 China's absence of political looks disappointing to some. Fifteen years ago organised dissent appeared in many Chinese cities and hopes for peaceful and democratic change inside China appeared that would have tilted the world.
But that mood of dissent seems virtually dead. Economics definitely explains explains some of the lull. Many Chinese are wealthier or believe they will be wealthier now versus in 1989. Then, China was only a handful of years into economic openness. Now the country is approaching a handful of decades into capitalist wealth creation.
But economics is not the whole story and anyone who says so is missing the point. Whilst China has in overall terms prospered recently this has been asymmetric to put it mildly. Compared to 1989 there are actually far more people, not less, who have to live as an 'underclass' - people who are relatively poor, have limited prospects, limited healthcare, and limited influence on officials.
Assuming around 1-in-5 of the 100 million migrant workers are either unemployed or under-employed already makes a demographic segment exceding twenty millions. This amount of people was never in the mix of 1989. And they live mostly in the cities where China’s revolutions always culminate.
China today is about what the Ministry of Public Security calls "Mass Incidents". These incidents are things like smaller scale urban marches; direct protests against officials; barricading corrupt factory bosses inside their offices; demanding justice from the authorities.
 China officially says there were nearly 60,000 such incidents in 2003 and allegedly involving three million people. Allegedly is probably an important word here because that figure just happens to be precisely 0.25% of the official population and to involve precisely fifty people per incident. Official Communist statistics, enough said.
But troll through the official Chinese media and stories of dissent are all over China coverage like a rash. True, these sorts of protests are more fragmented than in 1989. They have a different subject too. Mass Incidents in the 2000s are more about ad hoc resolution to commercial problems than a systematic right to vote they were in the 1980s. But they are in essence a democratic process of holding officials to account. Official recognition of mistakes? Officials resigning and apologizing? This never or rarely happened in the 1980s.
The effects of 1989 are also alive at the national level. Today it is effectively impossible for China’s leaders to say that 'people were justifiably killed', as Mao once dared to do in the 1960s and Deng hinted at in the 1980s. Sun yat-sen often talked of the primacy of ren quan (rights due to the people) over min quan (rights due to individuals as human rights). Many Nationalists mis-interpreted him to mean that poor Chinese should quietly respect authority. Dr Sun's view, too, carries little weight at the central level.
Relatively few live in mature liberal democracies. It is around 1-in-10 of the world’s population which is less than the population of China who are around i-in-5 of the world's people. For those people the frustration of Tiananmen 1989 is that it remains emblematic of China’s unfinished business from the whole 20th century. Universal suffrage will eventually arrive or so the thinking goes. The good news is that China has clearly not forgotten this unavoidable fact. It is clear the Communist Party and its bedfellows will eventually be voted out of office, or maybe back into office, who knows. They are certainly reactive to public pressure. The news in 2004 is that China's democratic path will be a varied process. |
