|
China’s 70th anniversary party can’t hide a sense of
unease
(Noel
Celis/AFP/Getty)
The People’s Republic
of China is marking its big birthday in the only way it knows how — a giant
parade with lots of weapons. By the time you read
this, fighter jets have probably already roared across the Beijing sky,
thousands of soldiers goose-stepped down the
capital’s boulevards, stealth drones whirred above, followed by columns
of tanks and trucks bearing sophisticated new intercontinental ballistic
missiles.
But, also by the time
you read this, there will have been an altogether different set of
commemorations in Hong Kong. Even as local authorities in the former
British colony ceremonially raised the Chinese flag, new protests flared
down its streets as an emboldened pro-democracy movement sought to puncture
the central government’s great day of national unity and celebration.
But Xi, as my colleague Anna Fifield
wrote, sees himself walking in Mao’s footsteps. More than his recent
predecessors, he has adopted the doctrinaire rhetoric of the “struggle” and
built a cult of personality around his rule, adding his name to the
country’s constitution and dissolving term limits. That elevation of Xi’s
own status has accompanied a tightening grip under his watch. The protests
in Hong Kong may seem the most direct, vociferous challenge to Beijing’s
rule, but there are ripples of disquiet across the mainland.
“To stamp out dissent,
the party has cracked down on lawyers, human rights activists and other
members of civil society,” Fifield wrote. “It has
overseen a sweeping campaign to forcibly assimilate ethnic minorities,
detaining about 1 million Uighurs in re-education camps in Xinjiang. Xi has
steered an anti-corruption campaign so extensive that it has led to the
arrest of more than 1.5 million people. ”
Xi is firmly ensconced
in power, but he’s never far away from the fear of losing it. “The history
of the People’s Republic of China is one of aspiration, destruction,
ambition, confidence and anxiety,” said Klaus Mühlhahn, professor of
Chinese history at the Free University of Berlin, to Fifield. “I think a
lot of Chinese policy is driven by fear. This fear of losing power, of a
development similar to what happened in the Soviet Union, shapes much of
the policy and thinking.”
Those anxieties have
intensified amid a worrying economic slowdown, one that has also been
compounded by an aggressive American trade war and a hardening anti-China
consensus in Washington and other Western capitals.
In a conversation with
Today’s WorldView last week, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong
suggested that Xi and China’s leadership need to think beyond the “powerful
narrative” they peddle at commemorations such as Tuesday’s 70th
anniversary: It’s a story anchored in historical grievance and tragedy,
bemoaning China’s misfortune at the hands of foreign invaders, only to be
redeemed by seven decades of plucky, resolute communist rule.
But China, Lee implied,
is no longer a victim on the world stage — and it can’t face the rest of
the world from such a position.
“I think they
understand intellectually that they have a problem,” Lee said of China’s
leadership. The challenge for them is “to pull the pieces together and
decide how to make a calibrated and controlled repositioning without being
stampeded into giving up ground.” He sees Xi as a political figure who has
assumed greater authority and powers to push through policies “he feels are
essential to get done.”
“The risk, of course,
is that if it is more centralized,” said Lee, “a lot more depends on the
right decisions being made right at the center.”
A thorny problem lies
in China’s domestic disturbances. This year marked other significant
anniversaries, too: It’s three decades since the bloody crackdown at
Tiananmen Square and five years since a new generation of pro-democracy
protesters first took to the streets in
Hong Kong. “These internal cohesion issues, I think worry them because
they do not see any easy way of dealing with any of them,” said Lee,
referring to the protests in Hong Kong and the crackdown in Xinjiang.
The Singaporean leader
doesn’t think Xi or his allies would countenance a repeat of 1989 with a
military intervention into Hong Kong. “This will be
worse if they have to go in that way, and what will they do with Hong Kong
after that?” Lee asked. “You have destroyed Hong Kong. I think China is now
in a dilemma — how do you hope that this comes down without them getting
overly involved?”
To be sure, Hong Kong’s
protests aren’t exactly an existential threat to Xi and his cohort. The
70th anniversary of the people’s republic means China’s single-party
government has lasted a year longer than the Soviet Union — and it shows no
sign of cracking.
The rise of “a true
opposition movement would take a systemic crisis — say, a real economic
meltdown or a climate-induced catastrophe — that doesn’t yet seem likely,”
Beijing-based journalist Ian Johnson noted. “And so, superficially at
least, the Communist Party seems to go from strength to strength, relying
on China’s capable civil service to make sure the high-speed trains run on
time, the highways hum with new cars, and the aircraft carriers get built.”
But there’s a tension
burrowed inside this seeming stability, Johnson concluded: “It is
precisely this return to prosperity that has given people the opportunity
to contemplate a century-old question: what exactly holds their country
together other than brute force?”
|
