The world’s most populous nation-
state has a one-party regime. The name of that party is usually
translated into English as the Communist Party of China, but if
one renders the name strictly according to the English words
for the combined ideograms by which it is represented in
Chinese, it comes out “Share The Wealth Party.”
China has been
making great economic strides lately. How great, we can’t
say for sure because information is tightly controlled and
often politically manipulated in the People’s Republic. By
almost everybody’s measures, however, the Chinese economy
has been growing while most of the rest of the world has been
in a business slump.
Such is
“the capitalist road” of which Chairman Mao
warned.
Now don’t
take your Maoist rhetoric TOO seriously. Do you want to know
the essence of the Sino-Soviet split of Mao’s time? Then
look behind the epithets about revisionism and compare the
political maps of Asia as it was in 1775 and in 1975. Do you
want to know the main thing that Liu Shao-chi and his fellow
capitalist roaders did to irritate Mao? Then it’s more
important to know the way that the politburo tended to vote in
the wake of Mao’s failed Great Leap Forward of the 1950s
than it is to understand the Red Guard rhetoric of the
1960s.
But there were
genuine policy differences between Mao and his supporters on
the one hand and Liu and his faction on the other. After Mao
died his followers, reviled as The Gang of Four, lost power and
the so-called capitalist roaders won the day. It was too late
for Liu, but his faction of the party has ruled China with an
iron fist ever since.
They call
themselves communists, but they don’t much believe in
sharing the wealth. The universal free education and socialized
health care system that Mao championed were among the first
things to be cut back. When Chinese couples have more than one
child, the younger siblings are banned from public schools and
hospitals. In the rural areas where Mao had his power base,
most of the material gains of the Chinese Revolution have
evaporated. In the urban factories, labor has fewer rights. As
China’s wealth has grown, its social inequalities have
grown even faster. People get jailed or executed not only for
opposing the government, but even for meditating the wrong way.
When you count shattered dreams, amputated rights, withdrawn
benefits and denied opportunities as well as executions,
incarcerations and exiles, hundreds of millions of human
casualties litter the right-of-way of China’s capitalist
road.
Now you may not
have to be Chinese to count yourself among the casualties. It
could be that all you have to do is breathe.
China’s
party gerontocracy has just chosen itself a new president, Hu
Jintao, and a new state premier, Wen Jiabiao. They are counting
on the Chinese people, especially the suffering and
undereducated rural poor, to give them the deference that a
Confucian society generally gives to elders and those in
positions of authority.
How do great
political changes happen in such a society? Yes, there is the
march of economic and technological progress, there are leaders
who decide to change directions, and there are foreign
influences. And then there’s the great Confucian escape
clause, the Chinese notion about The Mandate of Heaven.
To the
Confucian way of thinking, a person is a boor, a criminal and
an all-around jerk if he or she fails to honor those in
authority --- unless, of course, the leadership loses The
Mandate of Heaven. How can one tell? Traditionally, natural
disasters, famines and plagues are harbingers of the
mandate’s loss.
In 1976, as Mao
was on his deathbed, there was a catastrophic earthquake near
Tientsin. Estimates of the death toll range between the
official 242,000 and nearly three times that number. One of the
allegations in the disgrace of the Gang of Four was that they
mishandled the relief operations, but the thinly veiled
underlying insinuation was that Mao’s widow et al had lost
The Mandate of Heaven.
The
superstition can cut both ways, and as China’s party elite
recently passed the torch of national leadership among
themselves, they didn’t want any publicity about an
epidemic of a deadly new Atypical Pneumonia breaking out in the
country. And so, faced with a public health crisis, and
possessed of absolute control over the news media, the party
hacks went into denial mode.
The Chinese
Communist Party could have, and should have, used the media to
warn people about the danger and mobilize the country’s
resources to confront it. They could have, and should have,
patched up the threadbare rural public health care system and
attempted to stem the disease’s spread. Instead they
forbade publicity, and did nothing until the disease had spread
to the enclave of Hong Kong --- which does have a free press
and a reasonably modern public health system --- and to Vietnam
and other neighboring countries.
Now, because
the party elite feared the conclusions that might be reached by
a constituency that it has neglected for several decades,
Atypical Pneumonia has spread to other continents.
Let’s not
get panicky about it, and let’s not jump to the
unwarranted conclusion that the faction that was defeated in
1976 was all sweetness and light. But do understand that
because men with near total control over the information that
people in their country receive have abused their power, you
may end up as road kill along the highway of Chinese
politics.
Also in this
section:
US State Department report on human rights in
Panama
Frei Betto, Lula's
assault on hunger
Girvan, The Greater
Caribbean This Week
Jackson, China's news blackout is
our health hazard
Tikkun, Give us news, not
propaganda
RSF, US attack on the
international press
CPJ, US attack on the
international press
