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4 The Dragon's
metamorphosis By David Gosset
Used to widespread Western criticism on
China's human-rights record, lack of religious
freedom, and Han chauvinism, and the inaccurate
view that China's ruling party is a monolithic
entity obsessed exclusively with maintaining an
unfair status quo, some fail to acknowledge the
extent of China's social pluralism and political
opening-up.
In fact, the level of
individual freedom enjoyed today by Chinese
citizens has no equivalent in China's past.
Beijing's elites are
gradually engineering
political adjustments, and a process of managed
democratization is reinforcing China's economic
re-emergence and will ensure the renaissance of
the Chinese world. To understand current
socio-political dynamics, one has to remember the
long and tortuous post-imperial and post-colonial
transition, to reflect on Chinese traditional
values and their links with modernity, and to
discuss some of the factors that will determine
the nature of China's future political system.
On his fourth visit to China as French
president, Jacques Chirac told Chinese students in
Peking University on October 26: "Tomorrow, China
will be one of the great [powers] if not the
greatest power in the world." A member of the
presidential delegation, former French prime
minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, declared: "For our
children the norm will not be American anymore but
Chinese." Such affirmation raises a fundamental
question: What would be this norm and the exact
content of its intellectual, social, economic and
political dimensions?
It is particularly
timely to reflect on the political dynamics of a
re-emerging China. With the 17th Congress of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approaching in the
second half of 2007, one can expect a lot of
debates on China's politics, its main players and
their priorities. The China Leadership Monitor of
the Hoover Institution already published last
spring a paper by Lyman Miller titled "The Road to
the 17th Party Congress".
Observers will
ask to what extent President Hu Jintao has been
consolidating his power since the 2002 Congress.
Will the 17th Congress mark the end of Jiang
Zemin's influence and that of his allies? If yes,
what does it mean for Shanghai which is known to
be Jiang Zemin's power base? Will the country's
fourth-generation leadership - that of Hu Jintao -
take the necessary steps to ensure a better
distribution of wealth and more social justice?
Does it mean more political reforms? Is
there any difference between the 16th Congress'
xiaokang - "little prosperity" society -
and the more recent emphasis on harmonious society
(Sixth Plenum of the 16th CCP Central Committee,
Beijing, October 8-11)? The list goes on.
One has to go beyond political theater and
avoid journalistic "parochialism in time". Hence,
let us put China's socio-political reality into
both historical and intellectual perspective, even
if this reality is a challenge for the analyst.
China is highly heterogeneous. It is,
mutatis mutandis, the Europe of the Far
East - a Europe without nation-states, with many
languages but only one writing system. Four times
the US population, one European Union plus one
Africa, China's population is so large that when
we speak about the "Chinese" we are almost always
making oversimplifications.
Of the 22
provinces, nine are more populated than France.
Moreover, as an effect of post-Maoist China's
rapid economic growth, some coastal areas (Dalian,
Shanghai, Xiamen or Shenzhen, soon Tianjin and
Ningbo) are, to a certain extent, closer to
London, Sydney or San Francisco than they are to
most of the Chinese vast hinterland.
Even
in the middle of the 18th century, Charles de
Secondat, baron de Montesquieu tried with great
difficulty to make sense of China's contradictory
elements (The Spirit of Laws, Book VIII,
Chapter XXI). In the preface to My Country, My
People (1935), Lin Yutang wrote: "China is too
big a country, and her national life has too many
facets, for her not to be open to the most diverse
and contradictory interpretations."
Contradictory interpretations often
reflect contradictory events (for example,
corruption cases but also the fight against
corruption), or even current objective trends (for
example, the growing interest in Confucian
doctrine and practice but also signs of
Westernization), and it is another reason to focus
on longer-term dynamics that have the advantage of
being less ambiguous and constitute a more solid
basis for anticipating China's future political
orientations.
A century of political
modernization For more than 100 years
China has been going through a process of
democratization as a part of its overall
modernization.
Less visible than the
economic modernization, the political
modernization has been a key feature of China's
20th century history. In fact, today's social
pluralism and economic freedom (private economy is
at the center of China's re-emergence; for
example, the private business sector accounts for
70% of Zhejiang's total output value and pays 60%
of the local taxes) would have been impossible
without a concurrent political transformation. It
is not that one dimension determines the others,
but they are in constant interactions.
At
least six major phases led to the current
socio-political configuration.
The initial
step was the Hundred Days Reform in 1898. Under
the influence of such intellectuals as Kang Youwei
(1858-1927) or Liang Qichao (1873-1929), who were
inspired by the Japanese Meiji Movement initiated
in 1868, reformists tried to prevent the Qing
(1644-1911) Dynasty's decline. During 100 days the
young Emperor Guangxu (1871-1908) issued many
decrees aimed at modernizing the Chinese state
(creation of a university, building of railroad,
etc). However, the Manchu establishment felt
threatened, and the Empress Dowager Cixi
(1835-1908), a highly complex and fascinating
figure, staged a coup forcing Kang Youwei and
Liang Qichao to flee to Japan. The Hundred Days
Reform failed but indicated the path toward
modernization.
Only three years after the
death of the conservative Cixi, the much
better-known 1911 revolution opened a new chapter
of China's history. Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), the
father of the modern Chinese nation, was elected
president of the Chinese Republic. This was a
decisive moment: imperial China was over. On one
side, China's collective memory carries 20
centuries of imperial rule and, on the other, not
even one century of post-imperial politics. This
certainly explains imperial reflexes or attitudes
observed from time to time in the Chinese world.
The 1919 May Fourth Movement is another
important milestone on the road of political
modernization. Two years after the
