Chinas+rebirth+hangs+in+balance,+Lawrence,+Star



=China's rebirth hangs in balance=


 * (From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=2514527)**


 * The Star, May 10 2005, By Patrick Laurence**

Even the most inattentive consumer can hardly be unaware of the plethora of Chinese-made products on the shelves of South African shops, ranging from sophisticated electronic equipment and mundane but indispensable tools, to enough items of clothing to cover a sartorial connoisseur from head to foot.

The veritable cornucopia of merchandise from the People's Republic of China (PRC), much of it relatively inexpensive and of a sufficiently high quality to compete with the best from China's more established competitors, is the outward sign of spectacular developments in that giant country on the Asian mainland.

The immensity of the changes in China can be encapsulated in a single sentence: The gross domestic product (GDP) of China, a country of 1,3-billion people, is growing at a rate approaching 10% per annum and this, as the Economist has noted, is sustained by an annual investment requirement of more than 40% of its GDP.

The implications are obviously profound and could lead to China resuming the status it achieved 2 000 years ago when, according the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development publication, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, it produced nearly a quarter of the world's output. The potential political fallout is evidently huge.

The origins of China's modern economic rebirth go back to the succession of Deng Xiaoping as leader of the PRC in 1978 after the death in 1976 of its founder, Mao Zedong, and Deng's reversal of Zedong's economically disastrous policy of enforced agricultural collectivisation and rapid state-initiated and controlled industrialisation.

The reforms that Deng, a pragmatist who was castigated as a "capitalist roader" during Zedong's cultural revolution, brought about include: Deng's initiative raises the question of whether a politically authoritarian system can co-exist with an economic system of free enterprise, or whether, to use Marxist terminology, a dictatorship of the proletariat can resist the countervailing forces of even a modified form of capitalism.
 * Termination of collective farming and restoration to peasant farmers of their traditional right to decide what crops to grow, and the right to sell a least a portion of their produce for profit.
 * Introduction of an open-door policy to the West to attract its investors and technology.
 * Establishment of specialised economic zones (SEDs) on the south-eastern seaboard, where tax incentives were offered to foreign investors and where local entrepreneurs could ply their skills under a profit-driven market system.

In a dissertation written before his rise to power, Deng argues that it is possible to adopt a foreign mode of production (capitalism) without having to embrace its relations of production (private ownership and class-based conflict between owners and workers).

His thesis is diametrically opposed to the classical Marxist doctrine that the underlying economic substructure determines the nature of the overarching superstructure, including the political system.

Events since then seem to have at least partially justified the view of Deng's Maoist opponents that his reforms were a potential threat to continued all-embracing control of the Chinese Communist Party.

Political developments in the decade after Deng took power incorporate the emergence in Beijing of what became known as the democracy wall, on which posters were pasted demanding political reform and the withdrawal of condemnatory judgments against purported reactionaries during the Maoist-inspired cultural revolution.

A BBC synopsis of subsequent events includes pro-democracy protests in different parts of China, but above all in Beijing, and culminates cataclysmically in the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4 1989, when government security forces, spearheaded by tanks, killed hundreds of unarmed pro-democracy demonstrators in the streets around Tiananmen Square, if not, as the Chinese authorities insist, in the square itself.

Tiananmen Square remains an ugly blot on the record of post-Mao Zedong China, and, moreover, one that refuses to go away.

As Amnesty International has noted, the circle of victims widens with every annual commemoration as the authorities imprison those who seek justice for the victims of the 1989 killings, while maintaining their sphinx-like silence on demands for compensation and the release of all those held over the pro-democracy protests.

But it should be conceded that since the Tiananmen Square crackdown, China has probably enjoyed its longest spell of relative political calm since Chinese communist forces drove their nationalist adversaries under Chiang-Kei-shek off the Chinese mainland onto the neighbouring island of Taiwan.

A threefold explanation helps account for the stability: nthe brutal crushing of the pro-democracy demonstrations still inhibits renewed street protest; A manifestation of Chinese nationalist fervour is the recent outburst of anti-Japanese rioting in China, in part because Japan, which remains a major obstacle to dreams of Chinese hegemony in East Asia, has urged the Europe Union to maintain its arms embargo on China while simultaneously refusing to apologise to China's satisfaction for its military invasion of China in 1937 and the occupation of parts of its territory until 1945.
 * the economic boom, for which Deng and his successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, must be given credit, helps to alleviate political distress; and
 * the adoption by the government of an increasingly nationalist stance serves to deflect anger to real or imagined foreign adversaries.

Another is China's anti-secessionist law aimed at Taiwan that was passed by the National People's Congress less than two months ago.

The law, while reaffirming the PRC's view that there is only one China, consisting of mainland China and Taiwan, and committing the PRC to the "sacred duty" of reunifying China, warns that the PRC will never allow secessionist forces in Taiwan to secede from the PRC.

Article eight specifically reserves the right of the PRC to employ non-peaceful means to protect China's sovereignty and territorial independence should the possibility of peaceful reunification be exhausted.

Having initially reacted sharply by declaring that the Republic of China - as Taiwan is officially known - is a sovereign state and that only its 23-million people have the right to decide its future, Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian has invited his PRC counterpart, Hu Jintao, to visit Taiwan.

His invitation, which follows a visit to the PRC by the Taiwanese opposition leader, Lien Chan, signals a slight but welcome ebbing in tension.

The longer it lasts, the better.

The more time the profound changes in China's economic substructure have to gather momentum and promote ideological and democratic transformation in its superstructure, the greater the long-term prospects of a peacefully negotiated process of reunification, particularly as Taiwan is a major investor in the PRC.


 * The Star's contributing editor Patrick Laurence is the editor of Focus, journal of the Helen Suzman Foundation