, and change. Washington is not ready for this. It has not considered the possibility carefully. But the chances are at least even that sooner or later the United States is going to be forced to throw out its long established assumptions about China and the policies based on them, and start a rethink. Events look set to offer no other option.
[1] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article3602728.ece
[2] See World Journal 世界日報 22 March 2003 China section, p. 1.
[4] http://newsblaze.com/story/20080322215303nnnn.nb/newsblaze/TOPSTORY/Top-Stories.html
[5] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7f31888c-f8e5-11dc-bcf3-000077b07658.html
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/22/world/asia/22prexy.html?ref=world
[7] http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h5Z6bJwtN_roGSIUQiQnfbf2NkhgD8VJA9C80
[8] http://chinascope.org/main/content/view/796/107/
[10] http://www.foxbusiness.com/article/office-press-secretary-statement-president-bush_530335_1.html
[11] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/24/2197277.htm?section=justin
[12] http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/taiwan-ponders-games-ban/2008/03/23/1206206921690.htm
[13] See Agence France-Presse, "China Warns of 'life or death struggle' in Tibet," 19 March 2008.
