Posted on 10/20/2007 9:51:30 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
IT WAS the white Rolls-Royce that stole the show, as far as the hundreds of Chinese tourists wandering towards the Communist party’s congress in Tiananmen Square were concerned.
They stopped and watched as the limousine, a symbol of unattainable wealth to the average Chinese person, was loaded onto a flatbed truck outside the Rolls-Royce showroom. Its thick windows, apparently bulletproof, were polished, its tyres wrapped in velvety cloth and it was driven off to a new home.
One of China’s 106 dollar billionaires may have woken up to a pleasant surprise this weekend but, not surprisingly, the staff in the showroom were too terrified by a foreign questioner to disclose any details of the car’s buyer.
It disappeared down Wangfujing Street, lined with glitzy boutiques, past the old Stalinist Beijing Hotel, past the square where the Communist party of China droned on through its 17th congress in the Great Hall of the People. Out in the great malls of the people, the new rich appeared heedless of the party’s rhetorical calls for redistribution, fairness and socialist morality.
Beijing has become two cities over the past week. One is the capital of red banners, proletarian faces and orchestrated applause for middle-aged men in dark suits with dyed hair, gathered under the hammer and sickle. These are the people who run China.
The other is the city of night-clubs, vintage bordeaux drunk with spicy Sichuan food, luxury brands and five-star hotel lobbies populated by more middle-aged men with dyed hair, accompanied by slender, attentive companions. Increasingly, these are the people who own China.
Tomorrow, the Communist party will probably unveil the nine men who will govern this nation of 1.3 billion people and oversee the world’s fastest-growing big economy for the next five years.
They include two men tipped for the top. One of them, Xi Jin-ping, 54, straddles the two worlds, for his wife is a popular singer called Pen Liyuan, who has a substantial audience among the mall Maoists.
Xi is the son of a party elder, Xi Zhongxun, thus qualifying as a “princeling” entrusted with the inheritance and transmission of absolute power. He was made party boss of Shanghai after the purge of his predecessor in China’s biggest corruption scandal since the 1949 revolution.
The second man to watch is Li Keqiang, 52, who runs Liaoning province, in China’s industrialised northeast, where state-owned factories stand silent as the new economy of exports and services leaves them and their workers behind.
The two men are said by Chinese analysts to be the best placed to take over from President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao five years from now.
So far, so stage-managed, but even as the party completes its rituals of secret bargaining and censored announcements, the ebb and flow of Chinese political life is bypassing its dictates.
And the gap between rich and poor, epitomised by the white Rolls-Royce on the one hand and street scavengers on the other, has set off a public policy argument that strikes at the core of the party’s claim to legitimacy.
The hottest reading among intellectuals in Beijing last week was a small magazine called Yanhuang Chunqui (Spring and Autumn), containing an essay by Li Rui, who served as secretary to Mao Tse-tung.
“As an old party member aged 92, and one who has been a party member for more than 70 years, I should contribute my own ideas for the party’s self-criticism to the 17th congress,” Li wrote.
“From 1949 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of millions of innocent people were purged by mistake and tens of millions died of hunger. This makes us bitter with hatred. It was all because our party failed to counterbalance power with democracy.”
Li called for immediate freedom of speech, the end of censorship and a democratic constitution.
His article was hastily deleted from the internet by China’s army of web censors. But a famous poet and dramatist, Ren Yanfang, shared a humorous account of what happened next with readers of his blog.
“This morning, I got up, opened my computer and found Li Rui’s message to the 17th congress was deleted from the internet. But one of my friends said he had the magazine, so we made an appointment to meet in Zhongshan Park, near the Great Hall of the People.
“As I passed by Tiananmen Square, a policeman searched me to see if I had a bomb or a dagger, thinking I might be a threat to the congress. I showed my papers as a former senior official and was allowed to go.
“As I came back from Zhongshan Park, they searched me again!
“I was very angry, so the policeman said, ‘Write a letter to Hu Jintao.’ I said, ‘Yes, I will definitely write to ask him why the Communist party of China is so scared of the people.’ ” Hu has led an ideological crackdown, suppressing dissent, imprisoning journalists and allowing the police to beat and detain “troublemakers”, in violation of the protections guaranteed by the Chinese constitution. Yet the congress has allowed an air of elite dissent to flourish, perhaps because the leadership is wary of turning on its own.
On Friday, Chinese reporters were amazed to hear Hu Deping, 65, the son of a reforming leader of the 1980s, openly call for democracy in a meeting on the sidelines of the congress.
“I’m completely for a democratic political system,” said Hu Deping, who is vice-chairman of the party’s United Front Work Department.
One irreverent blogger even dared to post criticisms on the People’s Daily website, calling the congress a forum for “impractical expectations”. The state’s flagship paper promptly deleted the item and shut down his blog, but that did not deter “blackbird in China”, who vented his ire on another popular website.
“So my article is against the constitution? If it is, just let me know. Why shut down my blog? I think the People’s Daily should be shut down.
“It allows people only to pay tributes to the party and won’t allow people to criticise. This policy will force people to take their protests to the street.
“President Hu stresses building a harmonious society – but without freedom of speech, how can we build it? Now we realise that this so-called reform is not made for us ordinary people. This reform only lets officials become the idle rich and billion-aires; they have mistresses and live in paradise.”
Troubling, candid words for the comfortable middle-aged men in both worlds in Beijing this weekend. For the makers of bulletproof limousines, sales can only get better.
That day is coming for Chinese leaders.
Maybe, S. Korea. But Singapore has no freedoms, or any has want or need to progress in that direction.
Sounds like “let them eat cake”. People on the bottom of the pile will find a way around all the security. Just take time. This place is starting to crack.
It is very significant that a Commie party official was able to make a pro-democracy statement and still be allowed to breathe. Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese government sees democracy in some form as an inevitability, but they want to avoid the fiasco that ensued when the USSR collapsed, so they are moving very slowly towards democracy, rather than taking a giant leap.
I hope that's not wishful thinking on my part. I think we would all welcome a democratic China which protects the freedoms of its people with open arms.
From each according to his means to each according to his needs. /s
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