Beijing Means Business
The dragon is reaching out. Fresh from border hostilities, China’s premier comes to India bearing economic olive branch.
When China dreams, the world gets a nightmare. The dream of the new Helmsman, Xi Jinping, has already spawned a thousand editorials, and excited Sinologists are still reading tea leaves to decipher the nuances of the Oriental reverie. Will “the Chinese Dream”, an obvious echo of “the American Dream”, feature that one virtue of capitalism that is still forbidden in the People’s Republic: Individual freedom? Will it herald the beginning of what Chinese dissidents call the Fifth Modernisation— democracy— by the fifth generation leadership? Or, as the dreaming citizen shops for happiness and prosperity in the Great Mall of China, will invisible censors of the party be editing the dream to suit the truth of the state? After all, in the mythology of revolutions, slogans are poetry of the masses, and Chairman Mao, himself an amateur poet, generously contributed to the pulp of the Great Proletarian Tomorrow, his sonorous lines ranging from Bombard the Headquarters to Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom. Deng Xiaoping, the moderniser who relegated Mao to the souvenir shop, was practical to a fault: “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.” It was glorious to be rich in Dengist China, but tanks rolled over dreams as in Tiananmen Square 1989. It is change indeed, at least in the semantics of sloganeering, when a Chinese leader recognises the right to dream. Is China witnessing a Xi change? It is inevitable; the paradox of free market and fettered citizen— what you may call social capitalism, or better still, capitalism with Chinese characteristics— can’t last forever. China thinks it can beat western capitalism with the glitz and sprawl of wealth, the shine of Shenzhen and Shanghai, and keep the national mind safe from the counterrevolutionary viruses of democracy. Perhaps Xi, the first Chinese communist party leader from the post- revolution generation, realises that globalisation of the mind is something the Party, still a Leninist machine that sends enemies of the state to the gulag that exists in perfect harmony with the supermarket, can’t stop. Xi’s dream will remain another piece of glib Goebbelism unless he is courageous enough to allow the dreams of such saboteurs as the multimedia artist Ai Weiwei and the Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, co- author of Charter 08, the dissidents’ manifesto for freedom which dared the pinstriped mandarins of Zhongnanhai with a blasphemy: “The era of emperors and overlords is on the way out.”
The empire that continues to evoke admiration, awe, fear and envy in equal measure is nervous as well as paranoid. It is a global power in a permanent state of war— at home and across the borders. Within, it confiscates the conscience of the questioning citizen. It sees bogeymen everywhere— in the real world as well as the virtual world. China’s extraterritorial transgressions have already made its near abroad hostile, be it Japan, Vietnam or India. It is also the unofficial benefactor of all those rogue states, ranging from the comic strip dictatorship of Pyongyang to the genocidal regime of Damascus. The Chinese Century may be the most ambitious national work in progress, but China of the moment, in spite of the pace of its growth and the reach of its influence, is a First World power with a Third World mindset. If Xi realises the power and possibilities of a billion dreams in this China, change can’t be far away.
As India, a country suffering from chronic China complex, waits for the second most powerful leader from the People’s Republic, will we get a whiff of that change? That said, Premier Li Keqiang will be hosted by his Indian counterpart who is a fine example of a dream gone wrong in a democracy.