When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a few short months after state violence curtailed the Tiananmen protests, and then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Western observers began to assume that the Chinese Communist Party is living on borrowed time and will topple or implode any day now. Surely, according to this conventional wisdom, which is spelled out in high-profile books with titles such as China’s Democratic Future and The Coming Collapse of China, the Beijing regime cannot endure.
What these observers miss in their expectation of inevitable democratization or implosion is the obvious readiness of post-Tiananmen Chinese leaders to do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of the Communist Party. They have capitalized on the considerable resources at their disposal, including the goodwill associated with the role that the Communist Party had played in helping free China from foreign bullying before 1949. In addition, they have made careful study of all the factors that have contributed to the fall of other communist governments with an eye to avoiding the “Leninist extinction” of 1989 and its aftermath.
Since the early nineties, the Chinese authorities have displayed a sophisticated strategy for staying in control. They ratcheted up patriotic education campaigns that emphasized the Communist Party’s role in fighting imperialism. Haunted by the example of Solidarity, they moved swiftly and harshly against any organization that seemed capable of connecting people across class lines and geographical borders, while often taking a relatively lenient line on protests that involved only isolated groups and local issues.
Equally important, they worked to minimize some of the specific grievances that had fueled the massive protests of 1989. Students were frustrated by the state’s micromanaging of their private lives, so the Communist Party has been less controlling of what people say and do in their homes. Many were angered by the fact that the economic reforms only materially improved the lot of a small segment of society, so the authorities made it possible for a broader swath of people to enjoy at least some fruits of the boom times. If you let us stay in power, their new bargain proposed, we will give you more choices about how you make and spend money and what you do in your leisure time.
(Photographer Tong Lam, whose work appears on the opposite page, has been documenting the often curious directions in which this consumerist turn has been taking China. For more examples, see his online photo essay, available soon at dissentmagazine.org.)
This strategy worked well—so well that it gave rise to another conventional wisdom that hides important underlying issues. In this case, observers overstate rather than underestimate the strength of the Chinese Communist Party. In recent years, the organization has seemed to be on such a roll that it looks to some as if China may displace the United States as the most powerful nation on earth.
This second influential but misleading view is reflected in such new, high-profile works asWhen China Rules the World and The Beijing Consensus. These predictions mislead by minimizing the enormous challenges the Chinese Communist Party continues to face.
Given the incredible diversity of China, the strategy of rule sketched out above has never worked for everyone or applied equally to all parts of the country. Many Chinese in rural areas have been frustrated by how long it has taken for the rising tide that was supposed to lift all boats to reach them, and large numbers of members of ethnic groups, most famously Tibetan and Uighurs, have never accepted the mythic notion that in 1949 the Communist Party, whose leaders treated them much like colonized subjects, had gloriously “liberated” all citizens of the People’s Republic of China from foreign control. A third key grievance driving the protests of 1989—anger at corruption and nepotism—has never gone away...
Also see: Land of Many Nationalisms
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