Modernisation and Dissent?

Through the eyes of a friend, I took a glance at the Middle Kingdom’s economic modernization and its implications on political dissent among China’s new middle class.

China, China, China -- it dominates our headlines, we are told 'it is the defining power of our century representing a change of the international order and the beginning of the end of US unipolar hegemony'. The Chinese economic miracle is the stuff of legends; in the last 30 years, more people have witnessed an increase in their standard of living than at any period in human history.

With the exception of the occasional rural protest, mass dissent in China has arguably been crushed since 1989. Observers argue that unless economic growth slips behind 4-5% for a few consecutive years, China's new middle class will remain silent and will not cry out for political representation.

Take my old friend Mr Wang as an example. Mr Wang is the eldest of 8 children, one of his siblings died in infancy from the common cold and another perished from malnutrition at the height of Mao's Great Leap Forward. Mr Wang's family were good socialist workers who came from a long line of peasants -- they embraced the People's Liberation Army as saviours when they took the family's village in the 1940s. The family moved to Beijing, gained residency and took up positions in one of the top state-run work units in Beijing. Life was looking up for Mao's children of the revolution and they invested great faith in the Proletarian Dictatorship as the new guardian's of the Mandate of Heaven.

Then the 'Great Leap Forward'; this was a disastrous attempt by Mao to overtake British steel production within 15 years, enjoy bumper grain harvests and service phenomenal debt to the Soviet Union. It was a total disaster -- within 5 years of the Communist Land Redistribution, the peasants were forced to join 'People's Communes', all property now belonged to the State and upwards of 30 million people perished. Family life was all but eradicated. As local officials grossly exagerrated harvest figures to please the party leadership, China lost its capacity to feed itself.

Mr Wang remembers being forced to scrape bark off trees and boil grass for his family's sustenance as a boy. Yet even as his 2 siblings passed away and as China starved to death, Mr Wang still possessed an enduring faith in the party embodied in the teachings of Chairman Mao. "What choice did I have? What else did we know? Without the Party, there was only Chiang Kai Shek and the imperialists in the West", he remembers.

In the Cultural Revolution, Mr Wang joined the Chinese military and deemed himself fortunate to be posted as a kitchen hand, "I could eat meat everyday”, he explains, “in the kitchen we always got the best rations". Safe from the political upheavals raging through Beijing, life in the People's Liberation Army saved my friend's political skin. After leaving the army, Mr Wang became a floor worker in a Beijing factory, eventually becoming his workshop’s party secretary and secured promotion to a management position after the company signed a joint-venture agreement with a prominent global corporation.

Yes, things were looking up for Mr Wang. He is a direct beneficiary of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and he now owns a townhouse in Beijing and drives a European car, travels abroad and retired at age 50. Yet Mr Wang says he feels “betrayed” by the Communist Party. “During the Mao era when we were promised a communist paradise, he dies and we get capitalism with authoritarian rule. Then all those young people were slaughtered at Tiananmen and it broke my heart. There is no point in even caring about politics anymore, you might as well just go out and get rich, that’s why so many former dissident leaders are now business people and don’t give a stuff about politics”.

Mr Wang is still a member of the Party, still laments the loss of dissent, just returned from yet another trip abroad and is contemplating his next car…