Dharamshala Diary: Understanding China and Our World

By Thubten Samphel

ON 11 JANUARY 2007, China fired a missile into the heavens to blast an aging Chinese weather satellite. The military implications of this feat in outer space are enormous. By this exhibition of its technological prowess, China, to many observers, seems to be preparing for the ultimate Olympic gold (most of which will deservedly go to it in 2008 and I will bet my dried ting-mo on this): Chinese pre-eminence in space.

If this happens, China’s sense of its traditional place in the world would have been redeemed. The Chinese people’s view of their country as the “celestial” kingdom and their emperors as the “sons of heaven,” would be truly mandated by their technological superiority in the heavens.

This is as it should be. For most of history, it was China, not the West, which held sway in the world. The ability to keep marauding nomads at bay by either military tactics (The Art of War) or by engineering marvels (The Great Wall of China and in our times the new railway line that links Lhasa to other cities) or by simply co-opting the restive barbarians into the Confucian hierarchical system of deference for those above (sinicisation) produced a civilisation that was continually able to renew itself and expand outward. This civilisation, which at various stages of its growth was also the world’s greatest manufacturing country with a standard of living much higher than the West then, sustained itself by many inventions. The Chinese inventions of paper, printing press, paper currency, water mills, gunpowder, rocket and rocket science, compass, the abacus that is the prototype incarnation of our calculator and perhaps the world’s present computing system and the ruling bureaucracy are the foundations of our industrial world. There are reports that Chinese navigators, long before Columbus, sailing vessels better equipped and larger than the ones Europe managed to produce centuries later, were the ones who actually discovered the New World.

“IN CHINA, people who refuse to allow their homes to be demolished by developers are called ‘nail households’. Most end up being chased away by the developers’ thugs or forcibly removed by police. But in recent weeks determined resistance by a couple in the south-western city of Chongqing turned a struggle for private-property rights into a cause célèbre. They have now reached agreement with the developers. But the debate will simmer on.” [Photo: 4 April 2007 issue of the Economist print edition]

Today China is all set to reclaim its old role as the world’s premier nation. “Only one of the world’s ancient cultures has any real vitality today, is on the ascendant and might dominate the world: China,” says Professor Kang Xiaoguang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The tremors of China’s rise are felt everywhere. China’s booming manufacturing base while supplying the world with cheap made-in-China goods is forcing millions of others in the rest of the world to lose their jobs. Trade barriers are going up and protectionism closing in. Perhaps there would be millions in the world who rued the day when Lord George Macartney, the emissary of His Majesty King George III, demanded of the Qing emperor Qianlong in 1793 to open his empire for trade with the West. Qing China refused, but the People’s Republic of China is trading with the world and doing it at the expense of the West.

But before China shoots for the stars, it is, irritatingly, pulled down by some real, earthly problems. And no missile, however awesome, can blast away these problems. China’s problems here on earth are highlighted in a recent four-hour BBC documentary called China. The documentary explores four core issues that concern the Chinese people and the rest of the world. They are the attempts made by China at village elections and some form of representative government, the status of women, the deteriorating state of the environment and the rising tide of protests, and how the Chinese justice system responds or does not respond to these issues of stability. This documentary is the story of the ordinary Chinese, who, as one officials puts it, with “their backs against the sun and their faces to the earth,” are the ones who are making the new China. What makes this documentary gripping is that the story is told in the urgent, strident voices of many courageous men and women who are confronted everyday with the grave consequences of China’s unbridled capitalism.

These men and women are no critics of the Chinese government. They are ministers, members of the People’s National Congress, scientists, professors and state prosecutors who work for the party and hold responsible posts in the government. And the story they tell of this other China should be of concern to all of us. Because of China’s voracious appetite for everything, the problems of China will become the problems of the world, sooner than we realise. The disappearance of rainforests, the sudden vanishing of manhole covers in Chicago to feed the demand for steel in China, the wiping out of textile and toy industries from Italy to India and the loss of jobs in most part of the world are attributed to this rise. The world may continue to buy made-in-China products, but if China’s economic growth with its focus on just profit and nothing else goes on, many of the pressing problems the world would confront would also become made-in-China.

The value of China is that it allows the viewers to have a clear-headed look at the many problems created by its development, from social instability to the huge damage done to the environment, from corruption to religious persecution. It is not that the leaders are unaware of these problems. In The Man Who Changed China: The Life and Legacy of Jiang Zemin , an officially authorised biography written by Robert Lawrence Kuhn, the author is allowed to quote Jiang Zemin’s wife. She said the files on her husband’s desk always dismayed her. “Explosions here, rioting there. Murders, corruption, terrorism — little that was nice.”

Zhao Qizheng, the minister of Information Office of the State Council (China’s cabinet), attributes these problems to “imbalances” that are natural in the course of China’s development, imbalances between the east and the west, between cities and the countryside, between rich and poor.

Others are not sure about the root cause of these problems. Some point to corruption. Xie Jian, a public prosecutor, has locked many individuals in jail for embezzlement of public money. She says, “Our country now is ruled by the communist party. And its image would be severely damaged if it doesn’t stop corruption. It shakes people’s faith in the communist party and their trust in the government. Eventually, if corruption can’t be stopped, the party would die and the country would die.”

There are others who suspect an alliance for all the social ills of China. Professor Kang Xiaoguang of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who dangled the tantalizing prospect of China’s dominance of the world in the near future, sighs, “So many problems and what is the reason? It is that against the background of the market economy, there is an alliance between authoritarian politics and the elites. It has maintained China’s stability and prosperity, but also created a string of problems. And amongst these we can see a dangerous trend. It is that power, money and knowledge are colluding to serve a bandit society. This gang of elites is robbing the masses.”

Dr. Gao Yaojie, an AIDS campaigner, suggests that media censorship is compounding the problems. She says, “The main thing is to speak the truth. Why should a nation be drowned in lies? Look, in the days of the emperor, whoever lied to him, were killed for disrespect. But now the liars are promoted as officials, get rich. Now rich people’s dogs do better than peasants.”

Others mourn the loss of China’s old revolutionary spirit and suggest that China’s present problems arise because of this loss. Ren Yangcheng is a gaunt man, who in the 1950’s as the team leader dug a canal through a mountain in Henan to bring water to villages on the other side.

He says, “Young people these days need to learn the spirit of hardship from the past. They must always think about the people, care for them. We can’t lose this old revolutionary tradition.”

Pan Liuru, a party official of Henan province today standing next to the veteran revolutionary, says, “I really admire him. Extraordinary!” he says, the sweep of his hand taking in the clean water of the canal gurgling high above the mountain crest. “Really, unbelievable! They never had enough food in their bellies. Had just rags to wear. They got just 12 fens for a day’s work. Our generation must learn from him, the next generation and so on, forever. If all the communists officials today are like those who built this,” says Pan Liuru, pointing to the canal, “the communist party would rule forever.”

But far more than corruption, the rising protests or the growing inequalities in China, the deteriorating environment is considered the one elemental issue that might force the leaders to re-orient China’s present model of development. As the BBC narrator says, “China’s people are paying the price for her rapid economic growth. Prosperity touches some. Pollution touches all…Nature in China is becoming a battleground, contested by scientists, environmentalists, government and ordinary people, 1.3 billion of them, whose water, air and soil are at stake.”

Pan Yue, the young and dynamic deputy minister of the Environmental Protection Administration who gave that famous interview to Der Spiegel in March 2005 in which he said that China’s economic miracle might end if China failed to protect the environment, is brutally frank about the real crisis. He says, “The environmental challenge is not just to provide our children with future happiness. But the real question is whether our generation can survive intact…Of the world’s ten most polluted cities, five, unfortunately, are in China. Such severe pollution is undoubtedly a grave threat to the physical health of the Chinese people.”

Wu Dengming, an environmental campaigner, echoes the same sense of anguish and urgency. “People welcomed the factories because with the factories moving in, we could make some money and prosper. But then when the factories were here, people realised our water has been polluted. We can’t drink it. Our soil has been polluted and the grain production has fallen. Our fruit trees have died of pollution. Our pigs have died. Our sheep have died. And our people have died too, died of cancer. Then they thought, we don’t want development like this, factories like these. At first we wanted money. Now we want quality of life.”

All this means that before China reaches for the stars, it has some real work of cleaning up on earth — for itself and the rest of the world. And these voices should be considered China’s conscience. For it is with their input and insight that China can manage the transition that benefits its own people and the world.