More than 13 years after China’s students challenged communist rule in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the party’s red flags fluttered triumphantly on all sides last week.
Across the square in the Great Hall of the People, a huge hammer-and-sickle looked down on the 2 100 delegates to the historic 16th party congress, as it prepared for a new dynasty of younger, pragmatic Chinese leadership.
President Jiang Zemin, the Shanghai apparatchik promoted to high office after the Beijing massacre, can claim some credit for having disproved the critics who said then that the party was doomed.
Shopping malls have risen along the Avenue of Everlasting Peace where tanks and armoured cars belched black smoke and killed protesters.
Young Chinese families out for the day eat at McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken instead of buying pancakes from the street cart sellers who once fed the students. A new metro runs under the square, carrying hundreds of thousands who used to cycle long distances to work. The station walls are lined with advertisements for cellphones and stylish clothing.
Inside the Great Hall of the People, the more than 2 100 delegates sat in disciplined stillness, occasionally making notes on their copies of Jiang’s speech. On the platform, female attendants topped up the tea mugs of the congress’s presidium. A familiar slogan about the ”Great, Glorious and Correct Chinese Communist Party” was displayed on the first floor balcony.
The reason why communism in China, unlike in the Soviet bloc, has survived, Jiang told the congress, was because it had won back the Chinese people by delivering on the economy. Previous reports have summed up the ”achievements” claimed over the past five years since the previous congress.
Jiang, now about to step down, summed up the past 13years. ”To develop a market economy under socialism is a great pioneering enterprise never undertaken before in human history,” he said. It had been ”a magnificent upsurge of Chinese reform”.
The paradox is that in order to achieve this, the party has had to jettison communism in all but name — that is until last week, when the word was not even mentioned.
Jiang is conscious that the compact with the Chinese people is still fragile. His ”important thinking” — his pragmatic theory known as the ”three represents” — has a very practical aim, to continue to deliver the goods.
”I hope they will do what they say, to serve our interests,” said one young office worker afterwards in the metro station. ”We are hoping for new policies which will work,” said a civil servant. ”The stock exchange has already gone up in expectation.”
This week the congress elected a new central committee that will choose the new top leaders, already selected after months of secret haggling.
None of the meetings where this was thrashed out were mentioned in the press. But most people believe that Jiang — who has reached the recognised age of retirement from party leadership — has got his own people in place. He achieved this partly by threatening not to step down, a classic manoeuvre from the past.
Out in the streets of Beijing, there was not much excitement about the congress. The red flags only fluttered near the Great Hall, except where some local party organisation had made a big effort. Most establishments in the bustling commercial centre plumped instead for red lanterns, of the sort that hang outside restaurants and look less political.
Outside the Wangfujing Auto Centre a large, bright red banner urged everyone to ”comprehensively carry out the Important Thinking of the Three Represents”. Asked how the three represents could be applied to selling cars, a salesperson said it was not really anything to do with them. ”It’s the party leadership’s business: we are just the people and we support them in what they do.”
Yet the Wangfujing Auto Centre’s own business has been made possible by the pragmatic thrust of the party’s policies that were initiated by Jiang’s mentor, the late Deng Xiaoping. The cheapest car in the showroom, a Volkswagen saloon manufactured domestically in the north-east, sells for 140 000 yuan (about R177 000). That is more than 10 times the average urban wage, but plenty of people can still afford it.
China’s new class of entrepreneurs no longer worries about exhibiting conspicuous wealth. Their black Buick saloons with tinted windows behave as arrogantly on the road as the Red Flag saloons of the party cadres once did. Beijing has seven ring roads built or planned and it needs every one of them.
Jiang is not a man for false modesty. ”The hard work of party and people,” he said last week, ”has attracted worldwide attention and will surely go down as a glorious page in the annals of the great Chinese nation.”
Most Chinese agree that a lot has been achieved, though many are cynical about the party and its motives. Even in the much poorer rural areas, the majority of peasants say their lives improved until the mid-1990s, when local governments were starved of funds and the rich-poor gap widened.
There is less agreement on whether the party can continue to deliver the goods. ”We still hear only empty words about poverty,” says a journalist, who came from the countryside. ”Until the party allows people to choose their local officials and get rid of them if they do badly, we shall never solve these problems.”
Jiang gave no hint that Beijing will permit political reform, even of the modest kind being discussed till the 1989 disaster brought it to a halt.
Around Tiananmen Square during the congress uniformed and plainclothes police had been instructed to ”maintain vigilance” against any citizen who might disturb the positive air. It is impossible for a Chinese citizen to lobby a delegate to the congress or even deliver a letter. They are whisked away from the hall in special buses. Vigilant soldiers then prevent anyone from approaching the hotels where they are quartered without a pass.
With China now inside the World Trade Organisation — Jiang says they should make the most of globalisation — there will be new economic innovations ahead. But the congress, which was in secret session until Thursday, demonstrates the persistence of old political ritual. — (c) Guardian Newspapers 2002