Why China's next earthquake might be political
Tuesday, June 3, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
The “c” in China has always stood for catastrophe.
Whether it has been those of nature, man-made political disasters, or a combination of both, no other civilized society has suffered more down through the centuries than the ancient Chinese polity. That was true in the old, dynastic, traditional China, captured in the melodrama of Pearl S. Buck’s novels which despite their lack of sophistication were a representation of what “the real China” was like.
In our own time, the chaos, destruction and loss of life during the two-decade long Japanese invasion and Occupation followed by the civil war, took millions of lives. The incredible butchery of the Maoists cannot be exaggerated: as many as 50 million people died in the famines brought on by The Great Helmsman’s attempt to short circuit modernization [and hang on to power] with his Great Cultural Revolution.
Then nature, as it so often has in the past, took a terrible toll in the 1976 Great Tangshan Earthquake, the greatest earth tremor in modern times. How many people died will never be known with certainty because of the attempt by the Communist regime to hide the reality — but it may have been more than 700,000. Unfortunately it seemed only another expression of traditional Chinese leadership’s disregard for human life. [When Communist Paramount Leader Deng Hsiao-peng, “the reformer”, was asked to release dissidents from prison for exile, he is said to have remarked to a Western visitor, “How many would you like? A few hundred thousand?”]
The differences between these past catastrophes and recent events in the Sichuan Earthquake of May 2008 are still playing out. Floods could follow the initial disaster and certainly the current [May 31, 2008] estimate of more than 60,000 dead is likely to increase dramatically. Whole cities of several hundred thousand people have been destroyed. More than a thousand irrigation and hydroelectric reservoirs are under siege from the damage by the earthquake, landslides that have blocked mighty rivers, and the heavy monsoon rains.
But perhaps the most significant difference of this and earlier Chinese natural catastrophes is the enormous visibility given them inside China and throughout the civilized world and the acknowledgement of much of the extent of the disaster by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. The omnipresent cell phones and cameras and the internet and the presence of foreign reporters in the region — sometimes by accident make it unlike any of the catastrophes of the recent past.
The government in Beijing, increasingly unable to discipline its local and regional Communist Party cadre and its parallel government, and faced with growing public manifestations of dissidence, had little choice but to embrace information about the catastrophe and welcome aid, foreign as well as domestic.
Given the enormity of the disaster, its isolated geography in western China on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, and the economic primitiveness of the region, throwing the military into the relief effort was an only option. But it has been clear almost from the initial dispatch of paratroopers that the Chinese military, however valiant, is ill-equipped for such an operation. For example, although Beijing has spent billions on the latest fighter planes imported from Russia [and copied in China] and created at great expense a submarine fleet with a huge secret base on the southern island of Hainan, it does not have the large transport aircraft which is the sine qua non of any such emergency relief operation.
It has been the fashion in most of the foreign reporting of the disaster — that is itself a novelty in secretive and closeted rural China — to record growing local complaints about additional victims due to faulty construction of private but especially public buildings such as schools. This is, in turn, a function of the systemic corruption that increasingly has characterized the China boom.
But it would be foolish to suppose that the same complainants among the five million dispossessed by the catastrophe who tell reporters it is the local corrupt Party officials who are at fault will not eventually also put the blame on the central government in Beijing. President Hu Jintao with his megaphone in the ruins is right to be ashen-faced as he viewed the carnage during two visits — again a first and the limited ability of the government to provide relief.
Although it sounds gross, one cannot but suspect Beijing’s welcome of foreign aid — at this writing even the previously unimaginable possibility that Japanese military help would join South Korean army aid already on the scene. It is undoubtedly, no matter how badly it is needed for humanitarian reasons, a political ploy. It must have occurred to someone, if not all, in The Forbidden City Communist Party headquarters that Beijing’s recent bellicosity was a mistake. Belligerent reactions, together with organizing Overseas Chinese and students to demonstrate in foreign cities, to foreign criticism of the recent events in Tibet had turned into a bummer.
Orchestrated anti-foreign demonstrations and boycotts may have rallied Chinese nationalism and xenophobia. But it had at the same time put into question all the obvious contradictions in Beijing’s stated aim of “a peaceful rising” for the new modern China and its aggressive military program, its support with arms and its defense of them at the United Nations, of such pariah regimes as those in Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma..
However these more emotional and propaganda aspects of the crisis play out, there are other major issues that place the economy and the regime at new risk.
Chinese inflation is at decade record levels, largely based on a rapid rise in the cost of food. With a worldwide rice market turning into a speculators’ paradise because of growing consumption, crop failures, speculation and draconian measures by some producers to halt exports, an epidemic which has cost China much of its pork production, and the new strains the earthquake and movement of people has put on transport, official and unofficial optimistic predictions that the earthquake would not affect the economy seem overly optimistic, at best.
New strains had already been developing in the Chinese economic miracle. Labor and energy costs have been rising for the exports which are the powerhouse behind the boom in the coastal cities. The movement of impoverished rural dwellers into the cities for temporary or part-time jobs has been turned into a strategy by some Chinese economists and apologists for the regime. But Sichuan, the province where the tremor took place, supplies about 20 percent of the new factory and construction work force, and many of them have tried to go home to find out what happened to families and rescue them.
The inequities and growing differentials in regional as well as individual incomes have been dramatized by the revelation of conditions in these inland regions like the one hit by the earthquake. The toll of corruption has taken on lives through pollution as well as construction failures have been demonstrated in a new and forceful way. And there is even public questioning, for the first time, of some of the mega projects and use of hydro resources which may have intensified the dangers in the pre-quake period and certain have in post-earthquake period. Experts who only talked to colleagues before in relatively esoteric terms are now coming forward publicly with biting criticism of Beijing policy.
The question is whether China has the possibility, even if some of these politico-economic difficulties are seen and acknowledged by the leadership, to begin the difficult process of turning them around. That would take enormously dynamic leadership, not only with the smarts to begin to radically revamp the system, but also with the charisma to carry them through.
Not only the Communist Party leadership — dominated for the most part by hacks who survived the chaotic twists and turns of the Mao Era — but “the new class” which has profited from the incredible boom in the coastal cities, would have to be swept along in a reform effort. Hanging over them is the very real ideological weapon the stand-patters in the Communist leadership have used with such effectiveness to stem dissidence — the traditional Chinese fear of chaos and fratricide that follows the deterioration of a dynasty. The almost instinctive response of the regime to trouble is more repression of dissidence. Still, there has been no crisis like this since the students and workers attempted to democratize the regime in 1989 at Tiananmen square. Even though there was conflict among the leadership at that time, the advocates of repression won out. A complicating factor is that the Olympics where China was to show a new face to the world are only weeks away.
Change may be coming. But it is impossible to even guess at the unanticipated consequences of one of the major natural catastrophes in modern history.