The Party is increasingly out of step with the dynamic people it governs.
There are, it is sometimes said, “a million truths in China.” As the Communist Party celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic today, there are only three worth keeping in mind.
First, the Chinese state will try to project strength. There will be fearsome weapons and 200,000 soldiers and performers in a grand procession in the center of Beijing, meant to convince onlookers of the power of the communist superstate. Do not be impressed. If communists do one thing well, it is staging spectacles. Destitute North Korea, for instance, is even better than China in putting on perfectly synchronized parades and mass gatherings. The National Day march says little about the effectiveness, resilience or vigor of China’s one-party political system.
Second, the Chinese state, for all its apparent might, is deeply insecure. The theme of the celebration is “The Motherland and I, Marching Together.” But so great is the regime’s worry about possible unrest or disruption in protest of its rule that the laobaixing—ordinary Chinese—will not be walking in Beijing’s parade. There will be no cheering crowds lining the route along Chang’an Avenue. Citizens will be kept away by a six-province security perimeter and more than a million police and “volunteers” enforcing the tightest security in the country’s history. The government has booked all the hotel rooms overlooking the route to prevent anyone from seeing the parade up close. Nearby residents have been ordered not to look out their windows or invite guests.
That leads to a third point: The Communist Party is becoming increasingly divorced from its subjects. Sixty years ago, the Chinese people supported Mao Zedong as he swept Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang from power. Mao rarely feared the populace he ruled, even unleashing the masses in the Cultural Revolution to do away with political foes. His successor Deng Xiaoping used the same tactic, albeit on a smaller scale, by initially allowing the Democracy Wall movement to proceed.
Mao and Deng, for all their faults, were sure of themselves. Their successors, however, are men of lesser talents—and are certainly far less confident in their rule. Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao have institutionalized the Communist Party and thereby prevented the excesses of their two predecessors, but they have done so at great cost to the vitality of their organization. In their zeal to weed out charismatic figures—to ensure, for instance, that there will be no Chinese Gorbachev—they have purged men and women of great imagination and capability from the party leadership’s ranks. What is left are thousands of colorless cadres standing behind the faceless Mr. Hu.
The Chinese people, however, are a different story. While Beijing officials are holed up in their offices planning gargantuan parades, the country’s citizens are making, in the words of journalist Hannah Beech, a “kinetic dash into the future.” Remaking their country at breakneck speed, they are outracing everyone else. If there are at least a million truths in China, it is because the Chinese are changing fast, perhaps faster than any other group in the world today.
If there is any cause for optimism about China, this is it. Decades of government-sponsored economic development and social engineering have made people aware, assertive and, unlike their leaders, confident. By now, this process of social change has acquired its own momentum and the party can no longer stop it. Instead, it has responded by becoming more repressive in the political realm, especially since 2002, with crackdowns on everyone from newspaper editors to the writers of karaoke songs.
As the late Samuel Huntington noted, instability occurs under many conditions, but especially when political institutions do not keep up with the social forces unleashed by economic change. When I went to my dad’s hometown, dusty Rugao in Jiangsu province, last summer, no one wanted to talk about the Olympics, which were seen as “the government’s games.” Instead, almost everyone asked how American democracy worked and who would win the presidential election.
The Communist Party has not sensed or responded to people’s widespread desire to have more say in their government. So do not be surprised that last month’s party plenum, despite the expectations of the global China-watching community, produced no political reforms of any significance. The country’s ruling organization can put on large-scale displays of goose-stepping soldiers, but it cannot keep up with the Chinese people, who are, in a very real sense, the ones on the march.
Mr. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” (Random House, 2001).
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