The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (42 page)

It was a horrendous and appalling act. The party and its leadership had been shaken to the core by the uprising. In the aftermath, the regime conducted a purge of those who had been sympathetic to the demonstrators, which included Deng’s own protégé. And the protests in Tiananmen Square were not the only shock the party would experience in 1989. That same summer, the Soviet Empire began to crumble. Indeed, on the day that Deng unleashed his military on China’s citizenry, Poles went to the ballot box to vote the Polish Communist Party out of power. Five months later the Berlin Wall came down. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev signed his resignation, becoming the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party.

These twin shocks—the Tiananmen Square protests and the collapse of the Soviet Union—served as a wake-up call for the Chinese regime. It was a near-death experience that would remake the social compact between China’s rulers and its people. In the years that followed, Beijing did not respond by turning inward, becoming a police state, or cutting itself off from the world. Instead,
the party launched a meticulous study of communism’s failings and altered its own formula for maintaining power. Teams of researchers were dispatched to Russia, eastern Europe, and central Asia to study the former regimes and conduct a postmortem on the errors that led to their extinction. The party understood after Tiananmen that Gorbachev’s failure could also become its own.

The catalog of the Soviet Union’s mistakes was thick. Its economy was hidebound. Living conditions had fallen hopelessly behind the West—a secret that was long in plain view. When faced with its own vulnerabilities, Moscow became more doctrinaire and imperious in its ideology. The lack of nuance and innovation likewise infected the Soviet bureaucracy and its party organs, which became ossified, top-heavy, and remote from the lives of the people. In sum, the Soviet Union’s cancer had grown from the inefficiency and rigidity of totalitarianism. In such a weakened state, Gorbachev’s early experiments in
political reform opened a process that he could not control, accelerating the regime’s demise. In retrospect, China’s neighbor to the north had offered a case study in how not to run a Communist dictatorship.

China was already more than a decade into its economic reforms when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the event only cemented Deng’s decision to pursue economic liberalization—not political reform—as a first step. But the reforms and adjustments the party embarked on went beyond economics. China’s ruling party struck a broad new bargain with its people.

The fact is that most Chinese have a far freer life today than ever before. Chinese citizens increasingly live where they want and with whom they want. Limits on one’s personal lifestyle have all but disappeared. In the past two decades, more than 200 million people have opted to move from the countryside to one of China’s new metropolises. They can own property, maybe even a car, and choose their own career or line of work. A generation ago, few if any Chinese tour groups would have been spotted in Europe or Hawaii. In 2010, over fifty-five million Chinese tourists traveled abroad, more than twice the number from five years earlier.

Even if they are not part of the growing middle class, Chinese citizens have access to more and better information than ever before. The commercialization of Chinese media has led to a lively news and entertainment environment, with newspapers, magazines, and television stations pushing the boundaries to compete for audiences. As long as journalists tread carefully, government censors remain silent. Likewise, more personal communication tools—from smart phones to a Chinese version of Twitter—have become a part of everyday life. On the Internet, Chinese surf their favorite Web sites, go shopping, or play video games. And, perhaps most welcome of all, the Chinese Communist Party shows almost no interest in controlling people’s private lives. The party, unlike a couple of decades ago, no longer hounds citizens about their “socialist purity.”

To be sure, freer does not mean free. Freedom of assembly and association remains within tightly drawn red lines, and breaching them can trigger a frighteningly harsh response. Censors keep a firm handle on media accounts that could embarrass the regime. The party’s control of political decision making is opaque and nearly
total. Organized political opposition and independent labor unions are banned. Minorities, especially Tibetans and Muslims in Xinjiang Province, are routinely repressed. Oddly, given the regime’s Communist roots, overall, individual freedoms have grown for most Chinese, while wider political freedoms remain constrained. But in general the same rule applies across all areas of modern Chinese life: as long as you do not threaten the party’s monopoly on power, you can go about your business and maybe even prosper.

For an autocratic regime set on maintaining its power, the party is remarkably open to where it finds the tools to sustain itself. Indeed, beyond learning from communism’s failings, it also studies and borrows ideas from democracy’s success. China has implemented a wide array of reforms—including term limits, local elections, public hearings, and participatory budgeting—in an attempt to win greater acceptance of its rule. Of course, the party rarely adopts anything wholesale, preferring to take the slice that best suits its needs without jeopardizing its legitimacy. “
We don’t waste our time with what is capitalism or what is socialism,” one adviser to the party’s leadership told me. “If today is better than yesterday, then I like the policy.”

Having shed its Communist ideological straitjacket, the party understands that its legitimacy stems from its ability to perform—especially when it comes to keeping the country’s economy humming. Rather than viewing private entrepreneurs as a threat, the party has welcomed the country’s professionals and leading businesspeople into the fold. A party that was founded as a platform for workers and peasants is now largely a coalition of government, economic, and social elites. As a result, many of the groups most likely to be at odds with the regime—intellectuals, students, and middle-class professionals—have become allies. As one Chinese scholar in Beijing recently told me, “
People are more conservative than in 1989. There would be no ‘Goddess to Democracy’ statue today.”

The party’s approach has never been a strategy of liberalization for liberalization’s sake. If there was one other lesson that China’s rulers took from Gorbachev and the Soviet Union’s collapse, it is the danger of flirting with democratic reform. After the Tiananmen Square protests, Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai party secretary, was elevated to be Deng’s new successor. His promotion was based in part on how effectively
he had combated large-scale protests in Shanghai.
The following year, in a meeting with Henry Kissinger, Jiang warned, “
Efforts to find a Chinese Gorbachev will be of no avail.” Indeed, anyone with those leanings had been rooted out. In April 1992, even as Deng committed China to greater economic reforms, he made it clear that this path should not be misinterpreted as a political opening. The
People’s Daily
quoted him saying that “liberalism and turmoil destroy stability” and that “as soon as elements of turmoil appear, we will not hesitate to use any means whatsoever to eliminate them as quickly as possible.” The party has hewed closely to this pledge ever since.

A few months after the calls for a Jasmine Revolution, some of the lawyers and activists who had been detained or kidnapped in February began to be released. As a group, these legal advocates are not easily cowed. They have already braved years of illegal detentions, beatings, and sometimes torture. These abuses hadn’t dissuaded them from speaking out in the past, often about the very indignities their captors had inflicted on them.
But this time it appeared to be different. There was an ominous silence from most of these typically vocal regime critics. The fact that many seemed so reluctant to speak out left many wondering just what type of pressure or abuse they had endured while imprisoned. After being detained and released after only two days, one well-known lawyer, Li Xiongbing, tweeted, “I’m really afraid right now; please don’t try to reach me, okay?” China’s repression since Tiananmen is no less real or brutal; it is simply more calculated and discreet.

In the evening, long after all the crowds had left Wangfujing, I took a cab to the Jasmine Restaurant & Lounge. The modern, fusionstyle restaurant is on the east side of the Workers’ Stadium, in the Chaoyang District of Beijing. A friend who had passed by earlier in the day tipped me off. He had seen that people had left flowers in front of the restaurant and scribbled messages supportive of the protests in chalk. Someone had told the authorities, too. By the time I arrived, the flowers were gone and the messages scrubbed away. Nevertheless, I went inside to speak to the frazzled manager, who probably could not believe his misfortune in having a business with a name that was now
associated with democratic revolution. He denied that anyone had left flowers or notes in front of his establishment. But he had heard from the police, who told him to contact them if anyone tried anything. He was clearly anxious about my questions and relieved to see me go.

In February 2011, it was immediately obvious that some party members had not yet wrapped their minds around the significance of the revolutions moving through the Middle East. I met with one well-known Chinese academic ten days after Hosni Mubarak had been ousted. Because of the sensitivity of the moment, he asked that we speak off the record. Indeed, he did not even want to meet at his university office. Instead, he chose a coffee shop in a Beijing shopping center.

He began by reciting the ways in which the events in Egypt bore no resemblance to the conditions in China. Mubarak’s government had been completely unprepared for a popular uprising. The protests in Egypt had been propelled by the economy, but the economy in China was performing better than anywhere. “
And, third, it is cultural. You have to understand that Chinese culture is an ancient culture, and—”

I cut him off. “I’m sorry. What about Egypt? I mean, wouldn’t you say Egyptian culture is an ancient one?”

He blushed even before I spoke. It dawned on him the moment the words came out of his mouth that he was walking into a blind alley. This old talking point—that an ancient culture like China’s would somehow be inured to democratic forces—seemed out of place as the land of the pharaohs clamored for representative government. It had been a reflexive response. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if to make a mental note not to repeat this line of reasoning when discussing Egypt.

I brought up the obvious point that the Chinese regime appeared to be nervous, even on edge. The wave of preemptive arrests of lawyers and human rights advocates suggested as much. When the Chinese media did cover the events unfolding in North Africa or the Middle East, they played up the dangers of chaos and unrest, not the underlying democratic demands that had given rise to the wave of popular rebellions. If it wasn’t something they found alarming, why censor it? He was not interested in speculating about the regime’s disposition, replying with a terse acknowledgment: “Yes.”

His own fears were focused not on the threat of unrest but on
the government’s ability to respond. “This generation of leaders have never faced a crisis,” he replied. “They are more reformist than Brezhnev or Mubarak, but they are technocrats, so they think in terms of procedure and they make small fixes.”

He was offering a take I had heard often from everyday citizens who had a romantic nostalgia for the epic, if deeply flawed, leaders from China’s past. In his view, China’s leaders might be precisely the types of political figures to fight rising inflation or take the air out of a housing bubble, but no one could say how they would respond to a crisis that struck at the regime’s legitimacy. They were untested. “They have much more economic resources and money to deal with a crisis than Deng,” he continued. “But they are less tough, more selfish, and lack the strategic vision. What is decisive is what you do in the moment.”

No matter what one thinks of China’s leaders past or present, there is no question the current crop are a bland, colorless version of their predecessors. Only two men in modern China’s history—Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping—have had the revolutionary credentials and force of personality to sit astride all of China. Chairman Mao, for all the suffering and torment he caused the Chinese people, was the founder. He was one of the most charismatic figures of the twentieth century, and only his own death could put an end to his reign as China’s modern-day emperor. Like Mao, Deng had fought the Japanese, survived the Long March, and commanded Communist troops in the civil war that expelled Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to Taiwan. A feisty and independent native of Sichuan, Deng was known for expectorating into a spittoon, sometimes while meeting other world leaders. Deng’s greatest feat may have been not surviving China’s civil war but Mao himself. The Great Helmsman’s mass campaigns and calls for “permanent revolution” had a way of culling the party’s senior leaders. Twice Mao purged Deng from power. And twice Deng was rehabilitated. Within a year of Mao’s death in September 1976, Deng had been reappointed to all of his former positions. Two years later, he launched the economic reforms that put China back on the world stage.

No Chinese leader today can offer a similar pedigree. They are apparatchiks and bureaucrats, not revolutionaries and guerrilla fighters.
Even a figure as senior as President Hu Jintao must lead by building careful consensus. As a result, no man is bigger than the party he serves. China is led by a collective leadership, not a strongman. For most Chinese, the shift looks like progress. Having witnessed the price China paid during the Cultural Revolution, people find a more institutionalized system appealing, inasmuch as it is less likely to be hostage to the whims of a single man. After Deng’s death in 1997, the party implemented new norms for leadership succession. China’s top two leaders—the president and the premier—now serve for two five-year terms before passing their posts to the next generation of leaders who rise to the positions after intense internal jockeying, all of it behind closed doors. Thus, in 2012, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao are expected to pass the baton to Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang, two men that few Chinese know much about.