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Chinese communism of the Deng kind collides with reality
WorldTribune.com
Sol W. Sanders
11/11/2013
Excerpt:
Despite the ballyhoo, there is little prospect significant reforms will emerge from the current upper echelon Chinese Communist Party meeting.
That’s despite virtually all foreign observers and most Chinese experts agreeing major changes are absolutely necessary to continue the past three decades’ fantastic economic progress.
China has now reached blocking obstacles, in part created by its very success. If those are not overcome, the economy could freeze up with half its population at near subsistence. Or it could face collapse of the ruling Communist Party regime. That possibility has been suggested publicly by former President Hu Jintao and the current President Xi Jinping.
Chinese paramilitary police stand guard in Tiananmen Square as security on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party plenum in Beijing, on Nov 8. /Mark Ralston/AFP
If drastic reform is not forthcoming for a variety of reasons – not least the difficulty of the issues – it is bad news not only for China but for the rest of the world. For when the Chinese left Communist orthodoxy, it rapidly became part of the world economy.
Maximum Leader Deng Xiaoping philosophized the color of the cat was irrelevant as long as it caught mice. So in 1978 Party meeting, similar to this one, he plunged into opening to foreign investment with its priceless accompanying technology and foreign markets. That invitation to the world resulted in unleashing what all who were acquainted with them knew was innate Chinese entrepreneurial talent.
Unlike the 1990 implosion of an autarchic Soviet Union, a China breakdown would reach into every facet of world economy, for example, even American kitchens. I shudder each time I pass Chinese frozen food-laden counters in my local big box outlet. It is unlikely their production could have escaped China’s growing omnipresent air, water and chemical pollution.
Hardly a week goes by without a major poisoning scandal reported even in China’s controlled media. But neither an earlier episode of imported contaminated dog food nor the recent disclosure of 600 dogs killed by poisonous Chinese “treats” has awakened the normally overactive Obama administration’s regulatory appetite.
It is only a matter of time until a major disaster occurs in the U.S. with the kind of food handling prevalent in China. Examples reach bizarre limits: waste cooking oil salvaged from gutters repackaged and sold to unsuspecting cooks.
It’s this corruption in all its 57 varieties heading the list of China’s problems.
Repeated anti-corruption campaigns have been unsuccessful in making a dent. That’s because, too often, those nailed are a result of Party infighting while others with more influence escape unscathed. And it reaches the topmost levels: former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was unmasked by a New York Times expose – undoubtedly sourced from his political enemies – as head of a huge family fortune.
The threat corruption poses for the Party was dramatized in the continuing saga of Bo Xilai, former Communist boss in the huge [30 million] southwest federal city of Chungking. It moved in stages from the murder of a British businessman and intelligence agent, to the failed attempt of Bo’s police chief to defect to the U.S., to Mrs. Bo’s conviction for murder of her business partner and lover.
As the son of a famous Civil War revolutionary figure, a “princeling”, on his way up to a major national role, Bo’s conviction for a whole police blotter of crimes tore into the Party’s bowels. Not the least ominous was Bo’s close association with China’s secret police chief, now removed but probably still an intra-Party player.
But whatever their other differences in their search for “reform”, virtually all leading Party figures reject the notion of ending the Communist Party power monopoly. In fact, President Xi Jinping, now a year in the catbird’s seat as Party general secretary, chief of state and chairman of the all powerful Central Military Commissions [Party and State], has made enough noises about the beauties of Maoism to suspect he may want to return to its more rigid suppression.
Growing dissident episodes have fed this Party nostalgia for a Maoist crackdown. In mid-October a jeep filled with Uighurs, a Turkic people, once the majority in Singkiang, China’s huge western Central Asian province, escaped surveillance. They crashed and burned before the giant Mao painting on Tiananmen square, scene of the 1989 government massacre of students and workers.
The provincial Party chieftain, conducting a decades-old campaign against a low-level insurgency fed by Central Asian expatriates, was immediately cashiered. Whether the rebels have ties to worldwide Muslim jihadists as Beijing claims, those relations are developing as bitterness over the effects of the Chinese Han in-migration.
Uighur [and continuing Tibetan] opposition to Chinese rule are less important that Beijing’s dilemma presented by its exploitation of the digital revolution for economic development and its use by social networks undermining Party control. A staggering ****two million “internet opinion analysts” censor forbidden materials on networks like the semi-official Sina Weibo, with more than 500 million registered users posting 100 million messages daily. But when railway officials tried to bury derailed cars after a 2011 major accident, digital telephone pictures revealed the attempted literal coverup. Their exposure led to a death sentence, later reprieved, for the minister and wiping out the ministry.
Bloggers are routinely exposing growing local civil unrest, often involving attacks on police. Beijing has stopped listing the number of incidents because of their increasing frequency. These often involve the expropriation of land in private use, the only fallback highly leveraged local governments have for financing both legitimate government and Party corruption.
Regime strategy sees solving poverty through continued urbanization, absorbing another 300 million of the half of China’s 1.3 billion still rural dwellers. But it has not been able to resolve overburdened city governments opposition to the hokou problem, which is a legal transfer of the migrants’ village registration. To do so, hardliners argue, would remove an important control. That means one sixth of China’s population, mostly part-time workers, living in the cities are treated as illegals and denied access, for example, to educational opportunities.
.................................................. .........
View the complete article at:
http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/11/...-with-reality/
WorldTribune.com
Sol W. Sanders
11/11/2013
Excerpt:
Despite the ballyhoo, there is little prospect significant reforms will emerge from the current upper echelon Chinese Communist Party meeting.
That’s despite virtually all foreign observers and most Chinese experts agreeing major changes are absolutely necessary to continue the past three decades’ fantastic economic progress.
China has now reached blocking obstacles, in part created by its very success. If those are not overcome, the economy could freeze up with half its population at near subsistence. Or it could face collapse of the ruling Communist Party regime. That possibility has been suggested publicly by former President Hu Jintao and the current President Xi Jinping.
Chinese paramilitary police stand guard in Tiananmen Square as security on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party plenum in Beijing, on Nov 8. /Mark Ralston/AFP
If drastic reform is not forthcoming for a variety of reasons – not least the difficulty of the issues – it is bad news not only for China but for the rest of the world. For when the Chinese left Communist orthodoxy, it rapidly became part of the world economy.
Maximum Leader Deng Xiaoping philosophized the color of the cat was irrelevant as long as it caught mice. So in 1978 Party meeting, similar to this one, he plunged into opening to foreign investment with its priceless accompanying technology and foreign markets. That invitation to the world resulted in unleashing what all who were acquainted with them knew was innate Chinese entrepreneurial talent.
Unlike the 1990 implosion of an autarchic Soviet Union, a China breakdown would reach into every facet of world economy, for example, even American kitchens. I shudder each time I pass Chinese frozen food-laden counters in my local big box outlet. It is unlikely their production could have escaped China’s growing omnipresent air, water and chemical pollution.
Hardly a week goes by without a major poisoning scandal reported even in China’s controlled media. But neither an earlier episode of imported contaminated dog food nor the recent disclosure of 600 dogs killed by poisonous Chinese “treats” has awakened the normally overactive Obama administration’s regulatory appetite.
It is only a matter of time until a major disaster occurs in the U.S. with the kind of food handling prevalent in China. Examples reach bizarre limits: waste cooking oil salvaged from gutters repackaged and sold to unsuspecting cooks.
It’s this corruption in all its 57 varieties heading the list of China’s problems.
Repeated anti-corruption campaigns have been unsuccessful in making a dent. That’s because, too often, those nailed are a result of Party infighting while others with more influence escape unscathed. And it reaches the topmost levels: former Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was unmasked by a New York Times expose – undoubtedly sourced from his political enemies – as head of a huge family fortune.
The threat corruption poses for the Party was dramatized in the continuing saga of Bo Xilai, former Communist boss in the huge [30 million] southwest federal city of Chungking. It moved in stages from the murder of a British businessman and intelligence agent, to the failed attempt of Bo’s police chief to defect to the U.S., to Mrs. Bo’s conviction for murder of her business partner and lover.
As the son of a famous Civil War revolutionary figure, a “princeling”, on his way up to a major national role, Bo’s conviction for a whole police blotter of crimes tore into the Party’s bowels. Not the least ominous was Bo’s close association with China’s secret police chief, now removed but probably still an intra-Party player.
But whatever their other differences in their search for “reform”, virtually all leading Party figures reject the notion of ending the Communist Party power monopoly. In fact, President Xi Jinping, now a year in the catbird’s seat as Party general secretary, chief of state and chairman of the all powerful Central Military Commissions [Party and State], has made enough noises about the beauties of Maoism to suspect he may want to return to its more rigid suppression.
Growing dissident episodes have fed this Party nostalgia for a Maoist crackdown. In mid-October a jeep filled with Uighurs, a Turkic people, once the majority in Singkiang, China’s huge western Central Asian province, escaped surveillance. They crashed and burned before the giant Mao painting on Tiananmen square, scene of the 1989 government massacre of students and workers.
The provincial Party chieftain, conducting a decades-old campaign against a low-level insurgency fed by Central Asian expatriates, was immediately cashiered. Whether the rebels have ties to worldwide Muslim jihadists as Beijing claims, those relations are developing as bitterness over the effects of the Chinese Han in-migration.
Uighur [and continuing Tibetan] opposition to Chinese rule are less important that Beijing’s dilemma presented by its exploitation of the digital revolution for economic development and its use by social networks undermining Party control. A staggering ****two million “internet opinion analysts” censor forbidden materials on networks like the semi-official Sina Weibo, with more than 500 million registered users posting 100 million messages daily. But when railway officials tried to bury derailed cars after a 2011 major accident, digital telephone pictures revealed the attempted literal coverup. Their exposure led to a death sentence, later reprieved, for the minister and wiping out the ministry.
Bloggers are routinely exposing growing local civil unrest, often involving attacks on police. Beijing has stopped listing the number of incidents because of their increasing frequency. These often involve the expropriation of land in private use, the only fallback highly leveraged local governments have for financing both legitimate government and Party corruption.
Regime strategy sees solving poverty through continued urbanization, absorbing another 300 million of the half of China’s 1.3 billion still rural dwellers. But it has not been able to resolve overburdened city governments opposition to the hokou problem, which is a legal transfer of the migrants’ village registration. To do so, hardliners argue, would remove an important control. That means one sixth of China’s population, mostly part-time workers, living in the cities are treated as illegals and denied access, for example, to educational opportunities.
.................................................. .........
View the complete article at:
http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/11/...-with-reality/