Thread: China's dream crumbling

China's dream crumbling


Premen Addy

The stars do not appear to shine on China's mandarins. Their Olympian dream crumbles in the fire of the Olympic torch. The relay that was to circumnavigate the globe in triumph has turned into a parody of a damp squib. The assembled multitudes who came not to revile the coming Caesars but to praise them misread the script: Jeers, not cheers, marked its every step. The celebration of Tibetan freedom has turned into a global forest fire, and not all the king's horses nor all the king's men -- Beijing's security thugs if you must know -- have been able to put out the flames.

The elected socialist Mayor of Paris and the city fathers have honoured the reviled Dalai Lama and the imprisoned Chinese dissident scholar Hu Jia by making them honorary citizens of France, to presumed applause from the shades of Voltaire and Rousseau, and to three visible cheers from legions of the living, who cherish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Supporters of the country's Right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy combined with the Communists to register their disapproval based on the lowest common factor of economic profit leavened by political advantage in the overall dealings with the Middle Kingdom. Orchestrated demonstrations against the French Embassy and French enterprises in China have commenced, the expected theatre of crisis, but these are unlikely to reach the xenophobic pitch of the Cultural Revolution or the earlier Boxer Rebellion and the siege of the foreign quarter and its legations at the turn of the 20th century.

But China is clearly out of sync with the rest of the world. Zimbabwe's hugely discredited despot, Mr Robert Gabriel Mugabe, having burgled his country's general election, ruined its economy and reduced the citizenry to ignoble penury, has ordered a shipload of arms from China for his Zanu PF praetorian guard as insurance in a fast deteriorating situation. The whole of Sub-Saharan Africa being exercised by Zimbabwe's deepening crisis, it would surely have made diplomatic sense to consult the African Union and Zimbabwe's neighbours in southern Africa, and even states further afield, but that would amount to a failure to appreciate the constricted sensibility of the primordial mandarin, in the memorable words of the proconsul George Nathaniel Curzon, "discharging his ceremonial duties with a mechanical and servile accuracy... but arrogant with a pride beyond human conception".

In despatching the consignment of weaponry, Beijing was no doubt upholding Zimbabwean sovereignty, just as it had Pakistan's amid Islamabad's massacres in Bangladesh in 1971, and it was its own sovereign right, no doubt, to aid a friend in need irrespective of the self-same friend's monstrous deeds.

Traditional Chinese statecraft evokes reverence among some Western Sinophiles, notably Mr Henry Kissinger, not by coincidence an admirer of the reactionary 19th century Austrian Minister Count Metternich. The former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser was much given to drooling at the mention of Chou En-lai and his master Mao Tse-tung. Yet the low, criminal cunning of Dickens's Artful Dodger is scarcely comparable to an imaginative diplomacy driven by instincts of decency and broad intellectual horizons. The enduring mentality of a tributary overlord defeats this purpose.

China's Ambassador to Britain, Madame Fu Ying, in a whimpering attack on British and Tibetan protesters on the editorial page of The Daily Telegraph referred to the shock felt by Chinese students in the UK and their compatriots at home as they witnessed the mayhem of the Olympic torch relay in London. Was this the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, she asked plaintively. It most assuredly is. Where would these islands and the wider world be without them? Madame Fu would do well to meditate on their intellectual and moral significance in the context of her own country and its people.

The warp and weft of Han Chinese nationalism reveals an ingrained victimhood that brooks no denial. The wrongs done to China in the 19th century by an imperialist West, as if they were recent occurrences, are drilled into impressionable minds and intoned as self-evident truths. The sufferings inflicted on China's minority peoples -- in Xinjiang, for example -- are blissfully ignored.

Writing in The International Herald Tribune, Matthew Forney, an American journalist resident in Beijing, debunks the naïve belief in a new liberal, Left-leaning generation of Han Chinese sophisticates. The genre simply doesn't exist. He writes: "Educated young Chinese far from being embarrassed by their Government's human rights record, rank among the most patriotic, establishment-supporting people you'll meet. As is clear to anyone who lives here, most young ethnic Chinese strongly support their Government's suppression of the recent Tibetan uprising. One Chinese friend who has a degree from a European university described the conflict as 'a clash between the commercial world and an old aboriginal society'. She praised her Government for treating Tibetan people better than New World settlers treated American Indians. It is a rare person in China who considers the desires of the Tibetans themselves. 'Young Chinese have no sympathy for Tibet,' a Beijing human rights lawyer, Teng Biao, told me."

There is something akin to collective amnesia on Mao's tyranny and its excesses such as the Great Leap Forward and the 30 million dead from starvation and his murderously destructive Cultural Revolution. All that apparently matters to the young is money and future prosperity. Shades of Imperial Japan's 'Co-Prosperity Sphere' and Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, where obedient populations acquiesced in their own indoctrination for the greater glory of the state.

The stability of dictatorships can, however, prove illusory. Gen Galtieri's regime collapsed in Argentina like of house of cards in the aftermath of the Falkland's war, which he himself started with false expectations. The Shah of Iran, despite the grandiose comedy of Persepolis, fell to the medievalist nostrums of an Islamic cleric called Ayatollah Khomeini. And the British envoy Lord Macartney, having witnessed the ritual and splendour of the Qing court in 1793, likened China to a ship unaware of its own distress. "She may perhaps not sink overnight... but she can never be rebuilt on the old bottom," he wrote.

Jonathan Spence, the distinguished Yale historian of China questions China's claim to modernity. "I understand a modern nation to be one that is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies, new ideas. If it is used in this open sense, we should have no difficulty in seeing modern as a concept that shifts with the times as human life unfolds, instead of relegating the sense of the modern to our contemporary world while consigning the past to the traditional and the future to the post-modern. I like to think that there were modern countries -- in the above sense -- in AD 1600, as at any moment in the centuries thereafter. Yet at no time in that span, not at the end of the 20th century, has China convincingly been one of them."

Amen to that.

An interesting analysis.

The Olympic Flame is the property of the IOC.

So unfortunate that China made it a prestige point and ate crow, in a manner of speaking!!

I am surprised that the normally astute Chinese made such a grave error in judgement!!