【10.11.06 英国每日邮件】The China powder keg: a nation that's either on the edge of bec

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1327158/JOHN-HUMPHRYS-China-A-nation-edge-superpower-anarchy.html

By John Humphrys

The chanting, when it ­began, sounded angry. I was in my hotel room in Beijing trying to put ­together a report on ­political repression for the Today programme and this ­sounded as if it might be just what I needed.

I had been in China for more than a week. Everywhere I went people had been telling me that things had changed so much since

I first started reporting from here more than 30 years ago that I would scarcely ­recognise the place.
True, there are many protests, sometimes violent, but almost always out in the ­provinces and motivated by a single ­grievance.

Yet here we were in the heart of the capital, a short stroll from Tiananmen Square, and something was going on. I grabbed my producer and, as the shouting grew louder, we ran outside — to be ­confronted by a tug-of-war.

The kitchen staff had challenged the hotel management to a contest and there they were in the middle of the street, heaving away on a thick rope, the chefs’ hats falling into the gutter, the managers’ ties askew, all of them shouting fit to burst. The ­managers won.

Not quite the scene I had imagined, but what’s interesting is that it is possible for a foreign journalist to wander the streets of this city, microphone at the ready, and nobody will take a blind bit of notice.
When I first started reporting from here, that would have been unimaginable.

We needed permits in triplicate to go anywhere and we were always accompanied by ­minders. Today it’s even possible — with a little effort — to talk to dissidents.

So here’s the first contradiction of ­modern China.

The Communist leadership of this country has an absolute monopoly on power, but foreign journalists have never been so free to ply their trade.

What’s even more remarkable is that so many people in senior Communist Party positions are now happy to admit openly that it’s a mistake to prevent ­Chinese ­people speaking freely to each other.

Not that they can say anything they choose.

China has also pulled off a breathtaking economic transformation which will soon see it become the ­mightiest economic power in the world. It will challenge American hegemony as never before in ­modern times.   

At Shanghai University I had an intriguing exchange with Professor Xue Jin, one of the most senior ­academics in China.

Yes, he said, things have improved enormously in China — but they still have some way to go.

‘Can someone like you say what you want?’ I asked him.

He hesitated, looked away and smiled, partly to himself, partly to me. ‘I can say almost everything I wish to say.’

‘Almost everything? When will you able to say everything?’

Another long pause and this time he chuckled.

‘In my lifetime,’ he said.

‘And how old are you?’

‘In my sixties.’

And at this he roared with laughter. ­

Remember, this is a man who survived the horrors of the Cultural ­Revolution and he could not be in his hugely influential job without the approval of senior figures in the Communist Party.

For someone like him to admit to someone like me that there are things he wants to say but cannot is significant.
Even Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao talked about the need for political reforms to underpin the economic ­transformation.

He said only last month: ‘I believe freedom of speech is indispensable for any country.’

Indispensable, perhaps, but not absolute. What neither ­Professor Xue nor anyone else is allowed to say is that the Communist Party should begin to relax its hold on power. That is the break point.

The real fear haunting the men who control the Party is that if they allow reform to move too far and too fast their country will go the way of the old Soviet Union, which collapsed in the 1990s.

And let’s be clear what we mean by ‘dissidents’. They don’t have to march chanting down the streets — let alone stand in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square — to qualify for the title.

It is enough to add their ­signature to Charter 08, the manifesto drawn up by a group of brave Chinese intellectuals two years ago calling for ­political reform and greater freedom for Chinese people.

The level of punishment depends on how prominent the individual is, how persistent, and how much attention he draws to himself — at home and, especially, overseas.

Human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who wrote to the American Congress detailing human rights abuses, vanished last year and has not been seen since.

His brother came to ­Beijing to try to find out what had happened to him a few weeks ago, but left with nothing to show for it.
‘I can accept it if my brother has broken the law and is in prison. But no one will tell me where he is,’ he said.

Liu Xiaobo is China’s most famous dissident. He won the Nobel Peace Prize this year and has been feted by Western ­countries as a hero. But the Chinese threw him in jail – ­sentenced him to eleven years for ‘inciting subversion’.

No one is allowed to visit him or even talk to his wife, who lives in an apartment building in the better part of Beijing. Her phone has been disconnected — permanently, it seems — so I went to try to talk to her in ­person. I didn’t get far.

There were two guards at the barrier and when they saw my microphone they moved quickly to block me. More guards arrived almost immediately.

Would they deliver a message to her from me? They would not. Instead they pointed me to a notice stuck on the gates at the entrance to the complex: ‘No interviews.’

I was told, politely but firmly, that I must ‘cooperate’ and should leave immediately. The guards followed me down the street at a discreet distance and took photographs.

Liu’s lawyer agreed to talk to me but preferred to do it in a café near his office, rather than attract the attention of the ­security police. He told me that the judges here are not independent and therefore dissidents cannot get a fair trial. People I spoke to all said China was moving towards greater democracy. So did that mean they wanted an alternative to the Communist Party for which they could vote at some future election? Not one of them did.   

Yet even he conceded that there is greater freedom of expression and it is growing. Apart from my brief encounter with the guards outside Madam Liu’s apartment, my only other contact with the police had been in Chongqing more than a thousand miles from Beijing.

This is a dystopian vision of a city, the fastest growing ­metropolis in the world, with 30 million people.

The ­pollution is so bad you can ba­rely see the tops of the high-rise buildings that are being thrown up every five minutes. Some days you can barely breathe.

On my second night there, a police officer came to my hotel to welcome us to his city and wish us a pleasant stay.

Oh, and when we talked to local people could we please remember that many of them are not sophisticated and might not understand my questions, so could I please try not to ­embarrass them? And that was it. We never saw him again.

So I talked to many ­people about many things — including democracy and exactly what they mean when they say they want more of it.

Before I came here I met a group of Chinese students at the London School of Economics. Some of them were relatively new to Britain and some of them had lived abroad for years.

All were bright and lively and ­thoroughly engaging and all of them said China was moving towards greater democracy.

So did that mean they wanted an alternative to the Communist Party for which they could vote at some future election? Not one of them did.

I suggested that the essence of democracy was the power of the people to throw out the ­government if they lose faith in it.
One young woman looked me in the eyes and said: ‘Why? You do it all the time and what have you got to show for it?

'Every new government makes the same ­mistakes as the last one. In China we have made great advances over the past 30 years.’ The ­others nodded in approval.

It could be, of course, that all these young people had been brainwashed, but there is another explanation.

If the fear of the Communist Party leadership is losing their monopoly on power, the fear of the Chinese people is returning to instability.

When we British talk about unstable government we think of no party being able to command a majority.

When the Chinese talk about instability they mean civil war, chaos, and mass starvation under Mao. They mean tens of millions dying as their rulers fight for power. When the Chinese talk about instability they mean civil war, chaos, and mass starvation under Mao. They mean tens of millions dying as their rulers fight for power

Mao may have been responsible for more deaths and suffering than any other leader in history — Stalin and Hitler included — but his legacy (so far) has been a country that is more united than it would have been possible even to imagine when he began his long march to power.

China has also pulled off a breathtaking economic transformation which will soon see it become the ­mightiest economic power in the world.

It will challenge American hegemony as never before in ­modern times.

Another contradiction in China: how to reconcile a country that is based on the principles of Lenin, Marx and Mao with its embrace of capitalism on a scale that would make a banker blush.

I popped into a few stock exchange trading floors in ­Shanghai.

The dealers were not sharp-suited young men in braces, but ordinary people who had come in off the street: young and old, men and women, many of them still in their working clothes like the two nurses in ­uniform I spotted.

They were all seated in front of computer screens with the stock market index boards flashing away in front of them. I asked one elderly woman how she was doing.

‘Not good today,’ she said. ­‘Everything’s falling.'

How often does she come here? Every day, she told me. I reminded her that she lived in a ­Communist country.

‘That has nothing to do with it,’ she laughed. ‘This is just ­gambling . . . this is just a game.’
Except, of course, that it’s not.

China is much more than a country. It is the only ancient civilisation that has survived to emerge as a serious world power.

And it’s done it by endlessly ­reinventing itself. The implications of that for the world are enormous. And for China?
Well, the vast numbers of poor people here want to get richer. It’s estimated that the very ­poorest — more than 20 million — live on the equivalent of £60 a year.

But what everyone I spoke to wants most is stability.

In one sense at least, this nation is still in a state of turmoil.

Eight million people leave their homes in rural areas every year and travel to the cities to find work, ending up as migrant workers living in foul dormitories, seeing their wives and children perhaps only once a year?

The dangers are obvious. The leadership is about to publish a new five-year plan which will promise to raise the wages of those who are paid pathetically little. Given the pressures they are under, they have no choice.

But it is those low wages that keep the price of their goods low enough for the rich West buy in such huge quantities.

If exports begin to dry up, the jobs may ­disappear and what happens to the migrant workers then? Social unrest is a real danger.
And if wages rise and the effect is to create a much more educated, questioning population, there is another danger. The new middle class may well demand political reform that goes a long way beyond what the leadership is prepared to countenance.
The Communist Party is ­gambling that it can restore and maintain China’s greatness without ripping the country apart again.

There is no guarantee that it will succeed. In this new globalised, inter-dependent world what happens to the world’s biggest country ­matters to every single one of us.

If they lose their gamble none of us will escape the consequences.