Jonathan Fenby: To understand China's future, look to its past
[Jonathan Fenby is a British author, journalist, and former editor of The Observer.]
Visitors flying in to Beijing's new Norman Foster-designed airport, or gazing across Shanghai's Huangpu River from the Bund to the tower city of Pudong, are liable to think of China as a land that has turned its back on the past.
Watch the destruction of old Beijing to make room for a city of concrete, steel and glass, take the world's highest railway to Tibet or drive across 20-mile bridges, and you seem to be witnessing a country on steroids that cannot wait to embrace a future in which it feels destined to displace the hidebound powers that dominated the last century.
In one sense, this is correct. It is exactly 30 years since Deng Xiaoping unbottled the genie of market economics after the power struggle that followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Growth on capitalist terms has become the leitmotiv of the last important power ruled by a Communist party. But, while the party leader, Hu Jintao, preaches the virtues of a “harmonious society”, wealth disparities increase and the gap between the booming coastal provinces and the poor interior shows no sign of narrowing.
In the past 30 years, more people have been made materially better off in a shorter time than ever before - in part simply because of the sheer numbers involved. But the past is no more another country in China than anywhere else - and that past needs to be understood to grasp the deeper currents beneath the gleaming modern China.
Though it has evolved over the centuries, the pattern of top-down autocratic rule set by the First Emperor after he united China in 221BC persists. In its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist form, the present regime claims the Mandate of Heaven as Imperial rulers did over the centuries before the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
In his speech to the five-yearly Communist Party Congress last October, Mr Hu insisted that only communist rule could ensure China's future. It is as if Gordon Brown tapped into the divine right of kings to insist that new Labour must remain in power.
Under the Qing, provincial magistrates feathered their nests and oppressed the peasants. Today local party bosses cut deals with businessmen to grab land from farmers and use the police or their own bully boys to harass anyone who dares to stand up to them.
But the more benevolent strain of the Imperial heritage encapsulated in Confucianism, with its emphasis on mutual obligations is also enjoying a revival. A huge Confucian Disneyland is planned for the sage's birthplace in eastern China....
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Visitors flying in to Beijing's new Norman Foster-designed airport, or gazing across Shanghai's Huangpu River from the Bund to the tower city of Pudong, are liable to think of China as a land that has turned its back on the past.
Watch the destruction of old Beijing to make room for a city of concrete, steel and glass, take the world's highest railway to Tibet or drive across 20-mile bridges, and you seem to be witnessing a country on steroids that cannot wait to embrace a future in which it feels destined to displace the hidebound powers that dominated the last century.
In one sense, this is correct. It is exactly 30 years since Deng Xiaoping unbottled the genie of market economics after the power struggle that followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Growth on capitalist terms has become the leitmotiv of the last important power ruled by a Communist party. But, while the party leader, Hu Jintao, preaches the virtues of a “harmonious society”, wealth disparities increase and the gap between the booming coastal provinces and the poor interior shows no sign of narrowing.
In the past 30 years, more people have been made materially better off in a shorter time than ever before - in part simply because of the sheer numbers involved. But the past is no more another country in China than anywhere else - and that past needs to be understood to grasp the deeper currents beneath the gleaming modern China.
Though it has evolved over the centuries, the pattern of top-down autocratic rule set by the First Emperor after he united China in 221BC persists. In its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist form, the present regime claims the Mandate of Heaven as Imperial rulers did over the centuries before the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.
In his speech to the five-yearly Communist Party Congress last October, Mr Hu insisted that only communist rule could ensure China's future. It is as if Gordon Brown tapped into the divine right of kings to insist that new Labour must remain in power.
Under the Qing, provincial magistrates feathered their nests and oppressed the peasants. Today local party bosses cut deals with businessmen to grab land from farmers and use the police or their own bully boys to harass anyone who dares to stand up to them.
But the more benevolent strain of the Imperial heritage encapsulated in Confucianism, with its emphasis on mutual obligations is also enjoying a revival. A huge Confucian Disneyland is planned for the sage's birthplace in eastern China....