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Year of Olympic triumph and crises for China

— Photo: AFP

SERIOUS THREAT: Chinese migrant workers prepare to go back home at Xian railway station in Shanxi province. Millions find themselves without work due to a slowing economy.

2008 was a year tattooed on the material and metaphysical topography of China ever since it won the bid to host the summer Olympic Games. It was to be the year that unveiled a resurgent, powerful and modern country to the world. In the end, notwithstanding the success of the Games, it was in fact a year of crises. Natural disasters, domestic dissent and an international financial meltdown coalesced to offer up twelve months of formidable challenges.

Every scenario that China pessimists have for years been claiming would expose the unsustainability of the continued dominance of the ruling Communist Party was realised.

In January freak snowstorms paralysed the southeast of the country for weeks, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded at railways stations, causing searing economic damage. Two months later in mid-March riots in Lhasa sparked an international campaign on Tibet with the Olympic torch relay being repeatedly attacked on its international leg. Heightened separatist activity in the western Xinjiang province followed. In April China’s worst train crash in a decade was a tragic precursor to the devastation wrought by May’s earthquake in Sichuan province which killed upwards of 80,000 people, many of whom were children buried under collapsed school buildings.

After a brief respite in August when China wowed the world with its sporting and organisational ability by pulling off what was arguably the grandest Olympic Games in history, a milk powder contamination scandal which sickened some 300,000 children had angry parents protesting country-wide.

But the greatest challenge of all was the spread of the global financial crisis to China’s shores. By year end the country’s seemingly unstoppable economic engine began to splutter leading to mass factory closures and millions of job losses. In November exports fell by 2.2 per cent year-on-year, the first such drop in seven years. The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has predicted GDP growth could fall to as low as 5-6 per cent next year, half the rate of 2007.

The ability of China’s political structure to withstand stresses of this kind, in particular an economic slow-down, has a question mark hanging over it. China’s growth is akin to an elephant riding a bicycle according to one line of reasoning. As long as sufficient speed is maintained the elephant manages to stay upright but any speed bump along the way will lead to its falling off.

In fact the Communist Party ends the year firmly in charge, the manner of its response to 2008’s challenges indicating the resilience of the party as well as its changing style of governance.

The quick and organised response of the central leadership to both the snowstorms and the earthquake earned it much popular support. For example Premier Wen Jiabao was on board a plane to Sichuan within a few hours of the news of the earthquake, long before the real extent of the devastation had become clear. He spent several days and nights personally visiting sites where victims were buried underground shouting encouragement and soothing away the tears of affected families.

Unprecedented freedom was granted to the domestic media in the reporting of these tragedies underlining a shift from past practices when the occurrence and impact of natural disasters was often kept secret. As recently as 2003, the government was caught covering up the spread of the SARS virus. That lessons in public relations and the importance of greater transparency were learnt from the SARS episode is evident.

The central authorities were also able to effectively distance themselves from the wrongdoings of local government officials. Those found guilty of negligence leading to shoddy construction of school buildings or in connection with the milk powder scandal were quickly identified and scapegoated allowing Beijing itself to be projected as the enforcer of justice.

In the context of the March riots in Tibet, the party successfully fanned and tapped into strong nationalist sentiment, focussing public opinion on the anti-China bias in the West. The majority of Chinese rallied behind the leadership in standing up to what was widely seen as a bullying, prescriptive West.

What is often not understood is how the Communist Party’s legitimacy is not derived from overtly repressive tactics as much as the maintenance of social order and the delivery of growth.

Consequently, the economic slowdown does indeed pose a serious potential threat to the leadership’s ability to maintain stability and retain popular backing. The urban middle classes who have emerged as a major pillar of support for the party are facing a rocky time as are millions of migrant workers who suddenly find themselves without work.

The government will as a result have its work cut out for it in the New Year which also happens to be a year that will mark several momentous anniversaries. It will be the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party’s accession to power. More sensitively, it will also be the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989.

An economic depression could potentially inflame and help aggregate a wide range of disaffections at this delicate time, in a country already struggling to cope with a widening rural-urban, rich-poor divide. The strategy that Beijing will deploy to counter the slowdown in growth will involve massive expenditure on infrastructure projects, and the cutting of taxes and interest rates. It will be an uphill struggle and some amount of social protest is likely unavoidable. Ironically however, the crisis may actually strengthen the party’s rule by underscoring the need for a firm hand to avoid the political and social chaos that characterised much of China’s 20th century history.

Scarred by revolutionary upheavals amongst which the most recent was the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) there is little sense that the Chinese people want another destabilising revolution.

In fact both the Communist Party’s strategies for responding to crises and the public’s response to these have long tentacles stretching back into the nation’s history. Traditionally in China the emperor in Beijing was seen as the final court of appeal and enforcer of justice against the wrong doings of corrupt local officials who failed in their duty to protect the people by upholding the righteous policies of the imperial centre. The philosophical underpinnings of the Chinese empire, steeped as they were in Confucianism prioritised order, equating stability with just rule.

The fire-fighting stratagems of the Communist Party in 2008 and the manner in which what is an increasingly educated and mobile Chinese public responded to these, reveals a continuity with history that the epochal changes the country has seen in recent decades seemingly belies.

By tapping into historically conditioned frames of reference as well as a rising tide of nationalism, the party looks set to weather the economic woes of the next few months.

Adopting a flexible and pragmatic approach and increasingly ruling by consensus, China leadership is likely to continue to befuddle the predictions of China doomsday sayers for the foreseeable future.

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