Author: Premen Addy
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 25, 2007
The 'Made in China' brand has lost some of
its shine. The Middle Kingdom has taken a significant hit in the US, the UK,
the EU, and one or two lowlier ports of call like Panama. Mattel, the giant
American toy retailer, has withdrawn some $ 18 million worth of goods from
China because their lead content posed a possible threat to the well-being
of children. Hamleys in London, the world's most famous children's store,
has withdrawn its Chinese-made items because they are considered unsafe.
Chinese tyres and toothpaste have also come
under this ban. One hundred Panamanians have died taking a Chinese cough mixture.
The head of Chinda's Food and Drug Administration was tried and shot, the
mark surely of nervous desperation. Curing cancer with a firing squad is an
unreliable remedy. The disease is merely guaranteed to spread to the innards
of the political economy.
The growing volume of industrial accidents,
increasing coal mining explosions throughout the country, forcible confiscation
of rural land and property by privileged developers and their hired thugs
in cahoots with Communist Party apparatchiks are fuelling serious discontent
in the hinterland.
Such manifestations of crony capitalist malfeasance
disfigure China's body politic like carbuncles, yet this is the coming superpower,
according to media prophecy, the most articulate prophets embedded with the
Right-wing Financial Times, The Economist and others of the genre, whose gift
for such divination is shared by the presiding deities of casuistry in the
New Left Review. They are joined by coarse sheets of the street adept at spotting
common "anti-imperialist" hatreds under Marks & Spencer corsets
and homespun burqas, billowing pyjamas and luxuriant, henna-coloured beards
sprouting from primordial aquifers resistant to all evolutionary change of
mind and spirit.
Whither Communist China? Chairman Mao's answer
was the Great Leap Forward, the People's Communes and the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution. Betwixt and between, he denounced 'Soviet revisionism'
and 'Soviet social-imperialism' even as he entertained Nixon and Kissinger
in Beijing, confiding to them that he preferred dealing with men of the Right
rather than those of the Left.
The Great Helmsman's first experiment led
to history's worst famine in which some 30 million to 50 million Chinese perished.
Such was the desperate hunger that some people ate other people; and, moving
about alone was to court danger to life and limb.
The Cultural Revolution became a laboratory
for dysfunctional nihilism. Double-talk and double-think gained acceptance
as proof of Maoist grace. Class war in extreme instances descended into cannibalism,
the choicest morsels being livers of class adversaries. The sainted Chairman
lived through this turmoil in solitary splendour, living his dreams, enjoying
the pleasures of the flesh with queues of peasant women clocking in and out
of the emperor's bedchamber. A factory drill for our times, no doubt. Mao's
court was a seraglio of political eunuchs, whose cloying expressions of loyalty
resembled a falsetto chorus from the castrati pleading their right to be the
arbiters of China's destiny.
Philip Short, once a BBC correspondent in
China, presented a chilling television documentary with rare footage never
seen before. The urbane Zhou Enlai, for instance, was seen haranguing the
mobs. The divine right of kings had mutated into its Sinified form. Men and
women, some relatively young, others old, bore witness in quiet, dignified
tones to their nation's nightmare.
Viewing this film one recalled one's time
at a British university where some of the great and good (and they truly were
great and good) held forth on the paradise that was Maoist China. Joseph Needham
was an outstanding biochemist and the greatest historian of Chinese science
from antiquity, whose peers voted him Britain's most learned personality of
the century - the 20th, as it happened. His fellow enthusiast was the formidable
Joan Robinson, who had earned a formidable reputation as an economist of the
Keynesian school. Her pamphlet on the People's Communes and a Penguin special
on the glories of the Cultural Revolution are collectors' items today.
Needham saw the Cultural Revolution as a fusion
of the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution
and Socialist Liberation, which , presumably, was why it blew such a gigantic
fuse!
Robinson fought China's cause until Beijing's
treacherous assault on Vietnam in February 1979. She remarked plaintively
that she had not, after all, understood China. She went into a coma soon afterwards
and died without regaining consciousness.
With its restive national minorities, China
is at a crossroads; its problems at home mirrored in its foreign relations.
Beijing's one permanent friend abroad of 58 years standing is Pakistan, arguably
a failed state. Having done the rounds with Russia, Vietnam and India, and
sworn eternal friendship with each, Beijing has fallen out with them in turn.
It would perhaps be wise to see the past in
China's present. In which case we can do no better than turn to WF Jenner's
masterly study, The Tyranny of History: The Roots of China's Crisis, for wisdom.
Hence this opening paragraph: "The state, people and culture known in
English as China are in a profound general crisis that goes much deeper than
the problems of a moribund communist dictatorship. It is a general one to
which everything from the remorseless increase of the population to the influence
of the archaic writing system contributes. The very future of China as a unitary
state is in question..."
The Yale historian Jonathan Spence in his
tome, The Search for Modern China, writes: "I understand a 'modern' nation
to be one that is both integrated and receptive, fairly sure of its own identity
yet able to join others on equal terms in the quest for new markets, new technologies,
new ideas. If it is used in this open sense, we should have no difficulty
in seeing 'modern' as a concept that shifts with the times as human life unfolds,
instead of relegating the sense of the 'modern' to our contemporary world
while consigning the past to the 'traditional' and the future to the 'post-modern'.
I like to think that there were modern countries in the above sense AD 1600
or earlier, as at any moment in the centuries thereafter. Yet at no time in
that span, not at the end of the 20th Century, has China been convincingly
one of them."
I rest my case.
