NATIONAL WEEKLY EDITION: "Twenty Years After Tiananmen: By giving citizens a piece of the action, the Chinese government maintains its grip," by John Pomfret, Washington Post, 15-21 June 2009.
I was on NPR with Pomfret once and he's always fairly impressive.
Pomfret asks the same question as The Economist's Banyan a while back, but comes up with a far better answer:
In 1989, a chorus of Western voices predicted the party's collapse. "One foot in power and one foot on a banana peel," was how the late, great David Schweisberg of United Press International described the party's predicament. I, too, filed my share of sensationalist dispatches, intimating a coming collapse.
But the party has defied such predictions. And it has done so by taking a brilliant step: giving a lot of Chinese--in the countryside, the cities, the media, the security services and the government--a bigger stake in preserving the existing order.
It wasn't enough for the Party to say, "get rich and stay away from politics," says Pomfret:
Instead of thwarting change, as it had in 1989, the party realized that it needed to lead it. "Keeping up with the times" has become its new motto--in the rural backwaters and the megalopolises, too.
Then a nice bit on the TVEs in the countryside (township and village enterprises) that absorb a lot of underemployed farm labor. They've also encouraged the party to force a lot of farmers off land too.
The party decided that peasants no longer have to pay taxes, and launched reforms in the cities that targeted the needs and desires of a growing middle class. The ownership society emerges:
The marchers who flooded Tiananmen Square in 1989 had, in the words of Cui Jian, the balladeer of that generation, "nothing to their names." But today's Chinese urbanites own apartments, cars and Jacuzzis--thing they really don't want to lose.
Ownership means you can get divorced when you want too.
In short, you can count most of them out when it comes to revolution.
Old Communist China controlled everything. You needed a certificate to marry, divorce, have kids, retire, travel within the country or abroad, move, change jobs. Now, when Chinese finish university, they find their own jobs. Want to travel abroad? Get married? Get divorced? Go ahead.
Pomfret then offers a nice appraisal of what he calls "graduated censorship."
Yes, the Party demonstrates its control mechanisms with Falun Gong, Tibet, and Xinjiang, but it has dramatically evolved in terms of its personnel, replacing hacks with technocrats and college grads. It also opened itself up to businessmen and now constantly schools its cadres.
It has also begun to experiment with a measure of intraparty democracy to weed out corrupt or incompetent officials, and it has worked hard to minimize internal battles.
What comes next?
The serious challenges: getting old before getting rich, a toxic environment, and a political system that drags on the economic juggernaut, in Pomfret's words. The Party also basically stands for nothing nowadays except its continued rule. There is no "there" there anymore.
Pomfret says the party emerges "triumphant" from Tiananmen (not that different from Banyan). He just notes the costs and the future challenges better.
Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 11:17AM 
