WORLD_ The last thing China’s corrupt elite wants is war with Washington

THE AUSTRALIAN

The last thing China’s corrupt elite wants is war with Washington

MICHAEL SHERIDAN
THE TIMES June 09, 2015 12:00AM

In his Beijing flat an old man is writing as if he cannot be stopped. At this time of year he writes a lot, because June is the month when China remembers how dreams turned to dust.

His name is Bao Tong. Once he ranked among the powerful. He was director of the office of political reform of the Communist Party’s central committee. Nobody ambitious would want that job today.

Bao served as policy secretary to Zhao Ziyang, once prime minister and general secretary of the party. Zhao is long dead, his ashes enshrined with the hopes of change he embodied. But Bao keeps on writing.

As darkness closes around intellectuals, writers and lawyers, the old man is a pinprick of light. The insistent tapping of his keyboard does not let us forget. There was once a liberal wing of the Communist Party. Young Chinese believed in the slogan of reform and opening up. The world looked on with optimism.

Bao paid for his beliefs. On May 28, 1989, he was arrested. Zhao was purged. Days later, Deng Xiaoping sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square. Of all the dates in that momentous year, June 4 was the saddest. For China it was the turning point at which history failed to turn.

It is only now, while a dictatorial princeling rules the People’s Republic, that Bao is able to perform perhaps the most useful service of his life. He helps us understand what happened in China and what it means for the rest of the world. His is a voice of wisdom in a sea of ignorance.

A world away 10 day ago, China and the US faced off in Singapore at a security summit attended by ministers, spy chiefs and military commanders from a host of countries. They were all trying to work out what the future holds.

The rise of China and the role of the US dominated their discussions. The two nations have become rivals. They stand at odds as China seeks to expand its naval power beyond its territorial waters.

US Defence Secretary Ash Carter warned China to back off. A Chinese officer gave a boilerplate reply. There was barely a veneer of cordiality. It was fuel to the policy debate in Washington.

China is on the policy agenda in Washington in a way that has not been true for a generation. It may even exceed the Middle East as an issue in next year’s presidential election.

The conundrum for the US is: what are we dealing with? Is it like Germany in 1900? Or is China an era-of-globalisation power whose rise can be managed without war? Confront, engage or accommodate?

Unfortunately, nobody can invite the old man in Beijing to share his insights in person — the guards who watch Bao’s building day and night see to that. We do, however, have his words. Every policymaker should read them.

In his latest essay Bao explains the big picture in a way I hadn’t grasped before. In part that’s because we accept the past without thinking about it. We forget the gigantic scale of the Chinese Communist Revolution and of Mao Zedong’s victory. He broke an old civilisation, killed its gentry and overthrew the social order. In its past China had been the greatest trade mart on earth. Mao abolished capitalism.

Bao simplifies the three stages that followed in China like this: “Mao turned private property into state property. Deng Xiaoping transferred national assets, at generous and largely symbolic prices, to party elites. As a result today’s ‘princelings’ — the descendants of the party’s revolutionary generation — control much of China’s wealth.”

The biggest princeling of them all is President Xi Jinping. The US knows little about him or what he really wants.

After taking power in 2012, Xi confounded analysts by making himself the most powerful leader since Mao. He unleashed a campaign against corruption, using it to sideline rivals and frighten the bureaucracy.

Bao says graft is built into the system. When Deng began reforms, he said the party would have to let some people get rich first. This was mistakenly hailed by admirers in the West as proof that free enterprise was coming. In fact it meant that party members, their families and their cronies got rich first.

If this is right, America faces a regime that aims to keep power in the hands of its leading clans and reform the economy while retaining state supremacy over it. Such regimes are not likely to want war — their tyranny is an instrument of self-preservation.

But throughout Chinese history, families fought, factions divided and risk-takers plunged the country into disaster. Nationalism is a tiger Chinese rulers ride at their peril. Some people think the party’s endgame is near.

This may well be the biggest question in the next US president’s in-tray. Bao’s latest essay, written and translated for The New York Times, was clearly intended to reach that person.

In one way it is remarkable that Bao is able to get his opinions to the outside world. Protected by privilege, he lives under surveillance. His son, a publisher who works in Hong Kong, is proud that his father has mastered computers.

One wonders what would have happened in June 1989 if the internet had already come to China, if the students had been on social media, and pictures of the tanks and bloodshed had reached a billion mobile phones. The old man typing away in Beijing must ponder that.

The Sunday Times

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