John Wong
Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Volume 1, Number 1
October 1998
The 1998-1999 Shorenstein Seminars on Contemporary East Asia sponsored a talk by Dr. John Y. Wong on transformation in China on Tuesday, October 27, 1998, at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
A graduate of Oxford, Dr. John Wong specializes in international relations and history. He is the author of six books, the latest being Deadly Dreams Opium Imperialism and the Arrow War (1856-60) in China (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is called upon regularly by the media to comment on currents affairs, and has given public lectures in Geneva, London, New York, San Francisco, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore. In his lecture, Dr. Wong will deal with the latest transformation in China and Hong Kong. Dr. Wong is professor of history at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Four events in 1997 call for a reassessment of what we know and expect of China. The first was the death of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping on February 19. The second was the restitution of Hong Kong on July 1. The third was the reshuffle of the Chinese leadership at the fifteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), held on September 12-18. The fourth was the economic meltdown in Asia in the second half of the year, the powerful effect of which will be felt for some years to come.
The reassessment will be conducted in the following areas: political stability, economic developments, and regional security.
As in other authoritarian states, problems of leadership succession have plagued China since 1949. Because of the leadership's disregard of due procedures, a change of power has been habitually unpredictable and often accompanied by power struggles, even bloodshed. Of Jiang Zemin, it was repeatedly asked how long he would last and whether political stability would continue after Deng's death.
Jiang Zemin had eight years (since 1989) to consolidate his power under Deng's tutelage and protection. He now has few challengers. Only a small number of the CCP old guard remains. Li Peng and Qiao Shi, once considered potential contenders, stepped down from their respective positions as premier and chairman of the National People's Congress in March 1998. Furthermore, all the indications are that Jiang Zemin has slowly but surely consolidated his control of the People's Liberation Army.
The fifteenth party congress was remarkable in that it had a turnover of only two members. This suggests continuity and stability, in contrast to the meteoric rises that typified Mao's regime. In addition, this congress appears to have prepared a fourth generation of leaders to take over at the sixteenth party congress in five years' time, as all those elected or reelected into the Central Committee were below the retirement age of 70, except for Jiang Zemin. The nucleus of the next generation of leaders may form around Jiang's heir apparent, Hu Jintao, and others such as Wen Jiabao, Wu Bangguo, and Zeng Qinhong.
We might expect stability in China for the foreseeable future. What could have upset the proceedings of the fifteenth party congress was an eventful restitution of Hong Kong, like a June 4, 1989-style disturbance. Indeed, Western media had expected it to be so; more than eight thousand journalists from all over the world flocked into the tiny colony to report the handover on July 1, 1997. By the mid-morning of July 1, the mighty anticlimax among the journalists was all too obvious, and many preferred to talk to fortune-tellers about the future of Hong Kong than report on the swearing in of the new Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.
We all know that interference from Beijing will end the Hong Kong as we know it, which, in turn, will severely set back China's economic developments and thereby its stability. However, to date, Chinese leaders have kept their pledges to tolerate opposition voices in Hong Kong such as Martin Lee and the Cheng Ming monthly. Interestingly, Hong Kong has also become a point of reference for China as the latter goes into the twenty-first century. The elections in Hong Kong, the transparency of government, the integrity of its civil service, the Independent Commission Against Corruption, the rule of law, and the independence of the judiciary are institutions that are being closely observed and in some places imitated in China.
Economic liberalization began when Deng Xiaoping abandoned the Soviet model of command economy, reversed Mao's economic policies, and embarked China on the road to capitalism in 1978 under the guise of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." The question that had been asked for a long time was Would Deng's policies continue after his death, or would there be a leftist backlash? Even as the fifteenth party congress was under way in September 1997, archconservatives circulated a document comparing market reforms to the "revisionist" policies of Gorbachev and alleging that such policies had led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, it seems certain that Deng Xiaoping's economic strategy is irreversible. After eleven years of economic liberalism, even that guise of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is now discarded; few Chinese leaders feel the need to justify their capitalist schemes with socialist rhetoric. In 1997, we have seen Zhu Rongji's macroeconomic policies begin to bear much fruit. These policies included raising the prices for essential commodities such as grain, oil, and cotton that the state purchased from peasants and increasing the supply of fertilizers to the peasants. Thus motivated, the peasants produced a series of good harvests that quickly stabilized and even lowered the market prices of essential commodities. Likewise, inflation has been reduced. Fundamental tax reforms have greatly increased state revenues. Foreign investment over the last three years has increased exponentially.
Other economic reforms include the greatest effort to date in stamping out corruption. In July 1998 President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji named the army, police, and armed forces as being involved in smuggling and thereupon banned these and the judiciary and other law-enforcing agencies from engaging in business activities.
The fifteenth party congress also produced the important decision to privatize all but about a thousand state-owned enterprises (SOEs) by making them public companies. This change strikes at the very heart of China's communist ideology. Defining the public sector to include many different forms of ownership was indeed an "ideological breakthrough." The first major city to respond to Jiang Zemin's lifting of the "ideological shackle" was Canton. Promptly, bankrupt companies were sold off. In my own fieldwork in Canton, I have found that as a general rule, a worker made unemployed by a bankrupt SOE is compensated with a lump sum equivalent to two years' full pay plus one month's full pay for every year he or she has worked for that SOE. The worker is allowed to keep his or her housing and is also entitled to benefits from a social insurance scheme while looking for another job. However, such generous severance packages might not exist in other parts of the country.
China's growing economic strength has prompted some observers to make the alarming prediction that one day China and the United States will go to war. Such predictions do not seem to have taken into account the close economic cooperation between the United States and China, nor the increasingly close relationship between the armed forces of the two countries in recent years.
While the bureaucrats in the Clinton administration were making positive noises about China, the U.S. Congress voted in May 1998 to block further satellite or similar technology transfers to China. In as much as Congress typically takes a more adversarial stand against perceived national threats, that is to be expected.
When President Clinton finally visited China in June 1998, much publicity was given to the spirited debate between him and Jiang Zemin, including a sharp condemnation from the U.S. leader of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Less attention appears to have been paid to the agreement reached that both sides stop aiming missiles at each other or to another agreement that both sides would work out a schedule of military exercises to be observed by the other party.
May the leaders of the world and alarmists continue to play games and make noises about an impending war without actually precipitating one. Conclusion In its attempt to adjust to the modern world, China has gone through many transformations since its defeat in the Opium Wars of 1839-43 and 1856-60. Past transformations were guided by one philosophical principle or another. In the wake of the Opium Wars, the so-called Self-Strengthening Movement was guided mainly by Confucianism under the dictum "Chinese learning as the basis and Western learning as the means." Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution was guided by his Three Principles of the People, which is a synthesis of East and West. The New Culture and May Fourth movements had as their slogans "science and democracy." The Communist Revolution adopted Marxism and Leninism. The Cultural Revolution was dominated by Mao Zedong Thought.
China's transformation under Deng Xiaoping has no clear-cut ideology. The most easily identifiable feature of this approach is his "socialism with Chinese characteristics," which is an attempt to disguise capitalist policies behind a thin socialist veil. Now at the fifteenth party congress, what was labeled as Deng Xiaoping Thought was written into the Chinese constitution as the guiding principles for China's reconstruction, on a par with Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought. But all of these are contradictory principles. Small wonder that the Chinese people are very confused, and in this confusion are reduced to pursuing the only object with which they can easily identify, money.
When I compare the China of today with that of the Warring States period (475-221 BC), I find both to be times of unprecedented change when myriad schools of thought interact with each other. Today's interacting ideas include Confucianism, Marxism, Legalism, Taoism, Christianity, Buddhism, democracy, authoritarianism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping's directives, communism, capitalism, socialism, materialism, spiritualism, old ones, new ones, white cats, black cats.... It is also reported that 87.3 percent of the thousands of Chinese students awarded government scholarships to pursue postgraduate studies abroad have kept their contracts to return to China, so we must add to the list the British, French, American, Canadian, Australian, etc., versions of the above. In 1993, China stopped the practice of assigning jobs to graduates, instead it holds annual recruitment examinations for civil service jobs, which thus must have become a melting pot of all strands of thought. In the same way that the metamorphosis of two thousand years ago has shown itself to be intellectually the most lively period in Chinese history, it is quite possible that the new metamorphosis will breed a new philosophical approach that will guide China in the Twenty-first Century. Indeed, China is changing so rapidly that what I have written today may soon be dated, as it should be.
Summarized by Martin Beversdorf.
