In My View

Shining China

Chinese scholars are now debating whether the country could invest some of its trillion dollar plus foreign exchange reserve into a new “Asian fund” that would focus on building infrastructure in poorer Asian countries. The fund would be managed by an international organisation, specially created for administering it.

If this sounds like Beijing’s first foray into challenging the established international financial institutions like the western dominated International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the Japanese financed, Asian Development Bank, just ask Prof Wu Jianmin, a consummate diplomat; a former ambassador to the France, besides an UN body in Geneva. He is now the president of the Chinese Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

He told us in a talk that “anti-globalisation protests are not popular in China.” For the country’s growth is wedded to East Asia’s growth and “globalization.” As if to buttress his point he quoted the IMF stating that China contributes 25 per cent to the globe’s economic growth.

That self-confidence does not seem misplaced when one travels through the country. A 36-hour boat ride through the Yangtze beginning at Yi Chang and ending in Chongqing, tells a story of a nation on the rise and very near the top. The goal for the new cities, which have grown after the inundation of the Three Gorges dam put the old into a watery grave, seem to be to touch the sky. Literally, the cities and towns are dotted with skyscrapers as the innumerable Chinese seek to save on living space. But they have abundant opportunities, and are now coming into real money.

Post-Soviet socialism does not have a template for evolution. Marxism never told its adherents each step of achieving a socialist society, but instead had merely detailed the nature of capitalism and created the goal of socialism as a step forward leading to communism as the highest form of human condition.

China’s post-revolutionary ideologues are shaping a capitalist nation that could lead the people to the final stage socialist emancipation. Interestingly, despite being the third largest economy of the world, consumption levels of the Chinese is still quite low. They save more than 30 per cent of their income. They still do not throng the shopping plazas in as many numbers as their population should entail.

But in the process it is redefining many of the familiar signposts of socialism. As Dr Xiang Yao, director of a research institute attached to China’s apex State Council puts it: “In the past, our wrong policies have ended the lives of hundreds of thousands. In the past we followed poor socialism as opposed to rich capitalism. Previously, we put too much emphasis on class struggle.” Almost 35 per cent of the country’s top 500 millionaires are members of the Communist Party of China.

Now Hu Jintao’s China is full of words like “scientific harmonious socialism.” Like any other democratic nation - though ruled by one party – in China a governing idea first needs to become a part of the popular lexicon. The Chinese president had been saying those words for the past five years – since he came to power. Only this month, the CPC enshrined the word “scientific” into its constitution, giving the necessary direction to its socialist dicta.

The city-dwellers now openly talk of the “great divide” between the well-off urbanites and the poor rural folks. Dr Xiang even talked about another divide – the regional divide – that separates the more developed east from the less developed west and central China. He says financial resources and investments need to be diverted to those parts of the country as “eastern China should support the growth west and central China.”

So instead of “distributing poverty” – as socialism was long thought to do – the Chinese state is seeking to redistribute the national wealth. That wealth is being generated by the people of the country whose boundless energy has been unleashed by the party-state.

And how does China view its tri-lateral relationship with Russia and India? Prof Wu says that the relationship is based on the precept of “cooperation,” which is contrary to the notion of “confrontation” amongst neighbours.

“We will not follow our unilateral interests,” he says, “We want to be a prosperous, democratic and a civilised country.” Apparently, he is not just addressing an Indian but indeed his intended audience was others, further west. Clearly, China had decided to have a new kind of stable engagement with the major powers; its neighbours; and with the “developing countries,” as Dr Wu Jianmin elucidates.

The sense of Chinese civilisation abounds the country in many of the symbols chosen to make the nation attractive to its own people and outsiders. While the Chinese revolution - led by the CPC – entailed a clear disconnection with the country’s rather difficult past, now an attempt is being made to uphold some of the cultural artifacts of the same past so as to give the people a sense of history. The natural concomitant of that is the rise of Chinese nationalism, that can reach a high pitch in the years to come. Especially with China hosting the greatest sporting spectacle of all, the Onlympics next year. How this colour their worldview would be an interesting thing to watch?

Pinaki Bhattacharya, currently located in Kolkata, is a Special Correspondent with the Mathrubhum, Kerala. He writes on Strategic Security issues. He can be contacted at pinaki63@dataone.in . He is presently in Hawai’i, the USA at the East West Centre as a Student Fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme of the Centre.